Grant Allen's Mysterious First Marriage

Allen's Mysterious First Marriage

By the time Allen left Birmingham for Oxford in the autumn of 1867 his parents must have been back in Canada for some time, because Joseph Allen was appointed lecturer in modern history at Queen's University in April 1866. The post was honorary, without salary, and he resigned the following year.[i] Whether his nineteen-year-old son was left alone in England or was under the care of relatives is unclear; but there is no evidence that the young man felt any immediate impulse to take advantage of the lack of parental control. His first year at Merton passed without any recorded incidents. He had rooms in Mob Quad, and he discovered in a window pane some Latin lines scratched by a 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. 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. We see little trace of rebelliousness in his behaviour, although he did acquire a reputation for having 'advanced' political opinions and for being a little doctrinaire and over-forceful in expressing them. One did not need to be very radical, in the Oxford of the 1860s, to acquire such a reputation.

The only surviving evidence of his youthful opinions are to be found in an article he wrote for a short-lived college magazine of which he was co-editor. 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 politics at all. Allen really wants to talk about 'the present chaotic state of public morality' and the 'laxity of morals' which are especially evident in France. He makes it quite clear what kind of morals he is talking about: 'the licentiousness which we see in the reign of Napoleon III is complete and universal, and is infecting every relation of domestic life.' Prostitution, and sexual vice generally, is eating away at the fabric of society: it is not pleasant to contemplate, but it has to be inspected by anyone who wants to 'decypher the enigma of history.' For the reaction is at hand; the cloud has a silver lining. Only 'Communism, or some form of government closely resembling it' will purge society of its decadence. That day is not far off. [ii]

Such an eager looking-forward to a regime of communistic Puritanism would seem odd in almost any young man. It seems doubly so when we recall these are the opinions of a youth who one day was going to turn into a sexual renegade with a reputation as an apostle of free love. But there is no real incongruity. The essay had a concealed personal application, as we shall see.

By the time his essay appeared in the magazine at the end of 1869, Grant Allen had taken a surprising step for an upper-class undergraduate of that time. It was a private matter, but it had serious public consequences. On 30 September 1868, at Holy Trinity Church, in Brompton, West London, at the age of 20, just as his second year at Merton was starting, he got married. His bride, Caroline Anne Bootheway, was three years older than he. The immediate consequence was that his postmastership promptly terminated: a heavy blow, for they normally lasted up to five years and he had drawn it for only one. We infer that the reasons for marriage were pressing indeed. While the marriage was not exactly clandestine, it is unlikely that it took place with the approval of the Allen family. One of the two witnesses, Exley Percival, was a school-fellow from Birmingham and had often figured in the prize-lists with Allen; he may have been an Oxford friend.[iii]

If Allen harboured any ambitions of gaining a fellowship at Merton and pursuing an academic career his marriage put paid to them. This was not necessarily because Fellows had to be bachelors. From May 1871 the rules changed at Merton permitting some married fellows and allowing applications from married men to become fellows. But Allen was never in the running for a fellowship. His studies suffered alarmingly in the wake of his marriage. To his contemporaries at Oxford, Allen was an student of remarkable gifts; 'undoubtedly one of the most brilliant undergraduates of his time,' as one told Allen's biographer Edward Clodd years later.[iv] But now he began to falter. He did not graduate until the summer of 1871, having suspended his studies in the previous year. Money had, obviously, became a serious problem. Merton charitably paid his scholarship 'on the ground of poverty' for a single half-term, from Easter 1871, presumably so he could graduate; but there were also what Clodd calls vaguely 'changes in family circumstances.'[v] This was almost certainly the result of bank failures in Ontario and an economic decline on Wolfe Island. The farming population fell again, the canal was abandoned and the senior Allens' rent-roll diminished. Probably his family either could not, or would not, pay him an allowance any longer. Allen made ends meet by private tutoring work, which also cut into his study time, and almost at once he had a semi-invalid wife to care for as well.

