'The Busiest Man in England' (Part 2)

HE BUSIEST MAN IN ENGLAND: GRANT ALLEN': Book Part 2

CHAPTER TEN

Last Orders (1896-1899)

1.

The last four years of Grant Allen's life brought him into smoother waters. He lived better than he ever had, more at ease and with more opportunities to work as and when he wished. He had several thousand pounds in the bank and investments in land and companies, and the expensive question of seeing his son established in a suitable career was settled, temporarily, when Jerrard was placed in a publishing house. 'Don't take to literature if you've capital enough in hand to buy a good broom, and energy enough to annex a vacant crossing', we recall Allen had advised the neophytes. But it had been years now since he had needed to think of requisitioning that broom for himself. In Gissing's Diary there is a lively pen-portrait of Allen as he appeared to the novelist in the splendid summer of 1895, when he was basking in the success of The Woman Who Did. Gissing met Allen at one of Clodd's Whitsun weekends at Aldeburgh. The creator of Rhoda Nunn in The Odd Women had no reason to think he would have anything in common with the supposed apostle of pagan free love, and he had already confided to his diary his opinion of his fiction: 'Got from lib. Grant Allen's This Mortal Coil. The time I waste reading such trash as this'. Yet he found himself liking Allen very much. His charm, his unaffected, naive manner, won him over. Signally lacking much of either commodity himself, he confided to his diary his envy at Allen's dual marital and financial success:

Grant Allen I liked much better than I had expected. He is white-haired; and all but white-bearded (a little sandy remaining) though only 47. Very talkative, and, with me, confidential about his private life. Says his wife suits him admirably, and shares all his views of sexual matters. Showed me a letter just received from her, beginning 'My darling Daddy'. ... His special study is anthropology. Thinks there never was a man Jesus: his whole story a slowly perfected mythus. Has rather high-pitched and sing-song voice, to me pleasant.[436]

In letters describing the same occasion he added these impressions: 'a simple, genial fellow, absorbed in scientific studies -- caring not a rap for the kind of work by which he lives. . . . Not a trace of pretence about Allen. He dresses roughly, talks with enthusiasm of his own matters, is devoted to a country life -- says that he was never out of doors in London after 11 at night. His memory is astounding. . . . Has known everybody worth knowing & seems in some marvellous way to combine infinite leisure with remarkable productiveness.[437] And again: 'I went with a prejudice against Allen, but, as so often happens, got to like him very much. He is quite a simple & genial fellow; crammed with multifarious knowledge; enthusiastic in scientific pursuits. With fiction & that kind of thing he ought never to have meddled; it is the merest pot-boiling. He reads nothing whatever but works of scientific interest'. And finally: 'Personally he is a good cordial fellow, & delightful in talk so long as he can keep off fiction -- when he becomes acrid and unjust. An amazing store of knowledge! And does his work with incredible ease'.[438]

Some of the buoyancy which Gissing recorded wore off as the year closed. Allen feared that he might emerge from his annus mirabilis with his forehead fatally stamped as a novelist with 'Opinions', like his character Montague Watts, and might possibly share his fate. The Wilde trials of April-May 1895 could hardly have eased his mind. John Lane was running scared for a while -- Wilde instantly vanished from his list and he sacked Beardsley -- but it did not prevent him from issuing Allen's The British Barbarians late in the year. Allen dusted off this manuscript which he had kept in his drawer for six years, and added a lengthy, defiant preface-manifesto in which he promised, as we saw earlier, to stick the 'hill-top' label on all his serious fiction in future, as a guarantee of its probity.

This short novel -- really a satirical fable with minor science-fiction elements -- marks a return to the anthropological novels and stories that had written in the late 1870s and 80s, but is written from an entirely different and more sophisticated perspective. The British Barbarians uses the device of a mysterious stranger, Bertram Ingledew, an anthropologist on a field trip from the future, who turns up one Sunday in a Home Counties village and proceeds to analyse their customs and taboos just as though its stuffy residents belong to a savage tribe -- which, from his perspective, they do. He succeeds in converting Frida Monteith, the wife of a boorish businessman, to his point of view. They run away together and enjoy a few idyllic days on the breezy uplands. They are hunted down by Monteith, who, much too barbarously monogamous to permit the theft of his marital property, promptly shoots Ingledew dead. His body evaporates into the ether, leaving only a pleasant smell behind. The novel ends with Frida's apparently planning to drown herself and her children in order to join him.

A fable like this suited Allen's talents rather well, by precluding the sentimentality and repetition which clogs so much of his other fiction. It also allows him to indulge unimpeded his acid wit. His mouthpiece, Ingledew, a Candide-like figure as well as a scientist, is perfect for the calm delivery of innocently outrageous notions. We expect a man from a utopian future to find the peculiar taboos of the nineteenth century morally repellent -- mourning clothes, 'No Trespassing' signs, marital proprietorship and many others -- but we expect him to remain fairly detached from them. He is, after all, a visiting scientist gathering data. Allen's self-consciously guileless, mock-ingenuous tone can be irritating in the other novels, but here it is appropriate enough. The British Barbarians, as well as being amusing and sharp, is Allen's most formally satisfying novel. But it was not well received. One reviewer warned readers it was 'a skit advocating free-love, suicide, adultery and all sorts of offences against law, morality, religion and common-sense'.[439] H.G. Wells, despite his recent friendly meeting with Allen, did not spare the novel either: 'redolent of bad taste and bad English, destitute alike of dramatic incident and character analysis'. He joined the queue of people advising Allen that if he wanted to say 'a good many things that require saying . . . let him call his sermon a sermon and be content'. This is most curious advice from one who would be using the novel as a polemical tool to an almost unprecedented degree.[440]

But whether editors really shunned Allen's work after his scandalous books and notorious views had become widely dispersed is not easy to say. Allen himself seemed unsure about the overall effect of what he had done. There was a brief period, he told friends, when he felt he 'stood idle in the market-place, because no one dared hire him', but he also told Herbert Spencer at the beginning of 1897 that any fall in demand, for his fiction anyway, was due simply to his being 'crushed out' by younger men.[441]

The periodicals editors, those most sensitive barometers of public opinion, showed no very overt reaction. His stories continued to appear in the Sketch, the Speaker and the Graphic, among others, much as before. George Newnes, who was strong on bright wholesomeness in fiction, continued to take all of his episodic crime stories for the Strand after 1895, although he risked nothing as they were all entirely innocuous. Allen did not, however, contribute any more single stories to the Strand. Excluding the three episodic crime series, Allen wrote six novels after 1895: A Splendid Sin, Tom, Unlimited, The Type-writer Girl, Linnet, The Incidental Bishop, and Rosalba. It must be significant that not one was issued either by Chatto & Windus or John Lane. Two of them were published by his nephew's house, Grant Richards, who also published all but three of his last non-fiction books; the others came out with minor publishers like C. Arthur Pearson, whose more usual fare was titles like Fun on the Billiard Table. Furthermore, two of them appeared under the same innocuous female pseudonym.

Not one of them was serialized either. Was the failure to serialize a free choice? That is hard to believe. In the manifesto preceding The British Barbarians Allen had promised that he was going to sacrifice three-quarters of his income 'for the sake of uttering the truth that is in me, boldly and openly, to a perverse generation'.[442] But that was going to apply only to novels carrying the 'hill-top' label. So many of his earlier books had been serialized that we must assume Allen would have serialized most of the rest if he could have found any takers. So he had paid an economic cost. However, the financial damage, if any, must surely have been cancelled out by the success of his episodic stories for the Strand and his new venture, the guidebooks to European art centres published by his nephew Grant Richards.

In any case he was no longer quite as much in thrall to the marketplace. Whether Allen found more fame than notoriety from his 'hill-top' fiction is a moot point. What is certain is that he found affluence. His two best-selling novels alone must have brought him several thousand pounds. He now had money to invest; and where else to invest it but in the book trade? He had already invested ₤200 in George Newnes Ltd, when it became a joint stock company in 1891. Now, when his nephew Grant Richards, at the age of only twenty-four, wanted to start his own publishing house, Allen had capitalised the company to the extent of ₤750 when it opened in 1897. He had great faith in his young nephew's acumen, having supported his career by finding him his first job with a bookseller and then another on the staff of Stead's Review of Reviews.

No doubt he would have invested even more himself, were it not for a more pressing demand on his purse. Earlier in that same year John Lane had found himself with a cash flow problem and had looked to Allen, one of his most successful authors, for help. Allen lent him a lot of what he had earned from The Woman Who Did. 'Lane's business was not old and he was beginning to find that a nest of singing birds, like a racing stable, required keeping up', ran Grant Richards' version of the story. 'One day, therefore, he telegraphed 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'.[443] Not quite true: Lane was notoriously slow in paying debts, and by 1899 he had repaid only L250 of the L1000, even though he had promised to pay the rest at the end of the previous year. This caused Allen some embarrassment because he had bought another plot of building land at Hindhead, and needed at least L200. He generously let Lane renew for the rest for six more months. But by the time the extended bill fell due, Allen was mortally ill. Lane, an astute businessman, did not regard these monies as loans, but as paying investments in his company. And he was right, in the sense that he always paid an excellent rate of interest. Extracting the capital, though, was not easy. Nellie Allen was still trying to get him to finish repaying it some years later.

2.

The most remarkable way in which Allen reshaped his career after 1895 was that he finished so abruptly with sexual controversy. He wrote no more confrontational essays like 'The New Hedonism', and when he lost, or surrendered, his platform at the Westminster Gazette he did not find a replacement. Perhaps he feared the backlash from the Wilde prosecution, as Clodd hints; perhaps he felt he had been outpaced by events and did not want his 'purity' fiction linked to other people's 'erotomaniac literature';[444] perhaps he believed he had now done all that he could do to requite his first wife's memory. Or perhaps concern for his second wife's feelings was a factor. He said something of this to George Bedborough, who wanted him to be president of the Free Press Defence Committee after he, Bedborough, had been prosecuted for selling Havelock Ellis's Sexual Inversion:

I will be frank. I married legally, young, a wife with whom I have lived and still live, after twenty-four years, in unusually close harmony. Although from one point of view [she] is a tower of strength to me, but from another I cannot help regretting that my writings have been held by many as a slight upon her, and that she herself has had to bear the imputation that they are so. Hence I do not desire to take any more prominent position than is necessary in this matter.[445]

Or was this just a convincing excuse? He could not have had much personal interest in bailing out a sleazy quasi-pornographer like Bedborough. Possibly what the reply really hints is that Allen had simply grown tired of being, in his own eyes, so hopelessly misunderstood. For the promise he had made that his most serious work would henceforth carry the 'hill-top' label was never fulfilled. It turns out, however, that it was not entirely for want of trying. He did complete a third 'hill-top' novel, titled The Finger Post, which presumably he wrote in the closing months of 1895. Whether he submitted it to Lane and had it declined is uncertain; but he did, yet again, ask Andrew Chatto for a candid opinion on it. And, as usual, he got one:

It is with the utmost diffidence and hesitance that, in compliance with your request to let you know without reserve how the story appears to me, I am constrained to say that I am unable to agree with the teaching of the story either as regards its pervading pessimistic view of life or of its contention that marriage is a curse, and that prostitution is a necessary concomitant evil with marriage. Holding as I personally do the opinion that the main purpose of fiction is to give pleasure to the reader, who I think ought to be able to retain a balance of encouraging remembrances after the perusal of any book, read as fiction is read, for relaxation or recreation, and that the record and discussion of displeasing facts should be reserved for a branch of literature in which sentiment and emotion have a secondary place. . . . I hope in spite of what I have now ventured to tell you of my views, that I may be privileged to make an offer for any other novel you may write of a less controversial nature and more on the lines of say The Tents of Shem and At Market Value, which are stories I think that have certainly added to the brightness and happiness of life.[446]

How perfectly these remarks of Chatto's delineate the long relationship between Allen and his main publisher! Andrew Chatto was a humane and civil man, prompt and punctilious in his dealings with his authors, and he always sounds sincere when he regrets that he cannot offer more for an MS. But he was a firm and unsentimental businessman, and his business was to know what would sell and make money out of it. As is obvious here, the two men had so little common ground other than a desire to see each other prosper. The clash of values, assumptions about what novels are for, and in particular, the quite unconscious, ingenuous cruelty of that last sentence, must have had Allen tearing his hair out and, one assumes, tossing The Finger Post manuscript into the fire, because none of his last novels answers to Chatto's description of it.[447] Further, it appears to have caused a permanent rupture in relations between the two. No more of Allen's work went to Chatto, not even his pot-boilers; and it seems that personal relations between them nearly ceased too. Two years later Chatto closed a strictly business letter with a rather plaintive invitation to a lunch-time 'symposium' he was arranging at his office 'on the impact of the ether as the mechanical cause of gravity'. (Chatto liked to dabble in popular science.)[448]

Allen's mood could hardly have been lightened by having to endure a book-length parody of The British Barbarians, called The Barbarous Britishers: A Tip-top Novel (1896), by Henry Duff Traill (1842-1900), a witty journalist, biographer and ex-editor of the Guardian. The unkindest cut was not only that the publisher of this parody was John Lane himself, but that he allowed Aubrey Beardsley (or was it an imitator?) to devise some art-work paralleling his originals. The new title-page showed a scowling maid carrying a box of hearth-cleaning equipment, a reference to the original scene where Ingledew scandalizes everyone by jumping up to help the pretty housemaid with the tea-things. (In Traill's parody of this scene, a plain maid with beefy arms asks him truculently 'if you'd be kind enough to 'elp me with the grates'.) Like the original, The Barbarous Britishers starts with a preface-manifesto, in which Allen's predilection for living on the breezy heights well away from the lurid glare of London is caught very well. 'Leave, oh leave the meretricious town and come to the airy peaks!' Traill has him saying. 'What do you say? "You would like living out here as much as I do if your businesses did not keep you in town." Nonsense. Fiddle on your businesses! Come out here and let them take care of themselves. I can't put you all up; but there's snug lying-out in the bracken'.

The plot of the parody follows the original closely, and it does make some rather telling points. In the original, there is a scene where Bertram Ingledew tries to reason with a landed proprietor after they have deliberately trespassed on his 'tabooed' estate while out walking. In the parallel parodic scene, the 'Alien' (a neat touch, that name) leaves his sandwiches on top of a gate-post while he is arguing, and the gamekeeper steals them. The Alien is 'more annoyed at the loss of the sandwiches than a scientific sociologist should be'. But 'Philister Cadsby' asks him innocently:

'If this isn't a case of a gamekeeper defying your taboo, as you have just defied old Bigwig's, what is it?'

'What is it?' shouted the Alien, his beautiful features distorted with passion. 'Why, it's robbery, sir; that's what it is! The man's a common thief'.

'Robbery! thief!' echoed Philister, bursting with laughter. 'Oh, by Jove! this is delicious! Just because you choose to taboo your lunch against the rest of the community, you seem to think that nobody but yourself has the right to eat it; whereas, when that poor little squire claims to put his land on the same footing, you -- ' 'Have done with this nonsense!' cried Bunkham furiously.

Traill allows his characters gradually to become aware of the absurdity of the plot that they are trapped in, and the preposterous dialogue which they have been given, and finally they refuse to go on with it at all. In the climactic scene where 'M'Turk' is required to shoot 'Bunkham Barleydue' in a jealous rage, he breaks down at last in an explosion of laughter:

'It's no use', he gasped between the peals. 'It's no use. I can't keep it up. It's trying us too high. You may make a puppet do a good deal obediently enough; but not this -- no, no, not this. There are some things that wake a soul of laughter under the ribs of wax -- and this is one of them. It's all very well for Mr Grant Allen to write these things sitting quietly in his study; but he should try coming out and saying them, or having them said to him. . . . Mr Allen's humour is very delightful, but apoplexy is too heavy a price to pay for the enjoyment of it. It is quite enough that it has made it impossible for us to go on with the story'.[449]

And so they all return to home and conventionality, 'Freeda' wondering why she had ever submitted to the 'slimy spoonings' of the Alien.

What Allen thought of this parody, or of the several other works which traded briefly on the titles of his hill-top novels, is unrecorded. He must have preserved at least a working relationship with John Lane, however, for in the last year of his life he prepared an edited edition of Gilbert White's Natural History of Selborne for him, with brief but extensive notes. These do not forbear to introduce some mildly acid Darwinian comments when the pious naturalist is spotted leaning heavily on evidence for intelligent design in organisms, which one reviewer thought were sometimes contemptuous in tone.

But, as we have seen several times already, Allen's innate optimism and creative resilience saw him through. He remained as productive as ever. Some of his last novels do exploit the new freedoms, probably to the limit that he was constitutionally capable of. All are pot-boilers. A Splendid Sin (1896) is a light-hearted social comedy. An upright young Englishman, Hubert Egremont, a physiologist who researches into heredity, fears he cannot marry his aristocratic Italian fiancee Fide because he has discovered he is the son of a dissolute English colonel. All comes right when Hubert's mother reveals he is really the bastard son of an American poet and a hero of Italian nationalism, news which is received with surprising equanimity all round. Attitudes were shifting, and no one was more acute than Allen at spotting this. He attempted to exploit the emerging market for white-blouse fiction with The Type-writer Girl (1897). Using first-person narrative, this follows the fortunes of feisty young Juliet Appleton, American-born Girton graduate, who suddenly needs to earn her living as a secretary. Like Allen's slightly later detective-women, Appleton is very much Allen's revisionist model of educated femininity -- cheerful, managing, and independent; not at all like the educationally force-fed neurotics who had figured earlier, or that self-destructive ideologue Herminia Barton. This novel starts in Allen's brightest, most sprightly manner as his heroine tries out a sleazy lawyer's office and an anarchist colony in Horsham, suffering sexual harassment in both. It goes downhill after she moves on to a respectable publisher and falls for her boss. Though it has some telling moments, the novel suffers particularly badly from its superficial engagement with its material. If he (and his readers) had been willing to confront the darker side of sexual harassment, it could have been an effective piece of social realism like Wells' Ann Veronica of a few years later. As it is, it ends as little more than a romantic romp.

