Now see how long a letter I have written unto you, going the Apostle one better, with my own left hand: only the busiest man in England could have found time to do it.

Grant Allen to 'Fiona Macleod', 1894 

Preface 

Acknowledgements

INTRODUCTION 'The Most Hateful of Professions'? 

CHAPTER ONE Canada and Oxford (1848-1873)

CHAPTER TWO Jamaica (1873-1876)

CHAPTER THREE Setting Out the Stall (1876-1880)

CHAPTER FOUR 'A Pedlar Crying Stuff': Selling the Wares (1880-1889)

 

CHAPTER FIVE The Stock in Trade: Writing Science

CHAPTER SIX The Stock in Trade: Light Fiction

 

CHAPTER SEVEN The Prosperous Tradesman (1890-1895)

 

CHAPTER EIGHT Dealing with the 'Dissenting Grocer'

 

CHAPTER NINE Retailing The Woman Who Did

 

CHAPTER TEN Last Orders (1896-1899)

 

CONCLUSION 'We of the Proletariate. . . '

 

Abbreviations in the Notes

 Notes and References

Bibliographies

 

 

 

'With coat-sleeve turned back, so as to give free play to his right hand and wrist, revealing meanwhile a flannel shirt of singular colour, and with his collar unbuttoned (he wore no tie) to leave his throat at ease as he bent myopically over the paper, he was writing at express speed, evidently in the full rush of the ardour of composition. The veins of his forehead were dilated, and his chin pushed forward in a way that made one think of a racing horse'. Thus are we introduced to Sykes, one of the most desperate of the literary hacks for hire in George Gissing's New Grub Street (1891). We are left in no doubt that, down there in the Darwinian nether world of late-Victorian authorship, success is defined as the survival of the fastest.

No one knew better than Gissing that nearly all Victorian writers with no resources but their pen lived anxious and arduous lives. They walked a precarious path. With some talent and a modicum of luck, they could hope that their path lay upwards -- towards a bare living for most, cosy comfort for a small minority, luxurious affluence for a tiny few. Quite often, though, it led downwards -- towards penury, the meagre charitable pension, the workhouse, the gutter. The path could change direction with shocking abruptness, and how far writers advanced along it either way depended, externally, on one thing only: the readiness with which the public would lay down its money to read what they had written. Authors might hope, in the long run, to create and train an audience to appreciate them; but meanwhile they had to live. Many of them -- a surprisingly high proportion of those in Grant Allen's generation who still have a reputation -- were financially buffered in one way or another from the most brutal pressures of the market. But, for all the rest, whether you were George Eliot or an anonymous penny-a-lining drudge, the laws of supply and demand ruled; and, in the absence of any safety net of social security, fellowships or sinecures, they ruled supreme. That was the regimen under which Grant Allen lived for the whole of his writing career.

This sounds too obvious to be worth stating, and so it would be if applied to a butcher, a baker, a candlestick maker. But in the case of the literary producers of the later nineteenth century, the economic facts of life rarely have been given their full weight. The spirit of our age is against it. In a climate of literary studies which has celebrated the death of the author and the autonomy of the text, it can seem crass to find it interesting whether, a hundred years ago, any particular author died in a feather bed or on a workhouse pallet.

Such a dismissive attitude has been exacerbated by the ahistorical slant of much modern literary scholarship but it is not, in fact, new. Even in the closing Victorian decades some writers and critics thought it irrelevant and irreverent to display much interest in bank balances and the rewards of the 'trade'. It pained Henry James to hear his colleagues crying from the house tops their sense of solidarity with grocers and shoemakers. Edmund Gosse, critic and poet, protested against some of his fellows' unseemly interest in hard cash, rates of production, deals with publishers, or what different periodicals paid per line. Yes, of course, Gosse conceded, business had to be done, contracts signed. But 'there should be a little modesty, one feels, in this pursuit of the guineas. . . . These functions should be performed in private, not flaunted before the public. I no more desire to know what my neighbour the poet makes by his verses than I crave to see the account books for my other neighbour the lawyer'.

Many did, in fact, did desire to know. Gosse's attitude was not uncommon, but it existed in the late Victorian era alongside a hungry interest in writers' bank balances, houses, activities and their opinions on everything. We see the same paradox in our own time. Attempts to de-historicise literature somehow manage to coexist with an unassuageable appetite for big literary biographies which are more candid and inclusive than ever before. And, at the more scholarly level, studies in literary history have proven to be remarkably resilient over the last twenty years or so, especially in the area of the socio-economics of Victorian writing and publishing. Peter Keating said rather gloomily in 1989 that the literary history, or more exactly the historical sociology of literature that was then being written was of an unadventurous kind. Keating's own The Haunted Study did much to counter that; and other studies of the calibre of those by Nigel Cross (1985), Michael Anesko (1986), Peter McDonald (1997) and Graham Law (2000) have continued the good work. One particularly welcome effect of that has been to direct attention to writers below the first or second rank, where the struggle for existence may be studied in its grimmest and most telling specificity. 

This book had its origin in my earlier The Vital Science: Biology and the Literary Imagination, 1860-1900. That book is a study of the creative uses to which writers put the ambiguous data of biology in the immediate post-Darwinian years, and I got interested in the way in which scientific popularisers interacted with their readers, and how some of them turned to fiction to dramatize their ideas. Grant Allen figured in a minor way in the earlier book, and I wished I had been able to explore his career further and how broad his interests were. But other projects drew me away, and there matters rested until 1999, the centenary of Allen's death, when a celebratory conference was planned at Bristol. Preparing the keynote address for that conference caused me to investigate his bibliography more thoroughly, and I grew astonished at the productivity and versatility of the man. He labelled himself proudly 'the busiest man in England', and he seemed entitled to the label: given what he achieved in a career lasting hardly more than twenty years, it is rather alarming to consider what he might have done if he had had a career twice as long. I was particularly intrigued by his own vigorous, acerbic and frequently witty examination of the professional freelance writer's lot; and that had a personal resonance too, for I had laboured for a time in that same vineyard, just a century after Allen, and I found what he had to say about the trials and tribulations, and the rewards of such a life was no was no less thought-provoking now than it was then.

The occupational disease of the biographer, said Macaulay, is the lues Boswelliana, the fever of admiring overstatement. I have been careful, I hope, not to catch that infection. Time has placed Grant Allen as an author of the third rank, and I expect him to remain there; it is not my task to reinstate him as an unjustly neglected writer, or even to mount a case for bringing very much of his work back from obscurity. Much of his work -- not quite all, to be sure -- was done for the day and has vanished with the day. I hope to show, however, that his career gives us some insight into the opportunities and rewards available in late-Victorian England for the most industrious writers of the type to which Allen belonged; and that is not a type which has been closely investigated.

Readers may wonder why, in a book which deals so much with money, I have made so little attempt to indicate its modern purchasing power. Inflation tables readily show, for example, that Allen's £1000 literary prize in 1891 is equivalent to £64,341 in 2004 British pounds. But as a guide to what such a sum 'meant' in terms of what it would buy, such a conversion is wholly misleading. It ignores on the one hand the many goods and services not then available at any price (effective health-care and domestic technologies, for instance); and on the other the relative abundance in England of other goods (relatively cheap land and basic building materials; very cheap semi-skilled labour and readily accessible, untouched countryside) 120 years ago. Critically, it ignores the effect of modern taxes, direct and indirect, which were low or non-existent then. This is an omission so serious that it has been said that a Victorian income, after being adjusted for inflation, should then be tripled to give an idea of its real buying power at the time. I know of no reliable way of adjusting for these factors. As a substitute, I have occasionally indicated some specific late-Victorian goods and services that might have been bought with a particular sum which Allen earned with his pen.

Adelaide

February 2007

 

The resources of the internet have transformed scholarly endeavour. Some of the primary research and virtually all of the exchange of ideas and information which stand behind this book have been handled via the web and email. No matter how recondite their interests, constant participation in world-wide discussion groups is available to all scholars now, and I have used these resources to the utmost. 

Even the internet has its limits, however, and a good part of the primary research for this biography was carried out in the British Library and elsewhere in England in 2001 during an Outside Studies Program provided by Flinders University, Adelaide. Other grants from Flinders' Faculty Research Budget relieved me of some teaching duties, contributed to the cost of conferences, and supported several foraging expeditions into libraries in the UK, Canada and the United States in 2002.