Certainly the strain was showing when, as a married man of a little more than a year's standing, he wrote to his friend Edward Nicholson, a 21-year-old student at Trinity. The time was New Year's Day, 1870 and Allen was spending what sounds like a fairly miserable Christmas on the Isle of Wight, trying to catch up on his reading. The tone of the letter is half-disconsolate and half-defiant. The two of them had been co-editors of their student magazine, but Allen was withdrawing. He was, he told his friend, 'much too poor a man to waste any more time on an unproductive place like Oxford. . . . All I want is a degree. I go in for no fellowship.' He wanted only 'the two letters, and as good a class as I can manage,' after which he intended to 'get an easy mastership, where there is lots of work and very poor pay, and subside into obscurity'.[vi] The class of the 'two letters' turned out to be a not very creditable Second at Greats. A few years before, George Saintsbury had got only a Second as well, despite working very hard. It rankled for the whole of his life. Was there anything, he wondered, 'which hurts so abominably and lasts so long as getting a Second. . . . The sting of a Second is almost incurable.'[vii] It's unlikely that Allen felt the hurt very much. He was fed up with Oxford; never spoke well of it, and in later life grew contemptuous of the education he had received there. His comments make a piquant contrast with Saintsbury's essay, which despite that 'incurable sting' is soaked in dreamy nostalgia in the Brideshead Revisited mode.

So, after graduating BA in 1871, Allen did as he had gloomily forecast he would do; did as many men with modest degrees and no prospects have done before and since. He turned schoolmaster, that 'refuge of the destitute,' as he called it later.[viii] He got a post down on the south coast teaching classics at Brighton College, which was one of the fairly new private school foundations run strictly on business lines. His brief time there has left few records except for a note in the school magazine bewailing his loss to the Reading Club, which prepared boys to deliver public recitals. However, a photograph of the little group of masters at the school, taken in the porch of the headmaster's house, furnishes the earliest known image of Grant Allen, at the age of 23. A spare figure under his mortar-board, he stands slightly apart at the rear of the group, perhaps to gain height from the extra step. His mouth is turned down disconsolately and he grips his coat with a slightly self-protective air. Even allowing for the conventions accepted by photographic subjects at the time, he looks distinctly unhappy and out of place among the other beefy pedagogues. At any rate, he was not with them long. He stayed at Brighton only for a term. Much later the egregious Frank Harris, man about town and, as the editor of the Fortnightly Review, one of Allen's many paymasters, would claim that it was he who replaced Allen as a teacher at the school. This is about as true as most of Harris's assertions.[ix]

Perhaps Allen took the Brighton post hoping that the sea air would do Caroline good. The same motive may have governed their shift, at the end of 1871, to Cheltenham, a spa town and a well-known resort of consumptives. His biographer Clodd calls this new employer 'Cheltenham College,' but there is no record of Allen's working at the existing venerable school of that name. There were, however, several evanescent schools and colleges established in the town in the later part of the century, and Allen was probably a 'tutor' (the term by which he described himself ) at one of them. It was at Cheltenham, at 'Belle Vue Villa', a house in the centre of town which may have been divided into apartments for teachers, that Caroline Bootheway Allen died on 23 March 1872 and from which she was buried in the city cemetery five days later. She was 26. The cause of death was tuberculosis. So ended the first excursion into matrimony for the man who, twenty years later, would be demonised in many quarters as the foe of that institution and the frankest, most uncompromising spokesman for free unions of his day.

When his wife died Grant Allen was only just 24. The tragedy that had overtaken the pair was of course a commonplace one. Tuberculosis was the familiar, implacable killer of tens of thousands of young adults in Victorian England, and Caroline had been an invalid almost from their wedding day. An unpublished poem which exists only as a hand-written copy made by Allen's friend Edward Nicholson seems to imply that the couple both knew within a year that her death was inevitable:

We stood upon the Westward-fronting cliff,
And gazed athwart the calm. The red sun dipped,
Purpling the blue. Between him and our eyes
Drave a black hull, black-sailed, that stood, and loomed
Huge, on the water's edge. The red sun sank,
And all was dark, save where one silent light
Bore slowly westward: and we watched its course
Awhile in silence: then we turned and went.
And all the cliff was dark, and all the fields.[x]

The death-ship is a rather too obvious and not very appropriate allusion to Tennyson's Arthurian barge, 'black as a funeral scarf from stem to stern' carrying the immortal hero to the island of Avalon, but there is no denying the sinister and ominous tone of this poem: the single light being borne westward into the sunset; the couple watching it silently and then moving away into the darkness. The poem's title is '1869'.

