Hans Klinke, the son of a baker, was born in 1907 and described himself as a Protestant citizen of Prussia. He studied English and theology from 1926, at the University of Greifswald (on the Baltic coast), and during his first term visited the Seventh World’s Christian Endeavour Convention, where he heard Ramsay Macdonald and Lloyd George. By the time he made his second study trip to England in August 1929, he had been assigned (in July 1928) William Hale White as the subject of his dissertation. In his Foreword he writes: ‘My stay and my studies in the house of Hale White’s widow in Sherborne were of crucial importance. I finished my dissertation by the beginning of the Summer term in 1930.’ He thanks his teachers, in particular ‘Professor Dr Liljegren’ who gave him his subject. Liljegren, who died in his hundredth year in 1984, was a Swede who was Professor of English in Greifswald from 1926 to 1939, returning there after the war. Dr Johannes Klinke, as he became known, became a pastor in Berlin in the Freie Kirche movement, in other words in the German Free Church. He served as an interpreter on the Eastern Front during the war, moving to Frankfurt am Main after the war, where he died of cancer in 1963 at the age of 56. He wrote no other books and was married with four children.

Klinke first wrote to Dorothy Vernon White (Hale White’s second wife) at Groombridge and received a reply from Sherborne. Impressed by what he had been able to find bibliographically in Germany, Dorothy and her brother-in-law Humphrey Milford of the Oxford University Press offered to help, and invited Klinke to stay on 17 July 1929.



He originally stayed with Dorothy’s mother, but moved to stay with Milford in Epsom, and from there visited the places Dorothy and Hale White had lived in together, finally staying in the house in Groombridge – in Klinke’s words ‘a real country-house covered in roses’. Some weeks of fruitful work at the British Library were followed by three weeks in Bristol, where he completed his research.

Dorothy White seems to have liked Klinke so much, when she met him with Humphrey Milford that July of 1929, that she not only made him a copy of the ‘Dorothy Book’ – Hale White’s personal collection of her letters and prayers, etc. – for his own use, but eventually assigned him Hale White’s room at Groombridge, in which Hale White had died, as his own study-bedroom. Here Klinke read Hale White’s Bible on his lectern, with Hale White’s annotations in German. He notes that Hale White possessed a copy of the latest German translation of the Bible by Kautzsch of 1894, and quotes White’s remark ‘What a cowardly compromise […] the Revised Version is’ (in Letters to three friends, p. 86).

Klinke read all possible printed sources relevant to Hale White, as well as some not yet printed or unprinted sources Dorothy supplied him with. His research is biographical and descriptive, not analytic or comparative, as one might expect of a dissertation completed in such a short time by someone in his early twenties. It is an inaugural­ dissertation, not a thesis. Its full title translates as: ‘William Hale White (Mark Rutherford): towards a biography, with particular regard to the influence of writers, thinkers and the events of his life, using much unpublished material.’

It should be said at the outset that Klinke’s bibliography is remarkable, including a list of extracts Dorothy made from letters written to her husband, mainly from Ruskin and Browning. All who admire Wilfred Stone’s bibliography (in his 1954 work, Religion and art of William Hale White) will recognize that he probably drew from Klinke, which he lists, along with Ursula Buchmann, as a ‘major critical work’. Klinke’s main sources are The early life of Mark Rutherford (W. Hale White); The autobiography of Mark Rutherford, which he treats as documentary; and William Robertson Nicoll’s Memories of Mark Rutherford (1924). He also made use of Dorothy White’s The Groombridge diary (1924) and Hale White’s Letters to three friends (1924) which Dorothy White edited for publication.


In his foreword, he first stresses the part played by William Robertson Nicoll in discovering this reticent author. He bemoans the chaos and contradictory nature of the available material, and suggests that the letters of Swinburne, Browning, Ruskin and G.H. Lewes could contribute much. He finds many dates in the literature wrong – especially in The early life – and takes pains to correct them, especially the dates of the births of Hale White’s children. He follows the life, collating his sources cogently, supplementing them when he can. For instance, in his account of White’s expulsion from theological college he includes (in English) an extract from a letter, written to Dorothy from the Rev. Charles Green in 1924, which I haven’t found quoted anywhere else:

‘I cannot remember that this act of discipline [in other words, the expulsion] excited any general feeling of surprise or disapproval […]. We all of that generation were as men groping in the gloom before dawn, while Hale White and the two other students who shared his fate had already caught the rising sun.’


Green described himself as Hale White’s senior at St John’s Theological College.

Klinke does justice to his subtitle by treating all the important influences, from Hale White’s father, Carlyle and Ruskin, to Caleb Morris, Wordsworth, the Bible, George Eliot, Swinburne, and others. But perhaps of more interest is the use he made of ‘The Dorothy book’. Dorothy not only made a copy of ‘The Dorothy book’ for Klinke – because ‘I do not like to part with the original’ – but allowed him to quote copiously from it. He was the first person she ever showed it to. It was a history and celebration of their love, among other things, in Hale White’s words. So far as I understand, Klinke kept the copy Dorothy made for him, so by some miracle it could still exist today.

