# Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/White, William Hale

​WHITE, WILLIAM HALE (1831–1913), novelist (under the pseudonym of Mark Rutherford), philosophical writer, literary critic, and civil servant, was born in High Street, Bedford, 22 December 1831. He was the eldest son of William White, bookseller and printer, of Bedford, by his wife, Mary Anne Chignell, of Colchester. His father, a strong dissenter and whig politician, was a man of some note in the public life of Bedford, and later became a famous doorkeeper of the House of Commons; he was the author of a series of lively parliamentary sketches for the Illustrated Times, a collection of which edited by Justin McCarthy [q.v.], appeared under the title The Inner Life of the House of Commons (1897). Hale White was educated at Bedford Modern School, and after a rather mechanical process of ‘conversion’, entered, at seventeen, the Countess of Huntingdon's college at Cheshunt, with a view to becoming an independent minister. He passed thence to New College, St. John's Wood, from which he was expelled, with two other students, for unorthodox views concerning the Biblical canon. Later he occasionally preached in Unitarian chapels, at Ditchling and elsewhere, and also in the London chapel of the famous Welsh preacher, Caleb Morris, for years Hale White's friend and spiritual guide. But his most definite early connexion with London was his engagement in the early 'fifties with John Chapman [q.v.], the publisher and editor of the Westminster Review, in whose office he met George Eliot and enjoyed her friendship. There are traces of this association in the sketch of ‘Theresa’ in the Autobiography, while Chapman is obviously ‘Wollaston’. In 1854 he passed into the civil service as a clerk in the office of the registrar-general, Somerset House; but was transferred in 1858 to the Admiralty, where he rose (1879) to be assistant director of contracts, frequently acting as director. He retired on a pension at the age of sixty. For a short time he was registrar of births, marriages, and deaths for Marylebone. He died 14 March 1913 at Groombridge, Kent, and was buried in the churchyard there. He was twice married: first, in 1856 to Harriet (died 1891), daughter of Samuel Arthur, a dress-trimmings maker, and a pupil of Sir Charles Hallé; by her he had five sons, the eldest of whom was Sir William Hale White, the physician, and one daughter; secondly, in 1911 to Dorothy Vernon, daughter of Horace Smith, metropolitan police magistrate for Westminster.
Hale White's work in literature virtually began with the appearance in 1881 of The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford, followed in 1885 by its sequel, Mark Rutherford's Deliverance. For the two books he invented a posthumous editor, ‘Reuben Shapcott’. He maintained the pseudonyms of ‘Mark Rutherford’ and ‘Reuben Shapcott’ through the series of novels which followed these works of spiritual biography, never formally acknowledging his authorship even when his place in contemporary literature had become assured. The novels closed in 1896 with Clara Hopgood. The intervening volumes, The Revolution in Tanner's Lane (1887), Miriam's Schooling, and other Papers (1890), and Catharine Furze (1893), yield, with the autobiographical books, the flower of his thought on life and religion, while his later imaginative work appears in Pages from a Journal, with other Papers (1900), More Pages from a Journal (1910), and the posthumous Last Pages from a Journal (1915), consisting of ​consisting of aphorisms, Biblical notes and sketches, a brilliant analysis of the book of Job, and some short stories which exhibit the poetic quality and delicate texture of his prose writing.
Hale White was a man of varied intellectual equipment, a scholar, an amateur astronomer, and an exact and painstaking literary critic. His work as a translator and exponent of Spinoza's ethical philosophy, as a student of Wordsworth's MSS. and his champion against the charge of political and religious apostasy, was of excellent quality, and his political journalism as London letter-writer for the Scotsman and many provincial journals was shrewd and broadly human. But his thought on life and literature received its deepest colouring through the religious and philosophic thinkers whose minds interested and fertilised his own, Spinoza and Wordsworth, with the great puritans, Milton and Bunyan. Spinoza drew him away from the ‘artificial God of the churches’ to a rational and also a transcendental view of religion, to which Wordsworth gave poetic expression, at the same time quickening his deep love of natural beauty. But throughout his passage from the theological to the philosophic position Hale White remained a puritan in temper and inclination.
The distinction of Hale White's writing lies in its intimate spiritual quality. Its main theme is that of provincial dissent in the early and middle nineteenth century; its setting the quiet scenery of his native Bedford and the eastern Midlands. Half dreamer, half thinker, his special appeal is to the lonely and the sensitive, and to the devout sceptic whose will is at issue with his intelligence. Under the veil of fiction, his work is essentially one of self-disclosure. In that respect the Autobiography and the Deliverance are as penetrating as Rousseau's Confessions, save that ‘Mark Rutherford’ is a reticent Englishman, and his more disturbing adventures are of the soul, not of the body. Slight as is their form, his novels impress the imagination by their sincerity and depth of feeling, touched and relieved with ironic humour, and by their still, if rather sombre, beauty of atmosphere; while as studies of nonconformist England they take high, and almost solitary, rank in Victorian literature.
Hale White wrote under his own name: translations of Spinoza's Ethic (1883) and Emendation of the Intellect (1895), A Description of the Wordsworth and Coleridge MSS. in the possession of Mr. T. Norton Longman (1897), Examination of the Charge of Apostasy against Wordsworth (1898), and John Bunyan (1905).
[The Early Life of Mark Rutherford, by himself, 1913; Sir William Robertson Nicoll, Memories of Mark Rutherford, 1924; William Hale White, Letters to Three Friends, 1924; Dorothy V. White, The Groombridge Diary, 1924; private information; personal knowledge.]
H. W. M.