Mark Rutherford’s Deliverance

Mark Rutherford’s Deliverance is the 1885 sequel to The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford, the two-part fictional self-portrait by William Hale White (1831-1913), the English writer who concealed his own history of lost faith behind the Rutherford pen name. The Deliverance carries Rutherford from the failed Dissenting ministry of the Autobiography into London journalism and a clerkship, his work among the hopeless poor of the Drury Lane courts, his late marriage, and the hard-won peace, the deliverance, he finds not in recovered doctrine but in duty, love, and acceptance of limitation. White’s spare confessional prose and his honesty about doubt made the Rutherford books touchstones for readers who had lost the old faith. The pair stands among the essential documents of the Victorian crisis of belief. Free PDF download available on BDeBooks.