Career
A selection of his parliamentary sketches was published posthumously, in 1897, by Justin McCarthy, the Irish nationalist Member of Parliament, as The Inner Life of the House of Commons. White himself was born in Bedford and educated at Bedford Modern School until the family moved to London. There he was trained 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, or rather his pen name, "Mark Rutherford", famous with three novels, supposedly edited by one 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 White translated Spinoza"s Ethics (1883). His later books include 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).
There is now a Mark Rutherford School in Bedford and a blue plaque commemorates White at 19 Park Hill in Carshalton.