Victoria, Lady Welby Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
Victoria, Lady Welby, also Lady Welby-Gregory, and before her marriage in 1863 Victoria Alexandrina Maria Louisa Stuart-Wortley-(MacKenzie) (1837–29 Mar 1912) was an English independent scholar who elaborated a theory of significs. She came from an aristocratic background, her father being the second Lord Wharncliffe; her husband was a politician, Sir William Earle Welby-Gregory, 4th Baronet (1829-1898). They had an estate at Dentham Manor, Grantham.She published little, but corresponded amply, in particular with C. S. Peirce who was otherwise rather isolated intellectually. Her work, on signification in general, was one of a number of theories current from the 1890s onwards, that foreshadow contemporary semantics, semiotics and semiology. She had a direct effect on the Significs group, mainly Dutch, including Gerrit Mannoury and Frederik van Eeden; and so indirectly on L. E. J. Brouwer and the founding of intuitionistic logic.
The precise position of significs, which received little recognition in her time, is still a subject of academic discussion. Lady Welby corresponded also with others of the pragmatist school of philosophers of her time, including William James, F. C. S. Schiller, Giovanni Vailati and Mario Calderoni. She contributed to Mind, the leading British philosophical publication, and corresponded also with Bertrand Russell and F. Cook Wilson. She influenced Charles Ogden, and so can be considered to have had some effect on the thinking of I. A. Richards. Her work also had a strong feminist or proto-feminist direction. Her papers are largely unpublished.
She had three children. Her other interests included the Decorative Needlework Society.