William White (journalist)

William White (1807-1882), was a prominent 19th-century British pamphleteer and parliamentary sketch writer.

Biography

William White was born into an East Anglian nonconformist family in 1807 and educated at Bedford School. By 1830 he had established himself as a bookseller and printer in Bedford. He was a strict Congregationalist and a political radical. He was a member of Lord John Russell's election committee in 1832, as a result of which his house was besieged by a mob and its windows were smashed. In 1843 he defeated an attempt to impose a requirement that all schoolmasters at Harpur Trust schools should be practising Anglicans. His newspaper letters written during this period were reprinted in an 1844 pamphlet entitled Bedford Charity not Sectarian.^[1]

White was deeply influenced by the works of Thomas Carlyle and became disenchanted with Congregationalist orthodoxy. In 1852, White’s son (William) Hale White, later known as a writer under the pseudonym Mark Rutherford, was expelled from a Congregationalist seminary for questioning biblical authority, and William White published a pamphlet entitled To Think or Not to Think. Hale White later claimed that his own literary style owed much to his father. The character of Zachariah Coleman in Hale White’s The Revolution in Tanner’s Lane, published in 1887, "is a tribute to William White... [Zachariah Coleman's] love of Byron, and his admiration for Cobbett, came from William White."^[2]

The Times claimed that William White's radical politics alienated many of his clients and thereby ruined his business, as a result of which he ran up debts. Lord Charles Russell therefore secured for him the appointment of assistant, later principal, door-keeper of the House of Commons. He was then in a position, for twenty-five years, between 1850 and 1875, to use his ringside seat in order to gather material to write weekly sketches of parliamentary life for the popular weekly Illustrated Times, which he entitled The Inner Life of the House of Commons. These sketches draw a vivid picture of many notable parliamentary personalities and events of the period. A selection of his parliamentary sketches was published posthumously, in 1897, by Justin McCarthy, the Irish nationalist MP, in a work entitled The Inner Life of the House of Commons.^[3]

William White died in Carshalton, Surrey, on 11 February 1882.^[4]

References