Analysis of William Hale White’s Catherine Furz

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on May 1, 2025

William Hale White first fictionalized his attempts to escape his childhood’s Calvinistic training by writing an autobiography under the name of Mark Rutherford. He later used his own name when he published another serious exploration of the conflict caused by organized religion in Catherine Furze (1893), a novel that appeared in two volumes.

While critics found little to praise in White’s colorless style and rigid characters, they had to appreciate his complete sincerity, as through his narrator he warned readers against the “professionally religious” who rush to judge others with a self-important energy lacking adherence to any Christian tenet. His own tendency to depression appears in his protagonist, as does his fluid attitude toward the nature of religious affiliation through the conflicts suffered by several additional characters.

Ostensibly, the novel considers the passions of 19-year-old Catherine Furze, daughter during the 1840s to the largest ironmonger in Eastthorpe, “in the eastern Midlands.” However, Catherine will realize her love only as a future impediment, one that she eventually accepts as too large to overcome, resigning herself to a fatalism that literally kills her. Her unrequited love for a married preacher, Mr. Cardew, is balanced by the unrequited love felt for her by her father’s workman, Tom Catchpole.

Sir William Hale-White

In an overlapping plot, Catherine must parry her social-climbing mother’s desire for a “good” marriage for her while struggling to continue her relationship with an upright country family, the Bellamys, who her mother finds too “simple” for her daughter’s interests. White uses the Bellamy family to symbolize a clearer-headed approach to day-to-day life contrasted with the social status so important to townspeople like the Furzes (or Mrs. Furze, to be exact).

When fire destroys Mr. Furze’s iron shop and home, his wife pressures him to leave the neighborhood of shop residences and move to “The Terrace,” a group of new houses built at the north end of town. He does so with concerns about leaving behind loyal customers and fellow Dissenters with whom he attends chapel. A weak-willed man, he cannot stand up to his wife’s badgering, so the move takes place.

Soon after relocating, Mrs. Furze sends Catherine to the Ponsonby School to learn to behave in a manner more suitable to the elevated life she foresees for her daughter. While there, Catherine falls in love with Mr. Cardew, simultaneously developing a fondness for his wife. In the meantime, Tom has fallen in love with Catherine, much to the dismay of Mrs. Furze, who deems him an unsuitable match.

When Catherine returns home and is seen with Tom, she could honestly deny the romantic connection her mother assumes to be the case. She does not, believing her protest will be seen as a lie. She is also so confused regarding her feelings for Mr. Cardew that she refuses to return to school. During Catherine’s visit to the Bellamys, Mrs. Furze concocts a plan with Jim, a disgruntled Furze employer jealous of Tom’s value to Mr. Furze, to help get rid of Tom. Jim frames Tom for theft, forcing Mr. Furze, who remains completely dependent on Tom’s help, to reluctantly fire him.

In the middle of all this turmoil, the novel’s narrator remarks on the main characters’ approaches to faith, taking Mr. Cardew to task for intellectualizing religion. That prevents his understanding the need for compassion while dealing with his congregation: “Evangelicalism, however, to Mr. Cardew was dangerous. He was always prone to self-absorption, and the tendency was much increased by his religion.”

He had felt an attraction to Catherine and encouraged her, although not intentionally, to respond to him, causing her immeasurable harm, as he tended to base his judgments “on his own imagination,” when in actuality they “were not in the least apposite to what was actually before him.” His intellectualism proves especially harmful for Catherine, who is at her most vulnerable, having “suddenly opened” to new experiences. She asked herself “strange questions,” and needed help answering those questions from Cardew.

As for Tom, he recognizes his own ignorance as a simple worker, desperately wishing himself able to share Catherine’s passions in questions of faith, and not understanding why she cannot return his love. After he is fired, he finds Catherine to explain that he had been framed, and she plainly tells him that she can never love him. However, she gives him her ring to wear, explaining to him that she plans never to marry, and Tom must take solace from that fact. After Tom departs, “terrors vague and misty possessed her… she could not put into words what ailed her, and she wrestled with shapeless, clinging forms which she could hardly discern.”

White describes his own former despair when he adds that her doubts “wound themselves about her, and, although they were but shadows, they made her shriek.”

Catherine falls physically ill due to the conflict she feels over Cardew, and the realization “that her life would be spent without love, or, at least, without a love which could be acknowledged.” Cardew, however, suddenly realizes love for his long-suffering wife when “something came to him—the same Something which had so often restrained Catherine. It smote him as the light from heaven smote Saul of Tarsus… his eyes were opened.”

White demonstrates one way that people may redeem themselves, simply through a sudden epiphany, but they must be ready to receive it.

Mr. Furze pays for his foolish dismissal of Tom and for allowing his wife’s manipulation. Following a huge flood, which symbolizes a washing clean of past sins, his business collapses and his creditors must agree not to foreclose. He and his proud wife are forced to return to the lowly group of shop homes, having lost all they had, including their daughter.

As Catherine grows more ill, her alarmed mother calls in Dr. Turnbull, allowing the introduction of another attitude toward faith, probably that closest to White’s own. Because Dr. Turnbull does not attend church, those who do consign him to a future hell, yet hypocritically summon him when their medical problems are serious. Although a materialist, the narrator explains, Turnbull represented the most spiritual of all the town’s inhabitants, taking “the keenest interest in science… a believer in a spiritualism infinitely beyond that of most of his neighbours, for they had not a single spiritual interest.”

His attempts to pull Catherine’s energies outside herself fail, however, and she becomes progressively more ill until she dies, but not until she asks to see Cardew, who had been away for a time with his wife. In his newfound wisdom, Cardew tells Catherine that she had saved him; she tells him the same, and the narrator declares, “By their love for each other they were both saved. The disguises are manifold which the Immortal Son assumes in the work of our redemption.”

The novel concludes with Tom’s name cleared of all wrongdoing and Mr. Cardew remaining devoted to his wife. The final note from the narrator reinforces the fact that the supposedly upright Cardew learned more from the experience of death than from his study of theology and ethics. White himself had tried various religions, agnosticism, and finally settled on a resignation to absorb experiences and allow them to mold him. Catherine Furze echoes that philosophy of resignation.