Numerous institutions have allowed me to use their holdings: a complete list is provided in the Bibliography. Many people connected with these institutions, and others, have shared their specialist knowledge with me and although we shall probably never meet in person it is good to know that we have met, and will meet again, in cyberspace. Among them I wish to thank the following particularly: Victor Berch for many obscure leads on Allen's short fiction; Angela Kingston of Adelaide for several rare and important finds; Nicholas Ruddick for our extended and enjoyable discussions about various aspects of The Woman Who Did, of which he was preparing his Broadview edition; Alex Scala of Kingston, Ontario for much information about that city as Grant Allen knew it; and Sandra Stelts, the curator of the Special Collections Library, Pennsylvania State University, for generous and repeated help over a long period. My thanks also to the following for their help on specific aspects of Allen's life and career: Mike Ashley and the Fictionmags forum; Donald Forsdyke, William Greenslade, Richard Landon, Mark Lasner, Graham Law, Xavier Legrand-Ferronniere, Bernard Lightman, Barbara Arnett Melchiori, Christine Nelson, Patrick Parrinder, Lyssa Randolph, Terence Rodgers, Christopher Sanguinetti, Jay Shorten, Jonathan Smith, Jean Soude, Richard Sveum, Phil Stephensen-Payne, Sue Templeman, Pierre Coustillas, Sabine Ernst, Greta Turner, John Owen Smith, Rebecca Venable, and the late Chris Willis. And a final thanks to Tony Twohig for the use of his house in Blackheath at a critical juncture.

Forty years ago, in a ground-breaking article 'The Sociology of Authorship' Richard Altick defined what he took to be 'the essence of the literary situation' for professional writers in the last Victorian decades. By that time, said Altick, writers who lived by their pen were being forced to accommodate themselves to a new mass audience; an audience of 'limited capacities and special expectations'. Every professional writer of the period, he continued, had to deal in one way or another with this question: 'To what extent was he obliged, as a member of his age's ruling class and supported, sometimes handsomely, by the pounds and shillings of his cultural inferiors, to debase his art, either for the sake of sheer intelligibility or for the more specific one of imparting desirable social, political, moral, and aesthetic attitudes?[1]

'Debasement' is a loaded term, and it is unlikely that many late-Victorian writers saw their plight in quite that way. Still, Altick's question admits of many answers and permits many stances. The most common stance which writers took towards it was the one that correlated best with the current state of their bank balance. Here is a voice answering Altick's question in a particularly stark, hard-headed way; a way which it is the aim of this book to define, illuminate and contextualize. As it happens, it is a fictional voice:

'But just understand the difference between a man like Reardon and a man like me. He is the old type of unpractical artist; I am the literary man of 1882. He won't make concessions, or rather, he can't make them; he can't supply the market. I -- well, you may say that at present I do nothing; but that's a great mistake, I am learning my business. Literature nowadays is a trade. Putting aside men of genius, who may succeed by mere cosmic force, your successful man of letters is your skilful tradesman. He thinks first and foremost of the markets; when one kind of goods begins to go off slackly, he is ready with something new and appetizing. He knows perfectly all the possible sources of income. Whatever he has to sell he'll get payment for it from all sorts of various quarters; none of your unpractical selling for a lump sum to a middleman who will make six distinct profits'.[2]

This quotation is from a novel to which we shall have frequent reference: George Gissing's New Grub Street (1891), that indispensable vade-mecum to the literary life of the 1880s. The speaker is Jasper Milvain, a brash young literary man on the make. The narrative does not require the reader to agree with the character's sentiments, for Milvain, as his first name hints, is the villain of the piece. Milvain seeks success, success measured in coin of the realm, and we see him trampling over everyone to get it. But he is a mightily attractive villain, especially when compared to the other writers whose careers Gissing charts with such loving despair: the ineffectual novelist Edwin Reardon, psychologically incapable of meeting the market; the hard-bitten veteran essayist Alfred Yule; his daughter Marion, exhausted by her task of cobbling together yet more 'literature' in the Reading Room of the British Museum; the naïvely idealistic Biffen; the semi-charlatan Whelpdale; all the other minor drunks and down-at-heel hacks. Indeed, it is exactly the tension caused by our awareness that the novel is of the devil's party without knowing it that engages us. It is propelled by a powerful if surreptitious envy and self-pity -- emotions which must figure in any socio-economic history of literature in the years of Allen's career, and from which our subject himself was not free.

The action of New Grub Street is set back nearly a decade: it opens in 1882. In that year, in real life, Grant Allen, a Canadian resident in London, is in his mid-thirties. He has been rather a late starter, but his career as an author-journalist is now getting into its stride. He wants to be successful; or, more exactly, he wants to make money -- though not for selfish reasons. It is, rather, because he does not expect to live very long and has a family to support. Jasper Milvain's analysis of what made for a successful tradesman-writer of the time is a fair account of the strategy which Allen is really pursuing at this point: not always willingly, it must be said, or without some poignant self-questioning, but always very effectively.

Having returned to England some years earlier after a spell teaching abroad, with no job and few resources, and eager to make a reputation as a scientific writer, Allen starts with a couple of technical tomes on evolutionary biology. Quickly he discovers that this will not earn him a living on a par with that of a prosperous country solicitor or doctor, which is the level he believes is his due and is determined to secure. He moves into the best general monthly periodicals of the day, ignoring the unanimous opinion of editors and working journalists that it is virtually impossible to make a living in that way. But by dint of almost incredible labour, Allen forces this market to yield a living. Soon afterwards, riding the boom of the New Journalism, he turns to writing miscellaneous essays for the weekly periodicals and newspapers as well. His favourite topics are in the area of popular science, especially botany, where his knowledge is prodigious; but he can and will turn his hand to anything.

Next, stumbling into fiction by accident, he finds that startling and sentimental short stories pay even better, so dozens of those too start to roll off his pen. Then he tries a serious novel of ideas -- one of the first explicitly 'Socialist' fictions of the '80s -- to promote his political beliefs. He polishes it carefully and elaborately, but it makes very little critical impression. Instead of giving up, he responds by varying his output, trying to appeal to different sectors of the market-place for fiction. Unremitting work produces several collected volumes of stories and some thirty-five novels, of which about six are still worth the attention of cultural historians, if not literary critics, a century later.

Twice in his career Allen finds he has a great popular success on his hands. What's Bred in the Bone (1891), a sensational thriller written to order at top speed, secures him one of the largest literary prizes ever awarded in Britain: a thousand pounds from George Newnes, the publishers of the magazine Tit-Bits. What's Bred in the Bone comes first in a field of 20,000 entrants to take the prize. It sells hugely in its first year, goes into seventeen impressions, appears in the form of a silent film in 1916, and is translated into several languages, including Icelandic. Nothing demonstrates better Allen's cold-blooded judgment in analysing and meeting the popular taste.

Allen's other triumph, The Woman Who Did (1895), proves to be a scandalous success of the first magnitude. Written from the heart, this is the most ambitious result of Allen's long-standing interest in women's issues, especially the relations between prostitution and marriage. About halfway through his career, we find him starting to articulate views on these subjects that are so charged and uncompromising that they border on the obsessive -- views which, as later chapters will elucidate, were formed from painful personal experience. At first praised, and then reviled by critics right across the ideological spectrum from the radical feminists to the Social Purity league, this 'sex problem' novel nevertheless sites itself at the head of its particular genre. Later on, some years after its author's death, it is made into a film. It goes in and out of print over the next century, but the latest edition appears in time for its centenary, and another scholarly edition appeared a little later. 

Somehow, on top of all this, Allen never loses sight of his 'serious' interests, which are enormously wide-ranging. At Allen's memorial service in October 1899 the positivist Frederic Harrison enumerated them: 'science, biology, physics, botany, mineralogy, metaphysics, history, palaeontology, archaeology, theology, philosophy, sociology, ethics, art, criticism'.[3] This may sound like the kindly exaggeration often thought appropriate at funerals, but that is not so. Indeed, Harrison could readily have added to his list: biography (Allen wrote three), classical studies, folklore, topography, geology, entomology, interior design and travel. About half of his total output -- that is, more than thirty books and many hundreds of articles -- testifies to these varied interests, and Allen's power to synthesize, generalize and find fruitful interconnections between them is remarkable. All his life he insists that his real work lies in science and philosophy, and he wished especially to help extend the reach of Darwinian biology into sociology and ethics. Economic pressures, however, oblige him to write popular science, for which he soon displays a powerful talent. Some of his pieces of popular science, like 'The Bronze Axe' (1889) and 'Mud' (1891) are fine products of the temporal and geological imagination. Almost none has ever been reprinted.[4]

It is tempting to over-emphasize Allen's sheer versatility as a writer. Certainly he may remind us of one of the other denizens of New Grub Street, who boasts 'I could throw off my supplemental novelette of fifteen thousand words without turning a hair, and immediately after it fall to, as fresh as a daisy, on an Illustrated History of the United States'.[5] Allen's pen is no less facile. He can jump from preparing a learned edition of Catullus' Attis to the task of banging out a history of Anglo-Saxon Britain; a popular biography of Darwin which is still an admirable short introduction to the man and his theory; a tale for boys; or a collection of moral uplift stories of artisan heroes. To all alike he brings to bear the same professional efficiency and air of expertise.