Its successor, Linnet (1898), though also a romance with an action-packed plot which moves between the Tyrol, London and Monte Carlo, does include a nearly adulterous affair between the hero, a composer of light opera, and Linnet, an international singing star and much-abused wife of a cold and greedy impresario. It is also powerfully anti-clerical, taking every opportunity to make mocking comments on Catholic intransigence and hypocrisy with respect to divorce. This novel is noticeably franker about matters of sexual morality than most of its predecessors, perhaps suggesting some slight renewal, in the end, of Allen's zest for controversy. His last novel, Rosalba (1899), is the first-person narrative of a beautiful high-spirited peasant girl living in Vicenza. Her mother drinks and abuses her; Rosalba runs away and wanders slowly across Europe, living on her talent for busking performances, involving dance and puppet-shows adapted from Shakespeare and other books she has come across. Although some of Rosalba's views about marriage echo Allen's 'feminist' sentiments, it is remarkable how, despite Rosalba's gypsy existence on the roads of Europe, matters are contrived so that she is fully chaperoned every step of the way.

He continued to work for the profitable Strand, whose circulation was going from strength to strength in the last years of the century, due in no small part to his friend Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, which had started to appear there in July 1891. Doyle's stories had introduced -- or popularized -- the device of having the central characters and settings reappear through a series of otherwise disconnected short stories. Allen and others modified it slightly, by introducing a thin narrative thread connecting all the semi-detachable episodes. He tried his hand at this new genre with twelve related 'adventures' (June 1896 to May 1897) starring the confidence trickster Colonel Clay, and the repeated frauds he practices on Sir Charles Vandrift, and his brother-in-law/secretary, the narrator. They are distinctly lightweight, but the plotting is ingenious and only occasionally tumbles over into the frankly incredible.

Immediately afterwards, although he was not quite the first with the idea, he developed a new twist: a female detective as heroine.[450] The Strand took two more series in this vein, published later as Miss Cayley's Adventures (March 1898 to February 1899) and Hilda Wade (March 1899 to February 1900). The first of these, with its travelogue detail, was extremely popular and was translated more than other of his works. There were two Dutch editions, and versions in Indonesian and Sundanese. A Girton girl with socialist opinions but no income, Miss Cayley refuses to take up teaching and instead takes a tour of the world: riding camels and her bicycle, acting as a commercial agent, and acquiring a fiance en route. Hilda Wade, Allen's last book, uses the same episodic format as before, as nurse 'Hilda Wade' (in disguise, for her real name is the rather more aristocratic Maisie Yorke-Bannerman) pursues the evil Professor Sebastian, who has had her father indicted for murder. She is assisted by her lover Dr Hubert Cumberledge -- he plays Dr Watson to her Holmes -- and together they pursue him to South Africa, Rhodesia, India and furthest Tibet; and there is a shipwreck in the Pacific for good measure. Hilda possesses an astounding eidetic memory, and this, combined with her 'female intuition' gives her almost supernatural powers which Holmes might well have envied. It is interesting that even this unpretentious series of detective stories reveals Allen's finding inspiration in psychological determinism. The publisher noted that Allen had intended to acknowledge 'his indebtedness for one of the main conceptions of this book to Mr Furneaux Jordan's Character in Body and Parentage'. Presumably this is the source, among other things, of Hilda Wade's prediction that a QC will murder his new wife within the year on the ground that she has the bodily characteristics of an intolerable shrew: 'an odd spinal configuration' and 'scanty hair' -- 'women with faces like that always get assaulted'.[451] Hereditarian reductionism was still riding high.

Allen did more than episodic fiction for the highly-paying Strand. Two final series of his natural-history articles, Glimpses of Nature (1897-8) and In Nature's Workshop (1899) appeared there, both consisting of lengthy, closely-written pieces illustrated with fine drawings by a technical artist. In all, he made sixty-six contributions to the Strand in eight years, and in some issues he had fiction and popular science running simultaneously. The stories, in particular, were very lucrative. For An African Millionaire he got L5 per thousand words, a high return when each episode ran to about 6000 words. It was so popular that Newnes paid him L1000 down for the serial rights to Miss Cayley. (The Strand could well afford them, however. Soon after Allen's death, its readership in the English-speaking world was said to be three million people a month.) The book version of An African Millionaire was the first novel that he entrusted to his nephew's publishing house, and it did very well. Even Bell, the colonial publisher, took 4000 copies in sheets. Then there were the carefully reserved rights, all sold off piecemeal by the industrious Watt: for An African Millionaire alone, L200 for the US book rights; forty guineas for the French translation rights; L80 for the German rights with illustrations. . . . This was the living that Allen had looked forward to, back in the hard days of the late '70s: the annual income of a very successful solicitor or doctor. You could call a doctor a tradesman, or an author a professional man, whichever you liked; it all came down, in the end, to the size and frequency of those cheques coming through the letter-box for services rendered.

Allen may have finished with popular sex controversy, but as he allowed more of his energies to flow into other interests, especially art history and religious anthropology, he was still not afraid of airing heterodox opinions. In 1897 Richards published as one of its first ventures The Evolution of the Idea of God. An Inquiry into the Origins of Religions (1897). This was a long labour of love for which Allen had been collecting the materials for his entire career and had then written slowly over ten years. The Evolution is an exercise in the anthropology of religion. (Allen took no interest in the ethical codes of religion, which he assumed are entirely detachable from, and do not illuminate, the origins of religious belief.) In it he tries to answer three questions. What is the origin of polytheism? What is the origin of monotheism? And, finally, what is the origin of Christianity? He traces the religious impulse back to corpse-worship, or rather the worship of the deified memories of the dead. More specifically, he thought he could offer a connecting link between Spencer's account of the origin of religion and the one proposed in James Frazer's The Golden Bough. Spencer thought that the religious impulse had originated in a fear of the spirits of dead people, perhaps because they seem to visit the living in dreams. The erection of tumuli or standing stones, or the planting of sacred trees, were originally an attempt to keep ghosts in their place, while the ancestors themselves were deified and had to be placated with offerings and sacrifices. Eventually this differentiated into polytheism and finally into monotheism.

Frazer, Max Mueller and others, including Andrew Lang, did not believe animism could be reduced to ancestor worship in this fashion. In The Golden Bough (1890; 1906-15), Frazer presented animism as the first, primeval expression of humanity's religious belief: that is to say, the attribution of conscious life to the most impressive objects of the landscape. The sun, great rocks, rivers and trees were thought to be the abode or the embodiment of potent spirits. Later, the gods were worshipped in the form of the animals of the hunt; later still, when agriculture had been invented, as corn or fruit-tree gods, or as human shapes personifying them. Frazer did accept, however, that ghost-worship was the most important agency is developing and evolving primitive animistic beliefs.

Allen proposed a theory which effectively was a blend of the two. He accepted Spencer's view that all gods were originally ghosts, but he proposed that sacred trees and standing stones planted on the tumuli or barrows of the deified ancestor gradually acquired the sanctity of the people buried below, and came to be worshipped independently after ancestor-worship was superseded and forgotten. In his The Evolution, and in the essays he wrote to accompany his translation of Catullus' Attis (1892), he describes many traditions from different cultures where tree-gods, or bleeding or speaking trees, were originally associated with burial mounds. The legend of the Christian crucifixion grew out of such a tradition, he thought. He took it for granted that the origins of Christianity are almost entirely a mixture of the mythical and the fictional.

Allen argued further that this primary stage of religious belief was bound up with the origins of agriculture, and could therefore explain the fertility rituals described so dramatically by Frazer. Why, though, were ghosts ever connected to vegetation-growth? Because, in the pre-farming, hunter-gatherer stage of human culture, the disturbed soil piled over a grave was especially fertile. The corpse below added nutrients; so did the blood, milk, and oil poured out as propitiatory offerings. The natural vegetation on the mound therefore grew miraculously lush and green. Later, seeds were deliberately sown as part of the burial ritual; their vigorous sprouting encouraged further experiments, and so began the deliberate cultivation of the soil. The human sacrifice of temporary 'vegetation gods', 'green men' killed and scattered in the fields to ensure fertility, arose from the same cause. It was not just a matter of propitiating the gods, claimed Allen.

I would venture to differ, with all deference and humility, as of a scholar towards his master, from Mr Frazer, in the explanation which he gives. . . . To him the human god, who is so frequently sacrificed for the benefit of the crops, is envisaged as primarily the embodiment of vegetation: I would make bold to suggest, on the contrary, that the corn or other crop is rather itself regarded as the embodiment or ghost of the divine personage'.[452]

Allen presented this thesis with his usual vigour and clarity and, as usual, he was optimistic about its reception. 'When it comes out', he said, 'the rock of animism is going to be ground to powder'.[453]But the standing of The Evolution was irretrievably damaged at the start, when it was reviewed scathingly in the Athenaeum by an authority on folklore, and rather more politely but just as devastatingly by Andrew Lang. Lang was no less interested in such matters than Allen, and at the same semi-amateur level. As a Christian, Lang deplored this kind of anthropological reductionism, but he kept that animus well in the background in his review. He concentrated on the evidential difficulties instead.[454] Allen's account required burial to be, universally, the oldest mode of disposing of the dead; but the most primitive cultures used, and use, other methods, including the exposure of corpses to the elements. Many burial customs show no connection to trees or standing stones, and many stones regarded as sacred were never the headstones of graves. Further, plenty of societies have existed which worshipped gods or spirits who were never mortal men. And there was a problem in the logical sequence of Allen's theory. And there was a problem in the logical sequence of Allen's theory. The most ancient burial sites, with their decorations and careful arrangement, suggested a loving care on the part of primitive men towards their dead: how, then, did this come to be transformed into the fear of corpses and their spirits, as Allen's theory required? 'I am making sumptuous hay of you ... I have you on toast', he had told Allen in his jaunty way, during an earlier exchange about sacred stones, and so it proved again.[455]

To Allen's chagrin, the early sales of The Evolution were thin -- about 750 copies in three weeks, and only a handful thereafter. Even committed freethinkers were not very interested in the subtle theoretical distinctions he makes; for them, Frazer and Lang had said it all already. Perhaps it would have done better if Allen had ignored Spencer's cautious advice to introduce the central phrase into its title, and had called it, tout court, The Evolution of God. Certainly its aggressively sceptical style suited the next generation better. Allen did not live to see his treatise taken up by the Rationalist Press Association, in the form of an abridgement done in 1903 by his brother-in-law, Franklin Richards, which sold very well. Despite G.K. Chesterton's quip that he would rather read about God's idea of Grant Allen than the other way round, it was still going strong in 'The Thinker's Library' series in the 1940s, by which time eighty thousand copies had sold, making it easily the most successful of all of Allen's non-fiction books.

Allen's most characteristic book of these last years, however, are the travel guides which he tackled strictly as a money-making venture for his nephew's firm. He financed his springtime visits to Europe with these guidebooks, devoting each one to an art capital. He completed ones on Paris, Florence, Venice and the historic cities of Belgium, and Grant Richards retained his name as a drawcard for the series when it was expanded after his death. Allen gave his guides a distinctive quality by being sublimely indifferent to the practical questions of where the visitor might lodge or eat or shop. (Allen resolved the first of these requirements for himself by the simple expedient of always putting up at the most luxurious hotel available, like the Hotel de France in Brussels.) Brisk, hectoring and self-opinionated, they are formidable in their focus on high culture, relentlessly educational, and enviable in their certainty of taste. Allen's last effort in this direction was The European Tour. A Handbook for Americans and Colonists (1899). This guidebook, which is addressed almost entirely to the North American college student market, was the last of Allen's hectoring, opinionated but extremely lively travel books. It gave him his last opportunity to play the teacher, his favourite and most distinctive role. As always, it is relentlessly highbrow and self-confident in its judgements. Art, and history discovered through art, is the only motive he recognizes for going to Europe at all; and Europe hardly includes Britain, for Allen asserted that, apart from the London art galleries and a few country towns, there is no reason for anyone from the new world to linger for long there: curious advice from one who had so eagerly transplanted himself decades earlier. For 300 pages the pace never slackens for an instant. Go here, go there, it commands, with different typefaces to tell the eager youth what to see and, indeed, what to think about what they had seen. 'This lightning Baedeker -- this Bovrilised Murray', said the Academy's bemused reviewer.[456] These guides were immensely popular, particularly in the United States, where they appeared for years afterwards in multiple editions, and they are still readily obtainable, and useful, today. Reports reached Grant Richards that half the English and American visitors to the Louvre and the Uffizi were to be seen clutching the little books in their floppy green jackets. Unfortunately this popularity was not actually reflected in sales. Richards put it down to the lending habit: people will not buy a guidebook if they can borrow a copy.

The last of Allen's enthusiasms was to cultivate his love for all things Italian, and especially Italian religious painting. He wrote numerous essays in his last years on art history, and some of his articles were collected after his death as Evolution in Italian Art (1907). It was his last play for Spencerian evolutionism. What he does here is trace the 'evolution' of the narrow subjects of Christian art -- the annunciation, the Madonna and child, and so on -- in the hands of successive painters and schools. He classifies them and constructs an evolutionary tree, as he might do for a species. But constructing a typology of art is only metaphorically a study in evolution; paintings are not really subject to variation and selection. Nor is the evolutionary biologist much concerned with the individual organism; whereas we want to know very much why this painter's Saint Sebastian is more worth looking at than that one. As a critic, Allen had more ability as a classifier and typologist than as an evaluator. His critical judgments on particular works of art were never more than rudimentary noises of approval: a fresco is 'distinctly alive'; a Sposalizio is 'exquisite' and 'the longer we look at it [a Fra Angelico], the more we love it'; Botticelli's Primavera is an 'exquisitely spiritual and delicate work . . . one of those profound pictures which must be visited again and again', and so on. He is best, as usual, at exposition: identifying the figures, describing their attendant symbolism, comparing and contrasting and grouping. When he attempts to explain what is actually happening in a picture, his interpretations are often rather too simple, for he had little understanding of the subtle symbolism of Renaissance painting, particularly secular painting. For example, he interpreted the Primavera on no fewer than three occasions as a simple allegory of the spring months. We cannot expect Allen to have grasped the arcane neo-Platonic symbolism of the picture, for that would be penetrated only by scholars of the next century; but it is curious that he did not realize that the right-hand figures do not represent March, April and May, as he claimed, but are obviously a re-telling of the myth of the rape of Chloris by Zephyr; flowers can be seen flowing from her mouth and spilling over the colourful robe of the figure to her right, Flora, which is her transformed self. Since Ovid tells the story in the Fasti, it was an odd omission for a classical scholar.

3.

It was during a stay in Venice in the early spring of 1899 that he was attacked with symptoms which were at first diagnosed as 'malarial'. He tried the remedy of staying for some time with Herbert Spencer -- now aged seventy-nine -- at Brighton, but it did no good. After he returned home, he was pursued by anxious letters from the philosopher, who was just as assiduous in pursuing health cures for others as for himself. This time the advice was to chew one's food more. He could not accept his friend's ignorance of Allen 'the importance of reducing food to small fragments. That you, a scientific man, should not recognize this is to me astonishing'.[457]

But there was much more wrong with Grant Allen than his habits of mastication. By mid-summer he was too weak to hold a pen and had to dictate everything. His last months were blighted by agonizing pain, relieved in the end only by constant morphine injections. Despite this, he seemed to think to the end that his complaint was malarial fever. As mortal illness took him in its grip and as the moorland visible in both directions from his bedroom windows changed from green to gold, he had also to watch all his dearest values being trampled in the mire on the international political stage. For the public talk, in that last summer, was of nothing but war in Africa. The Boer war was fought over whether the Dutch settlers or the British colonialists should rule the roost in South Africa, and the real issue in the conflict was who should exploit the stupendous mineral wealth in gold and diamonds. Allen's views on this sordid struggle, driven by greed and phoney patriotism, can easily be imagined, though he was too ill to take any part in the public debate about it. On 10 October President Kruger had issued an ultimatum to the British; it was rejected and war was declared. The Boers quickly took the initiative, laying siege to Mafeking, Kimberley and Ladysmith, but by that time Grant Allen was dead. The end came on Wednesday 25 October 1899. Winifred Storr, the teenaged daughter of some family friends who lived nearby, wrote in her diary: 'Exquisite but sad day Dear Grant Allen Died at 11.50 this morning. . . . Oh! poor darling little Mrs. Allen! It is too terrible for her. Left almost alone in the world! He passed away after very great suffering last night, it is better as it is for his sake. Poor man!'[458] A post-mortem examination was conducted the following day and revealed a malady that was judged to have been incurable: probably it was liver or pancreatic cancer.

Arthur Conan Doyle, also a Hindhead neighbour, was at the death-bed. By the time he wrote down his recollections years afterwards Doyle had become a convinced spiritualist, and his account has all the bluff, mildly sanctimonious cheerfulness of the true believer:

I well remember that death-bed of Grant Allen's. He was an agnostic of a type which came very near atheism, though in his private life an amiable and benevolent man. Believing what he did, the approach of death must have offered rather a bleak prospect, and as he had paroxysms of extreme pain the poor fellow seemed very miserable. . . . His brain, however, was as clear as ever, and his mind was occupied with all manner of strange knowledge, which he imparted in the intervals of his pain, in the curious high nasal voice which was characteristic. I can see him now, his knees drawn up to ease internal pain, and his long thin nose and reddish-grey goatee protruding over the sheet, while he croaked out: 'Byzantine art, my dear Doyle, was of three periods, the middle one roughly coinciding with the actual fall of the Roman Empire. The characteristics of the first period -- ' and so on, until he would give a cry, clasp his hands across his stomach, and wait till the pain passed before resuming his lecture. His dear little wife nursed him devotedly, and mitigated the gloom of those moments which can be made the very happiest in life if one understands what lies before one.[459]

Allen was in fact unafraid of death, though not, of course, because he had any belief in spiritualism. His attitude to that was like T.H. Huxley's, who said that the fear of being made to 'talk twaddle' by a medium in a seance was another excellent argument against suicide. Rather, Allen had lived close enough to death's embrace for most of his life, and an incident from his childhood in Canada, where he nearly drowned after falling through the ice, persuaded him that 'the actual dying itself, as dying, is quite painless . . . death itself, it seems to me, need have absolutely no terrors for a sensible person'.[460]

This cool, dry rationalism sufficed him to the end. Typically, one last matter which agitated him was meeting a professional obligation. The Strand had been running his last serial, Hilda Wade, and the final two episodes were yet to be produced. Doyle, one of the kindest of men, either wrote them all or finished them off for Allen. (His words about the exact part he played are ambiguous.) The twelfth and final episode appeared the following February, and was titled 'The Episode of the Dead Man Who Spoke'.

