Bibliographical, Biographical, Critical, etc
An Annotated Bibliography of Secondary Source Materials:
Bibliographical, Biographical, Critical
Last revised: 10 April 2020
Very few bibliographical items are listed here as all the accurate information in the sources known to me has been assimilated into my bibliographies on this website. The biographical material is selective in that sketches of his career in reference books which are obviously copied from earlier sources are not included. All the printed biographical articles known to me about GA contain minor inaccuracies. (The entry in the current printed edition of the DNB has many errors.) Here also are details of works which bear on the socio-economics of GA’s career as an author.
Place of publication is London or New York, unless stated otherwise. I’m highly grateful to many people who have given me leads to these references. The biographical sources aim to list everything of substance; I will be glad to hear of any other source of reliable information.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Adburgham, Alison. Shops and Shopping 1800-1914: Where, and in What Manner the Well-dressed Englishwoman Bought Her Clothes. 2nd ed. Barrie & Jenkins, 1981.
Detail for GA on interior decoration, his ‘Liberty’ phase etc.
Adcock, A. St John. ‘The Literary Life,’ in Modern Grub Street and Other Essays. Herbert & Daniel, [1913].
Addleshaw, Percy. ‘[Review of] The Woman Who Did,’ Academy, 47 (2 March 1895), 186-187.
Addleshaw, Percy. [Letter in reply to Grant Allen’s comments on review of] The Woman Who Did. Academy, 47 (16 March 1895), 351.
Alden, William L. ‘[Review of] The Woman Who Did,’ The Idler, 7 (February-July 1895), 565-567.
Alden, William L. 'London Literary Letter,' New York Times -- Saturday Review, 14 October 1899, 700, column 1.
Reporting illness of GA.
Alden, William L. 'London Literary Letter,' New York Times -- Saturday Review, 25 November 1899, 790, column 2.
Death of GA: ‘Allen was in his way an encyclopaedia. He knew most things, and of many things he had a complete and exhaustive knowledge. Genealogy was one of his hobbies, and he knew more about the origin of English families than is known at the Herald’s office’.
Allen, Joseph Antisell. ‘Some Curiosities of Criticism,’ The Week, 10:16 (Mar 1893), 372.
Altick, Richard D. ‘The Sociology of Authorship: The Social Origins, Education, and Occupations of 1,100 British Writers, 1800-1935,’ Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 66 (June 1962), 389-404.
Amigoni, David. 'Carving Coconuts, the Philosophy of Drawing Rooms, and the Politics of Dates: Grant Allen, Popular Scientific Journalism, Evolution, and Culture in the Cornhill Magazine.' In Louise Henson, et al, eds, Culture and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Media. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004.
Looks at 3 typical essays in the Cornhill, and GA’s characteristic blending of science and socio-cultural concerns.
Anderson, Anne. '"Doing as We Like": Grant Allen, Harry Quilter and Aesthetic Dogma,' Journal of Design History, 18:4 (2005), 335-355.
Quilter led an attack on Allen's 'Philosophy of Drawing Rooms' and Aestheticism in interior design.
Andrews, E.F. ‘Grant Allen on the Woman Question [letter],’ Popular Science Monthly, 36 (Feb 1890), 552-3.
Regretfully has to insist on what GA denies, that women should have a role as bread-winners.
Anesko, Michael. “Friction with the Market”: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship. Oxford UP, 1986.
Mine of information about James’s earnings, including over the period of GA’s career.
Anon to be arranged by date as far as possible
Anon. ‘World Biographies: Grant Allen,’ Literary World, 10:10 (10 May 1879).
Anon. ‘Literature as a Profession: A Fragment of an Autobiography by a Successful Author,’ Eclectic Magazine, 32 (Dec 1880), 699.
Anon. ‘Does Writing Pay? The Confessions of an Author,’ Belgravia (Jan 1881), 283-296.
A swaggering account of a successful career by a Jasper Milvain type. Could this be by George Sala?
Anon. ‘He Will Not Return: Grant Allen Prefers to Remain in England Where He Has Secured Fame,’ Daily British Whig [Kingston], 17 Dec 1888, 4.
Quotes GA’s father: ‘no position or emolument could induce him to exchange his beloved England for Canada. For Canada suffered him to seek elsewhere what was denied him in the land of his birth’. Alluding to a hint in a Toronto paper that GA ‘should be secured as a professor in Toronto University, the above was Joseph Allen’s response.
Anon. '"Colin Clout" at Home. An Interview with Mr Grant Allen,' Brisbane Courier, 24 Dec 1889, 7. [Originally in the Pall Mall Gazette, untraced.]
Anon. ‘Grant Allen, MA,’ Dominion Illustrated, 05:07 (Jul 1890), 37.
Anon. ‘How Novelists Write for the Press. Fac-similes of the MSS of William Black, Walter Besant, Bret Harte, and Grant Allen [opening of “Jerry Stokes”],’ Strand, 1 (March 1891), 295-98.
No relevant notes on these facsimiles and only interesting for anyone who wants to see GA’s handwriting.
Anon. ‘Mr Grant Allen at Dinner,’ Speaker, 16 May 1891, 577-8.
Barely comprehensible squib – conversation between GA and Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler (1890) with a possible glance at For Maimie’s Sake. But there are contemporary references here now lost entirely.
Anon. ‘”The Man That Was Not Allowed”,’ National Observer: A Record and Review, 8 (6 Aug 1892), 291.
Extraordinary attack, possibly by W.E. Henley himself, or by Charles Whibley:
‘They say there is little of tragedy in the world; there would be less if there were no Mr Grant Allen. One knew that Mr Grant Allen was a person who wrote books of a certain order, complaining the while that the public would not allow him to write books of a different order; and the knowledge was discomforting. But until The Athenaeum appeared last Saturday, one had not seen this pitiful complaint expressed with adequate force and point.
There is a note in our contemporary, headed ‘The Worm Turns,’ which has been ‘wrung out of’ Mr Grant Allen, because, having written—‘at white heat, in a glowing fever of moral enthusiasm’—‘a serious romance on a social theme’—some second Babylon, perchance, some sequel to Philistia—he was implored by a friendly publisher not to publish it. Mr Grant Allen being already a young man with a certain past, the publisher said that to publish this ‘serious romance’ would spoil Mr Grant Allen’s future. Therefore Mr Grant Allen, although this thing was ‘a part—a small part, a first instalment—of the authentic Message which, rightly or wrongly, I imagine the Power that inheres in the universe has implanted in me for transmission to humanity,’ intends to ‘destroy the manuscript.’ The consummation is, it would seem, a ‘tragedy!’ Picture it! The author of The Duchess of Powysland had ‘put his soul’ into this work. He had ‘put his religion’ into it. He had put as much as he could of the Power that inheres into it! But he ‘was not allowed’ (he never is) to publish it; and perhaps while we write it is being destroyed for ever and ever! You turn away in tears from this picture of noble struggle and heroic fall. But you stay for the moral. You cannot serve Art and Mammon. Nay, ‘the English author, unless rich enough actually to defy his public, must work under painfully soul-killing restrictions.’ Here is a difference. You can write, say, as Mr Sims writes; and you can also write as Mr Meredith. Shall you then write as Mr Meredith, and undergo such material privations as Mr Meredith may have borne for years? O dear no! You shall write as Mr Sims, and say you are ‘not rich enough to defy your public!’ ‘Twill be a tragedy, whereof the pathos may expressed in another analogy. You make soap for so much a year; for so much a year less you could make pictures. You go on making soap, and complain that you are not rich enough to make pictures. Truly, a just and manly complaint! As of a Hamlet, longing to make love to Ophelia and talk philosophy across the table, yet put inexorably upon the killing of Claudius and the avenging of his murdered sire. Yet are you better than he who, making soap, yet clamours for the credit for making pictures. This he who writes stuff which has no more concern with literature than his tailor’s bills, and insists that he is a man of letters. As a discerning tradesman you count him a useful and admirable citizen: it is not enough—he will be an artist.
The matter is of no great importance; but perhaps it were a pity if he were generally believed. He comes out of it all more profitably than poor Mr Grant Allen, with whom none but soft-hearted people (as ourselves) will sympathise. Ourselves, and his friends who have asked him, doubtless with throbbing anxiety, ‘Why do you never put anything of yourself, of your soul, of the genuine Grant Allen, into your novels?’ Their disappointment must be cruel. We are very sorry; it must be a dreadful sensation—to have an authentic Message implanted in you for transmission to humanity by a Power that inheres, and to be unable to transmit it, because ‘nobody would afterwards take any other novel’ of yours. And yet—and yet the thought will occur: now that poor Mr Grant Allen’s soul has been put into a serious romance, and the serious romance is destroyed, it may be that were have heard the last of the soul of poor Mr Grant Allen. Yea, even of Mr Grant Allen: original, authentic, unique in human history: The Man that Is Not Allowed, and tells the public all about it.’
Anon. ‘Workers and Their Work, No. L. Mr Grant Allen, Novelist and Scientist', Pearson’s Weekly, 104 (20 Aug 1892), 71.
Interviewed at 'The Nook', Dorking. Claims to write 3-4000 words/day. No new information.
Anon. [prob. Corelli, Marie; Mackay, George Eric; Labouchere, Henry]. The Silver Domino; or Side Whispers, Social and Literary. 16th edition. London: Lamley & Co, 1894. First pub. 1892.
A book of scabrous satirical comment on writers of the day. In the last section, 19, ‘Byron Loquitur’, GA is condemned as follows, obviously in reference to his July 1892 Athenaeum letter:
GRANT ALLEN hath a ‘heaven-sent’ tale to tell,
But much he fears its utterance would not ‘sell’
Wherefore, to be quite certain of his cash,
He writes (regardless of his ‘inspiration’) trash;
Practical ALLEN! Noble, manly heart!
Wise huckster of small nothings in the mart, --
To what a pitch of prudence dost thou reach
To feel the ‘god,’ yet give thy thoughts no speech,
All for the sake of vulgar pounds and pence!
God bless thee, ALLEN, for thy common sense! (pp.342-3).
Anon. The Pen, as a Means of Earning a Livelihood, by an Associate of the Institute of Journalists. John Heywood, 1894.
Anon. ‘The Woman Who Wouldn’t Do (She-Note Series),’ Punch, or the London Charivari, 108 (30 Mar 1895), 153.
Witty parody of TWWD from someone who knew GA’s views and writing well.
Anon. Punch, 23 Nov 1895. Mocks GA as fraud.
Anon. Punch, 14 Dec 1895. Mocks GA as fraud.
Anon. ‘A Woman's View of Grant Allen's Free-love Novel,’ Literary Digest, 11 (15 June 1895), 7 --
Anon. ‘Mr Grant Allen’s Views,’ Natural Science: a Monthly Review of Scientific Progress, 7 (Sep 1895), 159-160.
Objecting to some points about inheritance GA made in his FR article of July 1895, ‘The Mystery of Birth’. Makes a good point that ‘the mystery of inheritance is not the mystery of assimilation, but something more. . . . Mr Grant Allen’s apparent simplification of the problem is attained only by ignoring it’ (160).
Anon. 'A Prophet Too Previous (To the Author of the 'Hill-top Novel'),' Punch, 110 (4 Jan 1896), 6.
Good-natured poetic lampoon directed against The British Barbarians and its author.
Anon. [Untitled], Academy, 18 March 1899, 317-318.
Brief biographical sketch, one in series of ‘prominent men of letters’. ‘He wrote better once than today, but that is only natural when his tremendous output is considered’. Photo portrait shows GA at desk, with microscope and typewriter.
Anon. ‘[Review of] Grant Allen: a Memoir, by Edward Clodd,’ Saturday Review, 7 July 1900, 21.
Anon. ‘The Writer's Trade,’ Academy, 59 (7 July 1900), 15-16.
Reflections on GA’s career as a Little Writer: “It may be that, two hundred years hence, not a single writer now living will be accounted a classic save only Mr Meredith”.
Anon. ‘[Review of] Grant Allen by Edward Clodd,’ Athenaeum, 16 June 1900, 749.
The reviewer wrote: “nor can anyone look at the bibliography appended to this volume without being astonished by the author’s amazing industry and versatility. Much as we admired Grant Allen’s powers, were hardly prepared for such a list” (749). That bibliography, of course, contained only a fraction of GA’s output.
Anon. ‘Portrait of Grant Allen,’ Canadian Magazine, 17 (May 1901), 16.
Anon. ‘Charles Grant Allen’. Library of the World’s Best Literature, ed. Warner. New York[?]: J.A. Hill, 1902.
Anon. ‘Grant Allen, Author, Dead,’ New York Times, 26 October 1899, 7, column 2.
‘He shared with Baring-Gould the distinction of being the most prolific English author of the latter half of this century, while in versatility he is said to have excelled any of his contemporaries. He was a novelist, a historian, an art critic, a physiologist and writer on evolution, a botanist, an entomologist, the author of works on natural science and dynamics and a traveller. . . he was also well known as a lecturer, especially on artistic and scientific subjects, to working-men.'
Anon. [Obituary]. Nature, 61 (2 Nov 1899), 13.
Rather a hypocritical notice, given the treatment meted out periodically in Nature: ‘All his scientific articles and books are attractively composed, and they have been the means of imparting much popular instruction to general readers’.
Anon. ‘Death of Grant Allen,’ New York Daily Tribune, 26 October 1899, 9, column 5.
Anon. ‘Mr Lang’s Tribute,’ New York Daily Tribune, 18 November 1899, 10, column 3.
Anon. ‘Sabine’s reminiscences,’ New York Daily Tribune, 25 November 1899, 8, column 6.
Anon. ‘Grant Allen on England’s Military Preparation,’ New York Daily Tribune, 24 February 1900, 10, column 1.
Anon. ‘Books and Literary Topics. Grant Allen’s Story Finished by Conan Doyle,’ New York Times, 17 March 1900, 170, column 1.
Anon. ‘Books and Literary Topics. Grant Allen’s Death and Things Said about Him,’ New York Times, 7 July 1900, 455, column 1.
Anon. [Discussion of GA’s ‘Sacred Stones’], Contemporary Review, 57 (Mar 1890), 353-365.
Anon. [Discussion of GA’s ‘Sacred Stones’], Athenaeum, 96 (18 Oct 1890), 516.
Anon. ‘The Immorality of Costliness,’ Spectator, 9 May 1891.
Response to GA’s ‘Democracy and Diamonds’, Contemporary Review, March 1891.
Anon. ‘The Sources of English Prosperity: a Reply to Grant Allen,’ Spectator, 4 March 1893, 280-1.
Probably a response to GA’s ‘Is England played out?’, reprinted in Post-prandial Philosophy.
Anon. ‘Grant Allen's Apotheosis of Sex,’ Literary Digest, 10:1 (3 November 1894).
Anon. ‘“Hill-top” Novels and the Morality of Art,’ Spectator, 23 November 1895, 722-724.
Of The British Barbarians: “we find in it no protest in favour of purity, but a skit advocating free-love, suicide, adultery, and all sorts of offences against law, morality, religion and common-sense” 722. Nothing else but denunciation of the hill-top ‘school’.
Anon. ‘Mr. Grant Allen's Theogonies,’ Bookman, 7 (March/August 1898).
Anon. ‘Grant Allen: References from Writers,’ New York Daily Tribune, 24 June (sup) 1900, 12, col. 2.
Anon. ‘Grant Allen,’ Writer, 21:6 (June 1909).
Anon. ‘Death of Grant Allen,’ Dial, 16 (Jul/Dec 1899), 324.
Anon. ‘Mr Grant Allen’ [Obituary.] Academy, 57 (28 Oct 1899), 489.
Very brief notice, but an excellent, familiar photo. ‘Mr Grant Allen was not one author but an epitome of authors’.
Anon. ‘Death of Grant Allen,’ Bookman, 10:4 (Dec 1899).
Anon. ‘Obituary. Mr Grant Allen,’ Daily News, 26 Oct 1899, 6.
A longish, most accurate account. ‘He was at one time a frequent contributor to the Daily News, and our readers owe many a charming column of natural history to his pen’. “One of the main necessities of Science, he wrote in the preface to his small book on The Colour Sense, is the existence of that organising class whose want was pointed out by Comte, and has been further noted by Herbert Spencer. To this class I would aspire in a humble capacity to belong. But the organising student cannot also himself be a specialist in all the sciences whose results he endeavours to coordinate, and he must here depend for his data upon the original work of others”. That very well explains Grant Allen’s place among writers and scientists. He was not a profound scientific man in any direction, but he had a very wide knowledge of the general results of scientific progress and speculation, and he had a very happy knack of lucid interpretation and exposition. The Darwinian St Paul, somebody dubbed him and certainly his power of expounding and popularising Darwin’s teaching to those could not for themselves take it at first hand was very remarkable.’ ‘In the higher class of travel articles – in describing , for instance, the Etruscan walls of Fiesole or the mud delta of the Po, and in tracing all the historical and geological reflections suggest by them, he was at his very best. In some his later work, his weaknesses of temper and manner were allowed too great room. But 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…. There was nothing he so much resented as the suggestion that what he wrote was not written in earnest. Yet there was some justification of the charge in his defence, for he said: “Not in earnest? Why, for years I have been trying hard as a matter of business to imitate the tone of the people from whom I differ in every possible idea – religious, social, political, ethical, psychological, biological, philosophical, and literary – and now, now NOW I am jauntily informed “I am not in earnest”! In the same conversation which contained this curious vindication of his earnestness, Mr Grant Allen stated an interesting fact, showing his scrupulousness as a novelist. He said: “I sometimes distort a scientific detail purposely, so that no bad use should be made of it. I don’t think a murder of mine could be really carried out. In a story I once cut an ‘inhibitory’ nerve in my heroine’s eyelid, well knowing it could not have the effect I attributed to it; but my justification was that it was a supernatural story”.’
Anon. ‘Funeral of Mr Grant Allen,’ Daily News, 28 Oct 1899), 7.
