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William Hurrell Mallock (7 February 1849 – 2 April 1923) was an English novelist and economics writer.
A nephew of the historian Froude,[1] he was educated privately and then at Balliol College, Oxford. He won the Newdigate prize in 1872 for his poem The Isthmus of Suez[2] and took a second class in the final classical schools in 1874, securing his Bachelor of Arts degree from Oxford University. Mallock never entered a profession, though at one time he considered the diplomatic service. He attracted considerable attention by his satirical novel The New Republic (1877),[3][4][5] conceived while he was a student at Oxford, in which he introduced characters easily recognized as such prominent individuals as Benjamin Jowett, Matthew Arnold, Violet Fane, Thomas Carlyle,[6] and Thomas Henry Huxley.[7] Although the book was not well received by critics at first,[8] it did cause instant scandal, particularly concerning the portrait of literary scholar Walter Pater:[9]
His [Pater's] first main work, Studies in the History of the Renaissance was published in 1873. Over the next three or four years it became the focus of considerable hostility towards Pater, principally reviewers objected to its amoral hedonism. 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. In the second edition of the Renaissance the 'Conclusion' was removed, partly in response to the public ridicule, but mainly because of pressure brought to bear on Pater within Oxford by figures such as Benjamin Jowett. In particular, the discovery of his 'relationship' with William Money Hardinge, a Balliol undergraduate, threatened Pater with a sexual scandal.[10]
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.[11][12][13] A few months later Pater published what may have been a subtle riposte: "A Study of Dionysus: The Spiritual Form of Fire and Dew."[14]
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?[15] (1879) and the satirical novel The New Paul and Virginia (1878) he attacked positivist theories[16][17] and defended the Roman Catholic Church.[18][19][20][21] 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. 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,[22] being Mallock's response to a controversy between, among others, Huxley and the Bishop of Peterborough.[23]
He published several works on economics,[24] directed against radical and socialist[25] theories: Social Equality (1882), Property and Progress (1884), Labor 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[26][27][28][29][30][31][32] 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,[33][34] substantially the same, was accordingly delivered by me in New York, Cambridge, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Baltimore.[35]
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).
Mallock is given prominent space in Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind:[36]
How is one to sum up the work of W. H. Mallock, which fills twenty-seven volumes, exclusive of ephemerae? Mallock is remembered chiefly for one book, Bernard Shaw, came off well from a bout with Mallock. In boyhood, Mallock "unconsciously assumed in effect, if not in so many words, that any revolt or protest against the established order was indeed an impertinence, but was otherwise of no great importance." His first aspiration as a conservative was the restoration of classical taste in poetry. But as he grew, he came to realize "that the whole order of things—literary, religious, and social – which the classical poetry assumed, and which I had previously taken as impregnable, was being assailed by forces which it was impossible any longer to ignore." He turned to the defense of orthodox religion against the positivists and other worshippers of skeptical science.[40]
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.)
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.[41]
Artist Tom Phillips used Mallock's A Human Document as the basis for his project A Humument,[42] in which he took a copy of the novel and constructed a work of art using its pages.[43]
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."[44]
As editor
Translations
University of Oxford, Adam Smith, St John's College, Cambridge, Edward Heath, Colleges of the University of Oxford
Cornwall, Plymouth, Somerset, North Devon, Exeter
Library of Congress, Diana, Princess of Wales, Latin, Oclc, Integrated Authority File
Devon, Wiltshire, Taunton Deane, West Somerset, Sedgemoor
Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Friedrich Schiller, Muhammad, Romanticism
Mauritius, French Revolution, Age of Enlightenment, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Carlyle
Politics, Edmund Burke, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Capitalism
Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Capitalism, Conservatism, Barry Goldwater
Conservatism, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Capitalism, Libertarianism
Conservatism, Politics, Protectionism, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher