Grant Allen in the ODNB: A Warning

GRANT ALLEN IN THE NEW OXFORD DICTIONARY OF NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY: A WARNING

The article in the print version of the new Oxford DNB was based on the original article in the old DNB by J.S. Cotton, a friend of Allen's. It’s a pity they didn’t leave it alone, for they allowed it to be 'updated' by a certain Rosemary Van Arsdel who introduced numerous factual errors, some of them ridiculous. It is most unfortunate that these errors are permanent in a printed reference work likely to be used for many decades. However, after protests to the DNB editors, the article on GA in the regularly-updated digital version of the DNB was corrected in October 2005. Nothing, of course, can be done about the print version.

Among the errors are the following:

1. "Joseph Antisell Allen … emigrated to Canada in 1840".

The exact date of J.A. Allen's emigration is unknown. (Contemporary accounts give different dates.) It must have been in the early 1840s but this precision is misleading.

2. "[GA's] marriage, at the age of twenty, to Caroline Ann Bootheway (b.1844/5)."

False: Caroline Bootheway was not born in either 1844 or 1845. She was born on 19 February 1846 and christened on 17 August 1846, at Loughborough, Leicestershire. (I have a copy of the latter certificate). In the national census of 1851, the entry supplied by her father as householder gives her age then as five, which is correct.

3. "Allen married Ellen (b.1852/3), the youngest daughter of Thomas Jerrard".

There is no ambiguity about the birth date. Ellen (Nellie) Jerrard was born on 20 May 1853. She married Grant Allen on the same day in 1873, where her age on the marriage certificate is correctly given as 20. In the Census of 1871 she was living with her parents in Lyme Regis and her age is given as 18. In the Census of 1881 she was staying with Allen in Bath and her age is given as 28, also correct.

4. "[From 1877 Grant Allen] began to publish popular scientific articles, always with an evolutionary moral".

False: As the bibliographies on this site prove, by no means all of GA's early scientific articles deal in any way with evolution or any moral arising from it. Some are on aesthetics, others on nutrition and digestion, and, most importantly, on various aspects of linguistics and the history of English nomenclature.

5. "During 1884 Allen began to contribute short stories to such periodicals as …"

Totally false: Allen did not "begin" his short-fiction career in 1884, or anywhere close to it. Apart from some juvenilia published earlier still, his first short story was published in July 1878, in the Belgravia magazine, when he was thirty.

6. "In All Shades (1886), set in Jamaica…"

Totally false: This novel is not set in Jamaica. It is set in Trinidad. This is important because GA had lived in Jamaica and deliberately changed the setting, almost certainly to avoid any risk of libel. He confirmed that he had moved the setting to Trinidad in an interview.

7. "Allen wrote two novels in direct response (The Woman Who Didn't, 1895, and The Woman Who Wouldn't (1895), and the notoriety of The Woman Who Did helped establish the 'new woman' novel as a genre."

The first part of this is utterly absurd. Grant Allen was a versatile writer, but his skills certainly did not extend as far as writing 'answers' to his own novels! The Woman Who Didn't was published by John Lane in 1895, and is by 'Victoria Cross(e)', real name Annie Sophie 'Vivian' Corey Griffin. Apart from its catchpenny title, it has no relation to Grant Allen's novel at all. The Woman Who Wouldn't is by 'Lucas Cleve', real name Adeline Georgina Isabella Kingscote, and was published by Simpkin and Marshall in 1895. There were various other attempts to cash in on the title, but none of them, needless to say, were by Grant Allen!

8. "when [Force and Energy] passed into the remainder market in 1894, he presented a copy to a friend…"

False: The book was published late in 1888 with a print run of 1000 copies, and was crucified by real physicists over the next two months in a few reviews, then forgotten. Not long after, in March 1889, Grant Allen himself wrote that his publisher had told him that all (certainly hundreds) of the unsold copies were being "converted into wallpaper," ie pulped. There would have been no unsold copies left nearly five years later and there is no evidence the book was on sale by that late date. In any case, it is questionable whether there was any such thing as a "remainder market," as we know it, for books in the 1890s. The copy GA gave as a present with an inscription was his own copy (or one of them; he himself valued the book highly).

9. "In 1892 … he built himself a cottage which he called The Croft".

If one thinks of a 'cottage' as a rural worker's small house, this is misleading. The Croft still stands near Hindhead and thanks to the owner I was able to examine the interior a few years ago. It has (or had then; renovations were in progress) a fireplace engraved with the initials 'GA'. It was and is a very handsome, double-fronted detached villa with at least five bedrooms in Allen's time, originally surrounded by rolling lawns and several acres of land. Its size and internal arrangements are described in a letter from GA to Conan Doyle, who thought of renting it. In Allen's time it must have had magnificent views in opposite directions from the large windows of the master bedroom, but the plantation trees have obliterated most of these since.