’The funeral of Mr Grant Allen, the well-known novelist, etc took place yesterday (Friday), the remains of the deceased being cremated at the Brookwood Crematorium. There were numerous floral tributes surmounting the coffin, which was of papier mache covered with white cloth. At Woking Station it was met by Mr Jerrard Grant Allen, son of the deceased, Mr and Mrs Robert Fergusson, Mr Grant Richards, Mr Frank Whelan, Mr J.S. Cotton, Mr Rayner Storr, The Rev. GB Stallworthy, and Mr and Mrs Richard LeGallienne. The latter sent a large wreath of ivy, which was placed at the head of the coffin. . . Mr Frederic Harrison, addressing the mourners, said they were not there to take part in any religious ceremony, for it would be an outrage on the life and last wishes of Grant Allen that any theological hopes or invocations should be uttered over his helpless body now resting in the sublime stillness of death. His life was a battle of continuous protest against creeds and conventions of the world around him. He lived free of such bonds, and he died free of them’.
Anon. ‘Mr Grant Allen [obituary],’ Athenaeum, 28 Oct 1899, 589.
A judiciously sour obituary, claiming that GA regarded himself as a failure for taking up novel-writing and thereby wasting his talents. Protested by Grant Richards.
Anon. [Obituary]. Literature, 25 Oct 1899, 423. Anon. ‘Death of Mr Grant Allen,’ Times, 26 Oct 1899, col.2.
Anon. ‘Report from Allen’s Funeral,’ London Chronicle, 28 Oct 1899).
Anon. ‘Grant Allen [obituary],’ Fortnightly Review, 66 (Dec 1899), 1005.
Anon. ‘Grant Allen [obituary]’, Literary Digest, 19 (18 Nov 1899), 610.
Anon. ‘Grant Allen [obituary]’, Writer, 12:11 (Nov 1899).
Anon. ‘The Late Grant Allen [obituary],’ Acta Victoriana, 23:03 (Dec 1899), 219.
Anon. ‘Grant Allen and Glenlivet’. [From The Northern Scot, in EC’s copy of GA; about Nov 1899].
Claims that the Scots family of Grant of Blairfindy was a Jacobite, ‘and in the ’45 his gallant sons took up arms, ready and willing to follow their Prince at the risk of life and lands. [After Culloden] ‘four sons of the old Laird of Blairfindy fled across the Atlantic to save their necks from the headsman’s axe, and made homes for themselves in the New World. From one of them Grant Allen was descended. His maternal grandfather was a Grant, and through marriage succeeded to a French-Canadian barony. One of the cherished possessions of the family is an autograph letter from Prince Charlie. … Glenlivet has therefore a just and honourable claim on the gifted and versatile Grant Allen … the old tower of Blairfindy, the home of his ancestors, still stands, strong and firm as it has done for centuries, looking down on the Livet as it glides under the birks and between the green braes on its way to the boundless ocean’.
Anon. 'Posthumous Praise,' Pall Mall Gazette, 1 November 1899, 4. The reviewer deals with both the GA edition of Gilbert White ('this sumptuous edition' by John Lane) and of Twelve Tales. 'Admirers of Mr Allen's talent as a story-teller will be glad to see this collection of Twelve Tales of his which Mr Grant Richards issued only a couple of days before death overtook the gifted writer. Some have been published before by Messrs. Chatto and Windus and others, but one, called 'The Churchwarden's Brother' is new. It is a weird little story, in the Hardy vein, a subtle psychical study such as Mr. Allen loved to write. In the introduction to this collection of tales Mr. Allen is interestingly reminiscent of his early efforts at story-writing, and this collection is the more valuable that it was chosen and arranged by himself. This book will charm and delight the widening circle of Grant Allen's readers, for the stories are some of the best short tales he has written; and the collection is comprehensive enough to show him in all his moods.'
Anon. [Review of Prehistoric Scotland by Robert Munro. London: Blackwood.] The reviewer quotes Munro: ‘The truth is that between language and race there is no permanent alliance. Many of the most sentimental and patriotic Scotsmen of the present day are Teutons by blood. . . And what a picture of mistaken identity do so many Englishmen present, when with the physical qualities of low stature, long heads, and dark eyes, they boast of their Teutonic origin! To console readers who may not find themselves labelled by nature among any of the original types which enter into our common nationality – neither dark nor fair, long nor short, dolichocephalic nor brachycephalic—but among the larger category of well-developed mongrels, let me assure them that no special combination of racial characters has ever yet been proved to have a monopoly of intellectuality and virtue’.
Anon. ‘(Charles) Grant (Blairfindie) Allen’. A Catalog of Crime. Edited by Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig. Taylor, Harper and Row, 1971. [Also brief comment on Hilda Wade.]
Anon. ‘(Charles) Grant (Blairfindie) Allen’. The Encyclopaedia of Mystery and Detection, ed. Steinbrunner & Penzler. McGraw-Hill, 1976.
Anon. ‘Mr Grant Allen on Euclid,’ Journal of Education, 6 (1884), 175.
Ardis, Ann. New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism. New Brunswick & London: Rutgers UP, 1992.
Scattered discussions of GA’s brand of feminism, his attitude to motherhood and his essential conservatism. Takes up Stead’s ‘boomerang’ notion (much repeated in modern terms by Showalter, etc) and tries to counter it with Fawcett’s position. Also discusses the line that Allen merely recuperates mid-Victorian sexual ideology despite posing as a radical.
Armstrong, Tim. "Supple Minds and Automatic Hands: Secretarial Agency in Early Twentieth-Century Literature." Forum for Modern Language Studies 37(2001):155-68.
Discussion of The Typewriter Girl.
Ashley, Michael, ed. ‘Grant Allen’. Who’s Who in Horror and Fantasy Fiction. Elm Tree Books.
Asimov, Isaac. ‘Grant Allen 1849-1899’ [sic]. Isaac Asimov Presents the Best Science Fiction of the 19th Century. Edited by Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg & Charles G. Waugh. Knightsbridge, 1991.
Atchison, Heather. 'Grant Allen, Spencer and Darwin'. In Greenslade & Rodgers, eds, 2005.
Austin, Alfred. The Autobiography of Alfred Austin Poet Laureate 1835-1910. 2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1911, II, 193-4.
Contains a letter from GA on his ‘Spring’ article, pub. in April 1883. See NF Bibliography. Austin adds: ‘The same post brought me his charming book Colin Clout’s Calendar, with the following inscription in it: Poetae . Claro . Veris . Britannici . Vindicatori . Munusculum . Qualecunque . D .D. Paenitentiae . Pignus . Obscurus . Ignotus . Innominatus . Auctor.’
Baker, William & Ira B. Nadel. Redefining the Modern: Essays on Literature and Society in Honor of Joseph Wiesenfarth. Assciated UP, 2004.
[ Barrie , J.M.] ‘The Conspiracy Against Mr Grant Allen,’ National Observer, 1 (22 November 1890), 12-13.
Heavily ironical squib in dialogue form about Allen, calling him ‘The Man Who Is Not Allowed’. He was “not allowed” to write a great scientific work. He then turned to the project of writing “a great novel” but the public’s “action was so threatening that he had to desist. The public flung the great novel back in his face”. Not that he had actually written it: “It was not precisely written, but he had quite made up his mind to write it”, it was “if I may be allowed to use the expression, up his sleeve, but he dared not bring them down”. But has “the conspiracy against him…embittered his views of life?” “By no means. He never complains; he is indeed one of those gentle spirits that dislike speaking of themselves. Yet what science, what literature, he could produce if the public would allow him!” It is not clear exactly which of GA’s laments this refers to: possibly it’s his complaining piece ’A Literary Causerie’ published in the Speaker of 1 November 1890. However, he doesn’t exactly ‘threaten’ there to write a frank work if he could find a publisher. GA revealed later (in the painful letter to Henley) that it was this squib that he GA had in mind when he wrote his Athenaeum letter.
Beckman, Linda Hunt. Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters. Ohio UP, 2000.
Comments: ‘The novelist Grant Allen ignores Levy’s Jewishness, focusing instead on her rejection of traditional Victorian notions about the path a woman’s life should follow. In an 1890 essay decrying higher education for women as an obstacle to the goals of the eugenics movement, he invokes her name: “A few hundred pallid little Amy Levy’s sacrificed on the way are as nothing before the face of our fashionable Juggernaut. Newnham has slain its thousands and Girton its tens of thousands”. The quotation is from ‘The Girl of the Future’. In the summer of 1889 Levy and a friend took a Dorking cottage and ‘discussed the Woman Question’. 177. GA probably formed his character ‘Blackbird’s’ repeated remarks about suicide from Levy’s collection A Minor Poet and Other Verse (1884), which deal repeatedly with death and suicide – they are fashionably pessimistic, even morbid.
Beer, Gillian. ‘Speaking for Others’ in Robert Frazer, ed. Sir James Frazer and the Literary Imagination: Essays in Affinity and Influence. Macmillan, 1990.
Comment on Great Taboo.
Beetham, Margaret. ‘Towards a Theory of the Periodical as a Publishing Genre,’ in Investigating Victorian Journalism, ed. Laurel Brake et al. Macmillan, 1990.
Bennett, Arnold. ‘Twenty Guinea Condensation Prize,’ Tit-Bits, 21 (19 Dec 1891), 192.
This called for a ‘condensation in six portions’ of What’s Bred in the Bone. Not a parody, but a (very) mildly humorous outline of the plot, designed to bring out its more absurd, or unlikely, details. Pretty thin stuff.
[Bennett, Arnold]. ‘The Fiction of Popular Magazines: An Inquiry,’ Academy, 63 (24 Feb 1900), 167-8. Reprinted in Fame and Fiction (1901).
[Bennett, Arnold]. The Truth about an Author. Constable, 1903.
[Bennett, Arnold]. ‘Books and Persons (An Occasional Causerie),’ New Age, 9 Sep 1909, 366-7.
Bennett claims ‘GA never wrote any fiction that was not frankly bad’. [Signed ‘Jacob Tonson’]
Besant, Walter. ‘Literature as a Career,’ The Forum, 13 (Aug 1892), 693-708.
Birdwood, George. ‘Does India Pay?,’ St James’s Gazette, 1 (21 Oct 1880), 5.
Letter to the editor attacking GA’s article in the Contemporary Review. His arguments called ‘pitiable’.
Black, Clinton V. Spanish Town: The Old Capital. Spanish Town: The Parish Council of St Catherine, 1960.
Note this book contains photos of the Old King’s House before the fire and a copy of a painting of the interior great hall.
Blackburn Harte, W. ’Some Canadian Writers of To-day,’ The New England Magazine, 9:1 (September 1890), 26, 33-34.
Minor biographical details. Contains a unique photograph. ‘He is a rapid worker, and under pressure can produce a lengthy scientific article full of facts, quotations, and statistics, without once stopping to refer to authorities in an almost unprecedented short time. . . . He has contributed innumerable articles on every subject under the sun to both American and English magazines. His versatility and the vast range of science and philosophy which is laid under contribution in his work, considered as a whole, is amazing’ (33).
Bland, Lucy. Banishing the Beast: English Feminism and Sexual Morality 1885-1914. London: Penguin, 1995.
Touches on GA’s social and sexual criticism at many points, showing how his views fit quite well with at least some feminist theory of the day.
Blathwayt, Raymond. ‘Mr Grant Allen at Home’. Interviews. With Portraits, and a Preface by Grant Allen. London: A.W. Hall, 1893, pp.68-75. This book, in poor condition in BL, has a slightly different Elliot & Fry photo of GA.
The interviewer reported GA saying: “I should still believe in Spencer’s Psychology if Spencer himself were to retract every word of it.” And further: “[GA] has in his mind a whole system of things . . . and if he was an independent man he would devote himself entirely to working out this system in its entirety; but as he has never had a farthing he has not earned, and there is a wife to clothe and a son to educate, he writes novels instead for Mudie’s young ladies, which, knowing him as well as I do, must involve on his part a self-repression which is as heroic as doubtless in the future it will be found to have been bracing and beneficial to the last degree” (p.72).
”I had an amusing talk with Grant Allen once about his writing. Said he, ‘My line is to write what I think the public wish to buy, and not what I wish to say, or what I really think or feel; and to please the public, for a man of my temperament and opinion, is not so easy as an outsider might be inclined to imagine. I began with a scholastic novel, Philistia, but when I offered it to magazines I was candidly told it would tend rather to deter than to attract subscribers. Socialism failing, I essayed domesticity, and produced Babylon: that did better, but didn’t set the Thames on fire. Then I tried a wicked novel, For Maimie’s Sake, but I suppose it wasn’t wicked enough or my natural innocence peeped through too obtrusively, and the young ladies who patronise the wicked novel didn’t seem to take to it. Perhaps the modesty natural to man prevents our being able to compete on this ground with lady novelists. After that I took to sensationalism pure and simple, and found it to pay a little better. Still, even now I could stand more pay, and be none the worse for it. When a man is ill half his time, and has to work as hard as he write for the remainder, he feels that a little less labour and a little more money might produce better results in the end’” (pp.72-3).
[On signed articles] ‘the self-respecting man dislikes to sign anything unless he can say absolutely and unreservedly all that he thinks on his subject. At present there is always a divided responsibility: an editor and an author share it between them. I have even known an editor insert a ‘not’ in a sentence in a signed article, so as to make the writer say the exact opposite of what he had intended’ 74.
This conversation gives a passing glimpse into the mind of this curiously-varied and richly-gifted man. But no words of mine can give an idea of the grace and delicacy and light fancifulness of his scientific writings. Here even the uninitiate may revel, the most inexperienced can rejoice. I once remember reading, with what pleasure I cannot say, his description of a swallow’s flight from the cold autumnal mists of England, across the chilly plains of France, down the wind-swept gorges of the gloomy Spanish mountains, across the blue Mediterranean, till it lost itself in the ocean of African sunlight far beyond’.
Blathwayt, Raymond. Through Life and Round the World: Being the Story of My Life. E.P. Dutton, [nd; 1917?]
Blathwayt lost his job as an East-end curate (allegedly because, in a test, he could not give the Ten Plagues of Egypt in order) and was forced to share a room with a failed artist and live on penny buns. He had the inspiration to do ‘interviews’ then almost unheard of, and started with William Black for the PMG. He had no trouble getting it in print. ‘I had started my career as a writer, and that without any trouble whatever! It seemed too easy and too good to be true, but the cheque that arrived a few days after soon dispersed any fears I may have entertained as to the reality of my good fortune . . . (154) Of course, circumstances were very different when I started journalism in 1889 from what they are today, and no man now could possibly hope to succeed, actually in a moment, as I did. On one Monday I was practically starving; on the following Monday the cheques had begun that delightful flow which they have never altogether ceased ever since. It was as though I had gone into an oil district and at once started a “gusher” . . . never again, I suppose, certainly not within the working life of the young people of the present day, will such a golden era, journalistically speaking, present itself as presented itself to me. I reiterate that my success was due, not so much to my own merits, which were feeble enough, as to sheer luck. The moment I started in new papers began to flood the market. In quick succession arrived, and generally flourished too, the Daily Graphic, Strand Magazine, Idler, Pearson’s Magazine, Searchlight, Black and White, Pall Mall Magazine, Westminster Gazette, Star, Morning Leader, Answers, Windsor Magazine, and half a dozen more, and almost all of them engaged me to write for them. (157). B. describes GA as, in costume, ‘always a pleasure to look at. Tall and slight, in an admirably cut loose grey suit, with snowy collars and cuffs and very neat walking shoes, he might have been an ordinary country squire’ (267).
Blavatsky, H.P. ‘Mr Grant Allen’s Ideal of Womanhood,’ Lucifer, 6 (July 1890), 353.
An editorial article denouncing his ‘Girl of the Future’ article: she puts his views down to his ‘materialistic science’.
Bleiler, Everett F. Science-fiction: the Early Years. Kent State UP, 1990.
Contains synopses and very brief comments on several of GA’s stories and novels which have science-fiction themes.
Bleiler, Everett F. The Guide to Supernatural Fiction. Kent State UP, 1983.
Contains synopses and very brief comments on several of GA’s stories with supernatural themes.
Bleiler, Everett F. ‘(Charles) Grant (Blairfindie) Allen’. In Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers, ed. Reilly. 2nd edition. St Martin’s Press, 1985.
Some short comments on GA as a writer of crime/mystery fiction.
Bonney, T.G. ‘The New Hedonism,’ Humanitarian: A Monthly Review of Sociological Science, 5 (July 1894), 106-113.
Attacks GA’s FR article of same name. What does it mean? ‘authors of this class are so fond of euphonious, but somewhat vague phrases’ 106. Not much else in here, and in any case GA said he agreed with most of his points about self-restraint, altruism etc.
Bower. F.O. ‘Mr Grant Allen’s Article on “The Shapes of Leaves”,’ Nature, 27 (12 Apr 1883), 552.
Severe criticism of GA as populariser of science: ‘Articles containing blunders of such magnitude, but written with that assurance of style which naturally carries conviction to the mind of the unwary, and disseminated through the country in a widely read journal like Nature, cannot but produce a rich crop of erroneous impressions. These it will be the arduous duty of teachers to eradicate.
’Everyone will agree that the popular writer must, before all things, be master at least of the first rudiments of the subject on which he writes: Mr Grant Allen has in two consecutive sentences shown himself singularly deficient in this respect’ (552).
Bowler, Peter J. The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades around 1900. Baltimore/London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1983.
Thorough study of the controversy over use-inheritance: the years of GA’s career are treated in Ch.4.
Bowyer, E.M.N. [Reply to GA’s article ‘An English Wife’], North American Review, 161 (Dec 1895), 759-760.
Braithwaite, Lloyd. ‘The Development of Higher Education in the British West Indies,’ Social and Economic Studies [West Indies], 7:1 (March 1958), 1-64.
Gives the history of the Queen’s College at Spanish Town and has some extra details about GA’s time there – eg. that he ran into opposition from church groups. Unfortunately maddeningly imprecise about some of its references and quotations. Some of these are obviously from the Kingston newspaper, The Daily Gleaner.
Brantlinger, Patrick. The Reading Lesson. The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteen-century British Fiction. Indiana UP, 1998.
Linked essays, mostly too early; chapter on Stevenson & Gissing, very little relevance to apparent topic.
Britten, James. ‘Grant Allen on Human Sacrifice among the Abruzzi Peasantry,’ Month, 92 (October 1898), 390.
Brock, M.G. & Curthoys, M.C
., eds. The History of the University of Oxford. VII: Nineteenth-Century Oxford , Part 2. Clarendon Press, 2000.
Oxford in the late 60s, during GA’s residence. Much useful detail.