But for Grant Allen dead men never spoke. He expected from death nothing but extinction. Conan Doyle was quite wrong. Allen was definitely no type of agnostic at all, and he once took pains to correct a newspaper story that he was. The agnostic takes his stand on the position that he does not know what lies beyond the phenomenal world. Allen's position was simpler: There is nothing to be known. His uncompromising opposition to all supernaturalism is well captured in a letter he wrote to a clergyman at Hindhead, who had written declining to know him socially because of his immoral and atheistic views. 'No man is bound to know another', replied Allen, in a dignified response, 'or to give any reason why he does not know him'. But he enlarged on his position:

To me, the first religious duty of man consists in the obligation to form a distinct conception for himself of the universe in which he lives . . .. . . . In matters of such fundamental importance, he ought not to rest content with any second-hand or hearsay evidence. He ought not to believe whatever he is told, but to search the universe, in order to see whether these things are so. Many years of study, historical, anthropological, scientific, and philosophical, have convinced me that the system of the universe which you accept as true is baseless and untenable. . . . I don't think the theory of Christianity is historically justifiable; and if it is not true, I cannot do other than endeavour to point out its untenability to others.[461]

Allen's conception of the universe in which he himself lived was an austere one: the very epitome of nineteenth-century materialism. Science reveals many wonders and aesthetic delights; but of purposiveness it reveals nothing at all, because there is none. There is no spiritual dimension to existence which has been overlooked by science, or which science cannot account for. No mystical insights, no privileged revelations into the nature of reality, are genuinely available and anything offered as such is at best fancy or wishful thinking; at worst, it is fraud, a delusion or an hallucination. There is only one kind of knowledge, and one means of acquiring it; and the boundaries of the various sciences are synthetic, for all real knowledge forms a seamless whole. The laws of Newtonian physics fully explain the behaviour of the universe, past, present and to come. Darwinian evolution -- itself reducible, ultimately, to biochemistry and thence to physics -- explains the organic world. The mind is an epiphenomenon of the electrochemical activity of the brain, an 'incidental phosphorescence, so to say, that regularly accompanies physical processes', in the formulation of the psychologist James Ward.[462] Even cosmic evolutionism, although it guarantees a movement towards ever-increasing heterogeneity, as Spencer taught, has no guiding hand or inherent intention or goal.

As for other existential dilemmas, such as the meaning and purpose of life, or how a person ought to live with the knowledge of inevitable death, Allen thought these were spurious problems worth very little of a sensible man's attention. The cosmic pessimism of the fin-de-siecle attracted him no more than the optimistic pleasures of supernaturalism. Near the end of his life he showed some interest in Catholic doctrines. One of his neatest stories, 'Luigi and the Salvationist', pits the faith of an Italian peasant against an English Salvation Army zealot who is trying to convert him, to the considerable advantage of the former:

'We are born: well and good; they baptise us instantly: and thereby we obtain baptismal regeneration. We grow up: we are catechised: we make our first communion. We become men and women: we consult our parish priest: we confess at least three times a year: we communicate at Easter: if we do anything wrong, we seek penance and absolution. By-and-bye we grow old: we feel death draw near: we send for our good father: we receive the viaticum: we obtain extreme unction: and we depart, forgiven. To make all sure, our children and friends after our demise see that masses are said for the repose of our souls'. He expanded his palms. 'What would you have?' he asked rhetorically. 'We do all that the Church demands. We fulfil every obligation. We leave no command unobeyed. Where is the need for this strange thing called conversion?'[463]

None of this had any personal reference, of course. Like many atheists Allen was intrigued by the internal coherence of Catholic dogma and the way it handles human frailty more realistically than the reformed churches; but that was all. In fact, his last long novel, Linnet, is as anti-clerical as any atheist could wish. Linnet is a gifted but untrained singer, an uneducated peasant girl and a devout Catholic who, after terrific pressure is applied by her parish priest, is married off to a greedy impresario. Complications ensue which give Allen many opportunities to comment on Catholic hypocrisy with respect to divorce, and he makes full use of them. His interest in religious belief was exclusively psychological and aesthetic. Chesterton said that T.H. Huxley was always talking about the religion he did not have, but Allen seemed to find all metaphysical questions fairly pointless.

On Friday, 27 October, in pouring rain, the body was taken in a coffin of papier-mache covered with white cloth to the Brookwood Crematorium, Woking. At the railway station it was met by Jerrard Allen, Grant Richards, Frank Whelan, J.S. Cotton, Rayner Storr, the Le Galliennes, and others. The only ceremony was a moving, simple and short memorial address by the positivist Frederic Harrison. It would, Harrison said rightly, 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'. Accordingly none was offered.[464] There was no music, the only sound coming from the roaring of the furnace nearby. His ashes were scattered in the garden of The Croft.

Soon afterwards, his will was published in the Daily Chronicle. His estate was valued at L6,455.3s.3d. His wife was the sole legatee.[465] In the same issue of the paper a cheesemonger was reported as having left L275,810. Grant Allen, tradesman-writer, would have appreciated the conjunction.

4.

Back in Canada, Joseph Allen, by now a widower, survived the death of his son by one year, dying at the age of eighty-six. Alwington, which he had finally inherited, passed out of the hands of the Allen estate in 1905. It stood until damaged by a fire in 1958 which claimed the lives of two occupants. The following year it was demolished, and a plaque on a traffic island is all that marks the site today, near a little bathing-beach on the lake shore. On Wolfe Island, Ardath House, Allen's childhood home, was derelict by the turn of the century. In 1902 a historian touring the property had pointed out to him by a local guide 'the very bedroom where, tradition said, Grant Allen, the noted novelist and scholar . . . had been born'. However, the fact that the same historian referred to Allen's '19 published books' does little for the credibility of this story. [466] Nothing but some foundations and walling remain. There is, on a wall near the Island's library, a large mural of Allen and his books done by local artists, so he is not entirely forgotten.

After Grant Allen's death his wife and son, aided by Grant Richards and other friends, continued to publish his literary remains and to float new editions of his work whenever possible. Nellie Allen inherited the copyright in eighteen of his books, but of these Grant Richards himself had published ten. Painting as gloomy a picture as he hoped he could get away with for his aunt's sake, Richards told the Inland Revenue authorities in 1900 that he valued these copyrights at only L100 for the whole lot, advice which apparently was accepted. After inordinate difficulties caused by the bankruptcy of his company and its subsequent recreation under his wife's name as the firm of 'E. Grant Richards' he republished The Woman Who Did in a cheap one-shilling edition with a big print run of 20,000 copies, specially for the station bookstall market. There was a brief scare when one of the railway companies refused to stock it, causing Richards to plead that its theme was by now 'extremely old-fashioned, and there is not a single line in it which anyone could say was offensive'.[467] It must have sold tolerably well, for he followed it in 1908 with another edition at the rock-bottom price of sixpence.

York Powell put another book together over Allen's name for Richards by extracting forty-four of the short essays on local history and topography which Allen had done for the two Gazettes at the very start of his career. Richards published the result as County and Town in England in 1901, and paid his aunt L25 advance on a 12.5% royalty, though it never sold anything like a thousand copies, nor was it expected to. He reprinted Colin Clout's Calendar on the same terms, as well as reprinting some of Allen's last articles as Evolution in Italian Art. All these enterprises were, as Richards put it, more a question of piety than commerce.

Jerrard Allen was twenty-one when his father died. After Charterhouse School he did not go to university but instead, in January 1897, joined his cousin, who was six years older, in the publishing business. But publishing was too dull for him, and soon after the turn of the century he moved into the theatrical world, becoming an impresario and agent, and here he enjoyed a somewhat chequered career. By 1906 he was managing the Criterion theatre in Piccadilly and was a partner in two ventures called Amusement Enterprises and the General Publicity Bureau. In 1908 we find him trying to bring his cousin in on a concern called the Zig Zag Puzzle Co. By 1910 he was administering, or working for, an exposition, 'The Festival of Empire and Pageant of London', which was held over the summer months of 1911 at the Crystal Palace, with the profits going to charity. In June 1912 he was telling his friend Theodore Dreiser, the novelist, in America that 'I am running a thundering good show on the halls -- The Bachelor Girls -- : I wish you could see it for it's good. Just five good smart girls in gorgeous frocks -- none of that damned nonsense about intellect in it but it's a big show and I know you'd like it'. The following year he made a lot of money in a Tango tea-dance venture, but his partner cheated him and he reported ruefully, 'I don't mean that I have just lost a lot: I've lost everything'.[468] He spent much time and energy, in the years before the outbreak of the First World War, in trying to get back to the New World which his father had been equally anxious to leave. The one wish of his life, he said, was to set foot in New York. During the war he managed it. He got a job representing the Professional Classes War Relief Council, and he and his wife, Violet Englefield, a comedienne and actress in musicals, and their young son, moved to New York in 1916 to raise money for the war effort on some sort of commission basis. The family stayed in America, where Jerrard worked as a theatrical manager.

Clearly Jerrard Allen was in some ways his father's son. He inherited his optimism, energy and readiness to seize the next trend. But he also seems to have had an insouciant nature verging on recklessness, very different to his earnest, diligent and punctilious father. When he left England his financial affairs were in a shambles, with debts on all sides. Among other things, he stood accused of pawning his father's gold watch, his mother's property, before he took ship. His cousin had to put in a great deal of effort to tidy up the mess he left behind -- he was well qualified to do that, being personally intimate with the bankruptcy laws -- although he seems quite ready to be put upon. The two men called each other 'Grantie' and remained on excellent terms. We hear last from Jerrard Allen in 1927, when he tells his cousin that he has heard that a large display of the firm's new edition of The Woman Who Did was being displayed on the stalls at the Caledonian Station in Edinburgh. When he retired, around 1939, the family moved to Florida. Jerrard died there in 1964 and his son Reggie also died there, apparently childless, in 1985.

Nellie Allen survived her husband by nearly forty years. She continued as a sleeping partner in Grant Richards' company and presumably drew some of the profits. Edward Clodd and other legal friends invested her legacy and royalties by setting up a trust fund which kept her comfortably for the rest of her life. She moved from The Croft to a smaller property in Hindhead, Little Croft, and also had flats in London, first in Westminster and later in Hampstead. In her widowhood she kept up some slight journalistic connections and had links with the suffragette movement. She took frequent rest cures in genteel hotels and nursing homes and travelled a good deal with her relatives. By the tenth year of her widowhood her nephew noticed that she seemed to find life rather boring; it had surely never been that during her husband's lifetime. She died in 1936 at the age of eighty-three.

Of Grant Allen's two main homes, The Nook, a century after Allen left it, stood as a mere shell, abandoned and derelict, in a secluded hollow of the grounds of a hospital. Most of its garden had either run wild or was built over, and the site was eventually completely redeveloped. As for The Croft, just as the railway destroyed the remote tranquillity of the Dorking region even in Allen's lifetime, so the arrival of the car and day-commuter traffic transformed the Hindhead, Grayshott and Haslemere region, speedily converting it into just another outer-suburban dormitory zone. The original Victorian intellectuals' colony dispersed in the early years of the century. The houses of its more prosperous members became hotels or offices or were pulled down. The Croft avoided that fate and still stands off the Tilford Road as a private house, though its grounds are depleted and it is now surrounded by dense woodland which block those expansive views of heather, heath and pine which gave Allen so much pleasure a century ago. But it still has a fine rolling expanse of lawn on which, in those almost unimaginably peaceful summer afternoons just before the splendours and horrors of the twentieth century started to unfold themselves, the Allens played host to their circle of wits and Grant shocked his young niece with his frank talk and daring speculations.

CONCLUSION

'We of the Proletariate...'

1.

'All the goodness, the humour, the tenderness, the imagination, the intellect, the brilliance, the love and laughter that were Grant Allen are now a little dust'.[469] With these sad words Richard Le Gallienne, the most steadfast of Allen's young disciples, wrote finis to his friend's vivid existence. To die young of an incurable malady is always a cruel fate, but we must feel even more than his friends did that it was especially so for Grant Allen. He died just when the Western world was on the threshold of transformations that he would have found fascinating. His reaction to Modernism generally, to Post-impressionism, to Surrealism, to the Great War and the War poets, to Freud and to early 20th century technology, especially the new technologies of entertainment, would have been very well worth having. It is curious to consider that, had he lived to no very exceptional age, he could have recorded his response to reading Ulysses. And what would he have made of post-Mendelian biology, or the new physics? As a publicist for scientific naturalism Allen rarely questioned the fixity of natural laws, and he never understood that the real value of a scientific law rests in its predictive value, not its descriptive function. At the time of his death, his cosmic progressivism, qualified though it always was, was starting to look quaint as Herbert Spencer's reputation in England began a terminal collapse. Einstein's paper on special relativity would be published in a few years hence, and by then Max Planck had already devised the foundations of quantum mechanics, despite once admitting that he found his own conclusions almost too peculiar to be credible. Such men had started to put the mystery back into science. The mathematical physics of the twentieth century would prove far more challenging to the imagination than Allen's cut-and-dried atomic materialism.

Nor, of course, did Allen give any credence to those subjective elements of human experience which may hint at a non-physical dimension to existence. The universe for him was a cool, clean, rational and, for most tastes, a rather arid place. But his beliefs were far from ossified as he entered his fifth decade, and he would surely have come to terms with the transformations and dislocations of the Edwardian years. It is only the fact that he died in his prime that fixes him so irrevocably as a Victorian. If he had lived as long as Thomas Hardy or H.G. Wells, and had lasted to the end of the Twenties, he would be remembered more as an interestingly transitional figure who bridges the two centuries.

It was not to be, however, and Allen's many friends and admirers registered their loss and tried to sum up his truncated career. There were many obituaries, and they paint a consistent picture, especially of his personal qualities. Everyone spoke of him as a loveable, kindly, delightful and honourable man. His moral courage, his earnestness in the cause of what he saw to be the truth, his transparent sincerity, his eager and generous enthusiasms, had impressed most people who had known had known him personally. The journalist Chris Healy spoke up for 'the priceless gift of his sympathy' towards junior struggling journalists, and the extant Chatto correspondence still shows how often he went out of his way to put new work before his own publishers.[470] William Sharp ('Fiona Macleod'), for whom Allen had been the best champion of Celtic literature, told a friend how much he felt the loss. 'I loved the man -- and admired the brilliant writer and catholic critic and eager student. He was of the most winsome nature. The world seems shrunken a bit more'.[471] George Gissing wrote from Paris, 'I liked him; indeed, I liked him very much. I found his talk delightful, & was always sorry that I could not have more of it; there was a great charm for me in his honest, gentle personality -- thoroughly honest and gentle, spite of his occasional scoffing at himself or at others'.[472] All agreed as to this sweetness of character. More than one person mentioned Allen as simply the most interesting man they had ever met, and perhaps that is the memorial Allen would have liked best himself.

They spoke up for his acute practical intelligence and professionalism too. His old sparring-partner Andrew Lang, said that he had differed from him on almost every issue; nevertheless, 'those who knew him as a man, and a friend, will never forget his unusual genius for kindness, gentleness, and dignity of character; for common-sense, too, in practical affairs'. He added: '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'.[473] Allen had no secretary; he handled himself all business that was not in Watt's hands, and his made him popular with editors. If you want something done, give it to a busy person, runs the maxim; and Allen, who liked to think of himself as 'the busiest man in England'[474] illustrates its truth. Not for him the vague excuses and spent-up advances supposedly typical of authors. Once he had promised, he delivered -- always. 'The time you suggest is full short', he once protested to his nephew over some ridiculous deadline, 'and, as Stevenson remarked, "'tis the work of an elephant"; but having several times beated elephants easy in a fair competition, I will undertake to do it; and when I engage, I keep my engagements, unless I die meanwhile. You shall have the earlier portion of Paris by Oct 15, law of Medes and Persians; and you shall have the last word of Florence by Dec 1'.[475] And naturally the work promised here came in on time, even though these historical guidebooks represented a formidable amount of field research and writing, for their approach is quite original. Allen had a will of iron, forged by years of toil in one of the most insecure and uninsurable of professions.

Certainly the persona he presented in his writings had its failings, and they are obvious enough. Even well-disposed contemporaries mentioned the occasionally irritating and aggressive tone of his writing. To that we can add a tendency to self-pity, petulance and exaggeration; we notice, too, that he can veer between an unconvincing humbleness of manner when he is on weak ground and a grating cocksureness when he feels confident. He was far from lacking in a sense of humour, but it could take on a biting and carping tone when his gift for satire got out of control, and even in his milder moments his love of paradox and flippancy and the throwaway remark did not always serve him well. His sense of humour failed him altogether over matters which he took seriously; and there were many of those, for he called himself 'a very earnest man, who takes life very earnestly'; one who wanted very much 'to do and say some good things in my generation'.[476] Sometimes his earnestness tips over into a brittle obduracy and crankiness which made him a natural target for the ill-disposed. His friend York Powell thought this was the character trait that most exposed him to ridicule and made him bitter: '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'.[477] Allen was too thin-skinned to be the thorough iconoclast he would have liked to be.