But, then, young men of 24 are resilient and Allen quickly married again, this time forming an eminently successful union that lasted the rest of his life. Really, he could not have been thought heartless if the whole episode had left little behind it except some fading sorrows and regrets. Yet, as we shall see, this is not what happened. His wife's life and death (episodes which would be almost entirely expunged from the record later on) played some central, if not perfectly comprehensible, role in giving a decisive form to Allen's views on social questions; highly controversial views which would animate the emerging feminism of 1890s England. Why was this so? Clearly, it was the nature and circumstances of the marriage that were decisive. Vexingly obscure though the circumstances are, it is possible to piece together something of the story from the few clues and considered silences that remain.

Little enough can be discovered about Caroline Bootheway, and nothing of a personal nature. But the dry public records do tell us enough to make it unlikely that she was a welcome addition to a rich clerical family with semi-aristocratic connections and a strong intellectual bent. Her origins were provincial and impeccably working-class. She was christened on 17 August 1846 at All Saints Church, Loughborough, a small Leicestershire town, with her parents being given as 'Willm' and Eliza Anne Bootheway. At the census of 1851, when she was five, the family was living at 1 Wood Street, Quorn (then called Quorndon), a village of some 1800 people where the main activity was framework knitting. In that census, her father is named as William 'Botheway' aged 31 and his wife as Louisa, aged 34. There were three children: Edwin, 7; Caroline, 5; and Maud May, 1. (Presumably Caroline's mother had died and the last child was her half-sister.) William Botheway's occupation is given as 'beer setter', probably a type of drayman; earlier, on Caroline's baptismal certificate, he had called himself a porter. He seems to have risen a little in the world as the 1850s went on, because he appears in two commercial directories as a 'beer retailer'. (But on the Allens' marriage certificate his rank is downgraded again to 'Laborer': perhaps Allen, the Socialist, encouraged this as a defiant gesture to set beside his own occupation, which he gave as 'Gentleman'!) None of the family was still in Quorn for the 1861 census, and William Bootheway was either dead or had moved from Leicestershire by the 1881 census.[xi]

Since nothing is known of Caroline Bootheway between the years 1851 and 1868, it is impossible to know how or where she met Grant Allen, but the natural assumption, given her class and background, is that she had moved from Leicestershire to London to work as a domestic servant. Probably they met, somehow, in London, during Allen's first summer vacation. On the marriage certificate the place of residence of both parties appears as Brompton. The area was popular with students. It is there, about a decade later, that H. G. Wells houses young George Ponderevo, fresh to London, in a thinly-disguised autobiographical passage in his novel Tono-Bungay :

I came to London in September . . . . Its centre was now in Exhibition Road. It shone pale amber, blue-grey, and tenderly spacious and fine under clear autumnal skies, a London of hugely handsome buildings and vistas and distances, a London of gardens and labyrinthine tall museums, of old trees and remote palaces and artificial waters. I lodged near by in West Brompton at a house in a little square. . . .

My apprehension of spaces and places was reinforced by a quickened apprehension of persons. A constant stream of people passed by me, eyes met and challenged mine and passed - more and more I wanted them to stay - if I went eastward towards Piccadilly, women who seemed then to my boyish inexperience softly splendid and alluring, murmured to me as they passed. Extraordinarily life unveiled. The very hoardings clamoured strangely at one's senses and curiosities. One bought pamphlets and papers full of strange and daring ideas, transcending one's boldest; in the parks one heard men discussing the very existence of God, denying the rights of property, debating a hundred things. . . .[xii]

It is easy to imagine the immensity, the anonymity, the huge indifference, of high-Victorian London going to Allen's head as it did to the young Wells later. He was, after all, despite his superficially cosmopolitan background, a youth who had known nothing but provincial life: Kingston at first; then New Haven, Dieppe, Birmingham, Oxford. This was his first summer off the leash. But unlike Wells, Allen was not cut out for sexual adventures. What might have been, in more experienced hands, a temporary liaison soon turned into marriage. After the ceremony, the couple continued to live in a street off Thurloe Square, quite close to the South Kensington Museum complex, where Allen probably scraped a living as a private tutor. They lived very privately or even secretively, it seems, because late in the following year Allen wrote to Nicholson in Oxford that 'since you have tracked the lion to his den, you may as well address here for the future.'[xiii]

Thirty years later, when Edward Clodd came to compose his Memoir of Allen immediately after his death, the problem of how to handle this marriage must have loomed large in his mind: there were the feelings of Allen's wife and son, then in his early twenties, to consider. He asked at least two of Allen's old college friends, Frederick York Powell, Professor of History at Oxford and expert on Icelandic sagas, and Andrew Lang, the journalist and man of letters, for information about what they knew, and probably for advice on how to handle it.

