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This article is taken from PN Review 43, Volume 11 Number 5, May - June 1985.

W. H. Mallock: Radical Tory, Romantic Classicist Martin Jarrett-Kerr


At Harvard I was presented to Mr Roosevelt . . . He was soon confiding in me that nothing which he had read for years had struck him so forcibly as parts of my own Veil of the Temple, (1904) which he had evidently read with care. (Mallock, 1907)

I have been reading a portion of Mr Mallock's article - it is written, so far as I have read it, in an excellent spirit - I mean grave and earnest, and very clever, which it was sure to be. (J. H. Newman, letter to Mrs Froude, 23 Dec. 1877)

I mentioned Mallock to Bishop Gore, who remarked with a snort of contempt that Mallock was 'a worthless fellow'. (Christopher Hollis, 1965).


William Hurrell Mallock (1849-1923) was a nephew of Hurrell Froude, of the Oxford Movement, and is best known for his The New Republic (1877 - still in print). He was educated by a private tutor who introduced him to liberal theological views which 'to me were shocking in an extreme degree'. Mallock went up to Balliol where he found these same views strongly represented by the Master, Benjamin Jowett, and his friends. Mallock reacted by writing his Republic, a remarkable feat for a young man, witty and frighteningly accurate in its parodies. Otho Laurence, the 'hero', has inherited a villa from a misanthropic and nihilistic uncle who had instructed that his grave be left uncared-for, with only the ...


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