1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Mallock, William Hurrell

MALLOCK, WILLIAM HURRELL (1849–  ), English author, was born at Cockington Court, Devonshire. He was educated privately, and at Balliol College, Oxford. He won the Newdigate prize in 1872, and took a second class in the final classical schools in 1874. He attracted considerable attention by his satirical story The New Republic (2 vols., 1877), in which he introduced characters easily recognized as prominent living men, Mark Pattison, Matthew Arnold, W. K. Clifford and others. 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) 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 published several brilliant works on economics, directed against Radical and Socialist theories: Social Equality (1882), Property and Progress (1884), Labour and the Popular Welfare (1893), Classes and Masses (1896) and Aristocracy and Evolution (1898); and 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, and in 1900 Lucretius on Life and Death in verse.