William Hurrell Mallock

"Is life worth living?"
Mallock as caricatured by Spy (Leslie Ward) in Vanity Fair, December 1882

William Hurrell Mallock (7 February 1849 – 2 April 1923) was an English novelist and economics writer.

Biography

He was educated privately and then at Balliol College, Oxford. He won the Newdigate prize in 1872 and took a second class in the final classical schools in 1874, securing his Bachelor of Arts degree from Oxford University. He attracted considerable attention by his satirical novel The New Republic (1877),^[1] in which he introduced characters easily recognized as such prominent individuals as Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, and Thomas Henry Huxley.

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? (1879)^[2] and The New Paul and Virginia (1878) he attacked Positivist theories, and 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, one in particular directed against Huxley's Agnosticism, entitled "'Cowardly Agnosticism' A Word with Professor Huxley," in the April 1889 issue of The Fortnightly Review.^[3]

He published several brilliant works on economics, directed against radical and socialist 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).^[4] Among his anti-socialist works should be classed his 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), and The Veil of the Temple (1904). He published a volume of Poems in 1880. His 1883 book Lucretius included some verse translations from the Roman poet,^[5] which he followed with Lucretius on Life and Death in 1900,^[6] 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).^[7]

Ironically, this latter work 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.

Artist Tom Phillips used Mallock's A Human Document as the basis for his project A Humument, where he took a copy of the novel and constructed a work of art using its pages.^[8]

References

1. ^ The New Republic - W. H. Mallock at www.pseudopodium.org
2. ^
   • Is Life Worth Living? by W. H. Mallock at Project Gutenberg
3. ^ "Cowardly Agnosticism" at aleph0.clarku.edu
4. ^ http://ia300212.us.archive.org/2/texts/ACriticalExaminationOfSocialism/ACriticalExaminationOfSocialism.pdf
5. ^ Mallock, W.H., Lucretius, 1883. New York: John B. Alden at Google Books
6. ^ Mallock, W.H., Lucretius on Life and Death. First Edition, 1900. London: Adam and Charles Black at the Internet Archive
7. ^ Mallock, W.H., Lucretius on Life and Death. Second Edition, 1910. New York: John Lane Company at Google Books
8. ^ Traister, Daniel, "W.H. Mallock and A Human Document" at Humument.com

External links

• Works by William Hurrell Mallock at Google Books
• Works by William Hurrell Mallock at the Internet Archive
• Works by William Hurrell Mallock at Project Gutenberg

Bibliography

• A Human Document (New York: Cassell, 1892) First US edition.

•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. 

Persondata
Name	Mallock
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	7 February 1849
Place of birth
Date of death	2 April 1923
Place of death