Broks, Peter. ‘Science, Media and Culture: British Magazines, 1890-1914,’ Public Understanding of Science, 2 (1993), 123-139.
Brown, J.H. Balfour. Recollections Literary and Political. London: Constable, 1917.
’Mrs Leo Hunter made me known to Grant Allen, who even then, alas, had a cough which sounded like a knock on Death’s door. I think he had written The Woman Who Did. . . ‘
Budd, S.C. ‘The Woman Who Did the Right Thing,’ Belgravia , 91 (1896), 337-
Bury, Blaze de. ‘Grant Allen’. Les Romanciers anglais contemporains, Paris: Perrin, 1900, pp. 113-125.
Cameron, Brooke. 'Grant Allen's The Woman Who Did: Spencerian Individualism and Teaching New Women to be Mothers', English Literature in Transition 1880-1920, 51.3 (Summer 2008), 281.
Cameron, Caroline Emily. The Man Who Didn’t, Etc. London: F.V. White, 1895.
Caracciolo, Peter L. ‘The Buddha under the Golden Bough: Central African Sculpture, Grant Allen, Edward Clodd and Heart of Darkness,’ L'Epoque-Conradienne, 1990, 87-103.
Carpenter, William B. ‘Vignettes from Nature,’ Nature, 25 (9 Mar 1882), 435-436.
Letter criticising some of GA’s comments about the size of extinct animals.
Carpenter, William B. ‘Vignettes from Nature,’ Nature, 25 (23 Mar 1882), 480-481.
Letter commenting on GA’s response to the above: ‘To me it seems far better that science should not be taught to the public at all than that by the use of the “vague but comprehensible language of ordinary life” such erroneous ideas should be propagated. I can assure Mr Grant Allen, from no small experience of popular science-teaching, that the public mind is quite capable of drawing a very clear distinction between “living” and “extinct” animals, and would urge him to keep the distinction steadily in view in anything he may hereafter write on the subject’ (481). William Boyd Carpenter was the ‘silver-tongued bishop of Ripon.’
Chislett, William. ‘Grant Allen, Naturalist and Novelist,’ Moderns and Near-moderns: Essays on Henry James, Stockton, Shaw, and Others. The Grafton Press, 1928.
One of the few critical pieces which mentions most of GA’s novels, but the comment is cursory and often wildly inaccurate factually.
Clarke, George Herbert. ‘Grant Allen,’ Queen’s Quarterly, 45 (1938), 487-496.
A few minor extra details about GA’s ancestry, but otherwise lifted entirely from common published sources.
Cleve, Lucas [ie Adeline Georgina Isabella Kingscote]. The Woman Who Wouldn’t. London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1895.
Clodd, Edward. [Review of] ‘The Evolution of the Idea of God,’ Folk-Lore, 11 (1897), 63-4.
Clodd, Edward. [Obituary of GA], Daily Chronicle, 26 Oct 1899), 3.
Clodd, Edward. ‘Introduction’ to In Nature’s Workshop. London: George Newnes, 1900.
Brief introduction of 2pp.
Clodd, Edward. Grant Allen. A Memoir . . . with a Bibliography. London: Grant Richards, 1900.
A short, discreet, conventional & superficial Victorian 'Life and Letters', but the only substantial biography, by a good friend of GA’s. Reviewed in the The Times, 11 July 1900 and Independent, 22 August 1901; Academy, 58 (1900), 480, 547.
Clodd, Edward. Memories . . . with Portraits. 2nd ed. London: Chapman & Hall, 1916.
Pp.21-36 are devoted to GA, but apart from printing an invaluable amusing rhyming letter by GA describing a typical day during his time in Jamaica, they add little to his biography of 1900.
Clodd, Edward. ‘Grant Allen 1848-1899,’ Fortnightly Review, 106 (July 1916), 124-35.
Preliminary version of chapter in Memories, 1916.
Cobbett, Ethel. ‘Woman and Natural Selection,’ Humanitarian: A Monthly Review of Sociological Science, 4 (Apr 1894), 315-319.
Defends Wallace, attacks Strahan. ‘in a reformed society… a man who has himself to thank for his degeneracy will have little chance of finding a wife, and that his bad qualities will die out with himself. If people did not constantly throw fresh mud into the stream, its foulness would gradually disappear’ 316. However, there is still a implicit belief that women are better than men at loving the highest when they see it.
Conrad, Joseph. Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad. Edited by Frederick R. Karl & Laurence Davies. 4 vols. Cambridge UP, 1983-1990.
A letter to Aniela Zagorska, Christmas 1898, refers to GA as a man of 'inferior intelligence', an imbecile who wrote 'popular scientific manuals', and someone who presented himself as 'a man of letters among scholars and a scholar among men of letters'.
’Constant Reader’. ‘Grant Allen's Writing,’ Literary Review (10 February 1923), 451--
Cotes, Alison. ‘Gissing, Grant Allen and 'Free Union',’ The Gissing Newsletter, 19:4 (October 1983), 1-18.
[Cotton, James Sutherland: probable author]. ‘[Review of] Grant Allen by Edward Clodd,’ Academy, 58 (January/June 1900), 547.
Clodd has a ‘deeply pathetic’ tale to tell, his life was ‘charged with tragic interest’. Having realised that writing on science and philosophy ‘meant starvation’ he ‘tried his hand at every branch of literature, and displayed a versatility which was truly marvellous. He achieved success; he became a known man, and commissions poured in. But success came too late. He had been constantly thinking, planning and scheming to produce wares to catch the literary market, and this ceaseless mental activity and worry wore him out, and cut short his life at a comparatively early age. He was never robust, and his burden was too much for him’ (547). Professes a feeling of ‘utter disappointment’ at Clodd. He does not answer his closing question, when he forgets ‘it was his bounden duty to assign a place to this hero and martyr, and to help time to form a correct verdict about him’. Also, ‘there is another background even more important than that of the family—namely, one of the social and intellectual antecedents of our time, so as to enable us and those who come after us to understand exactly where Allen took up “the burden and the lesson”, and what he has actually accomplished as a pioneer of evolution.’ Hammers Clodd’s bibliography seriously. ‘The writings are given in chronological order, which would be all very well for an author who kept to a definite pathway, and to whom dates were of consequence in order to establish his claims to originality. But Grant Allen did not keep to a definite pathway, but was philosopher, naturalist, physicist, historian, poet, novelist, essayist and critic. The efforts of a many-sided man like him ought not to have been given indiscriminately according to dates, but should have been tabulated according to subject-matter, and the tabulation should have been done in such a way as to show a definite purpose and a definite unfolding of a distinctive gospel.’ Mentions the omissions in Clodd’s appended bibliography.
C[otton], J[ames] S[utherland]. ‘Allen, Grant’. Dictionary of National Biography, 22 (Supplement), pp. 36-38.
Very accurate, judicious and contains a few biographical facts not in Clodd, but useless for GA’s writing career. Cotton was editor of the Academy. The revision of this by a R. Van Arsdel in the new print version Oxford DNB introduces several ridiculous factual errors, eg that Allen wrote parodies of his own novel!
Cowie, David. The Evolutionist at Large: Grant Allen, Scientific Naturalism and Victorian Culture. PhD. thesis, University of Kent at Canterbury. April 2000. British Library thesis service, DX 211016.
Large number of factual errors and must be read very cautiously & sceptically, but it is the first brave attempt to cover most of GA’s scientific writings.
Coyne, W.P. ‘Mr Grant Allen and the New Hedonism,’ Month, 81 (June 1894), 468.
Craig, Patricia & Cadogan, Mary. The Lady Investigates: Women Detectives and Spies in Fiction. Gollancz, 1981.
Discusses Miss Cayley’s Adventures and Hilda Wade on pp. 25-28.
Cross, Nigel. The Common Writer: Life in Nineteenth Century Grub Street. Cambridge UP, 1985.
A mine of information about the late-Victorian writing trade and some of its most endearing and pathetic hacks.
‘Cross(e), Victoria’. [ie Annie Sophie ‘Vivian’ Corey Griffin]. The Woman Who Didn’t. London: John Lane, 1895. The Woman Who Did Not. NY: Roberts, 1895.
Often said to be a parody or an attack on GA; but it is neither. It is a sentimental romance – it too was published in Lane’s Keynotes series, and the title was presumably chosen to trade on GA’s success. The heroine is a married woman of rather a ‘fast’ character who high-mindedly resists the temptations of adultery.
Cunningham, A.V. ‘The New Woman Fiction of the 1890s,’ Victorian Studies, 18 (December 1973), 177-186.
Preliminary version of material in the following.
Cunningham, Gail. The New Woman and the Victorian Novel. Macmillan, 1978.
Contains many mentions in passing, and sustained comment on pp.59-64. Sets WWD into the context of New Woman fiction being produced at that time and defines GA as a key member of the ‘purity’ school who also gave it its swan song. Enlivened by the author’s pleasingly sardonic wit. Some of the detail of Allen’s career and the background to WWD is not quite accurate.
Cunningham, Valentine. ‘Darke Conceits: the Professions of Criticism’. In Jeremy Treglown & Bridget Bennett, eds. Grub Street and the Ivory Tower: Literary Journalism and Literary Scholarship from Fielding to the Internet. Clarendon Press, 1998.
Cunningham, Valentine. ‘Unto Him (or Her) That Hath’: How Victorian Writers Made Ends Meet,’ Times Literary Supplement, 11 Sep 1998, 12-13.
Dawson, John. Practical Journalism, How to Enter Thereon and Succeed. A Manual for Beginners and Amateurs. L. Upcott Gill, 1885.
Dellamora, Richard, ed. Victorian Sexual Dissidence. U. Chicago Press, 1999.
Dixon, Ella Hepworth. “As I Knew Them”: Sketches of People I Have Met on the Way. London: Hutchinson, 1930.
’Mr Grant Allen was a great talker, and he would sit up, quite late at night, in the beautiful house he had built at Hindhead, eating endless biscuits out of a tin and discoursing on every topic, including politics, sex, and botany. It was literally impossible to get a word in. After we had left, we heard that he had remarked: ‘The Miss Hepworth Dixons would be such charming girls, if only they didn’t talk so much!’” 136-7.
Dorson, Richard M. The British Folklorists: A History. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968.
Doyle, Arthur Conan. Memories and Adventures. 2nd ed. London: John Murray, 1930.
Brief breezy reminiscences (303-305), notably of GA's final days and death bed scenes with Doyle’s spiritualism well to the fore.
Draper, Harry Napier. ‘Fact and Fiction,’ Nature, 38 (5 July 1888), 221.
Letter objecting to GA’s use of a Rhumkorf coil to attract lightning to a tree in This Mortal Coil.
Duncan, David. Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer. Williams & Norgate, 1911.
Dunton, W.F. ‘Mrs Fawcett on the Marriage Question,’ Free Review (July 1895).
Dyer, W.T. Thistleton. ‘Deductive Biology,’ Nature, 27 (12 April 1883), 554-555.
Criticises GA severely for making extreme deductive generalisations in trying to deal with the evolution of the shapes of leaves. He had put his finger on GA’s main weakness in all of his ‘serious’ scientific work. ‘It is no doubt pleasant, even fascinating, to sit down at one’s desk and, having formulated a few fundamental assumptions, to spin out from these explanations of what we see in the world about us. But I think when done it should be understood that the result is merely a literary performance, and though, viewed in that aspect, one may admire the skill and neatness with which it is accomplished, I nevertheless venture to think that the whole proceeding is harmful’ (554). Dyer was a heavyweight of botany and soon to become the Director of Kew Gardens.
Egan, Maurice Francis. ‘[Review of] This Mortal Coil,’ Catholic World (April 1889), --
Eliot, Simon. ‘The Business of Victorian Publishing’. In Deidre David, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel. Cambridge UP, 2001.
Ellmann, Richard. Oscar Wilde. Hamish Hamilton, 1987,
Mentions George Ives and the ‘New Hedonism’ controversy.
Elton, Oliver. Frederick York Powell: A Life and a Selection from His Letters and Occasional Writings. 2 vols. Clarendon Press, 1906.
From a letter to Clodd, 4 Apr 1895: ‘Is Allen still frightened over his book? I tried to reassure him. There is nothing new or startling in it, but he has managed to catch the Philistine’s ear. It is silly to bother about ‘answering’ his critics and he does not do it well.
He is such a good fellow and so earnest, and so deaf to the comic side of things that he has always an open place to be attacked in—and it hurts him.’ I, 187.
Ernst, Sabine. 'The Woman Who Did and 'The Girl Who Didn't': The Romance of Sexual Selection in Grant Allen and Menie Muriel Dowie'. In Greenslade & Rodgers, eds, 2005.
Fairclough, Henry Rushton. ‘Grant Allen’. Unpublished MS.
Some extra details on GA’s remoter family, but otherwise derivative. He was a professor at Stanford and GA’s brother-in-law.
Fairclough, Henry Rushton. ‘Grant Allen’s Personality,’ Montreal Life, 17 November 1890, 12-13.
Obituary article May be the same as the above MS
Fairclough, Henry Rushton. Warming Both Hands: The Autobiography of Henry Rushton Fairclough Including His Experiences under the American Red Cross in Switzerland Switzerland and Montenegro. Stanford UP and Oxford UP, 1941.
Stodgy memoir with a few details about the Grant family at Alwington; very little about GA .
Fawcett, Millicent G. ‘The Woman Who Did,’ Contemporary Review, 67 (1895), 625-631.
A formidable, witty, aggressively negative review-essay from one of the feminist leaders.
Feltes, N.N. Literary Capital and the Late Victorian Novel. University of Wisconsin Press, 1993.
The Marxist background is tedious and old-fashioned, but fortunately it’s detachable from the useful if rather undigested & trivial concrete details of publication of novels by Besant, James, Corelli, etc. Allen not mentioned.
Ferguson, Christine. Language, Science and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin-de-Siecle: The Brutal Tongue. Ashgate, 2006.
Contains a chapter ‘Savage articulations in the romances of Grant Allen’.
Fernald, F.A., comp. Index to the Popular Science Monthly from 1872-1892 Including Volumes I to XL and the Twenty-one Numbers of the Supplement. D. Appleton, 1893.
Fernando, Lloyd. ‘New Women’ in the Late Victorian Novel. Penn State UP., 1977.
Fiamengo, Janice. ‘[Review of] The Woman Who Did. Edited by Sarah Wintle,’ Canadian Literature, Autumn 1997 n154 p153.
Forsdyke, Donald R. ‘Grant Allen, George Romanes, Stephen Jay Gould and the Evolution Establishments of Their Times … And Who Was the Kingston Lady?’ Historic Kingston, 52 (2004), 95-101.
Foster, Joseph. Alumni Oxonienses: The Members of the University of Oxford, 1715-1886: Their Parentage, Birthplace, and Year of Birth, With a Record of Their Degrees. Being the Matriculation Register of the University, alphabetically Arranged, Revised and Annotated. 4 vols. Oxford: Parker, 1888.
Freedman, Jonathan. Professions of Taste. Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture. Stanford UP, 1990.
Despite promising title, contains little on authorial habits/matters.
Freeman, Nick. '"Intentional Rudeness"? The British Barbarians and the Cultural Politics of 1895'. In Greenslade & Rodgers, eds, 2005.
Freeman, Nick. 'British Barbarians at the Gates: Grant Allen, Michael Moorcock and Decadence,' Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction, 30:83 (Autumn 2001), 35-47.
Friedrichs, Hulda. The Life of Sir George Newnes, Bart. Hodder & Stoughton, 1911.
Comments from Newnes about GA’s winning the Tit-Bits competition for the £1000 prize story with What’s Bred in the Bone. Also contains some impressions of GA:
"The final choice, however, was not very difficult, for among the writers of real skill and talent who had competed was Mr. Grant Allen, and his story `What's Bred in the Bone' had that in it which made it an easy first. It was successful in every way, for it pleased the public from beginning to end; it made the serial story acceptable; it sent up the circulation, and had a magnificent sale when afterwards it appeared in volume form.
"There were not wanting superior persons who scoffed and sneered because a man of Grant Allen's position in the world of letters should `mix with that crowd', but he himself never regretted it, quite apart from the fact that the fee of £1000 came as a godsend in his struggle against a disease which obliged him to spend the winter in Egypt. Brave, patient soul! I see him now, sitting in the tiny waiting-room of the old Pall Mall Gazette in Northumberland Street, looking very frail and thin in his rough tweed clothes, and with the sad smile on his face; and I hear the pleasant, cultured voice that came rather as a surprise to those who saw him for the first time and noted that his bronzed face looked more like that of a farmer than a literary and scientific man. `Why not?' he said. `What is the matter with Tit-Bits, that I should be ashamed of having gained a prize in its literary competitions? I wish all the papers for which I have written pot-boilers were as interesting, and if some had paid me half as well I should not be where I am.'" [88-92; thanks for this reference to Jay Shorten, University of Oklahoma].
Frierson, William C. The English Novel in Transition, 1880-1940. NY, 1965. Nothing on Allen at all.
Gagnier, Regenia. ‘Production, Reproduction, and Pleasure in Victorian Aesthetics and Economics’. In Dellamora, 1999.
Has some account of Physiological Aesthetics and ‘The New Hedonism’, speaking of GA’s ‘heterosexual aesthetic, with its beautiful body of sexual selection’, 138.
Gardiner, Juliet, ed. The New Woman. London: Collins & Brown, 1993.
Contains an extract from The Woman Who Did and the editor makes the usual claim that the novel "ran to nineteen editions in its first year of publication" (171), but as usual it's not substantiated.
Gerard, J. ‘The Theorist at Large,’ Month, 64 (November 1888), 346. [In part on GA.]
[Gilder, Jeannette], ’According to Grant Allen,’ Critic, 26 (April 1895), 292.
’Mr Allen is horribly in earnest. we must confess that we do not understand very well what is troubling him, but hope that it has relieved him somewhat to vent it in a badly written extravaganza. We wish, however, to suggest to him a course of logic, before he takes up the subject again. He set out to prove one thing, and demonstrated another. From a plea for free love, the tale is changed into a powerful argument for the rights of children. That, at least is the only conclusion we can draw from its dreary, undramatic pages.’
Godspeed, Edgar Johnson. ‘Grant Allen and College Education,’ Dial, 23 (Jan/Jun 1897), 210.
