Background
He was born on December 22, 1831 in Bedford.
(Mark Rutherford is a much under-rated British author and ...)
Mark Rutherford is a much under-rated British author and deserves to be more widely read and appreciated. His sensitive portrayal of women in a time of change - the Victorian era - is very moving and thought-provoking. Check out our other books at www.dogstailbooks.co.uk
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He was born on December 22, 1831 in Bedford.
White studied for the Independent (Congregational) ministry, but was expelled from his college in 1852 for questioning the dogma that every word in the Bible was divinely inspired.
In 1858 he began to work for the British admiralty, where he rose by 1879 to assistant director of naval contracts. He supplemented his income by journalism. His chief writings are The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford (1881), Mark Rutherford's Deliverance (1885), The Revolution in Tanner's Lane (1887), Miriam's Schooling (1890), Catherine Furze (1893), and Clara Hopgood (1896). All were issued as the posthumous works of the nonconformist minister Mark Rutherford. The first two books are slightly fictionalized accounts of the author's own transition from rural England to the inferno of industrialized London and from Calvinist fundamentalism to a view of religion as a symbolic language for secular truth; the others are novels. His main subject is English puritanism: its greatness as the expression of valid insights; its decay, when the dogmas no longer represented sincere thought and feeling; and the problems of the puritan's moral conscientiousness and individualism when these persist after the disappearance of a literal faith.
Never popular, his work has been cherished by men like Arnold Bennett, D. H. Lawrence, and André Gide for the vividness of its picture of English nonconformity, its psychological acuteness, its general wisdom, and its style. Other works include An Examination of the Charge of Apostacy Against Wordsworth (1898) and a translation of Spinoza's Ethics (1898).
(Mark Rutherford is a much under-rated British author and ...)