United as they were about his personal qualities, Allen's friends could not agree whether his career should be judged a failure or a success, and whether he had died fulfilled, or as a disappointed and embittered man. Most thought he had put a brave face on things. For W.T. Stead he was a man who was conscious of failure, and that his life was therefore a pathetic one.[478]Andrew Lang offered this as summary: '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'.[479] The Academy said that 'he wrote seventy-two books, and in a sense regretted them all'.[480] Even Le Gallienne concluded that he had been forced to prostitute his great gifts, which he thought was one of the saddest things he knew of in recent literary history.[481] The anonymous obituary in the Athenaeum -- never a friend of his work -- took a more acerbic line. According to this, he became bitter in print and speech due to the stress of ill-health and constant writing. 'He was a signal instance of a man possessed of rapid apprehension, ready expression, and indomitable industry who never found his true vocation', it concluded.[482] Grant Richards protested about some of the phrasing -- his uncle, he said, was never bitter and had lived 'a singularly full and complete life with real zest and real happiness'. But the Athenaeum refused to give ground. A man who complained so much about his need to write fiction for money cannot be said to have died fulfilled, it insisted.[483]

The editor Clement Shorter was the only one to dissent radically from this. He warned against taking Allen's own moody comments too seriously, for he was given to exaggeration and sweeping comments by temperament -- Allen himself put it down to his Celtic blood. Shorter thought, rather, that 'he wrote stories as he wrote about art, about literature, about science, because his versatile temperament rendered it inevitable that he should do all these things. . . . I do not for a moment believe that Allen, had he in early years come into a fortune, would have concentrated himself upon science in the way that Huxley did; or that if he had done so his life would have been as happy as it undoubtedly was'.[484]

Such claims -- on either side -- are easy to make and impossible to disprove. They lead nowhere. It is more fruitful to attempt to summarize the unresolved tensions in his career and what they tell us about the lot of his kind of writer at the turn of the new century. His well-documented career has allowed us to investigate what it meant to earn one's living as a fairly successful, freelance miscellaneous writer in the last two Victorian decades. What, then, can be said of his more permanent reputation? A century ago, Edward Clodd ended his Memoir with a good question. 'Naturalist, anthropologist, physicist, historian, poet, novelist, essayist, critic -- what place is to be assigned to this versatile, well-equipped worker? Time . . . will alone determine what, if any, of Allen's writings will survive'.[485] So what, in fact, has time determined? What, out of that great outpouring from Allen's pen, has survived as a living cultural force?

Little enough. The question was answered even by his own contemporaries in terms that are not really open to challenge. Grant Allen was never in the first or second rank of popularity or reputation in late Victorian England, and his talents and place in the literary culture of his day were correctly judged by those of his fellows who were not blinded by prejudice against his sexual polemics. While he lived, he was known as an interesting, efficient, variously talented but inevitably ephemeral author-journalist who could be relied on to amuse, instruct, challenge and, occasionally, outrage. He was a man of his day. As a scientific worker, the reputation he wanted for himself, Allen was no deep thinker nor, except in a few technical areas of botany, an original thinker. The judgement at the time of his death was true enough. 'He was not a profound scientific man in any direction', said the anonymous obituarist in the Daily News, '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'.[486]

As we have seen, his most characteristic 'scientific' productions are his hundreds of short essays on topics of natural history, especially botany. Though they have an individual flavour, Allen was working the same vein as Charles Kingsley, Richard Jefferies and W.H. Hudson. The 'nature essay' -- armchair botany, entomology and ornithology -- was very much a nineteenth-century genre, and its popularity started to wane after Allen's death, though it lingered long enough into the next century for people to understand the target when Evelyn Waugh parodied it affectionately in Scoop in the form of the weekly essay by 'William Boot, Countryman'. Boot's column 'Lush Places' is found in the Daily Beast squeezed between a recipe for Waffle Scramble and the Bed-time Pets column, and it has a distinctly antiquarian flavour by the 1930s. Indeed, it is precisely its somewhat musty flavour which makes it the subject of Waugh's most benign humour. So much of Allen's vast output in the form of nature essays was ephemeral; soon it was forgotten. By its very nature -- quotidian, responsive to passing interests, essentially disposable -- most of Allen's work went the same way. His fate was that of all successful cultural middlemen: first they help to shape a climate of opinion; then they are absorbed by it; finally their role is forgotten or denigrated.

What claim might be made of Allen's residual value as a minor novelist? His skills and limitations as a novelist are rather similar to Aldous Huxley's two generations later. Huxley said once that some writers are not really congenital novelists, but are clever enough to be able to mimic a novelist's behaviour convincingly. That, surely, was Allen's gift. It is certainly true that for him, as for Huxley, the novel was a convenience rather than an artistic compulsion. The most memorable parts of his novels are embedded essays and his characters live only insofar as they are lively ideas on legs. As an anonymous reviewer of The Scallywag said, 'if a novel of Mr Grant Allen's were to survive for a century or two, though it would reveal no essential facts of life and society in our time, it would not be valueless, for a certain superficial tone and accent of the educated middle classes would be nowhere better reflected'.[487] That is not a bad summary of their residual interest for, like Huxley's early satirical novels, the best half-dozen of Allen's do embody and define aspirations and anxieties, phobias and fantasies and silences. His fiction taps into most of the anxieties and folk panics of the period 1880-1900, especially the socio-biological ones: racial degeneration; transgressive female sexuality; atavism and primitive reversion; miscegenation; the rampant sexuality and fertility of the lower orders and inferior stocks; the increasing androgyny of the young and the enfeeblement of sexual desire due to new social trends; and above all, the theme to which he returned repeatedly, the dire effects of inheritance, especially inherited disease and criminal traits. Indeed, it is hardly too much to say that all of his fiction is essentially a series of footnotes to Darwinism. Though the footnotes are often wrong-headed, trite, and soaked in sentimentality and gender stereotyping, it is still true that Allen was one of the first novelists to perceive the true range of the Darwinian theory; that is to say, that it had profound insights to offer to the arts as well as all the sciences of life. Nothing that he wrote in fiction will ever detain the literary critic, but he was adept at bridging the two cultures, and for that reason a part of his work -- both fiction and non-fiction -- will survive as a quarry of raw materials for the social and cultural historian.

2.

We of the proletariate cannot be pickers and choosers . . . the poor man (and the mass of litterateurs have always been poor, from the days of Grub Street onward) must take the first work that turns up to his hand.[488]

We of the proletariate? Grant Allen as a poor man? As a wage slave? A quizzical eyebrow seems in order. 'Has he starved?' George Gissing liked to inquire when he suspected a writer of not having earned his success. Allen had never starved. He had settled at the better end of Grub Street in his first days and, despite his own forebodings, the risk of being forced out of it reduced steadily with the passing years.

Consider, by way of contrast, the early years of the writer-journalist Arthur Machen, who was also briefly a John Lane Keynotes author. Born in 1863, Machen was fifteen years younger than Grant Allen, but Machen started his career much earlier and in that sense the two men were roughly contemporaries. In 1884, the year when Allen was being paid a surprisingly high price for his first novel, Machen was living in Holland Park in an unheated room so small that he kept his few books on the rungs of a stepladder outside his door. His regular dinner was half a loaf of dry bread and green tea. For weeks on end he spoke to no-one except during the brief exchanges of street and shop. In his room he read and wrote for several years in utter loneliness, toiling over occult books, studying Aquinas and working on a supremely unsaleable book called The Anatomy of Tobacco, until rescued by a small inheritance. Starting in 1881, Machen wrote eighteen books, including a translation of Casanova in twelve volumes. He had a brief success with The Great God Pan, but the sum total of his literary earnings over forty-two years was L635, or about L15 a year. '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?' asked Machen, rhetorically, in his old age. Only newspaper journalism kept him from the workhouse.[489]

By comparison with a story like that, Grant Allen did very well indeed. Arthur Machen might have been thinking of him when he contrasted his own early years with those men who were plugged into the network of privilege; the men who belonged to the world where a quiet word in the right ear was effective; the 'others', Machen calls them. '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'.[490] Allen's first decade may have been terribly hard, in his own eyes at least, but he did not lack for a helping hand when he needed it and there were depths of privation and humiliation of which he knew nothing. In the context of a career such as Machen's, is it not mere posing to speak of yourself as a proletarian when you can afford to winter on the Riviera each year and are enjoying so many other fringe benefits of the trade? Those benefits were not to be despised, after all. Some of them were vividly described by Anthony Trollope, speaking of the time after he had left the Post Office and therefore in a position to appreciate them the more:

There is perhaps no career in life so charming as that of a successful man of letters. . . . The clergyman, the lawyer, the doctor, the member of Parliament, the clerk in a public office, the tradesman, and even his assistant in the shop, must dress in accordance with certain fixed laws; but the author need sacrifice to no grace, hardly even to Propriety. He is subject to no bonds such as those which bind other men. Who else is free from all shackle as to hours? The judge must sit at ten, and the attorney-general, who is making his L20,000 a year, must be there with his bag. The Prime Minister must be in his place on that weary front bench shortly after prayers, and must sit there, either asleep or awake, even though -- or -- should be addressing the House. During all that Sunday which he maintains should be a day of rest, the active clergyman toils like a galley-slave. The actor, when eight o'clock comes, is bound to his footlights. The Civil Service clerk must sit there from ten till four, -- unless his office be fashionable, when twelve to six is just as heavy on him. The author may do his work at five in the morning when he is fresh from his bed, or at three in the morning before he goes there. And the author wants no capital, and encounters no risks. When once he is afloat, the publisher finds all that; -- and indeed, unless he be rash, finds it whether he be afloat or not. But it is in the consideration which he enjoys that the successful author finds his richest reward. He is, if not of equal rank, yet of equal standing with the highest; and if he be open to the amenities of society, may choose his own circles. He without money can enter doors which are closed against all but him and the wealthy.[491]

When Trollope's confessional account appeared in 1883 it described a level of success which Allen could only dream of. Yet by the end of his career he was enjoying all these perquisites in full measure. He called them the 'incidental consolations'. We have documented how quite sudden socio-economic changes within the world of letters threw up new opportunities, and how quickly new men bounded forward to seize them. A journalist, Raymond Blathwayt, a contemporary and friend of Allen's, records in his autobiography the heady moment when he leapt from obscurity to journalistic fame in a single week. Having lost his job as an East-end curate -- allegedly because in a test he could not give in order the Ten Plagues of Egypt -- the young Blathwayt was forced to share a room with a failed artist and live on penny buns. Then inspiration struck. He would seek out famous men, starting with writers, and persuade them to do 'interviews', a mode of publicity then barely heard of in Britain. He found interviews easy to get, easy to write and easy to sell, first to the Pall Mall Gazette and then to a host of other papers. His success was instantaneous and exhilarating. Even from the perspective of thirty years, Blathwayt could hardly believe his luck. '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'. Certainly he was well aware of the uniqueness of that point in the history of journalism:

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.[492]

Allen started from no such lowly base as Blathwayt, but in a quieter, more restrained and slower maturing way, this was the story of his success too. His prosperity, indeed his whole career, stemmed from a happy conjunction of the man, milieu and moment. It was made possible through an interaction between his own versatility and productivity, and his fortuitous arrival at exactly the right moment when his kind of talent could find its reward; the moment that the publishing historian Simon Eliot has defined as being the one making the period 1880-1910 the 'fleeting golden age for the facile writer of easily-read prose'.[493] And the socio-technological milieu he inhabited was one where every change in the production and consumption of text played into his hands. There was the new, expanding, eager readership comprising the first generation of beneficiaries of Forster's Education Act; the rise of the new (mass) journalism, itself made feasible by the web-fed rotary press and the linotype typesetting machine; the lucrative provincial syndication markets; the new American copyright provisions; the emergence of new kinds of middlemen with useful skills for hire that most authors did not have. Such a career as Allen's, particularly its rewards and concomitant pressures and conflicts, would have been impossible a few decades earlier and few decades later, under the influence of competing media, it would have taken a different course and had a different shape, though it might have been rewarded even better than it was.

Not that it was ill-rewarded. Allen was by no means an average literary jack-of-all-trades, but it is still surprising to notice just how generous the rewards could be for a respected and hardworking, but still fairly minor professional writer in this period. By most standards his productive power and sales sustained an enviable style of life. He benefited from the low cost of living, particularly the cheap cost of labour; for it easy to bandy about figures like a thousand pounds while forgetting what the purchasing power of such a sum actually was. A point of comparison is that Grant Richards, a kindly man and no skinflint, was paying his live-in cook L35 a year ten years after his uncle's death. Thirty years earlier, then, Grant Allen had only to write three of his Cornhill articles to pay for a service like this, and towards the end of his career he earned more than twice that cook's annual wages for just one monthly episode of his lightweight serials in the Strand.

Nor was it only a matter of income. Let us not underrate the non-financial 'consolations' which were far above the aspirations of most professional men. Many must have sighed as Andrew Chatto did when the Allens invited him to join them for a spring holiday abroad, an offer he had half promised to accept: 'Ah yes, when we felt young and hopeful. ... It was a very pleasant daydream to think so while it lasted, but we are awakening now to the reality that it is impossible for one to leave the business'.[494] Not for most of them three months on the Riviera each year, or winters in Algeria or Egypt, or trips to America lasting months, or the freedom to work to an entirely self-determined schedule while living in the style of a country gentleman in a beautiful and rural part of Surrey. Even in his darkest days Allen never knew real hardship except that caused by his invalidity. He worked hard, but he knew no 'shackle as to hours' for most of his writing life. He had a wide circle of friends, and plenty of Trollope's 'amenities of society', or at least the limited kind of kind of society he wanted. The kind which eyed him askance was the kind for which he cared nothing anyway.

3.

Yet, as we have seen repeatedly, his attitude to his material success was typically paradoxical. He insisted it was important to him, yet it seemed to bring him little satisfaction. Authorship, he was eager to tell anyone who would listen, 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 L20,000 a year. For the most part even tolerably successful authors only just pull through somehow. They 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.[495]

He knew how hard he worked, and he was not content with his position in life as a thousand-a-year man. Few writers felt the tension between Art and Mammon so acutely as Allen, or at least wrote about with such perspicuity. He could not escape from the literary life, but he certainly gave thought to the question of why there is such a gulf between the incomes of authors and., say, barristers. Why are the rewards for the first so scanty? Are writers intrinsically worth so much less to society? He returned repeatedly to this question, twice devoting strong and penetrating essays to it: 'A Scribbler's Apology' and 'The Trade of Author'. The first, written when his fortunes were at low ebb and he was fighting for his economic life, is the more bitter and self-punishing; the second, when he was emerging from the ruck and could see a clearer path ahead, is more analytical, witty and dispassionate.

What is the social utility of the writing trade, not only in the existing, nineteenth-century world but in the truer, fairer world that socialism might one day usher in? As early as May 1883, when he was just beginning to feel his powers and struggling desperately to find his footing, he meditated this theme in a long and painful article for the Cornhill, 'A Scribbler's Apology', which right from the self-denigrating title is the most ruthless piece of self-examination he ever made in pubic, and was almost certainly inspired by the recent appearance of Anthony Trollope's Autobiography. Trollope's most notorious comparison was between the novelist's trade and the shoemaker's. Trollope's point was to claim that his honest labours as a novelist were just as socially meritorious as the shoemaker's. Allen inclined to the opposite view. Watching a shoemaker at work from his study window as he sits plying his own trade of scribbler, he envies that tradesman's undeniably useful result of his day's work compared to his own dubious role in the national economy. What has he done that gives him the right to come to table in response to 'the clanging dinner-bell of collective humanity'? How has his day been spent?

Dismally. 'I have contributed a column of political abuse to my daily paper, and I have written half an unfavourable review, for a weekly journal, of a foolish and vulgar sensational novel'. How could such work be defended, especially by a man who counts himself a Communist? And, in particular, what can be said for the freelance journalist -- not the standard news reporter, whose utility is, theoretically, obvious enough, but the mere 'tootler' -- one like Grant Allen, for instance? One answer is that the tootler fills a want; the wants of editors, and behind them the wants of readers. But that is unsatisfying. What troubles Allen is the suspicion that writers like him are simply parasites on the ruling class. Relatively few people produce the really useful goods of the world, like 'bread, meat, clothing, science and poetry'. Most workers expend their labour uselessly on mother-of-pearl card-cases, malachite boxes, ivory-handled brushes, crests and monograms, or papier-mache monstrosities; in preserving game, breeding bull-dogs, manufacturing lawn tennis bats, or dressing young ladies' hair; in growing champagne, hunting sealskins, diving for pearls, grubbing for diamonds, shooting humming-birds, or pulling out ostrich-feathers all the world over. Is not the tootler similarly employed? Still, there is a hierarchy of uselessness. One ought to distinguish between harmless labours and 'the nasty, cruel luxuries, like sealskin jackets and Strasburg pie'. People, after all, must be amused; and a skilled hand can inform while entertaining. Allen consoles himself with the thought that he is practising what a later generation would call 'infotainment'. At best then the tootler must be content with negative self-approval: he may be doing little good, but he must see to it that he does no harm.[496]

Rather a dusty answer, to be sure. Leslie Stephen, though he was about to surrender the editorship of the Cornhill to James Payn, was so concerned about the state of mind revealed in this article that when he read the manuscript he wrote Allen a lengthy and kindly letter of moral support, explaining how he himself had, in his younger days, worked through and resolved the same dilemma:

I have often thought over your problem and have answered it pretty much to my own satisfaction. I cannot think any man blameworthy for making his living in any honest way: & I think journalism indifferent honest if does not lie or pander to clearly evil tastes. The question might arise if one claimed to be a man of genius, capable of moving the world. I am happily quite clear that that is not my vocation. I am certain that I can do much more good by bringing up my children decently than if I reduced them to poverty and ignorance in order that I might try my hand at inventing a new bit of metaphysical moonshine. I don't flatter myself that it matters two straws to the world whether I write or dig in my garden; but it makes a difference to my own little world, where I can really produce some effect.[497]

One wonder how Stephen's well-meant advice, the advice of a veteran of fifty, was received by the younger man. Allen might well have reflected that Stephen's quietism was a pretty self-indulgent philosophy. It was based foursquare on a private income and a place among the English intellectual aristocracy so assured that, after his time as the editor of the Cornhill had somehow halved its circulation, strings had been pulled to facilitate his smooth transition to becoming the editor of the DNB instead. Allen would have despised the opinion that it didn't matter 'two straws' to the world whether he wrote or dug his garden. He expected his writing -- the kind of writing he wanted to do -- to matter a great deal. But he could not have thought, by the end, that too much of it really had mattered.