However, such a blunt comparison, stressing the mere facility of Allen's pen, is demeaning and misleading. It's inconceivable that any of the cast of New Grub Street -- certainly not Jasper Milvain -- would have been willing to spend ten years gathering the materials for a study in religious anthropology or working out a treatise on physics, well aware that the sales are going to be numbered in the hundreds. But Allen is not deterred, for he believes his book on religion, by exposing its folk-myth origins, will help to consign Christianity, and by implication all other revealed religions, to the scrap-heap; and for him that is a goal worth pursuing indeed. This is what makes Allen an interesting study in the sociology of authorship. He straddles so many different areas in the literary culture of his day. We see him in multiple roles: as the constructor and marketer of popular fiction; the dedicated but unaffiliated scholar, pursuing his lonely course and reckless of his time and energy, as long as the work gets done; the feuilletonist whose latest chatty 'middle' for an evening paper is always mailed on time; the severely technical botanist with a thesis to expound on the evolution of flowering plants; the tosser-off of a long opinionated essay on London architecture or a profusion of other topics; and, most dramatic of all, the idealistic social reformer half-willing to immolate his own career for the sake of having his radical say.

Grant Allen suffers from ill-health for all of his life and is a semi-invalid for some of it. When he dies at the age of fifty-one, everything has been achieved in a career lasting only two decades. His obituarists, glancing down the truncated list of his books in Clodd, exclaim at this astonishing record. The Athenaeum professes itself staggered by his 'amazing industry and versatility. 'Much as we admired Grant Allen's powers', it says, 'we were hardly prepared for such a list'.[6] The Daily News' opinion is that 'if sometimes aggressive and irritating, Grant Allen was always suggestive and interesting. The amount of work which he turned out in his comparatively short life . . . was amazing, and there can be few contemporary writers who have alternately provoked and stimulated, alienated and attracted, so many readers'.[7] Andrew Lang, man of letters and no slouch himself when it came to productivity, calls Allen 'the most versatile, beyond comparison, of any man in our age'.[8] But not one of them, not even his closest friends, is in any position to grasp or to appreciate the full extent and quality of his labours.

An intriguing figure, then, Grant Allen: a fringe presence at many different sites of Victorian intellectual life. How did this prodigy strike his fellows? In character he was, all agree, a convivial man with a pleasantly enthusiastic, confiding manner. He was a superlative teacher. 'A walk with him was an education', the editor Frank Harris recalled years after his death. 'He had no whimsies or quirks; he was always reasonable, good-tempered, vivacious, bright, and interested in every human interest. To my astonishment he knew a good deal about painting and sculpture and architecture; he was certainly the best-informed all-round man I have ever had the good fortune to meet'.[9]That is a memorable tribute from someone as egocentric as Frank Harris. Because some of Allen's views on social questions were exceedingly controversial, many reviewers savaged his work with a ferocity remarkable even by the accepted standards of late Victorian criticism. Yet he seems to have had few personal enemies. He was on good terms with most people in literary London, with some notable exceptions. He was no less welcome in scientific circles, and he said once that he had the good fortune of being acquainted with every distinguished scientific personage in Britain. This did not prevent a few scientific men lambasting him for his amateurism. Gossip columnists reported his striking presence at many a public dinner. With his 'silky silvery hair and beard, and the rather pronounced features so often associated with men of uncommon ability', a reporter scribbled on the occasion of some banquet, 'Mr Grant Allen is the type of the contemplative man of science -- the dreamer who is also an active thinker'.[10] He was sweet-tempered, modest to a fault, and usually charitable towards his critics, even the most bigoted of clergymen.

Though he was far from being a typical Englishman, Allen did like to maintain the familiar English pose of the cultivated amateur. People commented how few books he ever seemed to have about him. Yet his range of information was astonishing. In Italian art, English history and prehistory, geology, and especially in botany, he was all but omniscient. He claimed, quite without boasting, that he could identify forty thousand plants by eye alone. At one point he toyed with the idea of setting up in business as a general office of all-purpose information, a sort of walking data bank; and his friends thought this was a reasonable ambition, for they used to chorus, when some questionable fact came up in conversation and no reference book was to hand, 'Let's look it up in Grant!' The impression that he did little reading could not really have been correct, for, as he told an interviewer in 1887, his first task every morning was to turn out a book review. That done -- and he followed this regimen for some years -- the work of the day could start.

Yet he always seemed to have plenty of free time. Anthony Trollope claimed that three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write. Allen did not go quite that far, but somehow he got through his stint by working only in the mornings. They were long mornings, though, and he was capable of ferocious application at the typewriter, being one of first British writers to make full use of the machine. Frank Harris liked to say that Allen's typewriter disturbed no one, for it went in 'one long even click', as the 'super-journalist', as Harris called him, turned out yet another 'first-rate article on almost any subject from the growth of the idea of God to the habits of the caterpillar, at a moment's notice, and without perceptible exertion'.[11] Richard Le Gallienne, perceptive critic, good friend and neighbour, recalled how 'anyone who has stayed in his house will remember how his typewriter could be heard, as you crossed the hall, punctually beginning to click at nine every morning, and, if you eavesdropped, you would seldom note a pause in its rapid clicking'.[12] He moved from task to task with little time for rumination. Interruptions made no difference. Le Gallienne noticed how, when the gong announcing lunch sounded, Allen would stop typing in the middle of a sentence; then, finding the meal was not quite ready, would return to his typewriter and finish that sentence and start another. Many modern writers might reflect, however, that the most significant detail in that story is the sound of the luncheon gong. There are worse intrusions than being called too early to a meal whose preparation had been undertaken, like all the other domestic tasks of Allen's well-conducted household, by several resident servants who looked after a family of three.

Of course there was a price to pay, and something of the personal toll this schedule imposed on him is suggested in this private comment to a friend: 'Even with the aid of my type-writer, I find it hard to get through all I have to do in the twenty-four hours. A man who would invent a day of forty-eight would be conferring a great benefit on suffering humanity. And yet, when one comes to think how tired one is at the end of the existing day, any addition to it would be rather terrible to contemplate'.[13] On the other hand, this very letter is addressed from the excellent and expensive Grand Hotel du Cap, Antibes, where his family enjoyed for years a winter suite. Allen made authorship pay well, though for him its rewards were painfully won.

Once the day's tasks were over, Allen liked to be out of doors. Everyone who knew him agreed that he talked best on his feet, and that his gifts as a teacher of botany and geology and entomology revealed themselves best on a country walk. York Powell, who knew him for thirty years, said his afternoon walk was 'the crown and pinnacle of his day; the pleasure to look forward to and to look back on; every copse and hedgerow was a living museum to him, every roadside or field corner a botanical garden'.[14] Everyone noted his love of the natural world. 'He loved nature as I have never seen it loved by any other man', another wrote. 'He would dart towards some tiny flower by the hedgerow and talk of it with a quite beautiful sympathy; he would watch the movements of a bird or an insect with an observation that seemed extraordinary'.[15] Allen was no nature-worshipper or pantheist, however. His minute inspection of the natural scene was always scientific and his observations were always the raw material of generalizations. As Le Gallienne said of him, 'what an amazing talker he was! No pose-talk, but talk easily born of his knowledge and love of the subject that at the moment occupied him. No more brilliant generaliser can ever have lived. Present him with the most unexpected fact, or the most complex set of circumstances (as it might seem to you), and he had his theory in an instant, and was making it as clear, by the aid of his marvellously copious and exact vocabulary, as though he had drawn it on the air'.[16] The label which he fixed on Herbert Spencer, 'the prince of generalists', fits Allen just as well. Some hint of the mental universe which he inhabited, a place where no fact, no statistic, no recollection, existed in isolation, can be caught from a stray comment he once made about a child's ideal education:

A country walk will be richer in his eyes if he knows the birds and beasts, the flowers and insects. A Continental trip will be the richer in his eyes if he can delight his soul as much in a Mantegna or a Van der Weyden, in the spires of Cologne or the facade of the Certosa, as in the Boulevards and the Opera, the Rigi or the Matterhorn. Geology, history, poetry, make the world the fuller for him. Here rolled the Triassic sea: here brooded the ice plain: here Francesca paced the grey streets of Rimini. Every subject in which human thought can steep itself adds to the pleasure and the depth of life. That is why it were well to make the basis of our education as wide, as real, and as varied as possible. Let us ground our boys and girls in realities, not words: in knowledge of life and the world they live in, not in irregular verbs and rules of syntax.[17]

All very well, one might retort, if the teachers were all of the calibre of Grant Allen. Dr George Bird told Clodd that, if he had had a son, he would gladly have paid Allen a thousand a year just to take the boy on a weekly rural walk. Another friend would have upped the pay to two thousand a year if Allen had been available to her for a daily stroll. 'He was so full of information', she said, 'and had such a very lucid way of imparting it'.[18]

From his essays and from all but his most pot-boiling novels, we can deduce a good deal about Grant Allen's temperament and attitudes. He was an advanced radical of that familiar English stamp -- the radical with a powerfully puritan admixture, a man in the mould of Cobbett, Orwell and Lawrence. He wrote against big landlordism, private ownership of raw materials, prostitution, working women, nationalism, militarism, racism, vivisection, most aspects of imperialism and colonialism, the established Church, the House of Lords, sexual double standards and the environmental degradation of cities. He was for (fairly) plain living and high thinking, a social philosophy he called Individualism, 'little England' and Home Rule, a country residence and early nights, the right to roam across landed estates, early mating but divorce on demand, maternal women and large families produced on positive eugenic principles.