Andrew Lang had, in fact, never met Allen while at Merton. He had not known him until they ventured on literary journalism together in London. But he knew that Allen had had difficult beginnings and that, as he reported to Clodd, 'in circumstances very trying he displayed noble attributes of character which I can only hint at. Indeed, Mr Allen behaved, if I may say so, more thoroughly in the spirit of the Gospel than any man I have ever met, though his intellect rejected so much that religion believes.'[xiv] Lang made it clear to Clodd that he did know something more specific than that about the marriage, but he wasn't talking: 'A great ox hath trodden on my tongue,' he said. But, he added mysteriously, 'probably without knowing it you give the story of that first marriage away. Every Oxford man will see the point.' Lang was sometimes given to writing with irritating allusiveness. However, the 'point' that an 'Oxford man' (in particular) might be expected to get was surely one about an illicit, or socially dubious, cross-class entanglement. Such relationships between 'literary' or 'artistic' men of the student class and working-class young women (sometimes more or less respectable, sometimes definitely not) were, of course, almost a cliche of the times. In literature the theme had been, and would continue to be, a favourite, in all of its many possible permutations: we think of George du Maurier's Trilby (1894) with its laundress heroine (the story is set in the 1860s), Murger's Bohemians, Angel Clare and Tess Durbeyfield, Jude Fawley and Arabella in Jude the Obscure, Alfred Yule and his shop-girl wife in New Grub Street, King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid (a Victorian favourite, treated by Burne-Jones, Tennyson and others). And literature reflected life: there is Ernest Dowson's idealised relationship with Adelaide Foltinowicz, the daughter of a Soho restauranteur; D. G. Rossetti and whoever the original 'Jenny' was of his poem ('fond of a kiss,' we hear, 'and fond of a guinea'); other artists like John William Godward, who had liaisons with their models; and above all, George Gissing and his tortured affair with the prostitute and alcoholic Nell Harrison. In the case of the more scrupulous and idealistic men (and Gissing's is the stereotypical case here) these relationships did sometimes end in marriage. Nor was the outcome necessarily as catastrophic as it was in Gissing's own case, nor as miserable as in his creation Alfred Yule's. Lang was surely hinting at a marriage of this kind.

If Lang refused to comment, York Powell was more forthcoming. A generous, urbane man of strong liberal views (he had been one of the very few Establishment figures to publicly support Oscar Wilde in the year of his trials), Powell insisted that the matter should not be omitted. 'You must not leave out the earlier marriage,' he told Clodd warmly. 'It is not fair to GA. It is a high credit to him. He was a martyr for a year and he never let the poor girl see that he was suffering for her. He made the end of her life happy and peaceful by his self-sacrifice and if Xtianity were true which it isn't GA would be safe for a good place in heaven'.[xv]

Clodd both accepted and rejected all this advice when he worded this section of his Memoir. On the negative side, he deprived Caroline Bootheway Allen of her very name and said nothing at all about her background or her situation when the couple met. We are told only that Allen had given 'hostages to fortune' by marrying so young, and that he had done so 'with more chivalry than prudence.'[xvi] The second phrase can only mean that this was far from being a marriage between social equals. We learn that Caroline Allen became ill soon after the marriage, with a 'paralysis', and was an invalid until her death. Transparently eager to dispose of the marriage as quickly as possible, Clodd implies that it lasted only two years. In fact it was three and a half.