Six years later he returned more specifically to the money question in one of his most brilliant essays, 'The Trade of Author'. This is a survey of problem of earning a living from miscellaneous writing, based on his first full decade of dearly-won experience. Witty, bitter, shrewd and memorably phrased, it is a masterly piece of writing. As we have seen, Allen had an almost neurotic interest in his own earning power, and his opening question goes, as usual, straight to the financial heart. 'How does it arrive that the wage of the average author, usually a person of some little education and some modest intelligence, falls so infinitely below the average wage of the other learned professions to which in like manner men bring but their brains and the skill of their fingers?' A barrister, even though his special skills are known to few, can mark his brief at a hundred guineas, and get it. Doctors chat to you with their meter ticking at the rate of twenty-five shillings a minute. Even an unknown water-colourist can ask thirty pounds for a smallish square of painted paper. Only in authorship does breadth of reputation bring no commensurate reward. How very odd it is, then, muses Allen, that when an admirer seeks out a writer 'known to half the world in a dozen countries', his hero is likely to be found living in a cottage on a twentieth of the income of a professional man who is totally unknown to the wider world. How can this be?[498]

The answer, Allen argued, lay in the peculiar disadvantages under which authors labour. There is the fact that the author does not even benefit, as the artist or sculptor does, from having a unique original to sell. One copy of his work is worth the same as another and the original is usually so much waste paper. More serious still is the effect of the Competition of the Dead. In law or medicine or accountancy or any other service trade, you, the client, are obliged to consult those who are active now, inferior though they may be to their dead predecessors. But the consumer of literature is under no such handicap. The dead are just as accessible and just as valuable as the living. And the works of the illustrious dead are available for practically nothing, driving down the living writer's price. The most-read authors are the ones whose names have been diffused the most, and who is interested in whether or not whether they are still alive? 'Who will care to buy a new book by a rising author', asks Allen, 'when he can get the pick of Thackeray, and Dickens, and Carlyle, and Macaulay any day for a shilling?' Though eager to embrace all the fresh talent in his day, Allen had little faith in its power to draw money from the pocket. Writing as he was in 1889, he probably had in mind the plunging prices of publishers' reprint series. The head-to-head competition between Routledge and Cassell had recently seen a huge range of classic authors become available for a trivial three pence. There the price bottomed out: the great writers had become accessible for the cost of three cheap newspapers. Matthew Arnold had made Allen's point for him earlier. Old books can be bought for very little, and that is good; but there are good new books too: what is needed is the work of vigorous new writers in books costing three shillings, and those are not available.[499] The only consolation Allen can offer is that authors are gamblers by nature and are ever-confident that they will find, one day, the thin spot at which to penetrate the hide of the 'pachydermatous public'. For the author who manages that, all doors are open. 'For when once an author has attained success, he is free indeed', Allen concludes savagely. 'He may say what he likes. He may tell the truth at last, and no man will curb him. From its favourites the public will suffer anything. Carlyle gave it abuse, Ruskin gives it nonsense, but it smiles benignly'.

Between them, therefore, these two articles suggest why Allen should not sound merely fatuous when he defined himself as a proletarian. It was that economic 'helplessness', to which he refers, the vulnerability of the sweated out-worker to fluctuations in demand, to the insolence of employers, and to strokes of ill-fortune. Freelance author-journalists like Allen participated in the most primitive economic transaction between capital and labour that it is possible to imagine. Until the Society of Authors was formed in 1883/4 writers had no collective bargaining power at all. In practice, the freelancer was indistinguishable from the day-labourer who stood with his fellows on the dockside each morning in the hope of hiring out his muscle-power one more time.

But even the labourer had his mates to commiserate with in the pub. The freelance was alone as few workers are alone, his alienation total, his wage-slavery manifest. Even Walter Besant, who was sometimes criticised for having too rosy a view of the actual rewards of authorship, had to admit that 'no worker in the world, not even the needlewoman, is more helpless, more ignorant, more cruelly sweated than the author'.[500] Each day the freelance chose his topic and wrote his piece with only his native wit to guide him on whether he had hit on something saleable. The convention prevailing at the time discouraged personal approaches. The contributor was expected to mail in the product of his labour with nothing but a name and address written discreetly in the corner -- Allen's own MSS show he followed this convention. Then the editor either took it (at his price) or posted it back with a rejection slip. Rarely was there room for negotiation. Sometimes there was no human interchange at all for years on end, and even multiple acceptances did not necessarily create any reservoir of good-will or obligation.

Under such a regimen Allen passed all his career. It was a gruelling way to make a living, even for the most versatile and accomplished pen. Towards the close of The Woman Who Did the narrator says that the bitterest pill that the aging Herminia Barton has to swallow, in her career as a literary journeywoman, is having her work 'publicly criticized as though it afforded some adequate reflection of the mind that produced it, instead of being merely an index of taste in the minds of those for whose use it was intended'.[501] This bitter observation -- obviously a cry from the author-narrator's heart -- was intended to be a self-defensive stroke. The truth, however, was that it is the very fact that Allen was an 'index of taste', echoing and defining the preoccupations of the day that gives him his best chance of survival. In another mood he seemed to accept this fate for himself. He closed his long introduction to The British Barbarians by claiming that the ideas in that book are 'sincere and personal convictions . . . warranted . . . by that spirit of the age, of which each of us is but an automatic mouthpiece'.[502]

Allen was indeed a mouthpiece for the Zeitgeist. His interests were so various, his grasp on his own time and its fleeting concerns and tastes so perceptive and lucid, that he will surely continue to command a small audience in each generation. Despite his repeated gloomy appraisals of his situation, he actually handled his own plight rather well. His own energy protected him from the worst consequences. He always made some time for his own interests. A man who could translate Catullus' Attis and publish it with a useful exposition and essays on tree-worship in the middle of all his other labours must have been a man of overflowing mental vigour. Other writers would have been destroyed or swallowed up by the killing workload which he suffered for years, but he was, in his versatility and flexibility and restless pursuit of the new, not merely the first among equals but unique. And the work is of surprisingly high quality. He wrote quickly, and had to write too much, but he had no reason to despise his own powers. He was rarely prolix, hardly ever repeated himself, and, rather like George Orwell, nearly always finds a fresh and vivid way of phrasing near-truisms. His best work has a verve, a lightness of touch, a self-delighting play of fancy and information, which quite belies the circumstances under which some of it was produced. All this added up to a lot more than 'tootles on the penny-trumpet'. Anyone who does more than dip into his work -- into his non-fiction especially -- will be struck by how well, in the end, Grant Allen succeeded in having his cake, and eating it.

The End

ABBREVIATIONS IN THE NOTES

ALS. Autograph letter signed.

Blathwayt. Raymond Blathwayt, 'Mr Grant Allen at Home', Interviews. With Portraits, and a Preface by Grant Allen.’ A. W. Hall, 1893, pp.68-75.

Clodd. Edward Clodd, Grant Allen: A Memoir ... With a Bibliography. Grant Richards, 1900.

CW. Letterbooks, 1883-- (Outgoing Correspondence). Chatto & Windus Archives, University of Reading Library, UK.

GA. Grant Allen.

GRA. Grant Richards Archives, 1897-1948. Archives of British Publishers on Microfilm. Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1979. (71 reels.)

Leeds. Papers held in the Brotherton Collection, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds, UK.

NGS. George Gissing, New Grub Street, ed. Bernard Bergonzi. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968.

PAP. Grant Allen, 'Physiological Aesthetics and Philistia', My First Book. With an Introduction by Jerome K. Jerome. Chatto & Windus, 1894.

PSU. Grant Allen Literary Manuscripts and Correspondence 1872-1937. Rare Books and Manuscripts, the Pennsylvania State University Special Collections Library.

TLS. Typescript letter signed.

WAC. Letters from GA to John Lane. The William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California at Los Angeles. Shelfmark A425 L265.

Watt. Letterbooks, 1884-1891 of A. P. Watt & Co Ltd. The Berg Collection, New York Public Library.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

Introduction

1] Richard D. Altick, ‘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), 403.

[2] NGS, pp.38-9.

[3] Frederic Harrison, Grant Allen, 1848-1899; An Address Delivered at Woking on October 27, 1899. Privately printed [the Chiswick Press], 1899, p.8.

[4] A selection by GA is in Alberto Manguel, ed. By the Light of the Glow-worm Lamp. Three Centuries of Reflections on Nature, Plenum, 1998. This gives the title ‘Prophetic Autumn’ to a passage from Moorland Idylls (1896), which is merged without explanation with an article ‘Our Winged House-fellows’ which first appeared in the English Illustrated Magazine in 1894.

[5] NGS, p.415.

[6] ‘[Review of] Grant Allen by Edward Clodd', Athenaeum, 16 June 1900, 749. Unsigned.

[7] ‘Obituary. Mr Grant Allen', Daily News, 26 Oct 1899, 6. Unsigned.

[8] Andrew Lang, ‘At The Sign of the Ship', Longman’s Magazine, 34 (Dec 1899), 183-192.

[9] Frank Harris, Contemporary Portraits. Fourth Series. Grant Richards, 1924, pp.94-95.

[10] [Douglas Sladen], ‘The Diner Out: Gossip About Authors', The Queen: The Lady~s Newspaper and Court Chronicle (16 Mar 1895), 450.

[11] Frank Harris, Contemporary Portraits, p.94.

[12] Richard Le Gallienne, ‘Grant Allen’ in Attitudes and Avowals With Some Retrospective Reviews. John Lane, 1910, pp.204-5.

[13] TLS, GA to Clodd, ‘Feb. 18’ [‘1893’ added in another hand]. Leeds.

[14] Oliver Elton, Frederick York Powell: A Life and a Selection from His Letters and Occasional Writings. Oxford: Clarendon P., 1906, II, 79.

[15] Clement Shorter, ‘The Late Grant Allen', The Critic [New York], 36 (Jan 1900), 41.

[16] Richard Le Gallienne, ‘Grant Allen', p.210.

[17] GA, ‘The Burden of the Specialist', Westminster Gazette, 3 (27 Feb 1894), 1.

[18] GA as teacher: anecdotes from Clodd, p.108 and Elizabeth O’Connor, I Myself. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1914, p.240. [19] ALS, Nellie Allen to Clodd, ‘April 9’ [1900]. Leeds. [20] Letter to Edward Clodd, 7 June 1900. Collected Letters of George Gissing, eds Paul F. Mattheisen, Arthur C. Young & Pierre Coustillas ( Ohio UP., 1990-8), VIII, 58.

[21] ‘The Biography of a Rebel', Review of Reviews, 22 (July 1900), 92. The author is probably W. T. Stead.

[22] ‘[Review of] Grant Allen by Edward Clodd', Academy, 58 (Jan/June 1900), 547. Unsigned.

[23] ‘Grant Allen', Gentleman~s Magazine, 74 (1905), 134-149.

[24] ‘Grant Allen, Naturalist and Novelist.’ Moderns and Near-moderns: Essays on Henry James, Stockton, Shaw, and Others. Grafton, 1928.

[25] Critical discussions of Allen’s work over the last thirty years have been almost entirely about The Woman Who Did and its context: Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own. Princeton UP, 1977; Lloyd Fernando, New Women~ in the Late Victorian Novel. Penn State UP., 1977; Gail Cunningham, The New Woman and the Victorian Novel. Macmillan, 1978; Patricia Stubbs, Women and Fiction: Feminism and the Novel 1880-1920. Harvester, 1979; Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy. Viking, 1990; Ann Ardis, New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism. Rutgers UP., 1992; Victor Luftig, Seeing Together: Friendship Between the Sexes in English Writing, from Mill to Woolf. Stanford UP, 1993; and Lucy Bland, Banishing the Beast: English Feminism and Sexual Morality 1885-1914. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995UP.; Arlene Young, Culture, Class, and Gender in the Victorian Novel: Gentlemen, Gents, and Working Women. Macmillan/St Martin’s P., 1999; and Ann Heilmann, New Woman Fiction: Women Writing First-Wave Feminism. Macmillan/St Martin’s P., 2000. . Three other studies, Gerald Levin, ‘Grant Allen's Scientific and Aesthetic Philosophy', Victorians Institute Journal, 12 (1984), 77-89; Christopher Keep, ‘The Cultural Work of the Type-writer Girl', Victorian Studies, 40 (Spring 1997), 401-426, and Barbara Arnett Melchiori, Grant Allen: the Downward Path which Leads to Fiction. Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 2000 have broader concerns.

[26] The only published biographical material which substantially supplements Clodd is to be found in the following: Blathwayt, pp.68-75; ‘JSC’ [James Sutherland Cotton], ‘Allen, Grant', Dictionary of National Biography, 22 (Supplement), pp. 36-38; Andrew Lang, ‘Mr Grant Allen. In Memoriam', Daily News, 28 Oct 1899, 7; Richard Le Gallienne, ‘Grant Allen', Fortnightly Review, 66 (Dec 1899), 1005-1025, reprinted as Grant Allen. Tucker [1900] and again in his Attitudes and Avowals (1910); and Frank Harris, Contemporary Portraits. Fourth Series. Grant Richards, 1924. Allen’s nephew Grant Richards provides more information in: ‘Mr Grant Allen and His Work', Novel Review, 1 (June 1892), 261-268; Memories of a Misspent Youth 1872-1896. Heinemann, 1932; and Author Hunting By an Old Literary Sportsman: Memories of Years Spent Mainly in Publishing, 1897-1925. Hamish Hamilton, 1934. There are few extra details about Allen’s ancestry in George Herbert Clarke, ‘Grant Allen', Queen~s Quarterly, 45 (1938), 487-496. The entry on GA in the New DNB (printed version) is a disgraceful effort full of factual errors, and should be ignored; the online version, however, has deleted these errors and is reliable.

[27] David Cowie, 'The Evolutionist at Large: Grant Allen, Scientific Naturalism and Victorian Culture'. PhD. thesis, University of Kent at Canterbury. Apr 2000. (British Library thesis service, DX 211016.) This covers most of Allen’s non-fiction, but has numerous factual errors.

[28] GA reassessment and bibliography: Peter Morton, ‘Grant Allen: A Centenary Reassessment', English Literature in Transition 1880-1920, 44:4 (2001), 404-440. Some of the bibliographical work underpinning this essay, and this book, may be found in my monograph Grant Allen: Victorian Fiction Research Guide #34. Brisbane: Victorian Fiction Research Unit, University of Queensland, 2002.

[29] ‘The Trade of Author', Fortnightly Review, 51/45 (Feb 1889), 264. The article is unsigned and unattributed in the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals 1824-1900, ed. Walter E. Houghton, II, 259, item 2795. But it is certainly by Allen. It rehearses many of his favourite themes and some of its phrases appear in his novel Dumaresq~s Daughter (1891), which was being written contemporaneously.

[30] Walter Besant, The Pen and the Book. London: Thomas Burleigh, 1899, p.134.

[31] For John Lane, see the following: J.W. Lambert & Michael Ratcliffe, The Bodley Head 1887-1987. The Bodley Head, 1987; Wendell V. Harris, ‘John Lane’s ‘Keynotes’ Series and the Fiction of the 1890’s', PMLA, 83 (Oct 1968), 1407-1413; J. Lewis May, John Lane and the Nineties. The Bodley Head, 1936; Katherine Lyon Mix, A Study in Yellow: The Yellow Book and Its Contributors. London/Lawrence: Constable/U. Kansas Press, 1960; James G. Nelson, The Early Nineties: A View from the Bodley Head. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1971; Margaret D.Stetz & Mark Samuels Lasner, England in the 1890s: Literary Publishing at the Bodley Head. Washington: Georgetown UP, 1990; Margaret Diane Stetz, ‘Sex, Lies, and Printed Cloth: Bookselling at the Bodley Head in the Eighteen-Nineties', Victorian Studies, 35:1 (Autumn 1991), 76-86. There is also one file about Lane/GA business in CW.

For GA and Grant Richards, see GRA. The microfilmed papers therein which relate to GA, his family and circle are indexed in Alison Ingram, The Archives of Grant Richards, 1897-1948. Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1981.

For GA and Andrew Chatto, see correspondence in CW. This is mostly letterbooks of copies of outgoing correspondence business, 1878- , but some incoming letters from GA are tipped into the letterbooks. The rest of the incoming correspondence from GA has not survived in CW.

For GA and A.P. Watt, see Watt. This comprises an incomplete run of the firm’s letter-books over the relevant years. There are copies of Watt’s letters to GA over the period 1883-1891. GA’s incoming letters have not survived. Some other records of the firm of A.P. Watt relevant to GA’s affairs (letters, contracts, notes etc.) are held in the Manuscripts Dept of the Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Records #11036.

[32] Most discussions of scientific popularization by non-professionals have focused on the high-Victorian period: the heyday of ‘natural history.’ For the last quarter of the century and after, there is Peter Broks, ‘Science, Media and Culture: British Magazines, 1890-1914', Public Understanding of Science, 2 (1993), 123-139; and part of Bernard Lightman’s article ‘The Voices of Nature’: Popularizing Victorian Science’ in Bernard Lightman, ed. Victorian Science in Context. U. Chicago P., 1997 provides a useful overview.