In social and political matters he can be relied on to side with the underdog, the oppressed and the exploited, though surely for ideological rather than empathetic reasons. Nearly all his fiction charts the doings of the upper middle classes and above: despite his animadversions on the aristocracy, he knew his readership well enough to make sure that all his novels show how dearly they love a lord. His working-class figures are all stock characters. His views on racial differences are cringe-making, even offensive, today but unremarkable for his time and in some respects were in advance of it: even a severe critic might allow that his heart is usually in the right place. In his youth he described himself as a Communist, and perhaps always thought of himself as one; but if so he managed to reconcile this with a little cautious personal speculation in building land. The Fabians' phrase 'the inevitability of gradualness' sums up his political position well enough, although he took no interest at all in party politics. No small part of his charm comes from the occasional perversity, even the self-contradiction, of his views. He loved to tip a received opinion on its head and to assert a paradox: he would have said it was the Irishman in him. In his first novel, Philistia, the young and poor Le Breton family are forced to wander the streets of Holloway, looking for lodgings. Their landlady is a tall, gaunt, hard-faced woman. We seem to be moving into the territory of Jude the Obscure and The Nether World, but Allen subverts our expectations by making her a domestic and maternal angel. She is how, however, entirely unconvincing.

2.

Immediately after Allen's untimely death in October 1899 one of his oldest friends began to collect letters and reminiscences for a biography. It was published in the following year as Grant Allen: A Memoir with a Bibliography. The author was Edward Clodd (1840-1930) and he was well qualified for the task. He was already an established author when Allen, then teaching in Jamaica, had run across his Childhood of the World (1873), a book introducing the origins of mythology and human culture to young readers. When Allen returned to England and made his foray into journalism, he and Clodd soon became acquainted. So began an intimate friendship which lasted for the rest of Allen's life. The two men were similar in their interests, values and temperament. Clodd was quite a prolific and popular writer, his main interests being the history of evolutionary theory, folklore, mythology, and the origins of Christianity. He was a rich man, a banker, and, in the nicest sense, a scalp-hunter of intellectuals, writers and artists. Tolerant, sympathetic, unenvious, genial and a generous host, Clodd made his Whitsuntide parties at his home at Aldeburgh in Suffolk into an institution. Almost all British and many foreign writers of any distinction accepted Clodd's invitations at one time or another. Good food, good drink and the liveliest possible conversation in male company were guaranteed at Clodd's. Grant Allen, a sociable man himself, was a regular at these parties, and for his part Clodd regularly took the train to Dorking or Hindhead to pass a day or two with the Allens; in addition, the two men were together every day for five weeks when they made a tour of Egypt in 1889.

Unfortunately Grant Allen was not served well by his biographer-friend. For reasons that are unclear, the Memoir was a rushed, sketchy and occasionally inaccurate job, well below the standard of even the usual stolid Victorian Life and Letters. It has been said that biographies should never be written with one eye on the widow. The Memoir was practically a collaboration between Clodd and Allen's widow and son, and it is uselessly discreet about key events in Allen's life, such as his first marriage and his spell in Jamaica. In this respect at least he gave satisfaction, for Nellie Allen was pleased with him for giving 'such a clear idea of my darling's beautiful personal character, and of the hard struggles that he had to bear'.[19] Few others were as satisfied, although Gissing told Clodd privately that he was glad that 'discretion rules from beginning to end. I should say that you have done the greatest possible service to Allen's memory -- to divest his personality of the temporary, the inessential, & to show the core of the man, his potent virtues, his amiable characteristics, his persistent aims'.[20] But Gissing had his own secrets, one of them not unlike one of Allen's, and he surely voicing his anxiety about posthumous biographical investigation, which he rightly feared would one day reveal much more than the 'core of the man' in his own case.

Most of the published reviews were negative or luke-warm. 'It is to be regretted that Mr Clodd has not produced a life of Mr. Grant Allen which would have been of more than ephemeral interest', said one.[21] Another lengthy review, in the Academy, was anonymous, but it was probably by James Sutherland Cotton, who had been editor of that influential journal between 1881 and 1896 when Allen had been contributing a good deal to it. Cotton had known Allen just as long as Clodd, and had worked alongside him during their early struggling years of journalism. It was Cotton who later wrote the accurate and judicious entry on Allen for the Dictionary of National Biography. With the resources and the insider's information he had at his disposal, Cotton could have done a much better job of work than Clodd, and no doubt his awareness of this coloured his review. He felt 'utter disappointment' when he read it. Clodd, he complained, had deliberately reneged on the biographer's most sacred duty: to assist time in forming a correct assessment of his subject. He had made no attempt to set Allen into his social and intellectual context, or even to ascertain properly what he had written, and to organise it meaningfully:

The Memoir has other even more obvious failings. There are far too many bland reminiscences solicited from old friends and copied out verbatim. Clodd made no attempt to use Allen's own writings to colour up his rather grey account, even though his subject was often frankly autobiographical and strongly opinionated in his fiction and non-fiction alike. He accepted uncritically the most complimentary remarks on Allen's scientific work, popular and technical, and never bothered to find out what his peers had really thought of it. He skated much too quickly over Allen's radical and inflammatory views on social issues, and never traced out their origin in his early experiences, even though he knew quite well that they had been formed there. Worst of all, despite the promise in the sub-title of his book, Clodd did not even try to discover the full extent and variety of Allen's writings, still less to evaluate them. Indeed, it appears that he compiled his bibliography simply by copying out the entries in the British Museum library catalogue of printed books. That library did not -- and does not -- have a complete set of the British editions of Allen's books, let alone of his overseas editions, translations, and the many, many hundreds of his more fugitive publications, a lot of which were unsigned. Small wonder, then, that Clodd was incapable of bringing into any kind of accord the two most disparate elements in Allen's career, which had put his subject under great nervous tension: the committed but unrewarded philosopher-scientist on the one hand, and the popular and affluent novelist-journalist on the other.

The most serious consequence of Clodd's rushing into print was that the Memoir was just about good enough to discourage anyone else from trying their hand at something better. A few years later, one Herbert Thompkins, an uncritical admirer of Allen's, did try to supplement Clodd by attempting an assessment of Allen's oeuvre in all its variety, including the popular scientific writings and a sampling of the periodical work. Thompkins' article in the Gentleman's Magazine is the best single overview of his career and achievement made before the very end of the twentieth century, although it is entirely inadequate on his social views, and the evaluation of his fiction is sketchy.[23]

After that, the rest is (almost) silence. Allen's main publisher, Chatto & Windus, found it worthwhile to reprint fifteen of his novels in a single-volume uniform 'new edition' in the 1890s, but nearly all of these were long out of print by the end of the First World War, and most of his volumes of popular science were out of print as well. Grant Richards reprinted some of Allen's uncollected work just after his death as a favour to his widow, but most of it slumbered undisturbed in the periodicals for another century. The lessons his career had to teach about the trade of writer in the late Victorian era did not yet interest literary historians, and even if they had, many relevant primary documents were still in private hands. Gradually his contemporaries and friends died off. Ironically, Clodd, who lived to be ninety, must have been one of the last survivors among those of Allen's friends who had observed his authorial career from start to finish.

