William Hurrell Mallock (7 February 1849 – 2 April 1923) was an English novelist and economics writer. Much of his writing is in support of the Roman Catholic Church and in opposition to positivist philosophy and socialism.
Moreover, Pater was the subject of a cruel satire in W. H. Mallock's The New Republic which was published in Belgravia in 1876-7 and in book form in 1877. He appeared there as 'Mr. Rose'—an effete, impotent, sensualist with a perchant for erotic literature and beautiful young men.[11]
Mallock's book appeared during the competition for the Oxford Professorship of Poetry and played a role in convincing Pater to remove himself from consideration.[12][13][14] A few months later Pater published what may have been a subtle riposte: "A Study of Dionysus: The Spiritual Form of Fire and Dew."[15]
His keen logic and gift for acute exposition and criticism were displayed in later years both in fiction and in controversial works. In a series of books dealing with religious questions he insisted on dogma as the basis of religion and on the impossibility of founding religion on purely scientific data. In Is Life Worth Living?[16] (1879) and the satirical novel The New Paul and Virginia (1878) he attacked positivist theories[7][17][18] and defended the Roman Catholic Church;[19][20][21][22] one of his uncles, Hurrell Froude, had been a founder of the Oxford Movement.
In a volume on the intellectual position of the Church of England, Doctrine and Doctrinal Disruption (1900), he advocated the necessity of a strictly defined creed.[7] Later volumes on similar topics were Religion as a Credible Doctrine (1903) and The Reconstruction of Belief (1905). He also authored articles, being a frequent contributor to many newspapers and magazines, including The Forum,National Review,Public Opinion,Contemporary Review, and Harper’s Weekly. One in particular, directed against Thomas Huxley's agnosticism, appeared in the April 1889 issue of The Fortnightly Review,[23] being Mallock's response to a controversy between, among others, Huxley and William Connor Magee, the Bishop of Peterborough.[24]
He published several works on economics,[25] directed against radical and socialist[26] theories: Social Equality (1882), Property and Progress (1884), Labour and the Popular Welfare (1893), Classes and Masses (1896), Aristocracy and Evolution (1898), and A Critical Examination of Socialism (1908) – and later visited the United States in order to deliver a series of lectures[27][28][29][30][31][32][33] on the subject:
The Civic Federation of New York, an influential body which aims, in various ways, at harmonising apparently divergent industrial interests in America, having decided on supplementing its other activities by a campaign of political and economic education, invited me, at the beginning of the year 1907, to initiate a scientific discussion of socialism in a series of lectures or speeches, to be delivered under the auspices of certain of the great Universities in the United States. This invitation I accepted, but, the project being a new one, some difficulty arose as to the manner in which it might best be carried out – whether the speeches or lectures should in each case be new, dealing with some fresh aspect of the subject, or whether they should be arranged in a single series to be repeated without substantial alteration in each of the cities visited by me. The latter plan was ultimately adopted, as tending to render the discussion of the subject more generally comprehensible to each local audience. A series of five lectures,[34][35] substantially the same, was accordingly delivered by me in New York, Cambridge, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Baltimore.[36]
Among his anti-socialist works should be classed his novel, The Old Order Changes (1886). His other novels are A Romance of the Nineteenth Century (1881), A Human Document (1892), The Heart of Life (1895), Tristram Lacy (1899), The Veil of the Temple (1904), and An Immortal Soul (1908).[7]
Mallock is remembered chiefly for one book, The New Republic, and that his first, composed while he still was at Oxford – "the most brilliant novel ever written by an undergraduate," says Professor Tillotson, justly.[38] ... But other books of Mallock's are worth looking into still—his theological and philosophical studies, his didactic novels, his zealous volumes of political expostulation and social statistics, even his books of verse.