[33] The ‘bookmen’s’ background and cultural context is discussed by John Gross, The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: Aspects of English Literary Life Since 1800. Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1973, pp.149.

[34] ALS to Hubert Bland, ‘Aug. 9.’ Bodleian Library, Oxford. MS.Eng.lett.e.120, fols 30-31. Allen did join the Fabians in 1891, but the standard history tells no more of him than that bare fact. See Norman & Jeanne MacKenzie, The First Fabians. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977, p.148. He joined the Society of Authors in 1889, but played no significant role in it and is not mentioned in the history of the Society, Victor Bonham-Carter’s Authors by Profession (1978).

[35] Baring-Gould’s productivity: The comparison with Baring-Gould was drawn in several obituaries. One said GA shared with Baring-Gould ‘the distinction of being the most prolific English author of the latter half of this century’. See ‘Grant Allen, Author, Dead', New York Times, 26 Oct 1899, 7, col.2.’

Chapter 1: Canada and Oxford

[36] GA, 'Among the Thousand Islands', Belgravia: A London Magazine, 36 (Oct 1878), 414. Signed J. Arbuthnot Wilson.

[37] At various times Allen used four noms-de-plume: 'J. Arbuthnot Wilson', 'Cecil Power', 'Olive Pratt Rayner', and 'Martin Leach Warborough.’ However, none of these pseudonyms was anything more than a very temporary, quickly surrendered, expedient. He made no real attempt to conceal his identity from his public, and ‘Grant Allen’ was the name he consistently used as a writer and in private life.

[38] The fullest details of the story are in Lionel Stevenson, The Ordeal of George Meredith. Peter Owen, 1954, pp.269-270. Possibly the names, real and disguised, of the heroine of Allen’s detective story-series Hilda Wade (1899) (her real name is Maisie Yorke-Bannerman) owe something to this incident.

[39]‘Among the Thousand Islands', 415. This describes Kingston as it appeared to Allen either on a visit to his home town in 1875 or en route from Jamaica to England in 1876, although some of the personal details in the article are fictive.

[40] ‘Among the Thousand Islands', Longman~s Magazine, 10 (May 1887), 61. This was a second article with the same title.

[41] A.R. Wallace describes his meeting with the senior Allens at Washington and Kingston in My Life: A Record of Events and Opinions. Chapman & Hall, 1905, II, 187.

[42] J.A. Allen, ALS to Charles Darwin, 29 July 1878. Item 11633 of the Darwin Correspondence Project, Cambridge University Library.

[43] Information about the is derived from Allan J. Anderson, The Anglican Churches of Kingston. Kingston, Ontario: 1963, pp.67-68. Margaret Angus, ‘Alwington House', Historic Kingston, 40 (1992), 21-32 traces the history of the house of the Grants and the Allens in very useful detail.

[44] Philistia. New ed. Chatto & Windus, 1895, pp.71, 79.

[45] Clodd gives this as his age when the family started their tour. But in Grant Richards’ interview of Allen, ‘Mr Grant Allen and His Work', Novel Review, 1 (June 1892) his age at the start of the tour is given as ten, and it is said that he spent two years at Dieppe. This is unlikely to be correct. Richards’ interview contains other factual errors.

[46] Allen recalled this in a letter reprinted in the Pall Mall Gazette, 46 (1 Aug 1887), 6-7.

[47] Clodd refers to the Dieppe school by this name. It was almost certainly the ancient foundation renamed in 1914 the College Jehan Ango. The handsome building still exists on the Quai as an infant school. See Simona Pakenham, Sixty Miles from England. The English at Dieppe 1814-1914. Macmillan, 1967.

[48] Information from the school archives. According to the King Edward’s School, the family was then living at Frontenac Villa, Beaufort Road, Edgbaston. The name (that of the Allens’ home county in Ontario) suggests this was the home of Grant relatives.

[49] This proportion is given in The History of the University of Oxford. VII: Nineteenth-Century Oxford, Part 2, eds. M. G. Brock & M. C. Curthoys. Oxford: Clarendon P., 2000, p.12.

[50] George Saintsbury, ‘Oxford Sixty Years Since', A Second Scrap Book. Macmillan, 1923. Saintsbury’s reminiscences are summarised in Dorothy Richardson Jones, ~King of Critics~: George Saintsbury, 1845-1933, Critic, Journalist, Historian, Professor. U. Michigan P., 1992.

[51] Quoted in [Louise Creighton], Life and Letters of Mandell Creighton. Longman’s, Green, 1904, I, 17.

[52] Joseph Allen at Queen’s University is described in D.D. Calvin, Queen's University at Kingston: The First Century of a Scottish-Canadian Foundation 1841-1941. Kingston, Ontario: The Trustees of the University, 1941, p.184.

[53] Correspondence relating to J.A. Allen's employment at Queen's is extant in the University archives. Personal communication, 15 Feb 2005, from Paul Banfield, Acting University Archivist. In a single casual remark in a letter to William James dated 6 April 1881 GA mentions that he spent the summer of 1867 back in Kingston. See Correspondence of William James, eds. Ignas K. Skrupskelis & Elizabeth M. Berkley. University Press of Virginia, 1997, 5, 158-9.

[53a]There is an amusing if rather malicious pen-portrait of York Powell in Sir Charles Oman, Memories of Victorian Oxford and of Some Early Years. Methuen, 1941, 204-6. According to Oman, he produced nothing at all of substance during his eight years of holding this prestigious appointment. He died in 1904.

[54] GA, 'The Positive Aspect of Communism', Oxford University Magazine and Review, 2 (Dec 1869), 97-109.

[55] Allen/Bootheway marriage: GRO Entry of Marriage dated 30 Sep 1868. Nothing is known directly of his family’s reaction to the marriage.

[56] ALS, Richard Pope to Clodd, undated, bound in Clodd’s copy of his Memoir. Leeds.

[57] Clodd, p.17.

[58] Quotations from two ALS to Edward Williams Byron Nicholson. Bodleian Library, Oxford. MS.Top.Oxon.d.120, fols 68, 70. The first was written after Christmas Day 1869 and the second on New Year’s Day, 1870.

[59] Quoted in Walter Leuba, George Saintsbury. Twayne, 1967, p.18.

[60] J.G. Swift MacNeill, What I Have Seen and Heard. Boston: Little, Brown, 1925, p.91.

[61] GA, 'A Modern College Education: Does It Educate in the Broadest and Most Liberal Sense of the Term?' Cosmopolitan, 23 (Oct 1897), 613, 615. Cosmopolitan was one of the new smart American glossy magazines, and Allen chooses his tone accordingly, but he repeated sentiments like these elsewhere.

[62] PAP, p.43.

[63] GA, Philistia. New ed. Chatto & Windus, 1895, p.167.

[64] Frank Harris, in Frank Harris: His Life and Adventures. An Autobiography with an Introduction by Grant Richards. Richards, 1947 reminisces as follows: ‘[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’ (p.154). Harris then explains how he was soon appointed by ‘Dr Bigge', the headmaster (actually the Rev Charles Bigg). The truth is that Harris went to Brighton as a French teacher, and not until 1875. This was four years after Allen had left his post as a Classics teacher, and he was never, of course, ‘Professor of Literature’ there.

[65] In a group of MS poems titled ‘Poems / by Grant Allen.’ Bodleian Library, Oxford. MS.Eng.poet.c.14, fol. 8.

[66] GA, Philistia, p.164.

[67] Clodd, p.162.

Chapter 2: Jamaica

[68] Allen recorded his first impressions of Kingston in the St James~s Gazette, 1 (23 Oct 1880), 12-13, and in an unpublished and undated article ‘Jamaican Reminiscences.’ PSU.

[69] [Charles J.G. Rampini], Letters from Jamaica. ‘The Land of Streams and Woods’. Edinburgh: Edmonston & Douglas, 1873, p.19.

[70] Anthony Trollope, The West Indies and the Spanish Main. 4^th ed. Rpt. Dawsons, 1968, p.14.

[71] Sir Sibbald David Scott, To Jamaica and Back. Chapman & Hall, 1876, p.76.

[72] Quoted in Letters from Jamaica, p.69.

[73] An autobiographical detail in the story 'Ivan Greet’s Masterpiece', Ivan Greet~s Masterpiece Etc. Chatto & Windus, 1893, p.32.

[74] Trollope, The West Indies, p.19.

[75] ALS, 5 July 1873. PSU.

[76] Gall~s Packet Newsletter [Kingston], 11 Dec 1873, 3.

[77] Colonial Standard and Jamaica Despatch [Kingston], 24 Mar 1874, 2.

[78] The Gleaner and De Cordova~s Advertising Sheet [Kingston], 27 May 1874, 4.

[79] Edward Clodd prints the full text of the (undated) rhyming letter in Memories. 2nd ed. Chapman & Hall, 1916, pp.25-26.

[80] Allen’s ALS to Herbert Spencer, 9 Feb 1875 mentions that Nellie Allen was in England with her parents at that date. University of London Library, MS791, fol. 104. A poem titled ‘To F.L.R. On Leaving Jamaica’ dated July 1876 mentions that his wife was absent at that date. PSU.

[81] Edward Clodd recorded the gossip of a Kingston journalist in his diary entry for 24 Feb 1905, while visiting Jamaica, but only part of the entry is decipherable. MS Clodd Diary. Leeds. Many years later, a gossip column in a Jamaican newspaper recorded: ‘His only known descendant here was a brilliant young man by the name of Hamilton. . . . But alas! Hamilton left for Panama without perpetuating in Jamaica the precious Grant Allen genes, and miscegenation, which had so much to its debit, lost the opportunity of adding the Grant Allen genes to its credit.’ Percy Flaj, ‘Grant Allen', The Sunday Gleaner, 26 Mar 1972, 10.

[82] Scott, To Jamaica and Back, p.246. Scott lunched with the Allens during his travels and provides the only known pen-picture of them ‘at home’ there.

[83] The Morning Journal [Kingston], 3 July 1875, 1

[84] A.C. Sinclair and Laurence R. Fyfe, The Handbook of Jamaica for 1883: Comprising Historical, Statistical and General Information Concerning the Island. London/Jamaica: Edward Stanford/Government Printing Establishment, 1883, p.329.

[85] The Gleaner and De Cordova~s Advertising Sheet [Kingston], 5 July 1876, np.

[86] Clodd, Memories, p.22.

[87] GA, ‘The Great Tropical Fallacy', Belgravia, 35 (June 1878), 413-425. This is one of several pieces about life in Jamaica which Allen wrote for the Belgravia soon after his return to England.

[88] GA, ‘Among the Blue Mountains', Belgravia, 39 (July-Oct 1879), 355, 357.

[89] GA, ‘The Epicure in Jamaica', Belgravia, 44 (May 1881), 285-299. Signed J. Arbuthnot Wilson.

[90] GA, ‘The Great Tropical Fallacy', 423; ‘Tropical Education', Longman~s Magazine, 14 (Sep 1889), 489.

[91] GA’s opinions on Jamaican education and race relations are quoted from Allen’s letters home in Clodd, pp.41, 43, 40.

[92] [W.G. Palgrave], ‘Jamaica', Quarterly Review, 139 (July 1875), 72.

[93] GA, In All Shades. Rand, McNally (1888), p.73.

[94] GA, ‘Down the Rapids', Belgravia: A London Magazine, 37 (Jan 1879), 288-296. Signed J. Arbuthnot Wilson.

[95] GA, ‘The Human Face Divine', New Quarterly Magazine, 2 n.s (July 1879), 167, 180. Unsigned and authorship not quite certain, but GA expressed notions similar to these elsewhere.

[96] Letters from Jamaica, p.81.

[97] Letters from Jamaica, p.16.

[98] GA, ‘A Jamaica Hurricane', St James~s Gazette, 1 (31 Aug 1880), 12-13. Unsigned.

[99] Lord Oliver, Jamaica, the Blessed Isle. Faber, 1936, p.206.

[100] GA, ‘Tropical Education', Longman~s Magazine, 14 (Sep 1889), 478-489.

[101] GA, ‘Ivan Greet’s Masterpiece', Ivan Greet~s Masterpiece Etc. Chatto & Windus, 1893, p.23. First published in the Graphic, 28 Nov 1892.

[102] GA uses these examples in his ‘Excursus II: On the Origin of Tree-Worship’ in his translation and edition of The Attis of Caius Valerius Catullus. David Nutt, 1892, pp.60-1.

[103] An account of this episode appeared in the Colonial Standard and Jamaica Despatch [Kingston], 28 Mar 1874, 2.

[104] Offprints of this paper, ‘Force and Energy', Canadian Monthly and National Review, 10 (July 1876), 20-31 may be what Clodd, p.44 refers to as ‘a treatise . . . first printed for private circulation in 1876.’ In 1888 Allen expanded it into a book with the same title.

[105] GA, ‘To Herbert Spencer', reprinted in The Lower Slopes: Reminiscences of Excursions Round the Base of Helicon, Undertaken for the Most Part in Early Manhood. Elkin Mathews & John Lane, 1894.

[106] ALS, GA to Herbert Spencer, 10 Nov 1874. University of London Library, MS791, fol. 102.

[107] Allen printed Spencer’s response to his poem and details of their first meeting in ‘Personal Reminiscences of Herbert Spencer,’ Forum, 35 (Apr 1904), 610-628, a memoir written in 1894.

Chapter 3: Setting Out the Stall

[108] PAP, p.44; a claim repeated in Clodd, p.58.

[109] ‘The Trade of Author', Fortnightly Review, 51/45 (Feb 1889), 267-8. Unsigned.

[110] The preceding quotations are taken from GA, Physiological Aesthetics. Henry S. King, 1877, pp.261ff.

[111] PAP, p.46.

[112] Thirty shillings a week (L178pa) was the stereotypical income of a skilled workman in the 1870s and still taken to be ‘a general average’ in 1901. The Realist novelist Arthur Morrison showed in detail how, ‘assuming that his wife is not a fool', a family man with three children could enjoy a ‘fairly comfortable standard of living’ on this. See his ‘Family Budgets. 1. A Workman’s Budget', Cornhill Magazine, 10 (Apr 1901), 446-456. Miranda Hill, in ‘Life on Thirty Shillings a Week', The Nineteenth Century, 23 (Mar 1888), 458-463 drew up a similar (real-life) budget. For many workers, of course -- especially women -- 30s a week was an impossible dream. Many families existed on a man’s wages of a pound a week. Both Reardon and Biffen are shown sustaining life as single men on twelve shillings and sixpence a week in New Grub Street.

[113] ‘My Lares and Penates', American Magazine, 6 (Oct 1887), 721. Sir William Wilson Hunter’s Imperial Gazetteer of India was published by Treubner in 1881 in nine volumes. In his Preface Hunter thanks Allen for his help, and they remained on good terms because he was one of Allen’s informants for The Colour-sense. J.S. Cotton of the Academy, who much later would write the entry on Allen in the DNB, worked on the same project. GA called Hunter a ‘literary whitewasher’ in an undated letter to A. R. Wallace, partially quoted in the latter’s My Life: A Record of Events and Opinions. Chapman & Hall, 1905, II, 263.

[114] So described by Richard Le Gallienne, quoted in Roger Lancelyn Green, Andrew Lang. Bodley Head, 1962, p.31.

[115] Saintsbury’s amusements are described in Dorothy Richardson Jones, ~King of Critics~: George Saintsbury, 1845-1933, Critic, Journalist, Historian, Professor. U. Michigan P., 1992, p.17.

[116] In a letter to Longman, quoted in Clodd, p.203.

[117] Andrew Lang, ‘Grant Allen', Argosy, 71 (Aug 1900), 412. Emphases added. He describes Allen’s scientific interests as ‘stinks’ in an undated letter to Clodd [dated ‘1900’ in another hand]. Leeds. Clodd silently omitted this comment when he printed the letter.

[118] These are the figures quoted in Roger Lancelyn Green, Andrew Lang: A Critical Biography. Leicester: Edmund Ward, 1946, p. x.

[119] Andrew Lang, ‘Mr Grant Allen. In Memoriam', Daily News, 28 Oct 1899, 7. Lang was right in his identification, but a letter to Nellie Allen at the time (probably 1888) suggests he misrepresents slightly what happened. ‘I owe you an apology for inadvertently suggesting that I fancied Mr Massinger a caricature of me. Alas--I never had that hero’s beauty, bravery, and luck at roulette: and I really never dreamed of anything but the most vacant chaff. . . . I hope Mr Allen is convinced that nothing would ever cause me to suspect, or expect, anything but the greatest kindness from him, even if it comes to pitching sacred stones at each other.’ ALS undated. Poetry/Rare Books Collection, State University of New York at Buffalo Library.

[120] GA, ‘The ‘Diversions of Priestley’', London, 4 (2 Nov 1878), 422-3, (9 Nov 1878), 447-8; (16 Nov 1878), 471-2.

]121] GA, ‘The Book of the Week. Tropical Nature', London, 3 (18 May 1878), 379.

[122] [Review of The Colour-sense]', London: The Conservative Weekly Journal, 5 (1 Mar 1879), 176-7.

[123] GA’s income was in the top 1% in Britain judging from the income tables in Harold Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society: England Since 1880. Routledge, 1989, pp.29-30. An article by G. S. Layard, ‘How to Live on ‘700 a Year', Nineteenth Century, 23 (Feb 1888), 239-244 describes such a life-style.

[124] Clodd, p.85.

[125] NGS, p.230.

[126] GA, ‘Some New Books', Fortnightly Review, 32 (July 1879), 154.

[127] PAP, p.47.

[128] GA, Philistia. New ed. Chatto & Windus, 1895, 270-271.

[129] ALS, Charles Darwin to G. J. Romanes, 23 July 1879. Item 12168 of the Cambridge University Library’s Darwin Correspondence Project.

