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.
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Biography
A nephew of the historian James Anthony Froude, Mallock was educated privately and then at Balliol College, Oxford. He won the Newdigate Prize in 1872 for his poem The Isthmus of Suez and took a second class in the final classical schools in 1874, receiving his Bachelor of Arts degree from Oxford University. He never entered a profession, though he at one time considered the diplomatic service.
He first drew wide attention with the satirical novel The New Republic (1877), conceived while he was a student at Oxford. Written as a roman à clef, it included characters recognizable as prominent figures such as Benjamin Jowett, Matthew Arnold, Violet Fane, Thomas Carlyle, and Thomas Henry Huxley. Although early critical reception was mixed, the book caused controversy, particularly for its satirical portrayal of the critic Walter Pater. Contemporary and later commentators described the depiction (as “Mr. Rose”) as deliberately cutting and suggestive of aesthetic and sexual affectation.
The appearance of The New Republic coincided with discussion of the Oxford Professorship of Poetry and is frequently cited as one factor in Pater’s decision not to stand for the post. Pater later published “A Study of Dionysus: The Spiritual Form of Fire and Dew,” which has sometimes been read as an indirect reply to the atmosphere of the controversy.
In subsequent decades Mallock wrote both fiction and polemical works on religion and politics. In books on religious questions he argued for dogma as the foundation of religion and rejected attempts to base religion solely on scientific claims. In Is Life Worth Living? (1879) and the satirical novel The New Paul and Virginia (1878) he attacked positivist ideas and wrote in defence of the Roman Catholic Church. (One of his uncles, Hurrell Froude, had been a founder of the Oxford Movement.)
He also contributed frequently to newspapers and magazines, including The Forum, National Review, Public Opinion, Contemporary Review, and Harper’s Weekly. His April 1889 essay opposing Thomas Huxley’s agnosticism appeared in The Fortnightly Review and was reprinted in Popular Science Monthly. The piece formed part of a broader public dispute involving Huxley and William Connor Magee, Bishop of Peterborough.
From the 1880s onward he published a series of works on economics and social policy critical of radical and socialist theories, including 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). In 1907 he visited the United States to deliver a set of lectures on socialism under the auspices of the National Civic Federation and at universities in several cities, including New York, Cambridge, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Baltimore.
Among his anti-socialist works is also the novel The Old Order Changes (1886). His other novels include 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 later received renewed attention from some conservative writers. Russell Kirk discussed him at length in The Conservative Mind, citing earlier critics such as George Saintsbury and John Squire on Mallock’s argumentative skill and style, while emphasizing his sustained opposition to political and moral radicalism.
He published a volume of Poems in 1880. His 1878 book Lucretius included verse translations from the Roman poet, followed by Lucretius on Life and Death (1900), a sequence of verse paraphrases influenced by the style of Edward FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam; a second edition appeared 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.
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."
Artist Tom Phillips used Mallock's A Human Document as the basis for his project A Humument, in which he took a copy of the novel and constructed a work of art using its pages.
Works
As editor
Letters, Remains, and Memoirs of Edward Adolphus Seymour, Twelfth Duke of Somerset, with Helen Guendolen Seymour Ramsden. London: Richard Bentley & Son, 1893.
Articles
Translations
"Lucretius on Life and Death," The Anglo-Saxon Review, Vol. III, December 1899.
"The Bridal Hymns of Catullus," The Anglo-Saxon Review, Vol. VII, December 1900.