Gosse, Edmund. ‘Literature as a Trade,’ The Author, 1 (15 Nov 1890), 179-180.
Glyn, Alice Coralie. ‘Nature’s Nuns,’ Humanitarian, 9 (December 1896), 420.
No copy located. Takes up Allen’s and Mivart’s positions.
Greenslade, William & Terence Rodgers. 'Resituating Grant Allen: Writing, Radicalism and Modernity'. In Greenslade & Rodgers, eds, 2005.
Greenslade, William & Terence Rodgers, eds. Grant Allen: Literature and Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siecle. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005.
A book of essays resulting from a conference on GA at the University of the West of England. Titles listed here separately.
Greenwood, Frederick. ‘Philosophy in the Market-place: Grant Allen and the New Hedonism,’ Contemporary Review, 65 (May 1894), 635-648.
Grost, Michael E. A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection. Website http://user.aol.com/MG4273/rogue.htm#Allen
Thorough guide to GA's detective fiction, setting it into the context of the 'rogue' tradition: concentrates on An African Millionaire.
Hannigan, D.F. ‘Sex in Fiction,’ Westminster Review, 143 (1895), 616-625.
Offers praise for The Woman Who Did. Also refers to Noble in ‘the April number of the Contemp. Review’, and mentions his nose metaphor.
Harman, Lillian. ‘Cast off the Shell!,’ The Adult: The Journal of Sex, 1 (Jan 1898), 149-150.
Trivial comparison of Jude and TWWD.
Harris, Frank. ‘Grant Allen’. Contemporary Portraits: Fourth Series. Grant Richards, 1924, pp.93-98.
A few pages of tribute with a few memorable comments. “He could be described with more ‘ists’ than anyone else I ever saw. He was an atheist and pacifist and socialist, a botanist and zoologist and optimist, a chemist and physicist, a scientist of scientists, a monist, meliorist and hedonist . . . . He taught literature at Brighton College in the seventies, and I followed him a little later. Some of the older boys were enthusiastic about him, and so when I met him in 1887, in the South of France, I was prepared to like him, and we became friends almost at first sight.// In person he was rather tall and thin, with a Scotch face, long and bony, sandy hair and light blue eyes, not ill-looking nor yet handsome, with an air of clean alertness and vivacity about him. . . . A walk with him was an education in botany and zoology, and he had no whimsies or quirks; he was always reasonable, good-tempered, vivacious, bright, and interested in every human interest. . . .He was, also, astonishingly articulate; a super-journalist; he wrote excellent prose, and could turn you out a 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. I used to say his typewriter disturbed no one, for it went// in one long even click.” (93-95). True to form, Harris spends more than a page quoting in extenso GA’s opinion of one of his, Harris’, short stories!
Harris, Frank. Frank Harris: His Life and Adventures. An Autobiography with an Introduction by Grant Richards. London: The Richards Press, 1947.
An abridged and expurgated version of what later became My Life and Loves. In his introduction, Richards recalls some details of GA’s acquaintance with Harris, who edited the Fortnightly when GA was writing for it. He says that “according to Grant Allen . . . [Harris] was intellectually unscrupulous; he would make no bones about omitting a negative or even of supplying one, if he thought that an article or an argument would be the better for it or would better suit the party or the principle he was at the time supporting!’ (x). GA uses this detail to mordant effect in Philistia. Harris mentions the name ‘E.B. Lanin’, which GA uses (in Under Sealed Orders?) which was in fact the pseudonym of Dr E.J. Dillon, an authority on Russia.
In the text, Harris tells how he replaced GA at Brighton College (a public school): ‘[a friend] came to me with the news that Grant Allen, the writer, had thrown up his post as Professor of Literature at Brighton College. “Why should you not apply for it; it’s about two hundred pounds a year”’ (154). Harris was soon appointed by ‘Dr Bigge,’ the headmaster. Obviously (what a surprise!) this account cannot literally be true. GA probably left Brighton at the end of 1871; he was certainly working in Cheltenham by March 1872. Harris went to Brighton as a French tutor, not English, and not till 1875.
Harris, Wendell V. ‘John Lane’s ‘Keynotes’ Series and the Fiction of the 1890’s,’ PMLA, 83 (October 1968), 1407-1413.
Very little information about GA.
Harrison, Frederic. Grant Allen, 1848-1899; an Address Delivered at Woking on October 27, 1899. Privately printed [the Chiswick Press], 1899.
Solemn and respectful as befitted the occasion, but nothing new. Harrison didn’t mind saying in this public place: “Of his fiction I know nothing, nor need I speak. He himself treated it as a bye-play, and I well remember that he often told me gaily that I should not trouble myself with his task-work of that kind” (8).
Hearn, Lafcadio. ‘Grant Allen,’ Victorian Philosophy. Tokyo: Hokuseido Press, 1930, pp 85-97.
Essay written in 1900 as a lecture. All the hard information is drawn from Clodd, but Hearn had read some of Allen, especially the evolutionary essays: ‘upon an immense variety of common subject considered in an astonishing new way. . . . Why should one kind of flower have six petals, another five? Why should some flowers be of one colour, some of several different colours? Why should such a blossom as that of the daisy have a great number of petals, arranged like rays?... The great less on these two books on botany was to teach people how much more interesting wild flowers are than cultivated flowers.’ 93-4.
Of TWWD, ‘a great many stupid people were offended by it because they could not understand the splendid irony of the whole story. They took it seriously. The story is about a young girl, graduate of Girton College and a University student, both of whom have absorbed some of the wild notions about social reform that were circulated some years ago. For example, they have got it into their heads that the marriage laws are not necessary; and that they should try to set a good example by living together as man and wife without any law. Grant Allen’s story only shows the natural and terrible consequences of such a decision in English society. After reading that book, I think the wildest advocates of abolition of the marriage laws are likely to remain silent for 100 years.’ 96-7. An interesting point of view.
Hepburn, James. The Author’s Empty Purse and the Rise of the Literary Agent. Oxford UP, 1968.
Hitchens, Robert. The Green Carnation, 1894.
"Our artists, as they call themselves, are like Mr Grant Allen: they say that all their failures are 'pot-boilers.' They love that word. It covers so many sins of commission. They set down their incompetence as an assumption, which makes it almost graceful, and stick up the struggle for life as a Moloch requiring the sacrifice of genius. And then people believe in the travesty. Mr. Grant Allen could have been Darwin, no doubt; but Darwin could never have been Mr Grant Allen. But what is the good of trying to talk about what does not exist. There is no such thing as art in England".
Hogarth, Janet E. ‘Literary Degenerates,’ Fortnightly Review (April 1895), 586-592.
Attack on “sex mania” in art and literature. Little of interest.
Howarth, Patrick. When the Riviera was Ours. Century, 1977.
Hubin, Allen H. Crime Fiction: a Comprehensive Bibliography. Garland, 1984.
Covers some GA items in detail.
Hudry-Menes, J. ‘L'Individualisme féminin dans la littérature,’ La Société Nouvelle (May 1896), 658-678.
In part on The Woman Who Did.
Hudson, Derek. ‘English Switzerland in Surrey,’ Country Life, 10 May 1973, pp.1310-11.
On the writers’ colony at Hindhead; with a picture of The Croft. Useful chatty background.
Hughes, David Y. ‘”A Queer Notion of Grant Allen's”’ [influence on Wells's Time Machine]. Science-Fiction Studies, 25 (July 1998), 271.
Hughes, David Y. ‘H.G. Wells and the Charge of Plagiarism,’ Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 21 (June 1966), 85-90.
Hughes was the first to compare The Wonderful Visit and The British Barbarians and to evaluate the charge that Wells plagiarised GA. Reveals that on 4 October 1895 (BB was published in November 1895) GA wrote to Wells: “This book—The British Barbarians—will be published shortly by Lane. It was written six years ago [ie in 1889], and read then by Chatto, who declined to publish it. It was sent to Lane six months back…”
Hynes, Samuel. The Edwardian Turn of Mind. Princeton UP/Oxford UP, 1968.
Mentions the Free Press Defence Committee with GA as a member, set up to defend George Bedborough, secretary of the Legitimation League in 1897, after 2 tons of literature was seized from his rooms. Also covers TWWD on pp.181-5, Wells’s review, etc.
Iverach, J. ‘Immortality and Resurrection - Reply to Grant Allen,’ Thinker, 7 (March 1895), 227.
Ives, George. ‘The New Hedonism Controversy,’ Humanitarian, 5 (Oct 1894), 292-297
Attacks GA for being anti-homosexual, quoting him as ‘Mr Grant Allen, after having so courageously unfurled the flag of love and liberty, sheathed his strong sword and hauled down that flag when called upon to defend it.’ 294 See Stead. Note that Edward Carpenter’s Love’s Coming of Age was pub. 1896
James, William. ‘Grant Allen's Physiological Aesthetics,’ Nation: a Weekly Journal Devoted to Politics, Literature, Science, and Art, 25 (1877), 185.
James, William. Correspondence of William James, eds. Ignas K. Skrupskelis & Elizabeth M. Berkley. University Press of Virginia, 1997.
Vols 1 (1861-84) & 5 (1878-84) mention GA and include one letter from him.
Letter to Alice Howe Gibbens James, 18 Jan 1883: ’Yesterday afternoon I spent at Robertson’s in company with Grant Allen, whom I found very friendly & forthwith felt familiar with.—A poor long nosed sandy bearded consumptive looking fellow, but a charming talker’ (5, 397).
Keating, Peter. The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel 1875-1914 (London: FontanaPress, 1991), pp. 189-194.
Sets The Woman Who Did into the literary and social-history context -- and a hugely informative book in general on GA’s period and the writer’s life.
Keep, Christopher. ‘The Cultural Work of the Type-writer Girl,’ Victorian Studies, 40 (Spring 1997), 401-426.
A long solid article with considerable comment on this social phenomenon in relation to GA's novel, especially in comparison with Gissing's The Odd Women. The only recent, really sustained and sophisticated treatment of any GA text.
Kennelly, Louise. ‘[Review of] The Woman Who Did. Edited by Sarah Wintle,’ English Literature in Transition, 39:1 (1996), 139.
Kent, Susan Kingsley. Sex and Suffrage in Britain, 1860-1914. Princeton UP, 1987.
Quotes Lyndall in A Story of an African Farm: ‘[A] woman who has sold herself, even for a ring and a new home, need hold her skirt aside for no creature of the street. They both earn their bread in one way.’ Wives and prostitutes are just substance and shadow. Even Eliza Lyn Linton said in 1888 that ‘in the streets it goes by an ugly name; but society and the Church call it marriage’ (quot 103). The suffragette slogan; ‘Votes for Women, Chastity for Men’. The wife bartered her only asset, her person, for the means of existence. Marriage is essentially a commercial or trade undertaking: joining the ‘housekeeping trade’ in order to live. These sentiments adopted these blunter terms in the years just after GA’s death, immediately before the war. No doubt the identification, the demystification, of marriage as a ‘trade’ had a particular resonance for GA. Properly viewed, the labours of the wife, the author, the prostitute, were analogous in that all three sold their skills and their services for what the market would pay. As Mona Caird put it, ‘father and mother are to share pleasantly between them the rights and duties of parenthood – the father having the rights, the mother the duties’ (quot 88).
Kernahan, Coulson. In Good Company: Some Personal Recollections of Swinburne, Lord Roberts, Watts-Dunton, Oscar Wilde, Edward Whymper, S.J. Stone Stephen Phillips. New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1968. [1917].
Details of a row between GA and irascible and misanthropic Whymper the climber. At Clodd’s, GA had apparently asked how much W. got for his lecture tours. Whymper was involved in the Matterhorn disaster which GA uses in Philistia.
Kestner, Joseph A. 'The New Woman and the Female Detective: Grant Allen's Miss Cayley's Adventures (1899)'. In Baker & Nadel, 2004.
Kevles, Daniel J. In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995.
Deals in detail with Pearson and Galton.
Lambert, J.W. & Ratcliffe, Michael. The Bodley Head 1887-1987. London: Bodley Head, 1987.
Covers the pub. of The WWD and The BB but offers no new information. Has some paras on William Watson, another Lane author.
Lang, Andrew. Was Jehovah a Fetish Stone? Contemporary Review, (March 1890), 353-365.
Deals dismissively with GA’s theory about grave stones, etc
Lang, Andrew. ‘ “The Evolution of the Idea of God”,’ Contemporary Review, 72 (December 1897), 768-781. A thorough, learned and destructive review. Reprinted Living Age, 216 (22 January 1898), 260-9. Burial is not the most primitive form of disposing of dead; Australians used various methods. Some races do have gods, or spirits to worship who never were mortal men. He presents a lot of arguments against GA’s thesis that worshipped stones were originally the head-stones of graves. And how did primitive peoples get from the stage of corpse-loving (ie in burial practices) to corpse-fearing, which he takes to be the origin of the religious impulse?
Lang, Andrew. ‘Grant Allen,’ Argosy, 71 (August 1900), 410-415.
Some reminiscences offered as a semi-review of Clodd. Dismissive comments about GA’s tiresome obsession with being a ‘Celt’. ‘Of all modern fads, this of heredity from races that have not been pure for thousands of years is the least plausible’ (411). They never met at Merton. Claims GA could easily have got a science fellowship, or ‘a good mastership at a public school’, which suggests he knew nothing of GA’s school career. Claims he ‘fell in love, at College’ with Spencer, which surely isn’t true. Claims he stayed in Jamaica four years, which is wrong. ‘So he took to popular science, by which a tiny income may be made by an extremely clever man in this educated age.’ (411). ‘The public does not care whether “petals are in all cases transformed stamens” or not, and I confess to sharing this hideous indifference.’ (412).Claims that during his work on London, GA acted as the military expert, which doesn’t sound very likely. And he judges: ‘his two moral novels were, in plain phrase, humourless absurdities, bad stories, and not good pamphlets’ (413).
Lang, Andrew. ‘At The Sign of the Ship,’ Longman’s Magazine, 34 (December 1899), 183-192.
Some obituary remarks in this column. ‘I first heard of him, from another undergraduate, now of literary fame, at Merton, about 1872, but never met him till he came to town and worked at science and journalism. His beginnings were difficult, as he has said, and in circumstances very trying he displayed noble attributes of character which I can only hint at [surely a reference to his first marriage?]. 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. He was charitable, self-denying, and could forgive not only his enemies, but his friends. . . . He was a most charming companion, and marvelled much that one could never see the world as he saw it.’
Lang, Andrew. ‘Mr Grant Allen. In Memoriam,’ Daily News, 28 Oct 1899, 7.
The notices of Mr. Grant Allen which I have read in the press deal mainly with that vast theme, his published works. I am anxious to say, also, a few words about the man as I knew him, though for many years I was not fortunate enough to meet him frequently. That famous Hill Top, whence he sent his authentic messages, in the matter of Ethics, to the world and the town, I have not seen since he occupied those heights. It was while I resided at Merton College that an undergraduate friend of mine, a school fellow of Mr. Allen’s, first spoke to me of his remarkable talents. We never met at that time, and I sometimes wonder how Mr. Allen liked the happy and careless society in which he found himself, under the care of the Principal of the Postmasters, the present Bishop of London. Later, he told me how he found scratched on an ancient pane of glass in the window of his rooms a rhyming mediaeval Latin verse. The Latin I have forgotten, but the sense was, “Why tarriest thou; what makest thou here, at Oxford?” He caused a wire grating to be placed over the pane, outside, that it might not suffer from the casual pebble of regardless youth. Perhaps not many undergraduates would have taken so much trouble. Mr. Allen was no antiquarian, his mind being rather in advance of the modern, though he was learned in the manners and flint implements of prehistoric mankind. Probably the leonine mediaeval verse appeared to him for he, too, was tarrying at Oxford, busy with unsympathetic classical works, while his heart was with physical science. I have always regretted that he did not take up science as an undergraduate. In that case must easily have got a “science fellowship” and probably a professorship. Thus equipped he could have given his whole time and genius to what he had most at heart. Though rather prejudiced against the classics, he could not help being an accomplished scholar, and he produced a translation, in verse, with an anthropological introduction, of the most famous poem of Catullus.
Not till Mr. Allen abandoned educational work in the West Indies, and threw himself upon the town, had I advantage of making his acquaintance. If I do not confuse my memories, he was one of the writers in London, that strange weekly Tory paper, which used to edit itself, before Mr. Henley became editor. Most men of that day wrote in London, such as Mr. Stevenson, Mr. Saintsbury, Mr. Henley, and, I think, Mr. Allen, and nobody read us. Mr. Allen also contributed to The Daily News, and, if I do not err, he used his knowledge of Indian affairs in articles on the Afghan Campaign. This cannot have been a congenial topic; would that all mankind shared his detestation of war. “Alas, that there should be such slaughter and bloodshed among Christian men,” wailed Arran at Ancrum Moor, over the body of the fallen hostile general. This was Mr. Allen’s attitude; and he was of those who seldom think their own country in the right. The fighting blood of Caln Alpine was in his veins, but he was a man of peace.
At that time he wrote on the Sense of Colour, and produced a work on a new Theory of Force, which does not seem to have persuaded, as yet, the authorities in science. His beginning in literature were difficult and discouraging, but one soon saw his essays in popular science in the Cornhill and other serials. No master ever had a pupil so devout as Mr Herbert Spencer had in him. With a tiny pocket microscope he would demonstrate the ‘dodginess’ of nature, in a flower or leaf, if I may use the expression.. But one could not persuade him that these stratagems were arguments for design. I thought his methods rather credulous and facile, but tastes vary in metaphysics. His work was interrupted by a serious illness, and it was after his return from the Continent, and in admiration of a singular instance of his generous and honourable private character, that his friends presented him with a microscope on a larger scheme than his tiny pocket example.