"He had astonishing acuteness, great argumentative power, wide and accurate knowledge, excellent style," Saintsbury says of Mallock. "He might have seemed—he did seem, I believe, to some—to have in him the making of an Aristophanes or a Swift of not so much lessened degree... And yet after the chiefly scandalous success of The New Republic he never 'came off.' To attribute this to the principles he advocated is to nail on those who dislike those principles their own favourite gibe of 'the stupid party.'"[39] ... In the past two or three years, interest in Mallock has revived somewhat, probably stimulated by that conservative revival for which Mallock hoped, and the lines of which he predicted. Is Life Worth Living?, Social Equality, and The Limits of Pure Democracy, together with Mallock's charming autobiography, are especially deserving of attention from anyone interested in the conservative mind. Mallock died in 1923, half forgotten even then; but he has had no equal among English conservative thinkers since. He spent his life in a struggle against moral and political radicalism: for bulk and thoroughness, quite aside from Mallock's gifts of wit and style, his work is unexcelled among the body of conservative writings in any country. ...
(H)e accomplished unassisted what the research staff of the Conservative Political Centre now carries on as a body. "Throughout almost all his books is to be noticed the aspiration after a Truth which will give the soul something more than 'a dusty answer'; it is everywhere evident," says Sir John Squire. In the search for this truth, he assailed some of the most formidable personages of his day – Huxley, Spencer, Jowett, Kidd, Webb, Shaw.[40] And none of these writers, not even Bernard Shaw, came off well from a bout with Mallock.[41]
He published a volume of Poems in 1880. His 1878 book Lucretius included some verse translations from the Roman poet, which he followed with Lucretius on Life and Death in 1900, a book of verse paraphrases in a style modeled after the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam by Edward FitzGerald. (A second edition was issued in 1910.)
Influence and legacy
Ironically, this last work on Lucretius came to be highly regarded by freethinkers and other religious skeptics. Corliss Lamont includes portions of the third canto in his A Humanist Funeral Service. Mallock himself, in his introduction, seems to be offering it, somewhat condescendingly, for the use of such non-Christians when he writes:
Those, however, who... are adherents of the principles which [Lucretius] shares with the latest scientists of to-day, can hardly find the only hope which is open to them expressed by any writer with a loftier and more poignant dignity than that with which they will find it expressed by the Roman disciple of Epicurus.[42]
The popular English novelist Ouida (Maria Louise Ramé) dedicated her book of essays Views and Opinions (1895) to Mallock—"To W. H. Mallock. As a slight token of personal regard and intellectual admiration."[43]
Artist Tom Phillips used Mallock's A Human Document as the basis for his project A Humument,[44] in which he took a copy of the novel and constructed a work of art using its pages.[45]
"Conversations With a Solitary,"The North American Review, Vol. CXXXIV, No. 306, May, 1882; Part II, Vol. CXXXVII, No. 322, September, 1883; Part III, Vol. CXXXVII, No. 324, November, 1883.
"How to Popularize Unpopular Political Truths," National Review, Vol. VI, 1885.
"The Old Order Changes," National Review, Vol. VI, 1885.
"A Critical Examination of Socialism," The North American Review, No. 613, 19 April 1907; No. 614, 3 May 1907; No. 615, 17 May 1907; No. 616, 7 June 1907.
^"Mallock, William Hurrell." In: New American Supplement to the Latest Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, Vol. IV, Ed. by Day Otis Kellog. New York: The Werner Company, 1897, p. 1976.
^Mallock, William H. (1871). The Isthmus of Suez. Oxford: T. Shrimpton & Son.
^Patrick, J. Max (1956). "The Portrait of Huxley in Mallock's 'New Republic'," Nineteenth Century Fiction, Vol. XI, No. 1, pp. 61–69.
^Margolis, John D. (1967). "W. H. Mallock's The New Republic: A Study in Late Victorian Satire," English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 10–25.
^Lucas, John (1966). "Tilting at the Moderns: W.H. Mallock's Criticism of the Positivist Spirit," Renaissance and Modern Studies, Vol. X, No. 1, pp. 88–143.
^Lynd, Helen Merrill (1945). England in the Eighteen Eighties. London: Oxford University Press, pp. 74–76.
^Ford, D. J. (1974). "W. H. Mallock and Socialism in England, 1880-1918." In: Kenneth D. Brown (ed.), Essays in Anti-Labor History: Responses to the Rise of Labor in Britain. London: Archon Books, pp. 317–342.
