PZ's Picks - S&H Jan/Feb 2007

No one reads Mark Rutherford! It is such a shame.
 
Last term I required the first-year students at Trinity to read Rutherford’s novel Catherine Furze in the Spiritual Formation course. It was amazing how instantaneously they “got” it, with its piercing portrait of an Anglican Evangelical minister gone wrong, and what happens to him, and his wife. Even George Eliot’s pendant-portrait, in Scenes of Clerical Life, of another Anglican Evangelical minister gone right, suffered by comparison. The students all chose the Mark Rutherford novel as their favorite.
 
Who was Mark Rutherford and why do I recommend him to you? And I mean, run don’t walk!
 
“Mark Rutherford” is the pseudonym of an English novelist and essayist named William Hale White, who lived from 1831 to 1913. White grew up in the bosom of evangelical Dissent, which means non-Church of England Protestantism in England. We would say that he grew up as a Congregationalist in the tradition of John Bunyan.  In fact, White attended Sunday School in the meeting-house at Bedford in which Bunyan himself had once preached.
 
William Hale White lost his faith in the church after he was disciplined at his theological college for a sermon which his teachers regarded as unsound. He gave up the idea of becoming ordained.  He became a civil servant, supported his invalid wife and their growing children for decades on a small government salary, and at night, without letting on to a soul, composed a series of stunning short novels. These included The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford (1881), which is in print as an Oxford University Press paperback; Mark Rutherford’s Deliverance (1885); four little gems entitled Catherine Furze (available from Trinity’s Bookstore), Miriam’s Schooling (you’ll have to get it on-line), The Revolution in Tanner’s Lane (still in print, sort of), and Clara Hopgood (ditto).
 
Each of these novels observes English provincial life of the mid-Victorian period, but from the standpoint of the issues facing evangelical Christians of that era. Rutherford himself was never not a Christian, and actually died as an every Sunday communicant of the Church of England. But he writes most of the time as an observer, though a sympathetic one. He knows the English Protestant theological tradition in a prodigious and completely engaged way. You might say that White is a Nineteenth-Century John Updike, but without the despair. 
 
For myself, the portrait of the Independent preacher, based on a real person named Caleb Morris, that occurs in The Revolution in Tanner’s Lane, is one of the high points in all English literature of an artist’s engagement with Bible Christianity. You will never forget it! Rutherford (i.e., William Hale White) usually contrasts the “genuine article,” such as the Caleb Morris character, with the thing gone wrong, for example, The Rev. John Broad in the same novel.  The reader thus knows that while evangelical Christianity can spawn Pharisees and hypocrites, it can also create new-born cruciform vessels such as Morris.
 
In some ways, the character of The Rev. Theophilus Cardew in Catherine Furze is your Trinity graduate gone wrong! He is a Simeonite (i.e., Evangelical) clergyman from Cambridge who lives in his head, and is spared by the sheerest Grace of God from destroying his life and his ministry because of bad theology linked to zero self-knowledge. Yet Rutherford is able in the same novel to give us a positive example of the real thing, in the character of “Orkid Jim,” who is converted soundly and emigrates to Pittsburgh where he saves many souls! No kidding.
 
Another thing about Mark Rutherford is his spare rhetoric and the way he puts major plot developments into a single sentence. In one phrase he can kill off a character with whom you have been thoroughly taken for 150 pages. As in life, things can change on a dime. There’s a little of the style of Ann Beattie here.

In summary, Mark Rutherford, whose books are all listed under that name but whose real name was William Hale White, was more in touch with the Evangelical tradition in which Trinity stands than almost any other remembered writer of Victorian England. He was also a diagnostician of immense and focused art, in observing, sympathetically, the human condition of Original Sin. And as you will see, the Cross is always there. FYI, I have been given the chance to read almost everything the man wrote, including his published correspondence and other notes, and he was a real Christian! I think of him as the other, believing side of E.M. Forster. Rutherford uplifts me and inspires me.

Run don’t walk!