He had told, himself, how he commenced novelist… He never liked fiction; unlike Mr. Darwin, he did not even read it, if he could help it, but, willy nilly, he succeeded as a novelist. This is one of the most extraordinary things in his career. … The truth was that Mr. Allen could write anything, and wrote all things, well. But science would steal into his novels and short stories. Of these, one of the first, “John Creedy”, was, as he himself thought, one of the best. That a man should excel in an art which he disliked, and rather despised, was matter for amazement. I marvel that he did not make an experiment as a play-writer; doubtless it would have been a triumph. I n verse he was a master of the Ballade, though he seldom worked in this fantastic field. With all these accomplishments, Mr. Allen was the most modest, urbane, and kindly of companions; in conduct “a sad good Christian”, despite his definite lack of theological opinions. His works on the evolution of religion I withstood; perhaps one should never enter into polemics with a friend, but I conceived that his system was not well-bottomed on facts. Now, the verifiable facts are the thing’ however, I could not draw Mr. Allen into controversy. His nature was much too kind and humane for even this paper warfare. I think he shrank from the remote possibility of a coldness based on such a trifle as difference of opinion about the Gods of the heathen. As an instance of his kind temper, I remember that he showed me proof-sheets of a novel in which I appeared as the Villain. The personal portrait (apart from my series of heartless crimes) was flattering, but recognisable; and, at my request (for it could only cause gossip), the villain was altered out of all possibility of recognition. “The body is yours,” he said, “but the soul is the black soul of ---.” The soul appeared to me to be that of the common miscreant of romance. However, Mr. Allen took very considerable trouble to make the body unrecognisable. His whole career, as far as I witnessed it, was kind, gentle, beneficent, and, above all, courageous. I do not mean as to publishing his odd but sincere ideas concerning love and marriage, but as to his resolute industry under the constant pressure of bodily illness. In his Woman who Did, so popular as it was, and still more in his British Barbarians, he seemed to lose touch with human history, and with the saving sense of humour. But such were his earnest conclusions after considerable study of life. He spoke out his mind, as he explained with some naivete, as soon as he thought he could afford to do so. A strange mingling of the ardent Celt and the canny Scot! As one born to differ from Mr. Allen in almost every conceivable point, I never could irritate him by opposition, and this I am anxious to record as a proof of the wonderful sweetness of his nature. It is chiefly for this sweetness and goodness of character that his friends (many of them much more intimate with him than I) will cherish his memory and endeavour humbly to imitate his example. For he was patient with a life in which his true genius was thwarted by circumstance: in which he succeeded where he had little or no wish to succeed, working at popular tasks, invita Minerva. Versatile beyond example he was, but not through desultoriness of character; only because he was hindered from doing what his nature constrained him to long to do. In all ways he was unique, and we cannot say that he wasted gifts which he was unable to put into sedulous practice.
Lang, Andrew. 'At the Sign of the Ship,' Longmans Magazine (January 1909), 190.
‘Mr Grant Allen’s account of how he became a novelist, in the preface to his Twelve Tales, is most curious. His interests, as we all know, were scientific, and he never seems to have suspected that he had any skill in narrative. He began with a mere parable or fable ‘on the improbability of a man’s being able to recognise a ghost as such, even if he saw one.’ I presume the seer would arrive at his result by the method of exclusions: ‘It is not anything else, therefore it is a ghost.’ ‘The impossibility of applying any test of credibility to an apparition’s statements’ is not obvious. Apparitions are always saying that there is a treasure, or a corpse, in such or such a place. On examination made no such things are found. There is the test of credibility, and ‘apparitional evidence’ usually breaks down. His fable or parable on this topic was so much liked by his editor that Mr. Allen went ‘on the downward path which leads to fiction,’ the upward path, one may say, judging by many of his excellent stories. He never concealed the fact that he would rather write on deep scientific themes, and he was a novelist against his will, yet a most successful artists in the art for which he did not care. Nothing can be more unusual, for the novelist is usually born to be so, and tells stories to himself and others from his childhood upwards.
Nothing was more characteristic of Mr. Allen than the story which he told about a short novel, Kali’s Shrine. The germ of the tale was sent to me by a lady, and I suggested her collaboration with Mr. Allen. There was something of ‘the supernatural’ (which he detested) in the romance, so he cut some nerve or other of the heroine’s and rounded the point in that way, though he knew that he was writing false science. Anything was better than ‘the supernatural,’ even a consciously false explanation. For such reasons I used to tell Mr. Allen that he was really as obscurantist as any Inquisitor. He thought that the end (science) justified the
means. Once, I think, he did confess to something of this defect, in conversation, or perhaps he only ‘put the question by’ as one of the many on which we could never agree. He was a most charming companion, and marvelled much that one could never see the world as he saw it. He would give a little evolutionary lecture, and I would answer ‘God is great.’ These were irreconcilable differences!
Lang, Andrew. There is a scattering of references to GA in Demoor, Marysa. ed. Friends over the Ocean: Andrew Lang's American Correspondents 1881-1912. Gent, 1989, and Dear Stevenson: Letters from Andrew Lang to Robert Louis Stevenson with Five Letters from Stevenson to Lang. Leuven: Uitgeverij Peeters, 1990.
Law, Graham. ‘New Woman Novels in Newspapers,’ Media History, 7:1 (2001), 17-31.
Ledger, Sally. The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the fin de siecle. Manchester UP, 1997.
Le Gallienne, Richard. Retrospective Reviews: a Literary Log. Vol II (1893-1895). London: John Lane, 1896.
Reviews of Post Prandial Philosophy, Lower Slopes, Woman Who Did.
Le Gallienne, Richard. ‘Grant Allen’. Fortnightly Review, 66 (December 1899), 1005-1025. Summarised in Review of Reviews, 20 (Dec 1899), 593.
Reprinted as 'The Late Grant Allen as a Literary Workman', Newcastle Weekly Courant, 16 Dec 1899.
Reprinted as Grant Allen. New York: Tucker [1900] and in his Attitudes and Avowals, 1910 .
A colourful memoir with lively detail not in Clodd.
’In the mere mechanical—but how important—matter of ‘turning out’ his ‘copy’ he was quite amazing.. Any one who has stayed in his house will remember how his type-writer 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. I don’t think that Grant Allen can even once in his life have ‘stopped for a word’. Interruptions made no difference. I have known him stop in the middle of a sentence at the sound of the luncheon gong, and then, having found on repairing to the dining-room that the gong was a little premature, go back to his type-writer and finish the sentence and begin another.
’He made science clear, he made it simple, he made it interesting, he made it positively romantic; for he was more even than an apt exponent, he was no little of a poet… More than clearness of statement was needed. Some of the dullest of writers are as clear as they are dry. Grant Allen’s individual clearness came of imagination, as his charm came of an illustrative fancy, and a gay humanity applied to subjects usually immured from traffic with such frivolous qualities. Thus he not only made knowledge delightful to know, but delightful to read.’
’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. And bright things by the score all the way! His gift of stating the most intricate matter impromptu in a few simple words, and of pouring out the most varied and profound learning as though he were telling a fairy tale, can hardly have been equalled, and certainly can never have been surpassed.’
Le Gallienne, Richard. The Romantic ‘90s. Introduction by H. Montgomery Hyde. Putnam, 1951. [First ed. 1926].
The ‘Celtic Movement,’ which was one of the marked and most far-reaching of the many movements of the ‘90s, was by no means entirely in the hands of Irishmen. Indeed, its first inception must be credited to Matthew Arnold’s lectures “On the Study of Celtic Literature” as far back as 1867, though it was not till twenty years later that those lectures began to bear appreciable fruit. By then ‘Celticism’ was very much in the air, and Grant Allen, who was one of the most barometric minds of the time, and one of the most vigorous and persuasive of all trumpeters of ‘advance’ in every form, began one of his Fortnightly Reviews review articles, entitled ‘Celtic,’ with the characteristically dashing challenge, he being of Irish blood himself: ‘We Celts henceforth will rule the roost in Britain.’ That he was a true prophet who will gainsay? (84). In a description of William Sharp, ‘Fiona Macleod’, RLG adds: ‘Grant Allen, among whose many great and endearing gifts was a genius for welcoming all novelties of promise, was enthusiastic, and immediately wrote one of his eager appreciations for, I think, the Westminster Gazette.’ (86)
Le Gallienne, Richard. Attitudes and Avowals With Some Retrospective Reviews. London: John Lane, 1910.
Leuba, Walter. George Saintsbury. Twayne, 1967.
Levin, Gerald. ‘Grant Allen's Scientific and Aesthetic Philosophy,’ Victorians Institute Journal, 12 (1984), 77-89.
Some misunderstandings in there about GA’s belief in Lamarckism.
Levin, Gerald. ‘Alfred Russel Wallace and Grant Allen: Five Letters in the Robert N. Stecher Collection 1877-1899,’ Bulletin of the Cleveland Medical Library, 26 (Spring Summer) 1980, 17-39.
Discusses 5 MS letters from Wallace dated 7 Oct 77, 17 Feb 79, 21 April 97, 4 April 99, 22 June 99. The first 2 are in Clodd. The last 3 have not been published.
Lighthall, W.D. ‘Grant Allen,’ The Week, 6:6 (Jan 1889), 10.
Lightman, Bernard. Victorian Popularizers of Science. U. Chicago Press, 2007.
Lodge, O[liver] J. ‘Mr Grant Allen’s Notions about Force and Energy,’ Nature, 39 (24 Jan 1889), 289-292.
Totally destructive review-essay by a real physicist destroying GA’s arguments. ‘Are we, then, to conclude that the author, in all this treatise, has hit on no germ of truth—nothing but what was well known before, or what is erroneous? I fear that . . . this must be our conclusion. . . . A scientific man may often feel harassed by being unable to express in literary form what he has to say; but, though this is an evil, it is surely a lesser evil than to have the knack of writing and no matter to write’ (291). Among other howlers, GA apparently believed that a cannon ball fired horizontally employs its energy in counteracting the force of gravity. He is apparently unaware that it reaches the ground as the same moment as another ball dropped at the same moment from the same height. .
Lorimer, Douglas A. Colour, Class and the Victorians: English Attitudes to the Negro in the Mid-nineteenth Century. Leicester UP/Holmes & Meier, 1978.
Lucas, John. 'Grant Allen: 'Writing to the Moment'. In Greenslade, William & Terence Rodgers, eds, 2005.
Luftig, Victor. Seeing Together: Friendship Between the Sexes in English Writing, from Mill to Woolf. Stanford UP, 1993.
Some pages on WWD and GA’s use of Shelley as a touchstone of ‘freedom’.
M.A.B. ‘Normal or Abnormal,’ The Englishwoman’s Review of Social and Industrial Questions, 20 (14 Dec 1889), 533-538.
Infuriated woman’s response to GA’s ‘Plain Words on the Woman Question’. Says she has never heard of ‘any suppositious Mrs A. ever feels herself morally obliged to have six children because her neighbour, Mrs B., has only two, or eight because Mrs. B. has none.’ 533. Attacked because he ‘openly declares spinsters, voluntary, or involuntary even, or we might say especially those who are most active in the work of the world, to be anomalies and monstrous departures from the normal and healthy type of womanhood’. 533. Claims that the ‘very existence of so many old maids in comfortable circumstances appears a proof that for some women at least celibacy is a more natural condition than marriage’ 535. Objects to ‘narrow-minded biologists who apparently cannot regard a woman except as a female animal’ 536. The ‘busy and active spinster of the present day’ is not a diseased or imperfect type.
McDonald, Peter D. British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice 1880-1914. Cambridge UP, 1997.
Packed with useful information about Allen’s near-contemporaries Conrad, Bennett and Doyle as tradesmen of letters: what they earned and how they earned it.
Machen, Arthur. The Autobiography of Arthur Machen. With an Introduction by Morchard Bishop. London: Richards Press, 1951.
1863-1947. Many picturesque details of Machen’s attempts to make his way as a writer-journalist in 1880s London. He lived in Clarendon Road, Holland Park in 1883, 84, 85, not in a garret ‘which have seen the miseries of so many lettered men’ but a monastic cell at the top of the house 10 feet by 5 with no fireplace. Here he lived, read and wrote for years. He kept his books on the rungs of a stepladder outside his room. He lived in utter loneliness, toiling over occult books, dreaming of medieval logic and the Angelic Doctor, and contrasting his position with other men of letters he had heard of. He worked on a supremely unsaleable book called The Anatomy of Tobacco. ‘These others have often gathered friends of all sorts, both useful and pleasant, at the University; they have come of well-known stocks, every step they take is eased for them, their way is pointed out, there are hands to help them over the rough and difficult places./… I am often made quite envious when I see and hear how a young man, fresh on the town, drops so easily, so pleasantly, so delightfully into a quite distinguished place in literature before he is twenty-five. He enters the world of letters as a perfectly well-bred man enters a room of a great and distinguished company, knowing exactly what to say, and how to say it; everyone is charmed to see him; he is at home at once; and almost a classic in a year or two’ 130-1. He read Rabelais and Balzac, dining on half a loaf of dry bread and green tea. ‘It was not a bad life on the whole. . . but the loneliness was an oppression and sometimes a horror. Weeks passed without any human converse beyond brief business dialogue’ 176. He started his writing life in 1880. Between 1881 and 1922, he wrote 18 books, one of them, a translation of Casanova, in 12 vols. ‘And my total receipts for these eighteen volumes, for/ these forty-two years of toil, amount to the sum of six hundred and thirty-five pounds. That is, I have been paid at the rate of fifteen pounds and a few shillings per annum. . . I believe that business men, engaged in manufacture, always ‘write off’ a considerable sum for legitimate wear and tear and depreciation of plant. What about the wear and tear of mind and heart and that T,e,a,r, which is pronounced in another manner; what about the depreciation of the plant – a highly important one – of self-confidence that my writing has inflicted on me? 187-8. ‘Let me tell an amazed generation that for five hundred a year or rather less two people could live very sufficiently in the ‘eighties and ‘nineties’ with a month’s holiday in France every year. 212.
McLaren, Angus. Birth Control in Nineteenth-century England. Croom Helm, 1978.
Contains two brief references, one to Allen's views on women as breeders; another claiming that GA, as one of the "old eugenically-minded social theorists" made birth control 'thinkable' at last in the Edwardian era. However, the book contains a mass of information showing that GA's views on women’s role being essentially 'breeding' were not that exceptional.
McLeod, Roy M. ‘Evolutionism, Internationalism and Commercial Enterprise in Science: The International Scientific Series 1871-1910,’ in A.J. Meadows, ed. Development of Science Publishing in Europe. Elsevier, 1980.
MacNeill, J.G. Swift. What I Have Seen and Heard. Boston: Little, Brown, 1925.
’The late Mr Grant Allen, the well-known philosophical writer and novelist, lodged in the same house with me at Oxford. He was a Post Master of Merton and his abilities were widely recognised. At “Greats,” however, contrary to all expectation, he failed to obtain more than a Second. . . . I remember that on the evening of the day on which the Class Lists were published he came to my rooms and declared with great energy and conviction – and, I think, sincerity – that he regretted his Second, not so much for his own sake as for the repute of the University, which he had no doubt would eventually be proved to be in error in questioning his capabilities. I think it may fairly be said, after fifty years, that Mr Allen was right and the examiners wrong when he was thus weighed in the balance.’ (91). MacNeill an Irish barrister and MP.
Macpherson, Margaret M. ‘Grant Allen’s Verses,’ Academy, 82 (13 April 1912), 477.
Points out that GA’s poem ‘Only an Insect’ was published in more than one version.
Marchant, James. Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences. 2vols. London: Cassell, 1916.
In 1889 Wallace received a degree from Oxford. According to a Prof Poulton ‘on that occasion Wallace stayed with us, and I was anxious to show him something of Oxford; but, with all that there is to be seen, one subject alone absorbed the whole of his interest – he was intensely anxious to find the rooms where Grant Allen had lived. He had received from Grant Allen’s father a manuscript poem giving a picture of the ancient city dimly seen by midnight from an undergraduate’s rooms. With the help of Grant Allen’s college friends we were able to visit every house in which he had lived, but were forced to conclude that the poem was written in the rooms of a friend or from an imaginary point of view’. (2, 219). The poem is obviously ‘In Magdalen Tower’.
Wallace was struck with GA’s theory that wheat and other grasses are degraded forms of plants that were once fertilised by insects. ‘I want to give G. Allen the credit of first starting it, and want to see how far he went . . . I know not who to write to for it, as botanists of course ignore it, and G. Allen himself is, I believe, in Algeria’. (Letter of 19 Feb 1889, 2, 46-7). References are to ‘The Pedigree of Wheat,’ Macmillan's Magazine, 47 (Nov 1882), 29-41. Rpt. The Origin of Wheat. Flowers and Their Pedigrees (1883).
Marks, Patricia. Bicycles, Bangs and Bloomers: the New Woman in the Popular Press. University Press of Kentucky, 1990.
Nothing relevant to GA.
May, J. Lewis. John Lane and the Nineties. London, 1936.
Surprisingly, nothing of substance on GA.
Mays, Kelly J. ‘The Disease of Reading and Victorian Periodicals.’ In John O. Jordan & Robert L. Patten, eds. Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-century British Publishing and Reading Practices. Cambridge UP, 1995.
Meadows, A.J. ‘Access to the Results of Scientific Research: Developments in Victorian Britain,’ Development of Science Publishing in Europe, ed. A.J. Meadows. Elsevier, 1980.
Melchiori, Barbara Arnett. Terrorism in the Late Victorian Novel. Croom Helm, 1985.
Discussed in this context are The British Barbarians, For Maimie’s Sake & Philistia on pp.97, 211-15, 228-32.
Melchiori, Barbara Arnett. Grant Allen: the Downward Path which Leads to Fiction. Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 2000.
The only sustained, book-length treatment of Allen as a novelist: the first product of the revival of interest in GA.
Mivart, St George. ‘The Degradation of Women,’ Humanitarian, 9 (October 1896), 250-257
Wives are not morally released from supplying conjugal services just because they don’t like it. In fact not liking it becomes a source of merit, morally elevating them.
Mivart, St George. ‘It is Degradation (A Brief Re-statement),’ Humanitarian, 9 (December 1896), 417-419.
Reply to ‘Is it Degradation? By GA, Humanitarian, Nov 1896. Mivart simply repeats himself.
Mix, Katherine Lyon. A Study in Yellow: The Yellow Book and Its Contributors. London/Lawrence: Constable/U. Kansas Press, 1960.
Monroe, H. [Reply to GA’s ‘Novels without a Purpose’], North American Review, 163 (Aug 1896), 504-505.
Moore, Doris Langley. E. Nesbit: A Biography Revised with New Material. Ernest Benn, 1967.