[130] GA, ‘Wintering in Hyeres', Belgravia: A London Magazine, 41 (May 1880), 46. Signed ‘J. Arbuthnot Wilson.’

[131] GA’s speculation is in ‘Glacial Epochs', St James~s Gazette, 2 (22 Jan 1881), 12-13. Unsigned.

[132] GA, ‘Monaco and Monte Carlo', Belgravia, 43 (Jan 1881), 324. Signed ‘J. Arbuthnot Wilson.’

[133] ALS, GA to George Croom Robertson, ‘Feb 23’ [1885?]. University College Library, University of London. MS Add.88/12.

[134] PAP, p.52.

[135] ‘X’, ‘New Grub Street’ [letter], Author, 2 (1 Aug 1891), 92.

[136] Allen uses this analogy in his ‘The Trade of Author', 269.

[137] GA, At Market Value. New ed. Chatto & Windus, 1895, p. 293.

[138] GA, ‘The Trade of Author', 263.

[139] GA, ‘My Lares and Penates', 725.

[140] Stead reprinted extracts with a commentary in the Pall Mall Gazette, 46 (4 Oct 1887), 13. Allen’s complaint appeared in the issue of 6 Oct 1887, 7. Defending himself, Stead pointed out that the American Magazine circulated simultaneously in England and America, and therefore many English readers would be seeing it anyway.

[141] Walter Besant, The Pen and the Book. Thomas Burleigh, 1899, p.30.

[142] Authorship as an occupation, c.1880: Richard D. Altick, ‘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), 400, quotes these figures but warns against taking them entirely at face value, for reasons which we need not pursue here. Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society, p.80, gives slightly lower figures for the category ‘authors, journalists', but those include male workers only. The other estimate is Walter Besant’s, as quoted in Richard D. Altick, ‘Publishing’ in A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture, ed. Herbert F. Tucker. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999, p.297.

[143] Quoted in James Hepburn, The Author~s Empty Purse and the Rise of the Literary Agent. Oxford UP., 1968, p.15.

[144] For James’s earnings over the period of GA’s career, see Michael Anesko, ~Friction with the Market~: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship. Oxford UP., 1986. Anesko’s meticulous work allows this figure to be derived from his Table 1 (p.176) for the period 1877-1899, converted at the rate of $4.85 to the pound sterling.

[145] Saintsbury’s earnings are detailed in John Gross, The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: Aspects of English Literary Life Since 1800. Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1973, p.158.

[146] His attempts to secure a post are described in Valentine Cunningham, ‘Darke Conceits: the Professions of Criticism', Grub Street and the Ivory Tower: Literary Journalism and Literary Scholarship from Fielding to the Internet, eds. Jeremy Treglown & Bridget Bennett. Oxford: Clarendon P., 1998, pp.72-90.

[147] J. W. Saunders, The Profession of English Letters. Routledge/U. Toronto P., 1964, p.175. For a broader sampling of Victorian authors of note who were insulated in one way or another from market forces see Valentine Cunningham’s witty ‘Unto Him (or Her) That Hath’: How Victorian Writers Made Ends Meet', Times Literary Supplement, 11 Sep 1998, 12-13. There is a good deal of extra detail in Paul Delany's Literature, Money and the Market: From Trollope to Amis. Palgrave, 2002, especially chapter 7.

[148] The quotations from Conrad are all drawn from Peter D. McDonald, British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice 1880-1914. Cambridge: Cambridge UP., 1997, pp.22, 24, 26.

[149] George Saintsbury, quoted in Jones, ~King of Critics~, p.98.

[150] NGS, p.347.

[151] ‘Does Writing Pay? The Confessions of an Author', Belgravia (Jan 1881), 283, 284, 296. Unsigned.

[152] Margaret Beetham, ‘Towards a Theory of the Periodical as a Publishing Genre', Investigating Victorian Journalism, eds. Laurel Brake et al. Macmillan, 1990, pp.19-32.

[153] This and the other epithets are drawn from Kelly J. Mays, ‘The Disease of Reading and Victorian Periodicals’ in Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-century British Publishing and Reading Practices, eds. John O. Jordan & Robert L. Patten. Cambridge UP., 1995, p.176.

[154] NGS, p.55.

[155] A. St John Adcock, ‘The Literary Life', Modern Grub Street and Other Essays. Herbert & Daniel, [1913], p.12.

[156] Adcock, ‘The Literary Life', pp.20-21.

[157] NGS, p.454.

[158] Besant, The Pen and the Book, p.9.

[159] Nigel Cross’s invaluable The Common Writer: Life in Nineteenth-Century Grub Street. Cambridge UP, 1985, provides information about the fate of ‘the wrecks.’

[160] Cunningham, ‘Darke Conceits', pp.73-4.

[161] ‘The Trade of Author', 266.

[162] The Pen, as a Means of Earning a Livelihood, by an Associate of the Institute of Journalists. John Heywood, 1894, pp.7, 3.

[163] [Arnold Bennett,] The Truth about an Author. Constable, 1903, pp.61-2.

[164] Adcock, ‘The Literary Life', p.21.

[165] [W. T. Stead], ‘Preface', Index to the Periodical Literature of the World. (Covering the Year 1891). Review of Reviews, 1892, p.8.

[166] John Oldcastle [ie Wilfred Meynell], Journals and Journalism: With a Guide for Literary Beginners. Field & Tuer, 1880, pp.41-2.

[167] Besant, The Pen and the Book, pp.135, 230.

[168] Walter Besant, ‘Literature as a Career', The Forum, 13 (Aug 1892), 702-3.

[169] NGS, p.347.

[170] Besant, ‘Literature as a Career', 701-2.

[171] ‘Literature as a Profession: A Fragment of an Autobiography by a Successful Author', Eclectic Magazine, 32 (Dec 1880), 699. (Reprinted from Belgravia.) Unsigned.

[172] Besant, ‘Literature as a Career', 707.

[173] GA, ‘Depression', Westminster Gazette, 5 (19 Jan 1895), 1-2.

[174] John Dawson, Practical Journalism, How to Enter Thereon and Succeed. A Manual for Beginners and Amateurs. L. Upcott Gill, 1885, p.93.

Chapter 4: A Pedlar Crying Stuff: Selling the Wares

[175] GA, ‘Geology and History', Fraser's Magazine for Town and Country, 21 (June 1880), 780.

[176] GA, ‘Annals of Churnside. I.’King’s Peddington', Pall Mall Gazette, 33 (31 Jan 1881), 10-11. Unsigned.

[177] GA, ‘Springtide, North and South', Pall Mall Gazette, 5 Apr 1883, 4. This article inspired a poem from the Laureate, Alfred Austin. See The Autobiography of Alfred Austin Poet Laureate 1835-1910. 2 vols. Macmillan, 1911, II, 184.

[178] So GA claimed in Richards, ‘Mr Grant Allen and His Work', Novel Review, 1 (June 1892), 264. Actually there were at least three signed turnovers before Allen’s piece appeared on 25 Sep 1883. (One of these used a pen-name.) Allen’s co-writer of turnovers for the Pall Mall, Aaron Watson, recalls Allen’s labours in his A Newspaper Man~s Memories. Hutchinson, [1925].

[179] See GA’s letter ‘A Doubtful British Mollusc', Nature, 22 (9 Sep 1880), 435.

[180] GA, ‘The Philosophy of a Visiting Card', Cornhill Magazine, 46 (Sep 1882), 273-290. Unsigned.

[181] ‘A Scribbler’s Apology', Cornhill Magazine, 47 (May 1883), 542. Unsigned.

[182] Arthur Machen, The Autobiography of Arthur Machen. Richards, 1951, p.236.

[183]Information from John Dawson, Practical Journalism, How to Enter Thereon and Succeed. A Manual for Beginners and Amateurs. L. Upcott Gill, 1885, p.113. Another source quotes sixpence a line for the Pall Mall, which amounts to about the same for middles of the length that Allen contributed.

[184] GA, ‘Rural America', St James~s Gazette, 1 (1 Oct 1880), 12-13. Unsigned.

[185] GA, ‘Among the Thousand Islands', Belgravia: A London Magazine, 36 (Oct 1878), 415. Signed J. Arbuthnot Wilson,

[186] GA, ‘A Scribbler’s Apology', 540.

[187] GA, ‘An American Farm', St James~s Gazette, 1 (4 Oct 1880), 12-13. Unsigned.

[188] GA’s loathing of London is illustrated by quotations drawn from his ‘Preface', Science in Arcady. Lawrence & Bullen, 1892, p. ix; and his article ‘Beautiful London', Fortnightly Review, 60 (July 1893), 44, 50.

[189] ALS, GA to Croom Robertson, 9 Oct 1881. University College Library, University of London, MS.Add.88/12. Robertson (1842-1892) was editor of Mind and Grote Professor of Mind and Logic at University College London.

[190] ALS, GA to Croom Robertson, 3 Nov 1881. University College Library, University of London, MS.Add.88/12.

[191] Letters passing between Darwin, Romanes, Croom Robertson and Allen on this matter are items 12168, 13600, 13627, 13633, 13638, 13644, and 13736 of the Cambridge University Library’s Darwin Correspondence Project.

[192] Quoted in Grant Richards, ‘Mr Grant Allen and His Work', Novel Review, 1 (June 1892), 265.

[193] ALS, Chatto to GA, 5 Nov 1883. CW.

[194] Clodd, p.122-3.

[195] ALS, Chatto to GA, 29 Oct 1883. CW.

[196] ALS, GA to Croom Robertson, ‘Feb 23’ [1885?]. University College Library, University of London, MS.Add.88/12.

[197] The following quotations are from Philistia. New ed. Chatto & Windus, 1895, pp.2-115.

[198] Frank Harris’s editorial policy: Grant Richards, ‘A Note on Frank Harris', Frank Harris: His Life and Adventures. An Autobiography with an Introduction by Grant Richards. Richards, 1947, p. x. Richards implies that Allen was a victim of this behaviour while Harris was editor of the Fortnightly. But Harris did not take this post until 1886, two years after Philistia appeared. Harris was formerly a newspaper editor, like the editor in the novel, and may have behaved thus in that capacity, although Allen himself could not have been a victim.

[199] ALS, GA to George Croom Robertson, ‘Feb 23.’ University College London Library. In MS.Add.88/12.

[200] The work appeared as The Tidal Thames. With Twenty Full-page Photogravure Plates Printed on India Paper, and Other Illustrations, After Original Drawings, by W. L. Wyllie, and Descriptive Letterpress by G. Allen. Cassell, [1892].

[201] GA, ‘Untrodden Provence', St James~s Gazette, 1 (30 Nov 1880), 13. Unsigned.

[202] GA, ‘Cap d'Antibes', Longman's Magazine, 15 (Mar 1890), 505-514.

[203] Alice Bird’s reminiscences in a letter of 12 Jan 1900, quoted Clodd, pp.108, 110.

[204] Quoted in Doris Langley Moore, E. Nesbit: A Biography Revised with New Material. Ernest Benn, 1967, pp.156-7.

[205] ALS, Chatto to GA, 14 Sep 1886. CW.

[206] MS Clodd Diary, entry for Tuesday 26 Jan 1886. Leeds.

[207] Clodd, p.105.

[208] ALS, Lang to GA, ‘Jun 29’ [1888]. Poetry/Rare Books Collection, State University of New York at Buffalo Library.

[209] Herbert Spencer, Autobiography. Williams & Norgate, 1904, II, 412.

[210] These quotations from Dumaresq~s Daughter. New ed. Chatto & Windus, 1893, pp.9-92.

[211] Clodd, p.140. The MS Clodd Diary, 1889 covers the Egyptian tour. Leeds also holds a partial typewritten transcript of the diary, which covers the full period of his acquaintance with Allen; but it is highly selective and unreliable. Many of the MS entries, in tiny handwriting, are unfortunately illegible.

Chapter 5: The Stock in Trade: Writing Science

[212] GA, ‘The Progress of Science from 1836 to 1886', Fortnightly Review, 47 (June 1887), 883.

[213] Huxley’s approving comments are quoted in Clodd, pp.111, 112.

[214] The GA/Carpenter exchange over Vignettes from Nature is in Nature, 25 (16 Mar 1882), 459 and 25 (23 Mar 1882), 480-481. The description of Moorland Idylls as ‘science diluted with sentiment’ comes from the unsigned review in Nature, 52 (26 Mar 1896), 486. The unsigned review ‘Parturiunt Montes’ is in Nature, 52 (15 Aug 1895), 364-365.

[215] F.O. Bower, ‘Mr Grant Allen’s Article on ‘The Shapes of Leaves’', Nature, 27 (12 Apr 1883), 552.

[216] GA, ‘Leaves and Their Environment', Nature, 27 (26 Apr 1883), 605.

[217] W. T. Thistleton Dyer, ‘Deductive Biology', Nature, 27 (12 Apr 1883), 554.

[218] The phrase ‘unfathomed depths’ is Michael Ruse’s. See his article ‘Herbert Spencer', The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, ed. Ted Honderich. Oxford UP., 1995.

[219] The intellectual relations between GA and Spencer as GA saw them are best described in his ‘Spencer and Darwin', [an article-review of Pioneers of Evolution by Edward Clodd], Fortnightly Review, 67 (Feb 1897), 251-262.

[220] GA, ‘Force and Energy', Canadian Monthly and National Review, 10 (July 1876), 29.

[221] GA made this claim about Spencer in his contribution to ‘Fine Passages in Verse and Prose; Selected by Living Men of Letters', Fortnightly Review, 48/42ns (Aug 1887), 300.

[222] The quoted judgments about Spencer are taken from GA, ‘Personal Reminiscences of Herbert Spencer', Forum, 35 (Apr 1904), 610, 628. How the Forum came by the article is unclear, but no UK publication is known.

[223] Herbert Spencer, Autobiography, II, 4-5. Spencer’s essay advocating leaving banks unregulated appeared in the Westminster Review in 1857.

[224] The following quotations from Spencer are all drawn from Social Statics; or, the Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified, and the First of the Them Developed. Williams & Norgate, 1868 (a reprint of the American ed. and identical to the first British ed. of 1851), pp.257, 353-4, 414.

[225] GA, ‘Personal Reminiscences', p. 611.

[226] Bowler, Peter J. The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades around 1900. Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1983. A.R. Wallace, for instance, set his face against use-inheritance but was credulous about accepting examples of pre-natal influence, including an absurd case where a pregnant woman nursed a gamekeeper after his arm was amputated, only to produce a baby with a stump for an arm: Wallace found this very convincing indeed.

[227] Children of acrobats: This and other examples are mentioned quite uncritically in GA, ‘Second Nature', Common Sense Science. Boston: D. Lothrop, 1886.

[228] GA, ‘The Genesis of Genius', Atlantic Monthly, 47 (Mar 1881), 377

[229] ‘Falling in Love', Fortnightly Review, 40 (Oct 1886), 452-462.

[230] GA reviewed Weismann's Essays upon Heredity and Kindred Biological Problems’ in the Academy, 37 (1 Feb 1890), 84.

[231] For Spencer’s defence, see David Duncan, Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer. Methuen, 1908, pp.344ff. GA’s comments on Spencer’s psychology are quoted in Blathwayt, p.72.

[232] GA, ‘The Mystery of Birth', Fortnightly Review, 64/58ns (July 1895), 113-120. This is a reworking of a simpler version published under the same title four years earlier in the New Review, 4 (June 1891), 531-539, and an even earlier version, ‘A Living Mystery', Popular Science Monthly, 33 (Oct 1888), 730-739.

[233] ‘The Mystery of Birth', 118-120.

[234] This charge was made in ‘Mr Grant Allen’s Views', Natural Science: A Monthly Review of Scientific Progress, 7 (Sep 1895), 160. Unsigned.

[235] GA, ‘Our Scientific Causerie: The New Theory of Heredity', Review of Reviews, 1 (June 1890), 538.

[236] This judgment is Conway Zirkle’s, in Evolution, Marxian Biology and the Social Scene. U. Pennsylvania P., 1959, p.128.

[237] GA’s review of Weismann's Essays upon Heredity, Academy, 37 (1 Feb 1890), 84.

[238] Galton’s anecdote about fingerprints is quoted in David Duncan, Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer. Methuen, 1908, p.502.

[239] GA, Charles Darwin. Longmans, Green, 1885, p.62.

[240] H. G. Wells, An Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (Since 1866). 2 vols. Gollancz, 1934, II, 547.

[241] O[liver] J. Lodge, ‘Mr Grant Allen’s Notions about Force and Energy', Nature, 39 (24 Jan 1889), 291. Among other howlers, Allen seems to suppose that a cannon ball fired horizontally employs its energy in counteracting the force of gravity. He seems unaware that it will reach the ground as the same moment as another ball dropped vertically from the same height. Karl Pearson reviewed the book in Academy, 34 (29 Dec 1888), 421-422. The news that Force and Energy was being ‘converted into wallpaper’ is mentioned in a dictated LS from GA to Edward Clodd, ‘March 17th’ [1889]. Leeds.

[242] GA, ‘Dr Greatrex’s Engagement', Cornhill Magazine, 2 (June 1884), 561-583. Unsigned.

[243] Walter Besant, The Pen and the Book. Thomas Burleigh, 1899, p.171. Besant’s comments about treatises are in Ch. IV passim.

[244] The statistics about scientific articles carried by periodicals are derived from A. J. Meadows, ‘Access to the Results of Scientific Research: Developments in Victorian Britain', in Development of Science Publishing in Europe, ed. A. J. Meadows. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1980, p.54. Stead’s comments about scientific journalism are quoted in ‘Introduction’ to Index to the Periodical Literature of the World. (Covering the Year 1892). Review of Reviews, 1893, p.2.

[245] Meadows, ‘Access to the Results', p.57, quoting from a letter of 1874.

[246] ‘The Late R. A. Proctor', Knowledge, 4 (1 Nov 1886), 25. The obituary was almost certainly written by the new editor, Arthur Cowper Ranyard, an astronomer. Proctor’s comment on stone-breaking as an alternative career is quoted in ‘Proctor, Richard Anthony', Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Stephen & Lee, 46, 419-20.

