Stephen Dowell (1 May 1833 – 28 March 1898) was an English historian and legal writer, best known for his history of taxation in England.
He received further education in Sherborne and Highgate schools, afterwards attending Corpus Christi College, Oxford, which he matriculated into on 7 June 1851.
Dowell also compiled a three-volume anthology of personal selections from several writers' work, entitled Thoughts and Words (3 vols.
[6] Dowell's principal historical work was his History of Taxation and Taxes in England from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (1884), printed in four volumes.
[6] The publishers of the 1965 reprint referred to Dowell's work a "classic and unique study", which "remains a major source book on early English taxation".
[8] Patrick Polden, in his biographical sketch of Dowell for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004) describes the work as a "valuable contribution to historical knowledge", which remained valuable in the late 20th century for its "compendious account of more recent centuries", even if its "coverage of remoter periods is sketchy and outdated".