“During this holiday [1890 or 1891?] the Blands saw a great deal of Grant Allen,/ who was staying at Cap Martin, and they appear to have liked one another, though I find no evidence that the association was continued when the holiday was over. The only record I have is from a member of the party, who says that when he came over from his large and luxurious hotel to dine with them in their much humbler surroundings, he made a great fuss on account of his fear of getting typhoid in that place, and later he held forth to a largely feminine audience on the inferiority of women, a thing which may seem curious to those who recollect that a couple of years later his novel, The Woman Who Did, was looked upon as a feminist tract” (156-7)
Moore, George. ‘A New Censorship of Literature,’ Pall Mall Gazette, 40 (10 Dec 1884), 1-2.
First attack on the circulating libraries, who have reduced humanity to a ‘jelly-fish sort of thing’. This article attracted several responses, few of them very sympathetic to Moore’s position.
Morris, William. Collected Letters, ed. Norman Kelvin. Princeton UP, 1996.
Vol III (1889-92) contains a few mentions of GA: ‘Have you seen Grant Allen’s article in the Contemporary Socialism and Individualism? It is of little importance in itself: but as the manifesto of Herbert Spencerite against Herbert Spencer is of some interest’ (13 May 89). Another letter mentions ‘Democracy and Diamonds’ in passing.
Morton, Peter. The Vital Science: Biology and the Literary Imagination, 1860-1900. London: Allen & Unwin, 1984.
Short sections on GA as a Darwinian social theorist and short story writer reacting to biological theory.
Morton, Peter. ‘Grant Allen: A Centenary Reassessment,’ English Literature in Transition 1880-1920, 44:4 (2001), 404-440.
A first attempt to evaluate GA’s career as a whole, based on primary research. Absorbed in the book below.
Morton, Peter. Grant Allen (1848-1899): A Bibliography. Victorian Fiction Research Guide #31. Brisbane: Victorian Fiction Research Unit, U. Queensland, 2002.
Complete bibliographical guide to GA’s creative writings, with introductory essay. Largely supplant by this website.
Morton, Peter. The Busiest Man in England: Grant Allen and the Writing Trade, 1875-1900. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
Biographical/critical study focussing on GA as a professional author/journalist and what his career tells us about the socioeconomics of authorship.
Morton, Peter. 'Grant Allen: A Biographical Essay'. In Greenslade & Rodgers, eds, 2005.
Morton, Peter. 'Grant Allen's Publications: A Checklist'. In Greenslade & Rodgers, eds, 2005.
M.O.W.O. [ie Oliphant, Margaret], ‘The Anti-marriage League,’ Blackwood’s, 159 (January 1896), 135-149.
Famous attack on GA, Hardy and others. Basically a review of Jude and WWD with many humorous touches, condemning both for turning readers’ minds to a subject which even savages prefer to keep private. Concedes that GA’s hilltop is a sanitary dunghill, and “there are no details to trouble him” in WWD, unlike Jude.
Muchar, Agnes Manle. ‘Grant Allen’ in ‘Prominent Canadians,’ The Week, 8 (10 July 1891), 510. Signed ‘Fidelis’.
‘the very quickness and vividness of his imagination are apt at times to mislead him and cause him to mislead others … those who hold this conviction must necessarily regret the influence, in certain directions, of the Spenserian philosophy of Grant Allen's writings, and through him upon his readers."
Mullen, D. ‘[Review of British Barbarians],’ Science Fiction Studies, 2:2 (July 1975).
Nelson, James G. The Early Nineties: A View from the Bodley Head. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1971.
Some minor details of The Lower Slopes, but the study ends in 1894.
Nevinson, Henry W. Changes and Chances. London: Nisbet, 1923.
Personal impressions.
Nicholl, E.M. ‘A Plea for the English Wife,’ North American Review, 161 (Dec 1895), 759-760.
Answer to GA’s piece on this subject.
Noble, James Ashcroft. ‘The Fiction of Sexuality,’ Contemporary Review, 67 (April 1895), 490-8.
‘A fairly well-known novelist, in a letter replying to ‘A Philistine’s’ article let the cat out of the bag. A novel of his own had been rejected by some half-dozen publishers… and he was very angry…” Little of interest in this article. ‘To present men and women as merely or mainly conduits of sexual emotion, is as ludicrously inartistic as it is to paint a face as a flat, featureless plain, from which the nose rises as a lonely eminence’ (494) - an interestingly Freudian analogy. Classed as “novelists of erotomania”. Civilisation ‘places certain offices in comparatively obscure and unobserved corners of our dwellings – which sends us into seclusion even to wash our hands or to clean our teeth. As it is impossible to use the most fitting comparison, I can only say that the novelists of erotomania resemble the host who holds a reception, and cleans his teeth in the drawing-room before his assembled guests’ (495). He does not want to hear ‘the details of sexual psychology, which, if healthy, are familiar to every man and woman (though no more interesting as art material than the processes of digestion, and, if morbid, are attractive only to unwholesome undergraduates, or to neurotic young women of the idle classes’ (497-8).
Nottingham, Chris. 'Grant Allen and the New Politics'. In Greenslade & Rodgers, eds, 2005.
O’Connor, Mrs T.P. [Elizabeth]. I Myself. G.P. New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1914.
’I always used to say of him, that if I were a rich woman, I would give a salary of £2000 a year to take a walk with me every day. He was so full of information, and had such a very lucid way of imparting it’ (240). She quotes one letter from him: ‘Please thank your husband most sincerely for his generous review of The Woman Who Did. It is the kindest, honestest, and truest notice the book has yet received. What I particularly value is the fact that while differing fundamentally from the social and ethical theories of the book, he yet shows himself just to them and to it. I have had so much unfair treatment in other quarters that I know how to value this frank and fearless criticism’ (240).
‘Oldcastle, John’ [ie Wilfred Meynell]. Journals and Journalism: With a Guide for Literary Beginners. London: Field & Tuer, 1880.
O’Leary, C.M. ‘A New Theory of Aesthetics [review of Physiological Aesthetics],’ Catholic World, 36 (1882/3), 471.
Olwell, Victoria. 'The Body Types: Corporeal Documents and Body Politics circa 1900'. In Price & Thurschwell, 2005.
Pakenham, Simona. Sixty Miles from England. The English at Dieppe 1814-1914. London: Macmillan, 1967.
By the mid-1860s ’New schools had put advertisements in the English press. . . An increasing number of families were sending their boys to the Collège Jehan Ango on the Quai Henri IV.’ (66)
Parrinder, Patrick. 'The Old Man and His Ghost: Grant Allen, H.G. Wells, and Popular Anthropology'. In Greenslade, William & Terence Rodgers, eds, 2005.
‘Paston, George’ [ie Emily Morse Symonds]. A Writer of Books. Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1999 [1898].
Cosima Chudleigh, would-be young novelist, is married to an amiable boor. She is reminded of Nietzsche: ‘The only question which a man should put to himself before marrying is this: “Do you think that you will always have something to talk about with this woman?” Because all the rest will pass, and when all the rest has passed, there will still be the eternal necessity for something to talk about.’ Later she comes to realise: ‘we ought to be kind to each other, two poor insignificant little insects, crawling for a few moments side by side over a tiny speck of earth. I begin now to see the meaning of marriage; it means two against the universe, facing sorrow and sickness and old age and death together, holding fast to each other till the waves sweep them back again into nothingness’. Of the average novel, six or seven hundred copies were sold. The hard-bitten journalist, Miss Nevill, whose procedures are, when nothing else offers, to ‘fake up’ an article on old hats, or old boots, or historic bellows, and try it on one of the illustrated monthlies. If it comes back you cut it down and send it to one of the weeklies. If they won’t have it you chop it into ‘pars,’ and think yourself lucky if you can get it into one of the scrappy papers. For an article that costs you three or four days’ work, you may get anything from five guineas down to five shillings. Bless me, I’m letting you into all the secrets of the prison-house.’ 31.
Payne, William Morton. ‘[Review of An African Millionaire],’ Dial, 23 (16 December 1897), 391.
Looks forward to a “story in which Colonel Clay should be pitted against Sherlock Holmes in a desperate struggle of wits.”
Pearson, Karl. ‘[Review of] Force and Energy: A Theory of Dynamics,’ Academy, 34 (29 Dec 1888), 421-422.
Karl Pearson, 1857-1936. 1884 became Goldsmid professor of applied mathematics and mechanics, UCL. Admired and feared; a bitter and contemptuous style. A terrifying character formidable in his fields of the application of mathematics to biology, particularly the statistical underpinning to neo-Darwinism by statistical genetics. . FRS 1896. Here is tone is more sorrowful: he feels he says like the medieval theologian who has spent his life struggling to give a precise definition to hazy conceptions only to see them tossed aside by a brash heretic. ‘The notions of Force and Energy are surely difficult enough without any encouragement being given to farther prejudices in the popular mind’ 421. Refers to GA sending round ‘another pamphlet to physical specialists, as he did in 1875’. Objects to GA redefining Power, which by then had a clear definition as ‘the rate of doing work’ as ‘that which initiates or terminates…motion’. Of GA’s distinction between force (which aggregates) and energy (which separates) he says: ‘Mr Grant Allen may for his own personal convenience call the “powers” to which he refers force and energy, just as he might have equally well christened them Jack and Gill. No one can object to his own private use of the words . . . he simply introduces complete nonsense into well-known principles’ 421. Pearson then takes apart these definitions, showing, in the process, how close physicists were already getting to the Einsteinian equation of mass and energy, and the relativity of motion) ‘We advise him to do penance at once by writing us a blood-curdling Christmas ghost story, and by promising to entertain no more heresies’ 422.
Pemble, John. The Mediterranean Passion : Victorians and Edwardians in the South. Oxford UP, 1987.
Good on the consumption resorts, etc.
Perkin, Harold. The Rise of Professional Society: England Since 1880. London: Routledge, 1989.
Useful in offering comparative data on freelance writers’ earnings.
’The Philistine’ [ie J.A. Spender]. ‘The New Fiction: a Protest Against Sex Mania. Fifth Article: Recapitulation,’ Westminster Gazette, 5 (5 Mar 1895), 1-2.
‘So far as Mr Grant Allen is concerned, the question enables me to say that I have not the smallest desire to prevent the expression of any conscientious views which anyone may hold on such questions; and though personally I think the choice of fiction as a vehicle unfortunate, I fail to find anything to which exception can justly be taken in Mr Grant Allen’s manner of putting his case. The Woman Who Did is throughout decorous and free from coarseness. There is in it none of that morbid analysis which is the special mark of sex-mania. ‘The Philistine’ need hardly add that he is in total disagreement with Mr Allen’s conclusions’.
Price, Leah. 'Grant Allen's Impersonal Secretaries: Rereading The Type-Writer Girl'. In Greenslade & Rodgers, eds, 2005.
Price, Leah & Pamela Thurschwell, eds. Literary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture. Ashgate, 2005.
Pullar, Phillipa. Frank Harris. Hamish Hamilton, 1975.
Frank Harris claimed in My Life and Loves that he succeeded GA at Brighton College, as master of English. There are other details of GA/Harris, but they are all lifted from Frank Harris: His Life and Adventures with an introduction by Grant Richards. London: Richards, 1947, 1952.
[Rampini, Charles J.G.] Letters from Jamaica. ‘The Land of Streams and Woods’. Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1873.
A chatty account by a judge of a tour in year when GA arrived in Jamaica.
Randolph, Lyssa. '"The Romance of Race": Grant Allen's Science as Cultural Capital'. In Greenslade, William & Terence Rodgers, eds, 2005.
Reilly, John M., ed. Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers, 2nd ed. St James Press, c1985.
Fairly complete bibliography of books, but carelessly lists Moorland Idylls as short stories. Also a short survey of some of GA’s crime fiction by E.F. Bleiler.
Review of Reviews. The Annual Index of Periodicals and Photographs for 1890. London: Review of Reviews, 1891.
Review of Reviews. Index to the Periodical Literature of the World. (Covering the Year 1891). London: Review of Reviews, 1892.
Review of Reviews. Index to the Periodical Literature of the World. (Covering the Year 1892). London: Review of Reviews, 1893.
Richards, Grant. ‘Mr Grant Allen and His Work,’ Novel Review, 1 (June 1892), 261-268.
A long interview and the most revealing. GA mentions his plans for a “cottage” at Hindhead on two or three acres of land. Claims he moved to New Haven (Yale) at the age of 10, ie. 1858. Claims that (in 1892) he is a regular contributor to the Cornhill, “hardly missing a month”. Wrote leaders for the Daily News. Claims he moved to Dorking in 1883, not Clodd’s 1881. Calls Philistia “a religious work” which “embodies to a great extent my own ideals of life and conduct”. After that I like For Maimie’s Sake best. I think the first half of it the most successful work I have done in fiction. The last half was to a great extent sacrificed to the real or supposed necessities of a sensational story.” (265-6). Of literature as a trade: “It is the worst market into which a man can take his brains. Mr Besant makes much of the fact that a certain number of authors make incomes of over £1000 a year. But the same number of painters, barristers, doctors, make £20,000 a year. For the most part even tolerably successful authors only just pull through somehow. Thy can’t make fortunes; they seldom even leave their wives and children properly provided for. I don’t complain of all this; I don’t see how it can be prevented; the profession is overcrowded, and the competition keen; but as you ask me what I think of it compared with other professions I should say distinctly it’s an excellent one to keep out of.” 266. Says he never works more than five hours a day.
Richards, Grant. ‘Mr Grant Allen,’ Athenaeum, 4 November 1899, 621.
Protest at aspects of the anonymous obituary therein (see above), from GA's nephew and publisher.
Richards, Grant. Memories of a Misspent Youth 1872-1896. London: Heinemann, 1932.
Breezy autobiography which contains a considerable number of personal reminiscences of his uncle GA, but surprisingly little of much substance. Reprints the rhyming letter from Clodd mentioned above. It presents GA living a luxurious and varied life in the 90s.
Richards, Grant. Author Hunting By an Old Literary Sportsman: Memories of Years Spent Mainly in Publishing, 1897-1925. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1934. Opens with the opening of his publishing house, when he was 24, in Jan 1897. Only him, his cousin Jerrard Grant Allen (6 years younger; he had been to Charterhouse) and an errand boy. Has a smudgy photo of Franklin Richards. His father was a retired don by this point. GA ‘put up’ L750 into the business—‘he would have found more but, not long before, John Lane, who had published his The BB and TWWD, had borrowed a thousand of him. Lane’s business was not old and he beginning to find that a nest of singing birds, like a racing stable, required keeping up. One day, therefore, he tele//graphed to my uncle that he must see him at once. Grant Allen, always ready to help, went up to town at once, had Lane’s difficulties explained to him and, although he was very far indeed from being a rich man, went to his bank, arranged the loan and handed over the sum required to the founder of The Bodley Head. He had no cause to regret it’ 4-5. GR had introduced GA to the work of Wells and Le Gallienne. Of the Historical Guides. ‘They and their successors had a warm welcome, but my aunt could never understand why it was that, in spite of what would nowadays be called a considerable fan mail, the series did not make our fortunes. I of course knew how many had been sold, but the comparative smallness of the number was strangely discrepant with the agreeable stories of returned travellers who declared that half the English and American visitors to the Louvre, and the Uffizi were carrying the little green books. But that is one of the things one soon learns as a publisher—never to trust estimates of sale… in the case of those Guides there was the lending habit to be taken into account. The average unintelligent person always borrows a guide-book when he can’. 40. Of the EIG: ‘it being urged on my uncle by a far-seeing friend that the interpolation of the three words “of the Idea” would turn the edge of much prejudice. He was right. I am reminded by the many appearances of Grant Allen in this list of one of the horrid gaffes of my life. Running through my first catalogue with my uncle I casually remarked that I must look for a book by an Ablett or an Acland so that his name might not stand so prominently in the very forefront of my list. Yes, I said that, thoughtlessly and heedlessly, to the man whose kindness, appreciation, confidence and money had put me where was! . . . Grant Allen did not protest. He had too understanding a heart’ 40. He reports that he made about 170 on EIG, 120 on Linnet , lost money on the Guides and ‘a fair-sized sum’ on Tom, Unlimited.
Robb, George. ‘The Way of All Flesh: Degeneration, Eugenics, and the Gospel of Free Love,’ Journal of the History of Sexuality, 6:4 (1996), 589-603.
Covers familiar ground but raises some questions about the ‘counterparadigm’ that monogamy and puritanism were themselves responsible for national degeneration, and quotes GA on this.
Rollins, A.W. ‘Ad absurdum [review-article of The Woman Who Did],’ Critic [London], 27 (28 Sep 1895), 193-4.
A silly part-article; complains about the Perugia scene where they go out to buy ‘vegetables’. ‘its very thinness and meagreness, its poverty of incident and of phrase, enhance its quality of heathfulness.
Romanes, George J. ‘[Review of ] Physiological Aesthetics,’ Nature, 16 (7 June 1877), 98-100.
Romanes calls this ‘an entertaining little treatise’ and spells Allen’s name wrongly throughout, but is generally approving.
Romanes, George J. ‘[Review of ] Colin Clout’s Calendar,’ Nature, 28 (28 June 1883), 194-195.
Romanes defends GA from recent assaults on his scientific popularisation. ‘Mr Allen, considered as a literary man, is certainly a man of unusual ability, and he devotes his ability to diffusing an interest in biology among readers of periodical literature, who certainly could not be reached by any less attractive means’ (194)
Romanes, George J. ‘[Review of ] Charles Darwin,’ Nature, 33 (17 Dec 1885), 147-148.
Romanes praises this study, though mildly critical of GA’s placement of Darwin and Spencer at the same level, when their approaches are so different.
Roth, Edward. A Complete Index to Littell’s Living Age. Volume I. Comprising Contents of the First Hundred Volumes. Philadelphia: Edward Roth, 1883.
Rothenstein, William. English Portraits: A Series of Lithographed Drawings. Grant Richards, 1898.
Contains the lithograph and a biographical note of one page, probably by Grant Richards.
Rozendal, Phyllis. ‘Grant Allen’. B. Benstock & Thomas F. Staley, eds. Dictionary of Literary Biography, 70: British Mystery Writers 1860-1919 (Gale, 1988).
Rubinstein, David. Before the Suffragettes: Women’s Emancipation in the 1890s. Harvester Press, 1986.
Covers some fairly familiar ground but numerous minor mentions of GA. Has details of the Lanchester affair of late-1895, which had some real life parallels to the WWD situation.
