W. H. Mallock
William Hurrell Mallock (1849-1923) was an English writer and thinker, known for his satirical novels and significant contributions to philosophical discourse. Born in Devon, he was educated at home and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he graduated in 1874. Mallock gained early recognition with his novel "The New Republic" (1877), which garnered attention for its witty portrayals of prominent figures such as John Ruskin and Matthew Arnold. Although he wrote several other novels, none achieved the same acclaim as his debut.
In addition to his fiction, Mallock's nonfiction work expressed a conservative stance on politics and religion, often critiquing positivism and socialism. His books, such as "Is Life Worth Living?" (1881) and "Religion as a Credible Doctrine" (1903), reflect his dogmatic Christian beliefs and his view that science undermined traditional moral values. His ideas on capitalism and the entrepreneurial elite were influential in the United States, impacting conservative thought and inspiring figures like Ayn Rand. Mallock's life was marked by a sense of dislocation between urban and rural life, a theme he explored in his later works. He passed away in Somerset, leaving behind a complex legacy that intertwined literature, philosophy, and socio-political commentary.
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W. H. Mallock
Writer
- Born: February 7, 1849
- Birthplace: Cheriton Bishop, Devon, England
- Died: April 2, 1923
- Place of death: Wincanton, Somerset, England
Biography
William Hurrell Mallock was born on February 7, 1849, at Cheriton Bishop in Devon, England. He was the son of the rector of Cheriton Bishop, the Reverend William Mallock, and Margaret, née Froude, the sister of three famous brothers, including the skeptical historian and sometime philosophical novelist James Anthony Froude. W. H. Mallock was educated at home and in the Reverend W. B. Philpot’s private school in Littlehampton before going up to Balliol College, Oxford, in 1869. The degree Mallock obtained in 1874 was a mediocre one, but in the meantime he won the Newdigate Prize in 1871, made the acquaintance of Robert Browning and Algernon Swinburne, and began work on a satirical novel modeled on Thomas Love Peacock’s highly distinctive accounts of polite repartee exchanged at eccentric country house parties.
The novel in question eventually appeared as The New Republic (1877), causing something of a stir with its parodied portraits of such luminaries as John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater, and Thomas Henry Huxley. The novel also includes an unflattering depiction of Benjamin Jowett, the master of Balliol, to whom Mallock had taken a strong disliking. Mallock never wrote anything else as appealing as The New Republic; such subsequent novels as The New Paul and Virginia (1878), A Romance of the Nineteenth Century (1881), Old Order Change (1886), A Human Document (1892), The Individualist: A Novel (1899), and The Veil of the Temple: Or, From Night to Twilight (1904) became increasingly stodgy, whether they attempted more earnest accounts of the condition of England or tried unavailingly to be similarly witty. His nonfiction was far more significant, although it exhibited the same tendency of retreat toward conservatism in politics and religion alike.
Mallock became a prolific contributor to periodicals, closely associated with the Fortnightly Review, and produced a steady stream of books, embracing a dogmatic form of Christianity in Is Life Worth Living? (1881) and Religion as a Credible Doctrine (1903). He launched vitriolic attacks on “positivism,” initially directed at followers of August Comte but broadening to take in all natural science, especially evolutionary theory. The substance of his complaint argued that science had devastated traditional beliefs on a wholesale basis, throwing out morality in its attempt to eschew religion. This opinion was extrapolated into the political field in a series of increasingly severe attacks on socialism, which he saw as a pseudoscientific doctrine.
Mallock’s call for the formulation of a “scientific conservatism,” with whose aid socialism might be fought and defeated on its own ideological battleground, did not bear fruit immediately. His own moral defense of capitalism on the grounds of the entrepreneurial elite’s success in “wealth creation” only served to annoy such local contemporaries as George Bernard Shaw. Such ideas eventually proved highly influential in the United States, however, where arguments extrapolated along Mallock’s lines eventually displaced the brutal social Darwinism embraced by such philosophical entrepreneurs as Andrew Carnegie, both in orthodox conservative thought and such extreme versions as the “objectivist” philosophy of Ayn Rand.
Mallock died on April 2, 1923, in Wincanton in Somerset, having spent most of his life torn between metropolitan London and rural Devon. He never felt entirely comfortable in either milieu—as his mildly regretful Memoirs of Life and Literature (1920) makes abundantly clear.