^Driscoll, John T. (1903). "Philosophy and Science at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century," The North American Review, Vol. CLXXVI, No. 556, pp. 422–435.
^"Science Versus Religion," The Literary Digest, 11 June 1904, p. 859.
^Barry, William (1904). "Mr. Mallock's Apology for Religion," The Bookman, July 1904, pp. 135–136.
Adams, Amy Belle (1934). The Novels of William Hurrell Mallock. University of Maine Studies, Second Series, No. 30. Orono: University of Maine Press.
Bain, James Tom (1972). The Social Conservatism of W.H. Mallock. Thesis (M.A.): Tulane University.
Brown, Douglas P. (2004). The Formation of the Thought of a Young English Conservative: W. H. Mallock and the Contest for Cultural and Socio-Economic Authority, 1849-1884. PhD dissertation, University of Missouri.
Buckley, Jerome (1964). The Victorian Temper. New York: Vintage Books.
Burn, W. L. (1949). "English Conservatism," The Nineteenth Century, Vol. CXLV, pp. 1–11, 67–76.
Coker, Francis W. (1933). "Mallock, William, H. 1849-1923." In: Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. Ed. by Edwin R.A. Seligman & Alvin Johnson, Vol. X. London: Macmillan & Co., pp. 66–67.
Denisoff, Dennis (2001). "The Leering Creatures of W. H. Mallock and Vernon Lee." In: Aestheticism and Sexual Parody: 1840-1940. Cambridge University Press.
Douglas, Roy (2003). "Mallock and the 'Most Elaborate Answer'," The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. LXII, No. 5, pp. 117–136.
Eccleshall, Robert (1990). English Conservatism Since the Restoration: An Introduction & Anthology. London: Unwin Hyman.
Gartner, Russell R. (1979). William Hurrell Mallock: An Intellectual Biography. PhD dissertation, City University of New York.
Egedy, Gergely (2004). "Conservatism versus Socialism. The late-Victorian Prophet of Inequality, Mallock," Tarsadalomkutatas (Social Science Research), Vol. XXII, No. 1, pp. 147–161.
Kearney, Anthony (2012). "W. H. Mallock's Jenkinson and Thomas Love Peacock's Jenkison; a Likely Connection," Notes and Queries, Vol. LIX, No. 3, pp. 387–390.
Kirk, Russell (1982). The Portable Conservative Reader. New York: Viking Press.
Krueger, Christine L. (2003). "Mallock, William Hurrell, 1849-1923." In: Encyclopedia of British Writers, 19th and 20th Centuries. New York: Facts on File Inc., 223–224.
Leon, Daniel De (1908). "Marx on Mallock,"Daily People, Vol. VIII, No. 245.
Lucas, John (1971). "Conservatism and Revolution in the 1880s." In: Literature and Politics in the Nineteenth Century. London: Taylor & Francis, pp. 173–219.
McCandless, Amy Maureen Thompson (1970). Change and the Conservative: A Study of William Hurrell Mallock. Thesis (M.A.): University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Muller, Jerry Z. (1997) Conservatism: An Anthology of Social and Political Thought from David Hume to the Present. Princeton University Press.
Nickerson, Charles C. (1963). "A Bibliography of the Novels of W. H. Mallock," English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, Vol. VI, No. 4, pp. 190–198.
Peters, J. N. (2004). "William Hurrell Mallock." In: H.C.G. Matthew & Brian Harrison (eds.), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Vol. 36. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 337–338.
Woodring, Carl (1947). "William H. Mallock: A Neglected Wit," More Books, Vol. XII.
Woodring, Carl (1951). "Notes on Mallock's 'The New Republic'," Nineteenth Century Fiction, Vol. VI, pp. 71–74.
Wolff, Robert Lee (1977). Gains and Losses: Novels of Faith and Doubt in Victorian England. New York and London: Garland Publishing.
Yarker, P. M. (1955). "Voltaire Among the Positivists: A Study of W. H. Mallock's The New Paul and Virginia." In: Essays and Studies. London: John Murray.
Yarker, P. M. (1959). "W. H. Mallock's Other Novels," Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. XIV, No. 3, pp. 189–205.