His examination of this territory also encompasses the experience of melancholic dread and the problems of moral freedom. Finally, the beauty and power of White's prose are unparalleled in Victorian fiction. His fiction combines sincerity, intensity, and uncompromising psychological realism with an extraordinary stylistic purity.
Hale White did not begin to write fiction seriously until he was fifty years old, when he published under the pseudonym "Mark Rutherford." Born in 1831, "just before the Liverpool and Manchester Railway was opened," his first memory was "the coronation of Queen Victoria and a town's dinner in St. Paul's Square." His father, William, was a printer and bookseller; his mother was the former Mary Anne Chignell. White always loved his native town of Bedford, the home of John Bunyan, and recalled a happy childhood swimming and boating in the River Ouse in summer and skating on it in winter, roasting potatoes over open fires and eating gooseberries from a neighbor's garden. But these "perfect poetic pleasures" of a rural childhood were eclipsed each week by Sunday, which White describes as a "season of unmixed gloom."
White's family had been Independents--now commonly known as Congregationalists--since the mid-eighteenth century.
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