On the positive side, though, Clodd solicited from Powell, and printed, the only available glimpse of the Allen couple:

I remember being presented to his first wife - a gentle, quiet, soft-speaking woman, in poor health even then in the early days of their wedded life - and noticing the tenderness and care with which he anticipated her wishes, and spared her all fatigue or trouble, while it was delightful to see how she appreciated in her silent, grateful way his affectionate attention and guardianship.[xvii]

So far, so bland; but Clodd permitted himself a much more meaningful revelation than that. Grant Allen never once referred to his wife unambiguously in any of his writings, either published or unpublished. But Clodd had in his possession a single, telling clue which reveals something of their relationship. It is in the form of a poem entitled 'La Dame aux Camelias (To Alexandre Dumas, fils).' This Allen had omitted from his sole volume of poetry, The Lower Slopes. Although this collection was published as late as 1894 when Allen was 46, most if not all of the poems in it had been written years before. As the sub-title has it, they were 'excursions . . . undertaken for the most part in early manhood.' It is to this early period of his life that 'La Dame aux Camélias' must belong. Clodd had recovered the manuscript from Franklin Richards, Allen's brother-in-law and intimate friend; and he not only printed it in full in the Memoir, but added the revealing comment that it was 'one more personal than those published,' thereby confirming that the basic situation is factual.[xviii]

'La Dame aux Camelias' is a poem of sentimental recollection. It tells how the narrator has a valuable keepsake, which he keeps constantly by him; it is a 'dog's-eared, thumb-marked' copy of Dumas' novel. This had been his young wife's favourite reading and, when newly married, he and 'Maimie' had often sat over the book together, on a bank above 'the tumbling Rhone'.

And later when my Maimie's cheek was pale,
And weak her failing voice and low her breath,
And in her bloodless hands we read the tale
Of slowly creeping death,

Yet she would often raise her heavy head
To fix upon my face a tearful glance,
And whisper, 'Read me from the book we read
Long, long ago, in France.'

The connection between this fond recollection and Dumas' romantic story of the prostitute Marguerite Gautier, who is redeemed by her passionate love, only to die of consumption, is made quite explicit. There are several correspondences between the novel and real life. The novel was published in the year Allen was born. Alphonsine Plessis, Dumas' mistress and the model for the heroine, was one of the most celebrated courtesans of her day and died of consumption at the age of 23. This was Caroline's age at marriage. In the novel Marguerite's true love, Armand, is younger than she, and she tries to give him up to avoid compromising his career. The relevance to Allen's situation is obvious.

To put the question bluntly, then: Was Caroline Bootheway a prostitute, whom Allen had rescued from the streets and made his wife out of some amalgam of romantic love, chivalry, pity and political idealism? We recall that the 'rescued magdalen' cult became popular in Allen's adolescent years. Apart from all the novels dealing with the theme, there were the pictures so dear to the Victorian heart, lithographs of which were to be seen in many a home right up to the end of the century: Millais' Virtue and Vice and The Order of Release; Rossetti's Found; Holman Hunt's The Awakening Conscience. The gentle, retiring, humble prostitute did, occasionally, in real life match the 'tart with a heart' literary stereotype. According to the expert, Dr Acton, a certain number of these women 'are notable for the intensity of love with which they will cling. . . . The sick man is safe in their hands, and the fool's money also.[xix] Was Caroline a member of this branch of the profession, and did Allen later on idealise her death as a sacrifice, and she herself as the victim of the hypocritical social machinery which immolated her and women like her to protect her respectable sisters' virtue? One of the poems published in The Lower Slopes, 'Forget-Me-Not,' provides a hint that this was indeed Allen's attitude. At first sight this could be taken for a mere sentimental exercise:

Her soft white hand lay tremulous, clasped in his;

Her soft grey eye with pearly dew was wet:

He said, 'Though all things else, yet never this

Will I forget.'

He went his way, and seeking his own rest

Forgot love's little tender, stifled sigh,

Forgot the upheaval of that throbbing breast

Once clasped so nigh.

And bending o'er an unmarked, uncared grave,

Too late for any penance save regret,

He said, 'The single sin God ne'er forgave

Is, to forget.'

But its placement within The Lower Slopes is significant. It is the fourth of five poems of which the first, 'In the Night Watches,' bears Allen's sub-title '(Introduction to a group of poems still mostly unpublished).' All the other poems in this 'group' are expressly and overtly about prostitution, and they were the ones that Allen pressed the editor W. T. Stead to read when the volume was published in 1894. Stead was still firmly associated in the public mind for his exposure of child prostitution in the Pall Mall Gazette nine years earlier; and though he and Allen really had little in common, Allen regarded him as an ally on this subject. He urged Stead to read the first three of the group particularly: 'if you read those three, I don't care about the rest of them. There are two men in England really in earnest about the horrible slavery of prostitution. You are one, and I am the other. Don't condemn without reading. Read those three, and then read 'Sunday Night at Mabille.'[xx]

