William Hurrell Mallock

William Hurrell Mallock (7 February 18492 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. Biography A nephew of the historian Froude, he 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, 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), 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, and Thomas Henry Huxley. Although the book was not well received by critics at first, it did cause instant scandal, particularly concerning the portrait of literary scholar Walter Pater: 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.