In the inter-war years there was a flicker of interest in Grant Allen as a social prophet and as the spiritual grandfather of the new freedoms which marked the age of jazz and the flapper. There is an allusion to the title phrase 'The Woman Who Did' in the 'Cyclops' chapter of Ulysses (1922), as one of an absurd parade of pseudo-Irish heroes and heroines. There were short-lived new editions of The Woman Who Did in America and England in 1926 and 1927, the last for many years. A silent film based on The Scallywag was released in 1921. A final attempt to evaluate Allen's career as a whole was made in 1928, in a long but flimsy essay by the American literary journalist William Chislett.[24] After that, there was little but an occasional academic paper, some expensive library facsimiles of a few works, a reprinting of a handful of his stories in science fiction and other genre anthologies, and, in recent years, chapters discussing The Woman Who Did in works of feminist criticism and literary history.[25] Most biographical sketches have been content to copy from Clodd or from the entry on Allen in the DNB; and in this way some factual errors have been copied from one reference work to another for many decades.[26]

The first sign of a renewal of interest in Grant Allen's career as a whole came with the approach of the centenary year of his death, 1999. Oxford University Press issued a new edition of The Woman Who Did in 1995 in their Popular Fiction series, with an introduction by Sarah Wintle, in the form of a gaudy blue and yellow paperback bearing the stamp 'The bestseller that scandalized Victorian Britain'. The centenary itself was marked by a conference devoted to him at the University of the West of England, Bristol, and the subsequent planning of a book of essays to be issued by Ashgate Press. Barbara Arnett Melchiori's Grant Allen: The Downward Path Which Leads to Fiction (2000) followed, notable as the first attempt to deal critically with Allen as a novelist; and there was a doctoral thesis on Allen's scientific work.[27] In the following year appeared a centenary reassessment, founded on the first thorough attempt to determine exactly what Grant Allen had written -- no mean task.[28] All these developments made it clear that he was a figure well worth a proper biography, making use of the quite extensive and still extant primary materials, now scattered across three countries, which were overlooked or ignored by Edward Clodd in 1900.

3.

Insofar as it is more than an account of an exceptionally busy and self-reflective literary life, this study aims to open up a portal on the socio-economics of professional authorship, using Grant Allen's career to take up the question of how his kind of writer went about extracting a living from the market place in the last three Victorian decades. How exactly, starting with no assets but a head stuffed with miscellaneous information and armed with a ready pen, did Allen rise to comparative affluence with the kind of wares he had to offer? How exceptional was his achievement? What kind of concessions to publisher and public was he forced to make en route to prosperity?

Certainly these questions interested Allen himself, for he had much to say about the working conditions of the authorial trade in late Victorian England. He would have been the last writer to bridle at the word 'trade'. Indeed, he insisted on using it. For him, the need to earn his daily bread was paramount -- every penny he had came from his pen -- and he had few illusions about what he needed to do to get it. The question of where he might have been, or should have been, as an author was one he inquired into closely and repeatedly. He gave his answers (for they are multiple answers) now this emphasis, now that; and he cast them in the various forms of the polemical essay, the short story, the fable, and as episodes and authorial asides in his novels. Always they are always tinged with irony and an appealing if grim humour. 'Men are driven into literature, as they are driven into crime, by hunger alone', he asserted in gloomy tones, which (we must hope) contain a fair amount of self-mockery:


Mirror-silvering sweatshop or cosy book-lined study? Match-girls' 'phossy jaw' or writer's cramp? Which is nearer the truth? Only in the last twenty years or so has it become possible to give any reasonably objective answers to these questions, for the necessary comparative socio-economic studies have begun to emerge over this period: work of the quality of Nigel Cross's The Common Writer (1985), Michael Anesko's "Friction with the Market": Henry James and the Profession of Authorship (1986), Peter Keating's The Haunted Study (1989), N. N. Feltes's Literary Capital and the Late Victorian Novel (1993), Peter D. McDonald's British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice 1880-1914 (1997), and Graham Law's Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press (2000). Indeed, this biography might be seen as a supplement to the work of the these scholars; for what they do for Collins, Besant, James, Stevenson, Caine, Corelli, Conrad, Bennett, Conan Doyle and others, I have tried to do in my account of the busy life of Grant Allen.

In one important respect, however, these studies throw only an indirect light on Allen's career, for that career fits into a particular, distinctive and not well-explored stratum of late-Victorian literary activity. It is the stratum which was first defined and inspected by John Gross in The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters (1969). In part of this ground-breaking work Gross analysed the careers of what he called the 'bookman' -- the men and women who rose to prominence in the 1880s to meet the voracious demand for material to fill the novels and the new periodicals. They were, Gross shows, a distinct new breed: freelancers, but thoroughly professional authors who tried to make the bulk of their living from 'miscellaneous writing'. Miscellaneous writing can be defined, in this context, as the production of popular fiction, semi-popular or specialized non-fiction, and activity in what the French call high vulgarization: that is to say, the upper levels of literary and scientific journalism. None of the bookmen were creative geniuses, of the kind who create their own audience and succeed, in Gissing's phrase, by mere cosmic force. But neither were they necessarily hacks. As a group they are distinguishable, rather, for their ingenuity and shrewdness, and a determination to make the most of these gifts with relentless hard work.

The stratum of the bookmen was a broad one, and it has several distinguishable layers. It is to one of the most prosperous of these layers that Grant Allen's career belongs. It was a thin layer, however, because very few bookmen made enough money from pen-labour alone to allow them to live out their lives in solid, bourgeois comfort, at the same level, say, as that of the owner of a flourishing family business, of a commissioned army officer of a higher rank, of a partner in a small but thriving legal firm. That was the level to which Allen aspired and which he eventually achieved. He insisted on labelling himself a tradesman and would have scorned the 'bookman' tag, but his use of 'tradesman' has to be understood in a particular sense. From his perspective, doctors or lawyers or artists were tradesmen too, since they were all freelance artisans who sold their skills daily for what they would fetch in the open market. To put it another way, what Allen wanted was to become a self-employed professional man; a man whose profession is authorship; a man in an honourable profession, capable of earning his fees on exactly the same basis and at the same level as those in comparable lines of work. Certainly he evinced no trace of bohemianism, not even in his earliest days, either in his personal tastes or in his standard of living. From an early age he had commitments and dependants which he took very seriously. Professionalism and self-respect were his keynotes. Though he wrote fast, and with a close eye on the market, he scarcely repeated himself and he maintained a more than creditable standard, well apart from what Besant called 'the damnation of the cheque'.[30]
 
A salient feature of Allen's career is the amount of detail we have about the path he trod on the way to prosperity as a bookman. This is not true of most of them: few of the bookmen have ever attracted a candid biographer, and the ones who were the subject of a memoir or lengthy obituary soon after their deaths were never subjected to any indelicate probing into their finances. Edward Clodd permitted himself only the vaguest references to the matter. The difference, in Allen's case, is that the omission is all the more noticeable because his subject himself had an almost neurotic interest in his money-earning capacity and had no scruples about dilating upon it in private or in public. So Allen's own records are one source of information about his advance into affluence. Then there is the advantage that Allen dealt on intimately personal terms with three publishers and an agent (John Lane, Grant Richards, Andrew Chatto and A.P. Watt), who were all men who were scrupulous about their correspondence and whose firms have well-preserved records of their dealings with Allen.[31]

Then again, few of the bookmen had any scientific interests; yet for Allen writing popular science for the general periodicals and papers was critically important, especially in his earlier years. The socio-economics of popular scientific authorship in this period is another area which is only just starting to be explored.[32]

Finally, there is the factor of Grant Allen's own background. In some ways it was typical of the average bookman, yet in rather more ways it was intriguingly atypical. Nearly all of the most successful bookmen were, as Gross says, pre-eminently Oxbridge men with smooth Oxbridge manners.[33] Allen was an Oxford man, and his Oxford connections probably secured him his first toe-hold in journalism. But he lost that footing quickly, due to illness; and afterwards, as far as can be ascertained, he was on his own. In any case, he barely fits the specification drawn up by Gross (who does not mention him). He left Merton College with a mediocre degree in classics and said afterwards that he regarded himself as being, in effect, self-educated. By background and inclination he was an outsider, with an outsider's detachment, an outsider's idiosyncratic interests, and, potentially at least, an outsider's chip on the shoulder. He was a Canadian who had little good to say about the country of his birth, and the education that his affluent parents had given him at Kingston and in the United States, France and England deracinated him and gave him a flippantly sardonic outlook on English life. He disliked much about the government, policies, manners and customs of his adopted country, and what he said about them was often abrasively expressed. Apart from a few heroes like Meredith, Hardy and possibly Conan Doyle, he had what Gissing called an 'acrid' view of most of his fellow literary workers, and some of them returned the compliment. He was not one for coteries or committees or societies. 'I dislike organization -- I'm too individualistic to work together with them. . . . As socialistic as Marx, I am as individualist as Herbert Spencer. I will do better work for our common cause -- so far as it is common -- by holding aloof from all societies and saying my say in my own way. But I hope little. I am a gloomy pessimist. . . . PS. I am an invalid and have enough to do to earn a livelihood for my wife and family'.[34] He emerged from deepest Surrey only for business or social engagements -- although these were frequent enough, for he was no hermit; he had the bump of sociability. But by background and inclination he was a colonial outsider, with an outsider's detachment, an outsider's idiosyncratic interests and, potentially at least, an outsider's chip on the shoulder.