We notice that in recommending four of the five poems, the one that he omitted was 'Forget-Me-Not'. It is easy to see why. Whereas the others adopt a high-flown tone of moral indignation which is effective but impersonal, this one is tenderly personal in tone. Its sense of guilt, even of self-contempt, is palpable. It is surely autobiographical. While we do not know when it was written, it is easy to suppose that Allen felt compelled to requite his neglect, his 'single sin' that God (the God Allen did not believe in) would never forgive. Did he repress these feelings for years, because he could not write of them for fear of damaging his career; and did he burst out in public indignation once he became prosperous enough to become his own man at the end of the 1880s? Allen was a warm-hearted and kindly but not a particularly emotional man. Certainly he was not given to moral hand-wringing. Yet we shall see that on the subject of prostitution his habitual light, sceptical tone deserts him. Indeed, at times he seems to be not quite sane on the subject, particularly when he came to believe with complete sincerity that he had a quasi-divine mission to expunge it. And he thought he knew how to do so: he offers his solution again and again, most notably in his infamous novel The Woman Who Did. We cannot understand Allen's later extremely radical views on sexual questions without appreciating that all of them are founded on his detestation of prostitution and his conviction that a thorough-going social reform of the existing relations between the sexes would dispose of it. The silent reproach of that 'unmarked, uncared grave' surely coloured all the rest of his life.

After Caroline's death Allen left Cheltenham for Oxford, where he worked briefly as a private tutor and tried unsuccessfully for a university fellowship. He then took a last brief school-teaching post at Reading Grammar School. While at Oxford he had met the woman who became his second wife, Ellen (Nellie) Jerrard. Clodd is much more forthcoming about Miss Jerrard, who was born in 1853. She was undoubtedly a lady, the youngest of the five children of Thomas Jerrard, a substantial citizen of Lyme Regis in Dorset. Franklin Richards, an Oxford don and a good friend of Allen's, was married to Nellie Jerrard's sister. Richards' son, Grant Richards, Allen's nephew by marriage, founded his own publishing house as a young man, and became in 1897 Allen's publisher of most of his last books. Nellie Allen remains a shadowy figure. No one left any impression of her character, appearance or opinions, except for the usual Victorian platitudes ('charming,' 'the delightful Mrs Allen,' etc) and nothing is known of her influence on Grant Allen's views. His only public reference to her is to be found in the dedication to his anti-marriage novel The Woman Who Did: 'to my dear wife, to whom I have dedicated my twenty happiest years.' Certainly, though, their marriage was to all appearances idyllically happy, a circumstance which, given his acerbic view of that institution, badly disconcerted his opponents. An anecdote implies as much. Just after The Woman Who Did appeared, Allen gave an interview to air his views further. Impressed by his sincerity, the journalist closed his story with the defiant sentence: 'He is happily married.' The compositor who set up this text was incredulous that this assertion could be true of a notorious pornographer like Grant Allen. He introduced a couple of commas, so that the printed sentence read: 'He is, happily, married.'[xxi] Later in life Nellie Allen seems to have suffered from ill-health, like her husband, and was prone to those mysterious Victorian 'breakdowns' and general debility. She was only 20 when they married; the age Allen had been at his first marriage. No wonder that was the age he later pronounced was the right one for young couples to be paired off.

Nellie Jerrard had neither money nor occupation of her own, and Allen, now drifting between Reading, Oxford and Lyme Regis, needed a more stable and rewarding post before they could marry. When one turned up, it involved a drastic change of scene. In the summer of 1873 Allen was offered a position which sounded much grander than school teaching. It was an academic post with the title of 'Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy'. The snag was that the post was in the West Indies, at a new government college which was about to open on the island of Jamaica. Allen may have got the job through family influence, since the governor there, Sir John Peter Grant, was probably a maternal relation, and in his last year of what had been a very successful posting. At any rate there was nothing better on offer, so Grant Allen and Nellie Jerrard married on the strength of the appointment and the young couple took ship that summer for Jamaica, in time for the first term which was due to start on 22 September 1873. They probably travelled out on the steamer Elbe with William Chadwick, a mathematician and Fellow of Corpus Christi, Oxford, who had been appointed Principal. He and Allen were to be the only academic staff; one other man was appointed as steward and secretary.