William Hurrell Mallock is remembered primarily for The New Republic (1877-1879), the satirical novel which he began writing as an Oxford undergraduate and which won him accolades as a brilliant wit, skilled parodist and caricaturist, and incisive critic of the foibles and fallacies of some of his famous contemporaries. When he followed that triumph with his wonderfully wicked reductio ad absurdum of positivism in The New Paul and Virginia (1878-1879), his career seemed safely launched as a satirist, a successor to Thomas Love Peacock or a Victorian reincarnation of Diogenes, the cynic, or Democritus, the laughing philosopher. Mallock subsequently published seven more novels; more than a score of volumes on a variety of religious, philosophical, sociological, and critical subjects; three collections of poetry; and almost one hundred articles in periodicals. Whatever reputation he achieved during his lifetime has not survived. Only three of his books remain in print...