Ruddick, Nicholas. ‘Grant Allen’. D. Harris-Fain, ed. Dictionary of Literary Biography, 178: British Fantasy and Science-fiction Writers before World War 1 (Gale, 1997).
Ryan, Kiernan. ‘Citizens of Centuries to Come: the Ruling-class Rebel in Socialist Fiction.’ In H. Gustav Klaus, ed. The Rise of Socialist Fiction 1880-1914. Harvester, 1987.
Philistia is first in the table of socialist novels by date. It ‘revolves around an altogether more tormented experience of enlistment in the cause. Ernest Le Breton, an aristocratic but impecunious young intellectual, is undoubtedly cast in the mould of the holy fool rather than the wise fool, and the novel charts this socialist pilgrim’s bleak progress to the understanding possessed by Shaw’s more worldly-wise Trefusis from the start. [Shaw’s An Unsocial Socialist was serialised the same year.] ... Le Breton is obliged to learn that uncompromising idealism and selfless devotion to the socialist dream are not rewarded by a personal sense of moral absolution and political salvation. It is here that the irrepressible analogies between the socialist convert and the Christian convert are most prone to break down completely. The novel is centrally occupied, in fact, with the complicated relationships between contemporary socialist experience and the narratives of religion. The title, Philistia, signifies the land of the uncivilised bourgeoisie, the class-divided England in which the socialist chosen people, the ‘Children of Light’ find themselves in bondage, fighting to keep their faith alive. Through an external framework of chapter headings, such as ‘The Daughters of Canaan’ and ‘The Philistines Triumph’, as well as through a whole internal network of religious allusions, a mock-epic effect is created, whereby the heroic realm of biblical legend maintains a running ironic commentary on the incongruity of its imputed parallels with the social and political realities of upper-class Britain in the late nineteenth century. . . Ernest is the kind of intense and humourless ethical socialist who lacerates his conscience constantly... Allen does not disguise how insufferable such a remorselessly moralistic socialist can be, not least to other socialists. As the daughter of Ernest’s political mentor, the emigre Max Schurz, remarks: living with Le Breton ‘would be like living with an abstraction’, and a woman ‘might just as well marry Spinoza’s Ethics or the Ten Commandments. He’s a perfect model of a Socialist, and nothing else. ... Le Breton’s refusal to compromise his principles in the slightest, even where the most scrupulous would concede there to be no other option, loses him job after job as a teacher and then as a journalist, and brings himself, his wife and their baby to the point of penniless starvation. . . The novel, at any rate, leaves him the last word: “As things are constituted now, there seems only one life that’s really worth living for an honest man, and that’s a martyr’s. A martyr’s or else a worker’s. And I, I greatly fear, have managed somehow to miss being either. The wind carries us this way and that, and when we would do that which is right, it drifts us away incontinently into that which is only profitable.” (3, 287-8).
Saunders, J.W. The Profession of English Letters. Routledge & Kegan Paul/University of Toronto Press, 1964.
Scala, Alexander. ‘Grant Allen: Fame to Obscurity,’ Whig-Standard Magazine [Kingston], 26 Feb 1983, 4-13.
Also contains a reprint of ‘The Curate of Churnside’. Well-informed bio-critical piece with one or two minor errors of fact.
Scott, J.W. Robertson. Story of the Pall Mall Gazette: Of its First Editor Frederick Greenwood and of its Founder George Murray Smith. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1971 [1950].
Description of GA in a letter from Greenwood: ‘Mr Grant Allen is a smallish, fair, feeble-looking man of about 35 or so—nearly beardless, if I remember right’ (365).
Sharp, Elizabeth A. William Sharp (Fiona Macleod): A Memoir. 2 vols. London: Heinemann, 1912.
As ‘Fiona Macleod’ he wrote to GA sending a work as ‘a slight token of homage from the youngest and latest of Celtic writers to the most brilliant champion of the Celtic genius now living’. The letter is undated. 2, 16. GA replied, with various questions of pronunciation of Gaelic, saying ‘my Celtic blood is half Irish, half Breton’. It was a long letter; ‘only the busiest man in England could have found time to do it’. 2, 18. In Oct 1899 he wrote to Murray Gilchrist: ‘Today I am acutely saddened by the loss of a very dear friend, Grant Allen. I loved the man – and admired the brilliant writer and catholic critic and eager student. He was of a most winsome nature. The world seems shrunken a bit more. As yet, I cannot realise I am not to see him again. Our hearts ache for his wife – an ideal lovable woman – a dear friend of us both’. 2, 151.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Complete Works, eds Roger Ingpen & Walter E. Peck. London/New York: Ernest Benn/Gordian Press, 1965.
Notes on marriage etc in Notes to Queen Mab highly influential on GA.
Shattock, Joanne, ed. ‘Grant Allen, i.e. Charles Grant Blairfindie Allen 1848-99,’ The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, vol. IV. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999, 1450-1451.
Has a fairly complete list of GA’s books and at last removes gross errors of previous editions; but unaccountably omits The Desire of the Eyes and says it excludes some minor works (undefined, but several not particularly minor are missing).
Shaw, George Bernard. ‘Mr Grant Allen’s New Novel [The Devil’s Die],’ Pall Mall Gazette, 47 (24 Apr 1888), 3.
There are 3 principal men, one of the ‘a diabolical villain’. Another, Ivan Royale, is a fool, another is an Indo-Arab believing in Allah. Wonders why GA sees his villain as a villain, ‘especially as all his virtuous characters, with one exception, are either fanatics or idiots’. As a Darwinian, GA should see his villain’s crimes as meritorious. The reviewer thinks much of the beautiful lady novelist who starts off as an egoist and twaddler, but then becomes a purely romantic figure. ‘Mr Grant Allen has recently confessed to the world that competitive bookmaking leads to the survival of the fastest rather than the fittest’.
Shaw, George Bernard. ‘Two New Novels by Mr Grant Allen [This Mortal Coil and The White Man’s Foot],’ Pall Mall Gazette, 48 (20 Nov 1888), 2.
These reviews of Shaw's are reprinted with textual notes in Tyson, Brian, ed. Bernard Shaw's Book Reviews Originally Published in the Pall Mall Gazette from 1885 to 1888. Pennsylvania State UP, 1991. The editor claims GA persuaded the PMG to remove the ruder parts of Shaw's reviews of his work (p.16). Shaw is quite complimentary about GA's novels. He read The Devil's Die while attending a couple of dull plays as a drama critic. This Mortal Coil is praised as 'for a rapidly written book, a wonder of inventiveness and vivacity'.
Shorter, Clement K. ‘The late Grant Allen,’ Bookman (London) (December 1899), 76-78; The Critic [New York], 36 (January 1900), 38-43.
Short appreciation of little interest playing up GA's 'Celtic' background, which he liked to insist on himself.
Showalter, Elaine. Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siecle (NY: Viking Penguin, 1990).
Very brief discussion of WWD (51-2) mostly quoting contemporary opinion of it: Wells, Fawcett, Grand.
Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1977.
Some more very brief discussion of GA (184-5), relating him to Ruskin, but the chapter ‘The Feminist Novelists’ has a lot of background information.
Showalter, Elaine. ‘The Woman Who Did [letter],’ Times Literary Supplement, 27 August 1993, 17.
Showalter, Elaine. ‘Syphilis, Sexuality, and the Fiction of the Fin de Siecle’ in Lyn Pykett, ed. Reading Fin de Siecle Fictions. Longman, 1996, pp.166-183.
Shumaker, Jeanette. "Fallen Madonnas in Late-Victorian Fiction: Kate Chopin's and Grant Allen's Ambivalence about Sacrifice," South Carolina Review, 36:1 (2003), 40-50.
[Sladen, Douglas]. ‘The Diner Out’. ‘Gossip about Authors,’ The Queen: The Lady’s Newspaper and Court Chronicle (16 March 1895), 450.
Account of the New Vagabonds’ Dinner. GA described as having “silky silvery hair and beard, and the rather pronounced features so often associated with men of uncommon ability. Mr Grant Allen is the type of the contemplative man of science -- the dreamer who is also an active thinker”.
[Sladen, Douglas]. ‘The Diner Out’. ‘Gossip about Authors,’ The Queen: The Lady’s Newspaper and Court Chronicle (23 March 1895), 494.
Report of a visit to GA at Hindhead. GA took to fiction because it is the only kind of writing, apart from school books, which offers a decent living. Publishing first in serial form quadruples his income. If it were not for this, he would abandon the 3-volume novel for ones like The Woman Who Did, but he must achieve a success large enough to forego the serial rights, or large enough to make editors defy Mrs Grundy. The Woman sold more than 500 copies a day in the fortnight after publication.
[Sladen, Douglas]. Twenty Years of My Life. Constable, 1915.
Chatty reminiscences by journalist who knew everyone in arty 80s and 90s London. Minor remarks on GA.
Soloway, Richard Allen. Birth Control and the Population Question in England, 1877-1930. U. North Carolina Press, 1982.
A thorough, scholarly and pleasingly witty treatment of this subject, showing how reluctant doctors, etc were to admit that the precipitous decline in the birth rate was due to contraception among the professional classes.
Spencer, Herbert. Social Statics; or, the Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified, and the First of the Them Developed. London: Williams & Norgate, 1868. First printed 1851.
[Stead, W.T.?] ‘Muscle-reading by Mr Stuart Cumberland: A Reception at the Pall Mall Gazette Office,‘ Pall Mall Gazette (24 May 1884), 2.
Demonstration of demystified telepathy, attended by Grant Allen and other worthies, including Oscar Wilde.
[Stead, W.T.] ‘A False Prophet of Coming Ill. Mr Grant Allen’s Vision of the Future,’ Review of Reviews, 1 (May 1890), 511.
Discusses GA’s article ‘The Girl of the Future’ in the Universal Review. “Mr Grant Allen is a biologist who looks at the human race from the point of view of the stud-groom. . . .Mr Grant Allen hopes that when women are educated they will repudiate monogamy and deliberately seek to have as wide and varied a selection of fathers for their children as possible. . . . the ideal of motherhood will crystallise into a religious duty in a form which most people will regard as indistinguishable from promiscuous but limited adultery. . . . Women may revert to polyandry, but judging from the example, which he quotes, [ie Georges Sand and George Eliot] the motive will not be the scientific instinct which looks upon human beings as the farmer regards his brood sows and prize boars, but the same simple selfish desire which leads so many men astray. Even Mr Grant Allen would not contend that male incontinence is the outcome of a noble idea of fatherhood.”
[Stead, W.T.] ‘There is no Religion but Democracy, and Mr Grant Allen is its Prophet,’ Review of Reviews, 3 (May 1891), 462.
Extracts and commentary on GA’s article ‘Democracy and Diamonds’: ‘full of a lordly scorn which it is good to read, for such writing is somewhat rare nowadays’.
[Stead, W.T.] ‘Philistia and Mr Grant Allen: a Word of Expostulation,’ Review of Reviews, 3 (June 1891), 585.
Stead claims, despite what GA had asserted in his ‘Letters in Philistia’ article, that he could publish anything he wanted, and had never been subject to censorship. ‘It is all nonsense to pretend that it is impossible to publish and write anything in England that is shocking to stodgy bourgeoise respectability. … It is sheer nonsense to pretend that in England a man cannot say what he will. I may safely say without boasting that I have ventured to say and print in England that which no other journalist has said or printed, and yet here I am what I am… It is not plain speech and free speech that the English public dislikes, it is unclean speech, speech that is used in order to corrupt the mind and deprave the imagination that the British Philistia, if it be Philistia, protests against—and rightly protests—and will go on protesting, despite all that Mr Grant Allen says.’ In other words, Stead is for publishing everything; everything, that is, except ‘unclean speech’. He particularly objected to GA’s calling Parnell’s adultery as being ‘a breach of etiquette’ or breaking an egg at the little end. .. It is nonsense, and somewhat dishonest nonsense, to endeavour to confound the free and frank discussion of social problems which we find in Ibsen and in Tolstoi with this kind of insidious attempt to deprave the morals of the community by suggesting that adultery and treachery and deliberate perfidy are only equivalent to the breaking of an egg at the wrong end.
[Stead, W.T.] ‘Mr Grant Allen: His Work and His Critics,’ Review of Reviews, 6 (Sep 1892), 266.
Extracts and commentary from GA’s biographical piece in the Idler. Also quotes a piece from Andrew Lang (pub. in Longman’s about this time), which claimed that the novel is no place for advocating sexual and other reforms of ‘delicate matters’.
Stead says: ‘Noticing Mr Grant Allen’s lament that he cannot publish a novel with a social theme…Mr Andrew Lang, writing in Longman’s, says that he cannot agree with Mr Allen… Mr Lang says: ‘Let us suppose that an author is a Malthusian, or a Free Lover, or has a just and natural desire to reform the world on a variety of other delicate matters. Its seems clear, to myself, that his ideas cannot be put in a manner too simple, stern, and scientific. A novel is not the place for them. A novel is not a treatise. Many things that need be said should be said simply, directly, with all authorities and evidence. They ought not to be mixed up with flirtations, love affairs , and fanciful episodes. They many be true, but, presented in a romance, they may be most mischievously misunderstood and perverted. “Nana’, for example, may contain what we should know, and circumstances which we should endeavour to rectify. But a remor of morals would not be aided by letting ‘Nana’ circulate in English among the readers of Miss Yonge. At certain ages, fact of importance in themselves become mere excitements of prurient curiosity. Whatever the subject, a novel really is not a tract, nor a sermon, nor a treatise.’ (RR 266).
[Stead, W.T.] ‘The Book of the Month: The Woman Who Did by Grant Allen,’ Review of Reviews (Feb 1895), 177-190.
A critical analysis of GA’s thesis, with very lengthy extracts from throughout the novel. Stead makes some shrewd points, and avoids conventional moralising, although his closing remarks are badly adrift: “The race has arrived at monogamy. It is not likely to retrograde. The intercourse that results in offspring will tend to be more and more strictly monagamic, not merely because it is to the interest of the offspring, but because the severe restriction of such intercourse within monogamist limits immensely widens the field of intercourse other than the ultimate between men and women. The strictest monogamy in physical union is the condition of the freest possible promiscuity in non-physical intercourse between the sexes. ”He comes to the paradoxical but readily defensible conclusion that “from the point of view of the fervent apostle of Free Love, this is a Boomerang of a Book” (177). Note that this article contains a large photo of The Croft.
Stead, W.T. ‘The Book-stall Censorship,’ Westminster Gazette, 5 (2 Mar 1895), 1-2.
Discussing his publication of extracts, on the grounds that it would ‘do’ for GA’s case. Reports that in Ireland the Review had been banned from the bookstalls, by the main distributors, Eason’s.
[Stead, W.T.] ‘The Book of the Month. How God Revealed Himself to Man [review of Evolution of the Idea of God],’ Review of Reviews, 16 (November 1898), 519-525.
[Stead, W.T.] ‘The Death of Grant Allen,’ Review of Reviews, 20 (Nov 1899), 447.
A short notice. ‘Upon most political questions Mr Grant Allen’s views were very advanced. He was a Socialist, although not of a very pronounced type; but on questions relating to the sexes his views were, to say the least, peculiar. In The Woman Who Did, which was to be the first of a series of Hill-Top Novels, he scandalised a good many people; but that novel was milk and water compared with his esoteric doctrine.’ Stead was almost unique, then or later, in noticing the last point.
[Stead, W.T.] ‘The Biography of a Rebel [review of Clodd’s Memoir],’ Review of Reviews, 22 (July 1900), 92.
‘The garment of latter-day beliefs and conventions sat uneasily upon him; it fretted him, and he did not hesitate to let the world know of his irritation. . . . Mr Clodd’s life of his friend is the biography of a man who failed, and who was conscious of the fact. It is this realisation of failure which makes the story of Grant Allen’s life a pathetic one. . . . 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.’
[Stead, W.T.] ‘In Praise of Two Crimes,’ Review of Reviews, 10 (Oct 1894), 356.
Mentions a rejoinder by George Ives in the Humanitarian, his contribution to the ‘New Hedonism’ controversy. Stead summarizes: ‘who can picture his {Ives} despair and disgust when he found in the last number of the Humanitarian that Mr Grant Allen drew the line at unnatural vice? … says Mr Ives plaintively, why then did he write ‘The New Hedonism’?… Mr Ives asks, can these hateful vices be proved to cause sorrow and misery to those who indulge in them/ Can they be proved to be destructive to health, and is Mr Grant Allen any better than a Puritan after all? ‘ Will Mr Allen reply? ‘that depends whether Mr Grant Allen feels disposed to reply to Mr Ives’ criticism, and whether, which is doubtful, any periodical in the English language will deliberately make its pages the arena for discussing the ethics of unnatural vice’ 356. See Ives.
Stetz, Margaret D. & Lasner, Mark Samuels. England in the 1890s: Literary Publishing at the Bodley Head. Washington: Georgetown UP, 1990.
Describes the typescript of The Woman Who Did and the readers’ reports, quoting from both of them. Points out that these reports are dated October and November 1893, while Mathews and Lane were still partners. Comments: “Mathews presumably objected; thus, it was not until Lane had been in business on his own for nearly six months that The Woman Who Did was published, in the “Keynotes Series,” in February 1895” (45-46). Also contains brief bibliographical/historical notes on The British Barbarians, Victoria Crosse’s novel, and Traill’s parody.
Stetz, Margaret Diane. ‘Sex, Lies, and Printed Cloth: Bookselling at the Bodley Head in the Eighteen-Nineties,’ Victorian Studies, 35:1 (Autumn 1991), 76-86.
Steward, Jill. 'Grant Allen and the Business of Travel'. In Greenslade, William & Terence Rodgers, eds, 2005.
Stephensen-Payne, Phil & Utter, Virgil. Grant Allen: Hill-Top Philosopher. A Working Bibliography. Leeds: Galactic Central Publications, 1999. Galactic Central Bibliographies for the Avid Reader, Volume 52.
Comprehensive but outdated in that it omits very many items which have turned up since the authors completed their research on GA.
Stevenson, Lionel. The Ordeal of George Meredith. Peter Owen, 1954
Numerous slight references, including the cousin incident.