We may close with some statistics which help us take a first measure of our man. In his short life Allen produced seventy-seven volumes (counting his three-decker novels as one volume). He therefore published an average of three and a half books in each one of the twenty-two years of his career, dating from his first book in 1877. Of this total, forty-five volumes were novels, collections of short fiction, and poetry. The rest were on an extraordinary range of subjects. Some of them were assembled from periodical articles which had already seen print, but not all that many, for Allen did not reprint his own work very assiduously. For example, he contributed 102 long essays to the Cornhill right through his career, most of them very solid pieces indeed, closely-argued and running to eight or ten pages of fine print. This was well over a million words to that magazine alone. Yet he only ever reprinted twenty-six of these essays. Of the fifty-six articles of social criticism and commentary that he contributed to the Westminster Gazette in 1893-4, fewer than half were ever seen again. Finally, of the twenty-nine lengthy essays written for Longman's, he collected no more than ten. Presumably he thought the others were not worth reviving, though little of the residue is noticeably inferior to the items he did collect. Of his work in fiction, he left at least seventy of his short stories undisturbed in the magazines after their first appearance.

As a practitioner of the higher journalism, then -- not to mention his three or four books a year -- Allen was prodigious. His total output of articles, short stories and reviews amounted to very many hundreds of pieces, and that is only counting his signed or other indisputably identifiable work. He lived, of course, in an age of enormously productive penmen. In the preceding generation, the journalist G.A. Sala (1828-1895) was legendary for his output, and his breadth of interests came close to matching even Allen's. Sabine Baring-Gould (1834-1924), who shared some of Allen's interests in folklore and archaeology, was said in his day to have the longest title-list under one author in the British Museum catalogue. His productivity was sometimes compared to Allen's, but he did not depend on his pen for a living, and his work was done over many decades.[35] The most comparable name that comes to mind at once is Allen's colleague and sparring-partner Andrew Lang (1844-1912). But Lang's range was mostly literary-historical. Essentially he was a belle-lettrist; in fact, the very archetype of that species. He could not begin to match Allen's versatility, a point that he readily conceded himself. In terms of quantity and rate of production, Allen's was a record that was not outstripped by many; and in terms of range was outstripped by very few, if any, during his heyday. When comparing his career with others', we should always bear in mind that Allen's adult life was nearly half over before he had produced a single publishable word.

 

As the great St Lawrence river streams out of Lake Ontario, with Canada on its western bank and New York State on its eastern, its waters flow over a bed of soft limestone. But here and there, partly obstructing the river's passage, bosses of granite emerge from the water. They are the remnants of a band of tough igneous and metamorphic Precambrian rock, which forms the geological underlay to the Thousand Islands. These shaggy, craggy islets, whose name understates by far their total number, are thickly vegetated with pines and shrubs, and by the mid-nineteenth century they had become popular holiday havens. 'Their beauty is so unlike anything that one may see anywhere else', wrote Grant Allen on a return visit to the region. 'Tiny little islands, placed in tiny little rivers, crowned with tiny little chalets, and navigated by tiny little yachts; it all reminds one so thoroughly of one's childish dreamlands'.[36] The dreamy memories were his own, for this curious riverine locality was the country of his birth.

Grant Allen's father, Joseph Antisell Allen (1814-1900), was an Irishman and an Anglican clergyman, the son of a barrister. He attended Trinity College, Dublin, but left without a degree and spent some years hacking for a religious publishing house in London. At some time between 1840 and 1842 (accounts differ) he left Ireland for the New World, as tens of thousands of his compatriots were doing at the time and presumably for the same reason: to try to better his condition. If that was his intention he must have succeeded far beyond his expectations, because after being ordained at Montreal, and occupying a couple of livings in Quebec, his fortunes improved dramatically. Somehow, around 1845, he met and married (Catharine) Charlotte Ann Grant; and Miss Grant was an heiress, the daughter of a Baron.

Charlotte Grant Allen (1817-1894), Grant Allen's mother, had a romantic family background in which were mingled aristocratic French-Canadian, English and Scottish bloods. Her mother was a Coffin, from a Devonshire family of admirals and generals. Her father's family, the Grants, came originally from Blairfindy in Moray county, an area best known now for its small picturesque ruined castle and the Glenlivet whisky distillery. The Grants were Jacobites, and after Culloden the four sons of the laird fled Scotland to save their necks. By the end of the eighteenth century they had become a distinguished military family in the New World. Charlotte's father, Charles William Grant, inherited the French title of 5^th Baron of Longueuil through his mother's line, and the Grants owned considerable property in and around Kingston, the town in Ontario adjacent to the region of the Thousand Islands.

In 1833, because he needed to be in Kingston to pursue his political ambitions, the Baron built a large house just outside the town. 'Alwington' stood in spacious grounds reaching down to the water, and consisted of a central rectangular block of two stories with a single-storey wings on each side, all in the local limestone. In 1841 the government rented this mansion from the Baron to serve as the vice-regal residence for the short period when Kingston was the capital of the united Province of Canada, but in 1844 it reverted to the Grants and became the family headquarters. The frontage, facing towards the town, was quite modest; but any visitor approaching the house from the lake, coming up through the gardens along a path edged with irises to a flight of steps leading up to the terrace, got quite a visual shock. There, an ill-proportioned, Italianate portico, rising two full storeys and consisting of a great pediment supported in front by four massive pillars and behind by four equally massive pilasters, overhung and dwarfed the central block. Grant Allen grew up to detest the imitation classical architecture of the eighteenth century in England, and if this pretentious excrescence was part of his childhood home (it is not known exactly when it was added) perhaps his animosity started there.

Joseph Allen the clergyman could hardly have afforded by his own labours to keep his wife in the style to which she was accustomed. Fortunately that was not required of him. Instead the couple lived with her family at Alwington in leisured ease after their marriage. Two children were born to them there before the arrival of their third child and second son on 24 February 1848. He was christened Charles Grant Blairfindie Allen.[37] The components of this name reflect his mingled ancestry, and he was proud of his inheritance. It was an inheritance not financial, for he never saw a cent of the family fortune, but genetic. Allen liked to think of himself as a pure-bred, typical Celt, a race to which he ascribed many virtues, especially in the arts. He claimed at various times that such unlikely folk as Catullus and Dante Gabriel Rossetti were 'really' Celts. Without following Allen into one of his most enduring crochets, we can surely concede that a blend of seigneurial French, witty Irish, sober pragmatic Devonshire, and canny, brave Scottish bloods was likely to make for a pretty effervescent mixture.

Alwington was a large house, but in the 1850s when Allen was growing up it was fairly crowded. Apart from the owner, the Dowager Baroness (the Baron died in 1848), Alwington housed her son Charles Grant, the sixth Baron, his wife Anna, their seven children, and five servants. Some of the Allens must have lived there too, at least intermittently. The pressure was relieved, however, when Grant Allen was eleven, for in 1859 his uncle, aunt and the entire family of cousins packed up their household and moved to Paris, never to return. The last we hear of the Longueuil relations was a comical incident many years later, when a young woman of twenty-eight, a cousin whose name was presumably Hilda Grant but who styled herself Hilda de Longueuil, stayed with the Grant Allens at Dorking in Surrey, to get over a love affair. She attracted the aging and recently widowed author George Meredith, who pursued her vigorously for a while with letters after she returned to her home in France.[38]

The town of Kingston which lay beyond the front gates of Alwington during Allen's childhood was a small place whose chief distinction was some surprisingly grand public buildings. These were the relics of its brief glory as the capital of the Canadas, a status it had lost just before Allen was born, and they gave it a curious appearance. He had left as a child, though he had been back twice since then; but now he is seeing the town of his birth with thoroughly acclimatized English eyes, as a mature man:

a basking, blue stone-built town glowed in the foreground, its roofs all covered with tinned iron, and shining like gold in the morning sun. I could almost fancy myself in the East once more, looking out upon some domed and minaretted village of the Bosphorus. Building after building of a quaint debased American-Byzantine style, propped on pseudo-Doric pillars and surmounted by a false Italian dome (wood, tin-plated) stared upon us boldly, unabashed by its own pretentious absurdity. Incredibly monstrous they all are, if taken separately . . . yet looked on in the mass from the waterside, they really compose a pretty and harmonious picture. The effect is much heightened, too, by a few scattered martello towers, standing straight out of the shallow water, with red-rusted iron roofs, which contrast finely with the sun-gilded domes.[39]

The level and direction of the sarcasm here are difficult to determine. Is it aimed at the Canadians, or at the reader, or at the writer himself? And in what proportions at each? How deliberate are those clichés and the dead similes? The jaundiced phrasing seems a bit too eager to mock, and so falls into uncertainty: pillars, even if made of concrete, are either of the Doric order or they are not: they cannot be 'pseudo-Doric'. A dome is still a dome, and not 'false' even if it is made of wood and tin. But whatever the exact nature of his reaction at the time, we do know for sure that Allen soon steamed away down the St Lawrence to Quebec and an Atlantic crossing, and found neither occasion nor necessity to visit the land of his birth for another decade.

