1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Rutherford, Mark

RUTHERFORD, MARK, the pen-name of William Hale White, English author, who was born at Bedford about 1830. His father, William White, a member of the nonconformist community of the Bunyan Meeting, removed to London, where he was well known as a doorkeeper of the House of Commons; he wrote sketches of parliamentary life for the Illustrated Times, papers afterwards collected by his son as The Inner Life of the House of Commons (1897). The son was educated for the Congregational ministry, but the development of his views prevented his taking up that career, and he became a clerk in the admiralty. He had already served an apprenticeship to journalism before he made his name as a novelist by the three books “edited by Reuben Shapcott,” The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford (1881), Mark Rutherford's Deliverance (1885), and The Revolution in Tanner's Lane (1887). Under his own name he translated Spinoza's Ethic (1883). Later books are Miriam's Schooling, and other Papers (1890), Catherine Furze (2 vols., 1893), Clara Hopgood (1896), Pages from a Journal, with other Papers (1900), and John Bunyan (1905). Though for a long time little appreciated by the public, his novels—particularly the earlier ones—have a power and style which must always give his works a place of their own in the literary history of their time.