Stuewe, Paul. “Britishers at Home and Overseas”: Imperial and Colonial Identity in the Work of Grant Allen, Robert Barr and Sir Gilbert Parker. PhD thesis, University of Waterloo, Dec 2000. DAI DANQ51230.
St John, Charles E. ’[Review of] Evolution of the Idea of God,’ New World (December 1897).
St Pierre, Paul Matthew. ‘Grant Allen’. Dictionary of Literary Biography, 92: Canadian Writers 1890-1920 ed. W.H. New (Gale, 1990).
Contains numerous factual errors.
Strahan, S.A.K. Woman and Natural Selection,’ Humanitarian: A Monthly Review of Sociological Science, 4 (Mar 1894), 186-194.
Strong arguments against the eugenic gatekeeper theory of Wallace and GA. The argument is that if women were a free agent in the matrimonial market, every form of the unfit would slowly be eliminated because their refusal to mate with any but the highest form of male would gradually eliminate the the degraded, the weak, the deformed, the diseased. But symptoms of the unfitness, cancer, insanity etc appear equally in each gender, ‘even if we admit that educated women will only love and esteem the fit among men; which, of course, we cannot admit’ 188. In the case of women who are ‘independent pecuniarily’ eg saleswomen, female clerks we do not find ‘any special display of wise discrimination in the choice of husbands; 190. And men have enjoyed the advantages of self sufficiency and education, yet ‘they are not above marrying a plain wife for pelf, or a diseased one for love’ 190. ‘to expect that woman, in whom the emotional is so much more strongly developed than in man, will attain a higher level of control of the passions by the means which have failed in man, is to court disappointment.’ 191. In any case, ‘many of those [men] who are feeble, or who bear in their nature the seed of hereditary disease, are as loveable and as estimable as the majority of their more fortunate fellows, and some infinitely more so. Are we to teach woman that it is her duty to turn her back upon the weakling, the miserable, and the afflicted?’ 194. See Cobbett.
Strahan, S.A.K. Woman and Natural Selection,’ Humanitarian: A Monthly Review of Sociological Science, 4 (May 1894), 396-398.
Returns to the attack: ‘When Dr Wallace talks of his hopes for the future of the human race being grounded upon ‘the pure instincts of woman’, he is only poetising. The instincts of woman are not one whit purer than those of man. In the civilising process they have suffered perversion and vitiation equally with his.’
Stokes, John. In the Nineties. Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989.
Claims that the phrase ‘New Hedonism’ was a code for homosexual (but if that were true GA certainly didn’t know it) and has various small references including some of GA’s letters in newspapers.
Stubbs, Patricia. Women and Fiction: Feminism and the Novel 1880-1920. Sussex: Harvester Press, 1979.
Some useful background information. Discusses GA only on p.118 (WWD) and p.123-4 on motherhood.
Stutfield, Hugh. ‘Tommyrotics,’ Blackwood’s, 157 (June 1895), 837-- [not in F JS]
Stutfield, H.E.M. ‘The Psychology of Feminism,’ Blackwood’s, ? (January 1897), 104-117.
Sullivan, Alvin, ed. British Literary Magazines. Vol. 3: The Victorian and Edwardian Age, 1837-1913. Greenwood Press, 1984.
A few minor references but useful for its listing of periodical holdings, etc.
Sutherland, J.A. Victorian Novelists and Publishers. Athlone Press, 1976.
Unfortunately only deals with the mid-Victorian period up to 1870.
Sutherland, John, ed. ‘Allen, Grant,’ Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1989, pp.20-21.
This accurately summarises GA's career but the comments on the novels contain a few minor errors.
Syrett, Netta. The Sheltering Tree: An Autobiography. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1939.
Some minor reminiscences by GA's niece (as a young girl) on pp. 42-51, including the quality of his conversation, which she found ‘disconcerting and terribly embarrassing’ in that it turned frequently on sex. However, she became a ‘new woman’ novelist herself, and GA promoted her career.
Temple Bar. The One Hundredth Volume of The Temple Bar Magazine. Being an Alphabetical List of the Titles of All Articles Appearing in the previous Ninety-nine Volumes. Richard Bentley and Son, April 1894.
Tompkins, Herbert W. ‘Grant Allen,’ Gentleman’s Magazine, 74 (1905), 134-149.
A thorough and accurate outline of GA’s total output by an uncritical admirer, including a discussion of his popular scientific writings and uncollected periodical work. Probably the best single overview of GA’s career and achievement, although it’s entirely inadequate on his social views, and the evaluation of his fiction is sketchy. It does give an excellent sense of his versatility.
Traill, H[enry] D[uff]. The Barbarous Britishers: A Tip-top Novel. London: John Lane, [1896].
Rather laborious but quite shrewd parody of The British Barbarians with a hero now called ‘Bunkham Barelydue’. With cover and title-page designs apparently by Aubrey Beardsley (or an imitator?), parodying the ones he drew for Allen’s novel. The title page shows a scowling maid carrying a box of grate-cleaning materials, going to ask for help in her domestic labours from Bunkham.
Trotter, David. The English Novel in History 1895-1920. Routledge, 1993.
Mentions Allen and TWWD; some brief remarks on other relevant matters. ‘an interesting personality, deserving of a more informative biography than he got.’ 73.
Trotter, W. R. The Hilltop Writers: A Victorian Colony among the Surrey Hills. Lewes: The Book Guild, 1996.
A lively and well-researched social/cultural history of writers in the Hindhead area. Section 3, 'Biographical Notes' has an entry on GA (pp.65-73). It is drawn entirely from published accounts, and contains a few minor inaccuracies.
Turner, Frank Miller. Between Science and Religion: The Reaction to Scientific Naturalism in Late Victorian England. Yale UP, 1974.
Tyrell, R.Y. ‘[Review of GA’s Attis by Catullus],’ Classical Review, 7 (1893), 44.
Utter, R.P. & Needham, B.B. Pamela’s Daughters. NY: Russell & Russell, 1972 [1937]. A few very minor references.
Vedder, Catherine Mary. New Woman, Old Science: Readings in Late Victorian Fiction. Dissertation Abstracts, 54 (1993), 537-8a.
Wake, G. Staniland. ’Evolution of the Idea of God [review],’ Monist (July 1898).
Wallace, Alfred Russel. ‘Colour in Nature [review-essay of The Colour Sense],’ Nature, 19 (3 Apr 1879), 501-505.
Wallace, Alfred Russel. ‘[Review of] Vignettes from Nature,’ Nature, 25 (23 Feb. 1882), 381-382.
A marked improvement in tone here from earlier reviews by Wallace: ‘these are very slight blemishes in so excellent a book, which is calculated to bring home to every reader how much of interest and novelty, of intricacy, of beauty, and of wonder, is to be found in the structure or history of the humblest plants or the most familiar animals; and also, how greatly the once-decried doctrine of evolution has added to the ideal and poetic aspects of the study of nature’ 382.
Wallace, Alfred Russel. ‘Human Selection,’ Fortnightly Review, 48 (Sep 1890), 325-337.
This piece on female eugenic gatekeeping was written in full knowledge of and reaction to ‘Plain Words’ FR, (Oct 1889) & ‘Girl of the Future,’ UR (May 1890). It refers to GA’s solution as detestable.
Wallace, Alfred Russel. ‘Human Progress: Past and Future,’ Arena, 5 (Jan 1892), 143-159.
Wallace, Alfred Russel. My Life: A Record of Events and Opinions. 2 vols. London: Chapman & Hall, 1905.
In 1886: ‘Among the visitors to Washington was the Rev. J.A. Allen, of Kingston, Canada (the father of our Grant Allen), who, with his wife and two daughters, was living in apartments nearly opposite my hotel. I soon became intimate with this amiable and very intellectual family, and spent many pleasant evenings with them; while Mr Allen sometimes went for walks with me and took me over the Patent Museum. . . . From him I first learnt that his son was a poet, and he gave me a copy of his marvellous poem entitled “In Magdalen Tower,” written when he was an undergraduate, describing with wonderful ingenuity and picturesqueness the appearance of the city on a moonlit October night, but going on to discuss the deepest problems of philosophy and their attempted solutions. Take as a sample these two verses on law in the universe . . . The poem consists of twenty-one verses, every one of them perfect in rhyme and rhythm, and each carrying on the argument and illustration to the conclusion. This gifted writer would have been a great naturalist, and perhaps also a great poet, had he not been obliged to write novels and magazine articles for a livelihood’. 2, 121-2.
’[At Kingston] I had been invited to spend a few days in a delightful old country house on the shores of Lake Ontario, in the refined and very congenial society of Mr and Mrs Allen, and their two daughters. I much enjoyed this visit, and my genuine admiration of the writings of their only son, Grant Allen, was a bond of sympathy. The house is a roomy old-world mansion, situated in a small park with grand old trees, and fruit, flower and kitchen garden sloping down to the water. Mr Allen himself worked at his flowers, and had magnificent collection of gladioli now in full bloom. But what interested me even more was to see rows of vines in the open ground laden with as fine fruit as we grow in a vinery, though the winters are far longer and more severe than ours. But the higher temperature due to the more southern latitude, combined with a clearer atmosphere and a greater amount of sunshine, are far more favourable to all fruits and flowers which are uninjured by low winter temperatures.’ 2, 187.
Quotes GA on India: ‘As to your remarks about the wrong actually perpetrated by us in India, I know only too much about that question. For three years I was employed by W.W. Hunter, Director-General of Statistics for India, in collecting and working up the district accounts and other materials in his possession. Not to put too fine a point upon it, Dr Hunter is the literary whitewasher of the Indian Government. In working up the abundant reports and other documents submitted to me, I had plenty of opportunities for realising what English rule really meant. . . . I only got this article into the Contemporary by leaving out India, and looking at the question from a purely English point of view. I’m afraid the fact can’t be blinked that most Englishmen don’t mind oppression as long as the oppressed people are only blacks. A startling outrage, like the Zulu War, wakes them up for a moment; but chronic and old-standing sores, like India or Barbadoes, do not affect them’. 2, 263.
Waller, Philip. Writers, Readers and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870-1918. OUP, 2006.
Numerous references (mostly direct quotations) about various aspects of GA's career, in this vast work.
Ward, L.F. ‘[Reply to GA’s ‘Woman’s Intuition’],’ The Forum, 9 (June 1890), 401-408.
Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers and Periodicals 1800-1900. Series 1 of 5. 10 vols. North Waterloo Academic Press, 1997.
’We know now that many, probably most, of the eminent poets, novelists, and essayists were first and primarily known through the periodicals. We also know that the newly literate classes found their reading material in this medium, lacking the radio, telephone, television and paper-back book media which so dominate our own age. So the periodicals . . . were a primary source of entertainment, instruction, information, news, and one of the most notable means of social bonding. . . . This Directory begins to provide a bibliographical resource which will enable a more thorough and perhaps a more mature assessment of Victorian England’. I, 10-11.
Warne, Vanessa and Colette Colligan. 'The Man Who Wrote a New Woman Novel: Grant Allen's The Woman Who Did and the Gendering of New Woman Authorship,' Victorian Literature and Culture, 33:1 (2005), 21-46.
Most useful for its ingenious discussion and interpretations of contemporary Punch parodies and Du Maurier's cartoons. It is a pity that its argument about GA's use of pseudonyms is vitiated by assuming incorrectly that GA wrote as 'J. Arbuthnot Wilson' only as a fictionalist. There are a few other factual errors, but generally this is an important essay.
Watson, Aaron. A Newspaper Man’s Memories. London: Hutchinson, [1925].
‘I went up to London in 1882. . . . Thenceforward I shared the writing of ‘turnovers’ with Grant Allen, the turnover being the article which followed the ‘leader’ on the front page. . . . Grant Allen and myself, as I think I have previously observed, were between us responsible for most of the ‘turnovers.’ This lively and delightful writer. . . appeared to have carte blanche to write on any subject that seemed good to him, and he wrote engagingly on all subjects, however remote they might seem to be from any topic in which the general reader was likely to interest himself. Grant Allen’s grievance at that time, I remember, was that none of the great London newspapers had engaged him as science editor. He was not so reticent on the subject as he might have been, and his inability to obtain the sort of engagement which would have made it unnecessary for him to ‘waste time’ in writing long novels and short stories, and what not, was much talked about, and even written about, by injudicious friends, as a disgrace to the Press. It was assumed that the newspapers were contemptuous of science which was not true’ (96). [This appears to conflate the GA of 1882 with him of a later date, since, of course, he had not written long novels then.]
Waugh, Arthur. Critic (16 Nov 1895), 327.
’Mr Grant Allen has had a fine free advertisement for The Woman Who Did during the course of the present week in the impulsive adventures of a young woman of Battersea [the Lanchester case], who, being filled with the doctrines of community, and whetted, it is said, by the eloquence of Mr Allen’s heroine essayed to avoid marriage with the man of her choice and to set up housekeeping without the charge of a licence. Her parents thought otherwise and kidnapped her … Whether the lady owed much to Mr Grant Allen or not is at present uncertain. Her college friends repudiate the notion … The papers at any rate have helped heroine Barton to a new public. Headings such as “The Woman Who Would”, “The Woman Who Was Prevented” and so forth, have made appetising the broadsheets of the evening papers these five nights, and my bookseller tells me that he has to re-order a stock of Mr Allen’s debated manifesto.’
Wells, H.G. The Correspondence of H.G. Wells, ed. David C. Smith. 4 vols. London: Pickering & Chatto, 1998.
Letter 223 to GA, late summer 1895?, referring to GA’s praise of The Time Machine: ‘I think before you say anything in the book’s favour that you should know that I wrote the review of The Woman Who Did in the Saturday. So far as essentials go I hold by that review now, & any apology I could make for the Bank-Holiday flavour of its style, the window smashing midnight-concertina-playing tone of it wd I am afraid be a little belated now. But I sent the book to you, not in your aspect of prominent critic & with any designs upon your criticism, but simply because I wanted you to read it. I have as sincere an envy for the almost instinctive way in which you get your effects in your short stories & for your scientific essays, as I have – shall I say dislike? for your vein of sexual sentiment. . . . Apart from the difference in temperament that comes out when I read your fiction, I flatter myself that I have a certain affinity with you. I believe that this field of scientific romance with a philosophical element which I am trying to cultivate, belongs properly to you. Hence the book I sent. And you go on writing “Keynotes” that I cannot admire, goading me into ill-mannered & even unfair reviews, when there is this fantastic wonderland unexplored.
I cannot imagine that you will do anything but dislike me after this incident, but I trust that at any rate you will give me credit for not aiming at your public support. (I: 245-6).
Wells, H.G. An Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (Since 1866). 2 vols. Gollancz, 1934.
GA was ‘full of the new wine of aggressive Darwinism’ 546. ‘he was uneasy in his prosperity. He had had an earlier infection / of that same ferment of biology and socialism that was working in my blood. He wanted not merely to enjoy life but to do something about it. Social injustice and sexual limitation bothered his mind, and he was critical of current ideas and accepted opinions. . . . Like myself Grant Allen had never found a footing in the professional scientific world and he had none of the patience, deliberation – and discretion – of the established scientific worker, who must live with a wholesome fear of the Royal Society and its inhibitions before his eyes. Grant Allen’s semi-popular original scientific works such as his Origin of the Idea of God (1897) [sic] and his Physiological Aesthetics (1877) were at once bold and sketchy, unsupported by properly verified quotations and collated references, and regardless or manifestly ignorant of much other contemporary work. They were too original to be fair popularization and too unsubstantiated to be taken seriously by serious specialists, and what was good in them has long been appropriated, generally without acknowledgement, by sounder workers, while the flimsy bulk of them moulders on a few dusty and forgotten shelves. His anthropology became an easy butt for the fuller scholarship and livelier style of Andrew Lang.
His attempt to change himself over from a regularly selling, proper English ‘purveyor of fiction’ to the novelist with ideas and initiative and so contribute materially to vital literature was equally unfortunate. In that also he was, so to speak, an undecided amphibian, an Amblystoma, never quite sure whether he had come out of the water for good or not. He had always to earn a living, and the time left over from that, just as it had not been enough either for the patient and finished research needed to win respect in the scientific world, / was not now enough for the thorough and well thought-out novel of aggressive reality. [Of WWD]: ‘he tried to tell the story so that she should be sympathetic for the common-place reader. That was a most dangerous and difficult thing to attempt . . . I can bear my expert witness to the difficulty of the technical miracle he was so glibly setting about to perform. My mature persuasion is that the distance a novel can carry the reader out of his or her preconceptions is a very short one.... 548.
‘Across the interval of years I do not recall that wandering conversation with any precision. . . . I suppose we must have talked of the subject of The Woman Who Did and its related issues. Grant Allen and I were in the tradition of Godwin and Shelley. Its trend was to force a high heroic independence on women – even on quite young women. But Grant Allen, who had something in him – I will not say like a Faun or a Satyr, but rather like the earnest Uncle of these woodland folk, was all for the girls’ showing spirit.’ 552.
Wilde, Oscar. Letters, ed Hart-Davis. (London: Hart-Davis, 1962), pp286-7.
Praises ‘The Celt in English Art’ essay as a scientific demonstration of the superior role of Celts in literature.
Williams, Harold. Modern English Writers: Being a Study of Imaginative Literature 1900-1914. Sidgwick & Jackson, 1925.
A short summary of his career, concluding that 'even his more ambitious novels have little permanent value'. This would have been the general view just after the First World War. Williams' book was published in 1918 originally.
Willis, Chris. ‘New Women - New Crimes. A Survey of Grant Allen’s Detective-heroines’. http://www.chriswillis.freeserve.co.uk/allen1.htm
Willis, Chris. ‘The Detective’s Doppelganger: Conflicting States of Female Consciousness in Grant Allen’s Detective Fiction’.http://www.chriswillis.freeserve.co.uk/doppelganger.htm
Also in Greenslade, William & Terence Rodgers, eds, 2005.
Wintle, Sarah. ‘Introduction’ to The Woman Who Did. Oxford UP, 1995, pp.1-18.
Wynn, Michael. 'The Evolutionist at Large: A Study of Science and Fiction at Odds in the 1890s'. Cand. Philol. Thesis, University of Tromso, 1998.
Carefully done within its limits, but the author was seriously hampered by having access only to a limited GA bibliography, so there are some distortions.
‘X’. ‘New Grub Street’ [letter], Author, 2 (1 Aug 1891), 92.