The presence of the Martello towers and the grim Fort Henry are reminders that Kingston is an ex-garrison town, founded by refugees from the American Revolution and afterwards settled by Irish Protestant immigrants. It was fiercely loyal to the British Crown. It was already home to what would become one of the great Canadian educational institutions, Queen's University. No doubt whatever intellectual stimulation Kingston offered at the time centred on that college, to which Joseph Allen was briefly affiliated. But Kingston had another very different side to it. After 1847 the Orangemen were joined by tens of thousands of poverty-stricken Irish Catholic refugees fleeing the Potato Famine. Outbreaks of cholera and typhus in the slum quarters filled mass graves which had to be dug along the waterfront, and violent feuds among the Irish immigrants, arising from distinctions of class and religion, marked the early years of Allen's childhood.

But it is unlikely that these early events had much impact on the frail, bookish son of a rich, rentier clergyman. Grant Allen left Kingston when he was a young teenager, and in any case he spent much of his childhood on Wolfe Island, five kilometres by ferry across a channel dividing it from the gardens of Alwington on the mainland. The largest of the Thousand Islands at about 34km by 11km, Wolfe Island has a different geology. It is of limestone like the adjacent coastline and is mostly flat, not rugged like the other islands, and lacks their scenic charm. At the time of Allen's birth the Grants owned about a third of the island, or around 4500 hectares, of which a small portion was cultivated.

Perhaps to give herself some space away from her son and his family, the Baroness preferred to live on Wolfe Island in another Grant mansion, Ardath House. This was a rambling property built in 1828 by the Baron in the French style with oak ornamentation. She had a small church built in the adjacent village of Marysville -- was it perhaps to give her new son-in-law some pretence of an independent occupation? -- and the Reverend Joseph Allen became the first vicar of the parish. It is unlikely that he found his duties onerous. Trinity Church -- a small, plain box of a building with a stumpy tower, built of the inevitable limestone -- has the date of 6 October 1845 on its foundation stone, but for some reason the church was not finished until 1848, and was probably put to little use for some years after that. By 1851 another clergyman had taken over the parish affairs on the island, and Joseph Allen continued to live as a gentleman of means with his mother-in-law, wife and children at Ardath House. Grant Allen eventually had six siblings: five sisters, and an elder brother who predeceased him. But there was plenty of space for them all. Ardath House (called 'the castle' locally) had twenty-five rooms, with a central manor hall heated by a gigantic fireplace.

Apparently Allen had no formal schooling at all during his childhood. He passed a 'rustic boyhood' under the benign tutelage of his father, wandering about on the island 'with the raccoons and the sunfish'.[40] He went skating and fishing and boating, and laid the foundations for his later formidable knowledge of natural history in general and botany and entomology in particular. It is hardly likely, however, that this Huckleberry Finn-like existence filled very much of his time. For much of the year Wolfe Island was a taxing environment for a child with a weak chest. The channel between mainland and island was frozen solid from the end of December, with access only over the ice; and when the ice began to break up in the spring, the island might be cut off for weeks at a time. Later on, Grant Allen was fond of warning parents not to let their children's schooling get in the way of their education, but a warm study and a book-laden desk must have figured largely in his own childhood. His father reported fondly that he started the study of Greek well before his seventh birthday, and could read his Greek Testament by the time he reached it. He must have had four languages at his disposal before he was far into his teens.

The surviving accounts agree that the prevailing tone of the Allen family was intensely intellectual. There was a constant procession of eminent visitors to Alwington. The naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace stayed with them in the summer of 1886, after his American lecture tour, in their 'roomy old-world mansion', noting that Joseph Allen cultivated a magnificent collection of gladioli and a small private vineyard.[41] Joseph and Charlotte Allen must have had a very strong influence on their precocious son's development, but since Allen rarely mentioned his parents in later years the exact nature of their influence remains shadowy. From what is known of his career, Joseph Allen appears to have been a fairly combative person. In his few surviving letters, he gives a slight impression of officiousness. For example, having persuaded his son to send on to Charles Darwin a copy of a paper that he, Joseph, had written on the evolution of morality, he then wrote to the great man directly from Canada, trying to secure an invitation for his son to visit Down House. No invitation was forthcoming.[42]

But a fairer reading, perhaps, might be that, unfulfilled himself, he found a vicarious solace in his son's expanding reputation. Many years later, when Herbert Spencer accused Grant Allen of 'turning Socialist' he retorted that, on the contrary, he had been born one. It is hard to credit that Allen would have heard much socialism preached at him from his tough, acquisitive Grant relations, but his father's politics may well have been unorthodox, if not radical. His position in life, though externally enviable, may have chafed his sense of self-respect. 'A private gentleman' was how Joseph Allen described himself in documents; a gentleman who dabbled in verse and political pamphlet writing. But the blunt truth was that he was living on his wife's unearned income; was a pensioner, one might say, of the Grant family, and yet at the same time he surely appeared to his social inferiors as someone who had inveigled his way into the colonial landlord class. What the tenantry whose rents supplied those private means thought of their ex-pastor is unknown, except for one clue. In 1854, there seems to have been some criticism by a committee of the Wolfe Island congregation, to the effect that the landlords of the island ought to be doing more for the spiritual welfare of their tenants.[43] Joseph Allen may have regarded himself as the meat in the sandwich in such exchanges, and his perceptive son might well have pitied him for it.

There may be a hint of some of the tensions between his father and his mother's family in Allen's first and highly autobiographical novel, Philistia. In an early scene, young Ernest Le Breton goes as a private tutor to Dunbude Castle, the home of the Exmoor family, a hideous country house 'formed by impartially compounding a Palladian palace, a Doric temple, and a square redbrick English manor-house'. Over the dinner table Ernest has to endure the conversation of Lord Connemara, a bone-headed young Irish peer, who is having tenant problems:

'My tenants won't pay up, and nothing will make them. They've got the cash actually in the bank; but they keep it there, waiting for a lot of sentimentalists in the House of Commons to interfere between us, and make them a present of my property. Rolling in money, some of them are, I can tell you. One man, I know as a positive fact, sold a pig last week, and yet pretends he can't pay me. All the fault of these horrid communists that you were speaking of, Lady Exmoor -- all the fault of these horrid communists'.
     'You're rather a communist yourself, aren't you, Mr Le Breton?' asked Lady Hilda boldly from across the table. 'I remember you told me something once about cutting the throats of all the landlords'.[44]

Ernest, to the mischievous Lady Hilda's disappointment, disavows any murderous sentiments, although like his creator he does call himself a Communist. This stance causes him some grief shortly afterwards.

Whether the son conformed to, or reacted against, his father's private philosophical and religious beliefs is also unclear. Joseph Allen resigned his ministry in mid-life over some theological dispute with his bishop, and it's conceivable that he had a scathing view of the clergy which he transmitted to his son, who, by his own account, was a militant atheist and Darwinian from childhood. His son's memorable birth year, 1848, the year of European revolutions, also saw the issue of Marx's Communist Manifesto in England; and the Origin of Species burst on the world when he was eleven. Joseph Allen ensured that their message was not lost on his son. He was himself the author of Day Dreams of a Butterfly, a philosophical poem of appalling length with an appendix of notes citing authorities from Kant to Carlyle. He certainly made his son read Herbert Spencer. And, like several Victorian atheists, Grant Allen acquired a knowledge of the Bible that would have shamed many a divine; he quotes from it more than from any other work. On the other hand, he said once that he had no problem giving his villains an occupation, because he made them all clergymen. The converse is certainly true. He made most of the clerics in his fiction hypocrites, trimmers, time-servers, fanatics, arsonists or murderous psychopaths. Presumably that emphasis came from the paternal views rather than the paternal practice.

When Allen was born the population of Wolfe Island was only about 1300, nearly all of them tenant farmers, but in the years when he was growing up the community was expanding and prospering. By the time he left Canada, the population had almost tripled and a canal had been dug across the island to improve transport with the American side of the St Lawrence. So during the young Allen's rather idyllic childhood the island where he wandered at large was undergoing an invasion of eager farmers intent on turning the wilderness into cropland. Perhaps his observation of this process stands behind his later denunciations of the philistine habits of the North American farmer.

On the other hand, even a youngster must have been aware that this same transformation was enriching his family and was about to underwrite his family's long sojourn in the Old World. In his political articles, and in passages in his novels, the right of proprietors to sequester or (as he liked to put it, to 'taboo') large areas of land is one of his most constant targets. Certainly he was good at expressing his naive wonderment that, just because men like his grandfather had been able to acquire tracts of unowned Canadian wilderness, his family could, for ever afterwards, oblige the farmers, who extracted an arduous living from 'Grant' land, to pay rent sufficient to keep the entire large brood of the Allens and the Grants in idleness. How odd, how primitive, how laughable our arrangements would seem to an anthropologist of the future! Perhaps the first seeds of Allen's satirical The British Barbarians were sown on Wolfe Island.

