He won the Newdigate Prize in 1872 for his poem The Isthmus of Suez[2] and took a second class in the final classical schools in 1874, securing his Bachelor of Arts degree from Oxford University.

[16] (1879) and the satirical novel The New Paul and Virginia (1878) he attacked positivist theories[7][17][18] and defended the Roman Catholic Church;[19][20][21][22] one of his uncles, Hurrell Froude, had been a founder of the Oxford Movement.

[24] He published several works on economics,[25] directed against radical and socialist[26] theories: Social Equality (1882), Property and Progress (1884), Labour and the Popular Welfare (1893), Classes and Masses (1896), Aristocracy and Evolution (1898), and A Critical Examination of Socialism (1908) – and later visited the United States in order to deliver a series of lectures[27][28][29][30][31][32][33] on the subject: The Civic Federation of New York, an influential body which aims, in various ways, at harmonising apparently divergent industrial interests in America, having decided on supplementing its other activities by a campaign of political and economic education, invited me, at the beginning of the year 1907, to initiate a scientific discussion of socialism in a series of lectures or speeches, to be delivered under the auspices of certain of the great Universities in the United States.

This invitation I accepted, but, the project being a new one, some difficulty arose as to the manner in which it might best be carried out – whether the speeches or lectures should in each case be new, dealing with some fresh aspect of the subject, or whether they should be arranged in a single series to be repeated without substantial alteration in each of the cities visited by me.

His other novels are A Romance of the Nineteenth Century (1881), A Human Document (1892), The Heart of Life (1895), Tristram Lacy (1899), The Veil of the Temple (1904), and An Immortal Soul (1908).

Is Life Worth Living?, Social Equality, and The Limits of Pure Democracy, together with Mallock's charming autobiography, are especially deserving of attention from anyone interested in the conservative mind.

He spent his life in a struggle against moral and political radicalism: for bulk and thoroughness, quite aside from Mallock's gifts of wit and style, his work is unexcelled among the body of conservative writings in any country.

[42]The popular English novelist Ouida (Maria Louise Ramé) dedicated her book of essays Views and Opinions (1895) to Mallock—"To W. H. Mallock.

"[43] Artist Tom Phillips used Mallock's A Human Document as the basis for his project A Humument,[44] in which he took a copy of the novel and constructed a work of art using its pages.