Because ‘The Dorothy book’ doesn’t seem to be much quoted, let me instance one passage of vintage Hale White. There are passages like this elsewhere, but this was new to me:

‘Books perplex us and waste our time, because they contain so much that doesn’t concern us, much which we have no power to manage. If we find we have to rely on books for the settlement of any great questions, apart, of course, from mere questions of fact, we had better leave these questions alone.’ (Klinke, p. 130)

Klinke quotes much about the relationship between Hale White and Dorothy from ‘Groombridge diary’, but nothing as revealing as the following from ‘The Dorothy book’:

‘Dorothy and I are wife and husband as intimately and strictly as it is possible to be, if the relationship involves no ecclesiastical or legal sanction or bodily union. The love is perhaps the closer because it is love and nothing else.’ (Written by Hale White in April 1910; Klinke, p. 132.)

Hans Klinke, William Hale White (Mark Rutherford): Versuch einer Biographie (Frankfurt/Oder: Wilhelm Bohn, 1930)

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Ursula Clare Buchmann was born in Switzerland (St Gallen) in 1920, the daughter of a Swiss father and an English mother. She spent several holidays in England in the 1920s and 1930s. She studied English and German literature at Zurich University from 1941, qualified as a teacher, worked in the military law-courts of the Swiss Army during the Second World War. She then spent the year 1948/9 as an assistant in the German Department of Royal Holloway College. Her thesis was researched during the war, when many books were not available, though it doesn’t seem very impaired by that. Buchmann writes:


‘The main purpose of the present treatise is, not to judge the several books according to their artistic merit or demerit (even if we may point to certain features by the way), but to attempt a more or less systematic survey of the methods and theories Hale White suggests (and personally proves as valid in his own life) as leading in some measure to harmony through self-adjustment in a world of changing values. And this in its turn, in Hale White’s eyes, helps man in some measure to his “Salvation”.’

Her book could be called ‘Philosophy and theology in William Hale White’, and you can see from this quotation that it is a different kind of book from Klinke’s. She looks at the Mark Rutherford novels from the viewpoint of the moral lives of their characters, and not in any literary sense.

It is difficult to give a proper summary of Buchmann’s more or less theological study. She stresses what she calls Hale White’s ‘Personal religion’, identifies him as a Puritan ‘Agnostic’, and stresses the confessional nature of his writing, including the essays. That doesn’t sound very original, but I think in her detail she is. She sometimes finds a revealing phrase. She refers to the thirty years before Hale White began to write as ‘A long interval of silence which must have quickened his powers of selection […] and acted like a hot-house on the sensitive plant of his nervous system’, and she refers to the curative, healing, therapeutic nature of The autobiography of Mark Rutherford.

At the end of her book, Buchmann summarizes what she means by ‘self-adjustment’ in her title. She says that for Hale White, ‘Self­-adjustment is only possible if it does not demand the renunciation or suppression of what is vital to the life-force of the individual’ (p. 136). As examples of those who did renounce the ‘life-force’ and found ‘death-in-life’, she gives Hexton and Snale in The autobiography, Mrs Coleman and the Broad family in The revolution in Tanner’s Lane, the ‘gradual moral disintegration of the Furze couple’, in Catharine Furze, and Frank Palmer in Clara Hopgood, all of whom she calls ‘slaves of convention and respectability’.



She gives brief assessments of each of White’s books according to the success of their characters’ adjustment and moral worth. Zachariah Coleman (in The revolution in Tanner’s Lane), Miriam (in Miriam’s schooling), Catharine Furze and Cardew (in Catharine Furze), and Clara Hopgood and Baruch Cohen (in Clara Hopgood) are singled out as the most positive exemplars.



Buchmann is impressively well-read, referring to Cowfold (Bedford) as the ‘Barchester of Dissent’. Her book makes interesting mention and use of Carlyle, Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, Clough, Hopkins, T.S. Eliot, and she quotes interestingly from Aldous Huxley’s essays and George Trevelyan’s English social history. She also makes copious use of a rather unusual book, H.V. Routh’s Towards the twentieth century: essays in the spiritual history of the nineteenth (1937), which covers Victorian thought from Mill to Newman and Darwin. Buchmann might have found the word ‘adjustment’ in her sub-title from Routh’s reference to Herbert Spencer’s definition of life as ‘a continuous adjustment of inner relations to outer relations’.

Almost at the very end of her book, still on the subject of Routh, Buchmann writes this:


‘In portraying the various solutions to the problem of self-adjustment to reality in a world of changing values, H.V. Routh also touches on Nietzsche’s Dionysian aspirations of mastering life as the “Superman/Übermensch”. Routh adds, “This superman of the future would ruthlessly repudiate any creed, tradition or allegiance which counsels caution, self-contempt or repression; one images that he would utterly have scorned his contemporary Mark Rutherford’s searchings of heart.” ’

Buchmann comments:

‘No doubt, no more typical antagonist to the ideals of Hale White could have been found than Nietzsche. But to us, who have lived through the Second World War – if only as onlookers – the cautious and unpretending attempts by William Hale White at finding a solution of this eternal problem of mastering life, may carry more appeal.’

The idea of Hale White/Mark Rutherford as the ultimate opposite of Nietzsche’s Superman makes Buchmann – for me – well worth reading.

Ursula Buchmann, William Hale White (Mark Rutherford) and the problem of self-adjustment in a world of changing values (Zurich: Juris-Verlag, 1950)

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[ ‘Notes on Two European Scholars of William Hale White: Hans Klinke and Ursula Buchmann’, Bunyan Studies, no. 17, 2013]

See also NJ’s preliminary remarks to this text, when he delivered it at the symposium of the Mark Rutherford Society, 2013: here