When he was about thirteen,[45] part of the Allen family began one of those leisurely tours of Europe, their duration measured in years rather than months, which were such an attractive feature of upper class life of the time. The senior Allens returned to Canada eventually and took up residence at Alwington, where they lived for the rest of their lives with their unmarried daughter. But their son did not return. Grant Allen could never have made a living from his kind of superior scientific and polemical journalism and novel-writing in Canada. He had to be at the heart of the literary-intellectual world to sell the produce of his pen, and in the last decades of the century that meant London. He went back to Alwington as a mature man probably only twice, once on a flying visit mentioned above, in 1876; and again during a tour of eastern North America in the summer of 1886. In many ways, which we will be considering later, Allen was a renegade and an outsider, and like many other expatriate writers was fiercely critical of British institutions, which caused some animosity. For example, his views on sexual and marital relations were partly formed, as he said himself, by the rather freer mores of the New World. Some of his stories and essays turn on this point.

According to the shaky notes which the aged Joseph Allen made forty years later just after his son's death, the furtherance of their children's, or at any rate their boys', education was the sole purpose of this long tour. It took them successively to the United States, France and England. They lived first in New Haven, Connecticut, from June 1861, and here Allen and his brother acquired their 'first rudiments of higher education beneath the shadow of the elms at Yale College'.[46] The peacefulness of Yale must have contrasted strangely with the public events of that tumultuous year: the Civil War had started in South Carolina a couple of months earlier, quickly followed by the secession of the states of the Confederacy. The Allen family followed the war closely and enthusiastically, seeing the struggle as an unambiguous fight for human freedom. Early in the following spring, around the time of the slaughterhouse that was the battle of Shiloh, they crossed the Atlantic to France. They settled into the English colony at Dieppe, where Grant attended the Collège Impérial, a handsome establishment on the Quai Henri IV which catered particularly for foreign pupils. He stayed a year, presumably to perfect his French, and he did become completely bilingual.[47] The family then crossed the Channel and he entered King Edward's School, Birmingham early in April 1864, when he was 16.[48] Surviving school records show that he had distinguished himself by winning a string of prizes in classics, mathematics and French -- but not, apparently, in natural history, even though science did appear on the curriculum. Perhaps he thought that the humanities offered more of a chance of a lucrative scholarship. If so, he was right, for only a tiny fraction, about 3%, of the college scholarships available at Oxford at that time were for study in the sciences.[49] So, when he left Birmingham in the summer of 1867 at the age of nineteen, it was to take up a valuable postmastership in classics which he had won at Merton College, Oxford. His life as an independent adult had begun.

In his old age the critic George Saintsbury wrote a memoir, 'Oxford Sixty Years Since', which captures a good deal of the atmosphere as Allen knew it when he went up in the autumn of 1867.[50] Oxford in the 1860s consisted almost entirely of the colleges and their supporting facilities. The big, comfortable late-Victorian and Edwardian villas running out along the main roads were not yet built, and few middle-class people lived in the town who were not connected in some way with the university. The monastic past still lay heavily on Oxford. There were some new buildings, but also many crumbling ones, and the general atmosphere was one of gentle decay. The entire undergraduate body numbered only about two thousand -- applicants were not plentiful, not even with the bait of scholarships -- and, of course, none of them were Roman Catholics, or women. No father who expected his son to follow a commercial or a medical or an engineering career considered Oxford; for all such youths, it was a waste of time. An eminent Scottish academic, himself an Oxford man, described the university in 1867 as a great, expensive steam-hammer, used only for cracking walnuts.

When Allen went up things were tranquil enough. The religious turmoil of the Oxford Movement had long since subsided after Newman's conversion to Rome. In the previous decade Morris, Rossetti, Burne-Jones and their friends had painted bright frescoes on the walls of the Union. It seemed appropriately symbolic that they had already faded into ghostly tatters, for Pre-Raphaelitism as a coherent artistic movement had come and gone. At Brasenose, an obscure tutor, Walter Pater, was preparing his The Renaissance, a book whose innocuous title disguised a vague but powerful promotion of hedonism, neo-paganism and, in the most delicate yet unmistakable terms, homoeroticism. When published in 1873 it would usher in Aestheticism, a doctrine part artistic credo and part self-publicity. Among other things, Aestheticism gave Hellenism a bad name and cast a temporary pall over Greats (classical studies), in which Plato had been figuring as a set author for the last twenty years. Parents grew disquieted, and Jowett and other tutors were obliged to scramble to explain, or explain away, the pederasty imbuing the Greek texts which their charges were expected to master. Grant Allen was not immune to the charms of Aestheticism, or indeed of Oscar Wilde himself, another Oxford man, but by the time Pater's book burst on Oxford his own university days were well over. During his time there, what intellectual excitement was available was still being supplied by theological debate and doubt -- for this was the Oxford of the Essays and Reviews, of the Higher Criticism, of Darwinian controversy, of the conflict between religion and the growing authority of science as symbolized by the Huxley/Wilberforce confrontation. The effects were proving unsettling. Every second Oxford man, it was said, was a sceptic in religion.

Serious scholarship was at a low ebb, especially in the natural sciences. T.H. Huxley growled that a man could achieve the highest honours Oxford could bestow without knowing whether the sun went round the earth or vice-versa. Few people cared about the mathematical studies of a certain don at Christ Church, but he was famous everywhere for the fantasy he had woven for the small daughters of Dean Liddell. And that seemed appropriate too: some irreverent spirits thought the worlds of Alice in Wonderland and Oxford were not really very distinct. Oscar Wilde reported later that the charm of the place lay in the fact that sordid reality was kept at a good distance, and this was an image that was being carefully nurtured in the '60s. Matthew Arnold had just ceased to be Professor of Poetry and during his tenure had published 'Thyrsis: a Monody' -- that most perfect expression of Oxonian nostalgia -- coining therein a famous phrase about 'dreaming spires'. Not that all the dreaming spires were as old as they looked. John Ruskin, then at the height of his fame and influence, was about to be appointed Slade Professor of Fine Art, and Gothic Revival buildings had arisen as the material expression of his teachings: the University Museum; Butterfield's chapel and Waterhouse's frontage for Balliol; Scott's chapel for Exeter College.

3.

On 27 April 1866, while his son was still at school in Birmingham, Joseph Allen was appointed lecturer in modern (civil) history at Queen's University in Kingston. The post was honorary, without salary, but it did have teaching duties.[52] In November of the same year, Allen was making himself unpopular by writing letters to the Kingston News advocating the annexation of Canada by the United States. Fearing the consequences for their institution, which was still struggling financially, the Trustees asked for his resignation on 4 January 1867, and that took effect the next month. So by the time Grant Allen left for Oxford that autumn, his parents had been in Canada for a year and a half or more. (After leaving school it seems Allen crossed the Atlantic to spend the summer with them before going up, but presumably returned to England alone.)[53]

Whether the nineteen-year-old was alone at Oxford or was in any way supervised by English relatives is unclear, but there is no evidence that he felt any immediate impulse to kick over the traces. His first year at Merton passed uneventfully, for he definitely belonged in the camp of the reading men. He had rooms in Mob Quad, and he discovered in a window pane some Latin lines scratched by an occupant in the sixteenth century. They advised the reader, or possibly the inscriber himself, not to waste his time at Oxford but to be vigilant in studying day and night. (They are now preserved in the College library.) It was not, initially, advice that Allen was likely to neglect. So far he had proved the very model of an industrious, intellectual youth from a loving family who was clearly destined for a career in one of the solid professions. He soon formed a small circle of studious friends: York Powell, later a lawyer and historian; Richard Pope, later a mathematics and divinity lecturer; Exley Percival of Brasenose, who had competed in the prize-lists with him at Birmingham; W.W. Fisher, a chemist. They found him very unlike the typical British undergraduate of the day, and that could hardly have been otherwise, given his unusually cosmopolitan background. No-one saw him as a rebel, although he did acquire a reputation for having 'advanced' political opinions and for being a little doctrinaire and over-forceful in expressing them. He had the socially disconcerting habit of never allowing an interlocutor to think he agreed with him when he didn't. One did not need to be very radical or bluntly outspoken, in the tranquil Oxford of the 1860s, to acquire such a reputation.

The only surviving evidence of his youthful opinions, other than those recollected by college acquaintances decades later, is to be found in an evanescent magazine, the Oxford University Magazine and Review, which he founded and co-edited with a friend. He contributed to it a few poems and a humorous tale mocking Americans' pretension, vulgarity and political corruption. But his one article for the magazine reveals more. He gave it a challenging title, 'The Positive Aspect of Communism', but its sentiments are hardly those of a political firebrand. In fact, it is not really about communism, or about politics at all. (Marx's Kapital appeared in German the year Allen went up to Oxford, but it is improbable that he had even heard of it.) What he really wants to talk about is 'the present ch