[247] Editorial, Knowledge, 1 (4 Nov 1881), 3.

[248] GA, 'The Trade of Author', Fortnightly Review, 51/45 (Feb 1889), 264. Unsigned.

[249] These calculations ignore tiny sums in royalties paid in later years, totalling a few pounds. Chatto sent him a cheque for current sales on his first two books as late as 1897: it was for 12s 2d. The returns from the periodical publications are estimates. I have assumed the St James~s Gazette paid three guineas an essay; the Pall Mall four pounds each; and that the long essays in Flowers and Their Pedigrees earned twelve guineas each. The total sum quoted probably errs on the generous side.

[250] NGS, p.397.

[251] Lang on GA's ‘slaps at orthodoxy’ and his request for small changes: ALS ‘Aug 5’ [1885]. Poetry/Rare Books Collection, State University of New York at Buffalo Library.

[252] GA, Charles Darwin, p.111.

[253] GA, ‘Big Animals', Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, 41 (June 1885), 778-786. Unsigned. Reprinted from Cornhill Magazine, 4 (Apr 1885), 405-419.

[254] GA, ‘The First Potter', Longman~s Magazine, 6 (July 1885), 265.

[255] Richard Le Gallienne’s phrase ‘sugar-candy euphuism’: ‘Grant Allen', Attitudes and Avowals With Some Retrospective Reviews. John Lane, 1910, p.181.

[256] GA, The Beckoning Hand and Other Stories. Chatto & Windus, 1887, p.277. The story first appeared in Belgravia, 56 (Apr 1885), 172-195.

[257] GA, ‘The Missing Link’ in Ivan Greet's Masterpiece, Etc. Chatto & Windus, 1893, p.179.

[258] GA, ‘Preface', Ivan Greet~s Masterpiece, Etc. Chatto & Windus, 1893.

[259] Letter from Wells to GA [late summer 1895?], The Correspondence of H. G. Wells, ed. David C. Smith. Pickering & Chatto, 1998, I, 245-6.

[260] TLS to Wells, ‘June 11. 95’ added by hand. H. G. Wells collection, University of Illinois Library, Chicago, A78.

[261] H.G. Wells, An Experiment in Autobiography, II, 551-552.

Chapter 6: The Stock in Trade: Light Fiction

[262] GA, ‘The Trade of Author', Fortnightly Review, 51/45 (Feb 1889), 268.

[263] Richard Le Gallienne, ‘Grant Allen', Attitudes and Avowals With Some Retrospective Reviews. John Lane, 1910, p.197.

[264] PAP, p.43.

[265] Frederic Harrison, Grant Allen, 1848-1899; an Address Delivered at Woking on October 27, 1899. Privately printed [at the Chiswick Press], 1899, p.8. Allen’s widow would not have liked hearing that, however. She told Clodd that her husband ‘really had a much higher idea of his novels than many people had, and used to say how much thought and work he had put into his later ones. He believed this would be recognized some day.’ ALS, ‘April 9th’ [1900] to Edward Clodd. In Clodd Correspondence, Leeds.

[266] John Oldcastle [ie Wilfred Meynell], Journals and Journalism: With a Guide for Literary Beginners. Field & Tuer, 1880.

[267] The Pall Mall Gazette reported that 1,315 novels were published in Britain in 1894. The next largest category was educational works, mostly text-books (615). None of the other identified categories amounted to more than a few hundred each. Simon Eliot’s Fig.26 shows that 31% of published titles were fiction over the period 1890-9, while the next three named categories did not exceed 12% each. See Some Patterns and Trends in British Publishing 1800-1919. The Bibliographical Society, 1994, p.14.

[268] Walter Besant, The Pen and the Book. Thomas Burleigh, 1899, pp.137, 143.

[269] This evaluation of the Cornhill~s market appeal is quoted in Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers and Periodicals 1800-1900. Series 1 of 5. 10 vols. Waterloo, Ont.: North Waterloo Academic P., 1997, 2, 1261.

[270] Anecdote in PAP, p.49.

[271] GA, ‘Introduction', Strange Stories. Chatto & Windus (1884).

[272] GA, ‘The Romance of the Clash of Races', Westminster Gazette, 1 (15 Mar 1893), 4. Reprinted in Post-prandial Philosophy. Chatto & Windus, 1894, p.75.

[273] ALS, Chatto to GA, 14 Aug 1884. CW.

[274] ALS, Watt to GA, 19 May and 15 July 1885, Letterbook vol. IX. ‘I think you will be satisfied with this transaction', Watt wrote modestly. He was right. Watt.

[275] Quoted in ‘From Grant Allen Esq. Author of Philistia, In All Shades, etc etc’ in Collection of Letters Addressed to A.P. Watt by Various Writers. The Literary Agency, 1893, pp.1-2.

[276] Blathwayt, pp.72-3.On GA’s reference to ‘My marionettes’: ALS to Chatto, 9 Oct 1885. CW.

[277] ALS, Chatto to GA, 5 Oct 1885. CW.

[278] ALS, Chatto to GA, 2 Nov 1885. CW. Chatto did not insist on a deletion, however.

[279] ALS, GA to Chatto, 9 Oct 1885. CW.

[281] Twenty Guinea Condensation Prize', Tit-Bits, 21 (19 Dec 1891), 192. More than one of Bennett’s biographers calls this a parody but what it does is condense the plot in a mildly amusing way.

[282] Quotations from What~s Bred in the Bone. Newnes, [nd], p.4.

[283] Quoted in ‘Obituary. Mr Grant Allen', Daily News, 26 Oct 1899, 6. Unsigned.

[284] GA, Under Sealed Orders. New ed. Chatto and Windus, 1896, p.86.

[285] GA, The Duchess of Powysland. New ed. Chatto and Windus, 1894, p.134.

[286] Blathwayt, pp.72-73.

[287] GA, ‘Science in Education', Westminster Gazette, 1 (11 Feb 1893), 4. Reprinted in Post-prandial Philosophy. Chatto & Windus, 1894, pp.25-6.

[288] Quotations from GA, Dumaresq~s Daughter. New ed. Chatto and Windus, 1893, pp.184, 188, 194.

[289] Le Gallienne, ‘Grant Allen', p.210.

[290] ALS to George Croom Robertson, ‘Feb 23.’ University College London Library. In MS.Add.88/12. Clodd, probably correctly, dates the letter to 1885. It is true that in it Allen refers to ‘novels’ written since Philistia, whereas only one other had been published by 1885, but he already had both his third and fourth novels in manuscript by late 1885.

[291] GA, ‘Introduction', The British Barbarians. John Lane/G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1895, p. xi.

[292] Lang is quoted in ‘Mr Grant Allen: His Work and His Critics', Review of Reviews, 6 (Sep 1892), 266. Unsigned; probably W. T. Stead.

[293] ALS ‘Feb 11’ [1895?]. Rare Books Collection, State University of New York at Buffalo Library. The reference is almost certainly to The Woman Who Did, as Lane was sending out review copies early in that month of 1895. The mention of the ‘cuckoo’ is metonymic for GA's articles on natural history, and another letter discusses the habits of the bird. 'Cock' may also be a private joke: Lang had published his essays on psychical research as Cock Lane and Common Sense in 1894.

Chapter 7: The Prosperous Tradesman (1890-1894)

[294] Douglas Sladen, Twenty Years of My Life. Constable, 1915, p.258.

[295] Henry W. Nevinson, Changes and Chances. Nisbet, 1923, p.85.

[296] Frank Harris, ‘Grant Allen’ in Contemporary Portraits. Fourth Series. Grant Richards, 1924, p.94.

[297] Letter to Alice Howe Gibbens James, 18 Jan 1883. Correspondence, eds. Ignas K. Skrupskelis & Elizabeth M. Berkley. University Press of Virginia, 1997, 5, 397.

[298] Quoted in Hulda Friedrichs, The Life of Sir George Newnes, Bart. Hodder & Stoughton, 1911, pp.91-92. Even Allen would have jibbed at entering the preceding competition for the best short story: the prize was a house which had to be named ‘Tit-Bits Villa.’

[299] ‘English Literary Piracy', Popular Science Monthly, 32 (Jan 1888), 424. Unsigned. The Popular Science Monthly was very quick off the mark in pirating GA. It appropriated one of his first pieces for the Cornhill, ‘Aesthetic Analysis of an Obelisk', for its monthly supplement, 7-12 (1878), 152-159 and forty-seven more articles thereafter.

[300] ‘The Woes of an English Author. A Pathetic Letter from Grant Allen', Pall Mall Gazette, 46 (1 Aug 1887), 6-7. No explanation is offered as to why the letter is being reprinted two years after its appearance in the US.

[301] ‘To Dorking by Coach', The Magazine of Art, 10 (July 1887), 284-5.

[302] For more information on the Allen circle at Hindhead, see Derek Hudson, ‘English Switzerland in Surrey', Country Life, 10 May 1973, pp.1310-11; and W.R. Trotter, The Hilltop Writers: A Victorian Colony among the Surrey Hills. Lewes: The Book Guild, 1996, although the account of GA’s time there has minor errors.

[303] Clodd, p.149. The Croft, renamed and enlarged, still stands as a private house and I am grateful to the owner for allowing me to view the interior. A fire grate with the initials 'GA' is the only obvious reminder of its builder.

[304] Clodd, p.148.

[305] Netta Syrett, The Sheltering Tree: An Autobiography. Geoffrey Bles, 1939, pp.46-7.

[306] Morley Roberts, The Private Life of Henry Maitland. A Portrait of George Gissing, ed. Morchard Bishop. Richards, 1958, p.90. The article which Roberts remembered Gissing alluding to with ‘angry amusement’ was perhaps ‘My Lares and Penates', although that referred to the Dorking house.

[307] Richard Le Gallienne, ‘Grant Allen’ in Attitudes and Avowals With Some Retrospective Reviews. John Lane, 1910, p.179.

[308] Richard Le Gallienne, ‘[Review of] Post-Prandial Philosophy’ in Retrospective Reviews: A Literary Log, II (1893-1895).’ John Lane, 1896, p.93.

[309] GA, ‘A Point of Criticism', Westminster Gazette, 3 (30 Jan 1894), 1-2. Reprinted in Post-prandial Philosophy.’ Chatto & Windus, 1894, pp.207-8.

[310] ALS to Hubert Bland, ‘Aug. 9’. Bodleian Library, Oxford. MS.Eng.lett.e.120, fols 30-31. GA joined the Fabians in 1891.

[311] GA, ‘Individualism and Socialism', Contemporary Review, 55 (May 1889), 730-741.

[312] GA, ‘Introduction’ to The British Barbarians.’ John Lane/G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1895, pp. xvii-xviii.

[313] A correspondent, George Ives, wanted to know why homosexuals were not catered for in the New Hedonism: ‘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’. (‘The New Hedonism Controversy', Humanitarian, 5 [Oct 1894], 294.) W.T. Stead, commenting on this, wondered mischievously whether ‘any periodical in the English language will deliberately make its pages the arena for discussing the ethics of unnatural vice.’ (‘In Praise of Two Crimes', Review of Reviews, 10 [Oct 1894], 356.) Either GA made no reply or the Humanitarian refused to print it.

Chapter 8: Dealing with the ‘Dissenting Grocer’

[314] GA, ‘Letters in Philistia: A Bourgeois Literature', Fortnightly Review, 55 (June 1891), 953.

[315] GA, ‘Fiction and Mrs. Grundy', The Novel Review, 2 (July 1892), 294-315.

[316] George Moore, ‘A New Censorship of Literature', Pall Mall Gazette, 40 (10 Dec 1884), 1-2. The article generated some correspondence, but few were very sympathetic to Moore’s position. A common response was that Mudie was a businessman, not a promoter of the arts, and his customers’ desires were paramount.

[317] ALS, GA to Clement Shorter, undated. Shorter Correspondence, Leeds. The stories were presumably some of those which appeared in the Illustrated London News or the Sketch.

[318] ALS recipient unknown, ‘Nov 29^th.’ Bodleian Library. MS.Autogr.b.9, no.275.

[319] GA, ‘Preface', Ivan Greet~s Masterpiece, Etc. Chatto & Windus, 1893.

[320] GA, ‘Introduction', The British Barbarians. John Lane/G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1895, p. x.

[321] The question of syndication and its effect on authors’ incomes is thoroughly discussed in Graham Law, Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press. Palgrave, 2000.

[322] NGS, p.19.

[323] Quoted in Michael Anesko, ~Friction with the Market~: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship. New York: Oxford UP, 1986, p.38.

[324] It may be that some other novels were first serialized in newspapers, where they are effectively untraceable. None of Allen’s surviving private papers or his publishers’ and agents’ records give any more information.

[325] A.P. Watt & Co. Records, #11036. Manuscripts Department, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

[326] Of GA’s long novels (all three-deckers published by Chatto) the price he obtained for the serialisations, at home and/or overseas for three (The Devil~s Die, The Tents of Shem and At Market Value) is not known. For three more Chatto bought the entire copyright: Philistia (L250); Babylon (L300) and Under Sealed Orders (L800) and arranged serialisation himself for those. Details of the remaining five are as follows: In All Shades: serial rights (Chambers's Journal ) L210 (plus another L100 due to breach of contract); volume rights L75. This Mortal Coil: serial rights (Chambers's Journal) L300; Australian serial rights L70; volume rights L100. Dumaresq~s Daughter: serial rights (Chambers's Journal) L300; US rights L40; volume rights L180. The Duchess of Powysland: serial rights (People) L300; US rights L50; volume rights L190. The Scallywag: serial rights (Graphic) L400; Australian serial rights L50; US rights L40; Italian rights L2; volume rights L200. For these five, therefore, Chatto paid L745 to publish them in book form, but the serial rights totalled L1860, or 2.5 times as much. The sums shown are gross amounts from which Watt’s commission and other expenses were deducted.

[327] On 4 Oct 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 . . .’ David Y. Hughes was the first to draw attention to this, in ‘H.G. Wells and the Charge of Plagiarism', Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 21 (June 1966), 85-90. There is no reason to doubt this explanation, but no letter pertaining to this has survived in CW.

[328] GA, ‘The Trade of Author', Fortnightly Review, 51/45 (Feb 1889), 273. Unsigned.

[329] GA, ‘A Literary Causerie', The Speaker: A Review of Politics, Letters, Science and the Arts, 2 (1 Nov 1890), 495-496.

[330] [J. M. Barrie], ‘The Conspiracy against Mr Grant Allen', National Observer, 1 (22 Nov 1890), 12-13. Presumably it was ‘A Literary Causerie', published at the beginning of the month, which triggered this squib. [331] [W. T. Stead], ‘Philistia and Mr Grant Allen: A Word of Expostulation', Review of Reviews, 3 (June 1891), 585.

[332] GA, ‘The Worm Turns', Athenaeum, 30 July 1892, 160. It is certain that the work in question was an early draft of The Woman Who Did: see below.

[333] GA, ‘The Trade of Author', 267.

[334] GA, ‘Falling in Love', Falling in Love, with Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science. D. Appleton, 1890, pp. 13-14.

[335] Lang’s sympathetic note to GA: ALS ‘Aug 8’ [1892]. Poetry/Rare Books Collection, State University of New York at Buffalo Library.

[336] The examples given are discussed in Eric Trudgill, Madonnas and Magdalens: The Origins and Development of Victorian Sexual Attitudes. Heinemann, 1976, p.235.

[337] Clodd, p.154. He does not date it, and the letter is lost, but it must belong to 1892 because an unpublished ALS to a Mr Turner, to which the date ‘Tuesday Aug 2^nd /92’ has been added, probably by Nicholson, alludes to it. In this letter GA thanks Turner for his advice about the disposition of a manuscript and continues: ‘one of them [ie another letter, the one Clodd quotes] came from the Bodleian librarian at Oxford, asking me to deposit the MS in the library under a promise of secresy [sic] during my life time. I don’t think I will quite accept this offer. I’ll keep the MS while I live, and then leave it to my wife to dispose of in some way afterwards.’ Bodleian Library, Oxford. MS.Eng.lett.d.298, fol.23.

[338] The Silver Domino; or Side Whispers, Social and Literary. 16^th edition. Lamley, 1894, pp.342-3. First pub. 1892.

[339] ’The Man That Was Not Allowed', National Observer: A Record and Review, 8 (6 Aug 1892), 291. There is an excellent summary of the strident opinions of the Observer circle in Peter D. McDonald, British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice 1880-1914. Cambridge UP., 1997, from which some of the following details are drawn.

[340] TLS [copy?] in the Grant Richards Archives, 1897-1948. Reel 50: Correspondence: ‘Allen.’ Archives of British Publishers on Microfilm. Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1979.

[341] GA, ‘The Minor Poet', The Speaker: A Review of Politics, Letters, Science and the Arts, 6 (27 Aug 1892), 261.

[342] GA, ‘The Pot-boiler', Longman~s Magazine, 20 (Oct 1892), 591-602.

[343] GA, ‘Ivan Greet’s Masterpiece', Ivan Greet~s Masterpiece, Etc. Chatto & Windus, 1893, pp.3-4; 6-7. First published in the Graphic: An Illustrated Weekly Newspaper, 46 (Christmas Number, [28 Nov] 1892), 11-13.

[344] GA, ‘The Artist and the Penny-a-liner', The Speaker: A Review of Politics, Letters, Science and the Arts, 7 (1 Apr 1893), 370-371.

[345] GA, ‘How to Succeed in Literature', The Speaker: A Review of Politics, Letters, Science and the Arts, 8 (9 Sep 1893), 271-272.

[346] GA, ‘The New Hedonism', Fortnightly Review, 61 (Mar 1894), 390. The quotation from The Picture of Dorian Gray is from Ch.2. One example of a sympathetic but puzzled response was T.G. Bonney’s: reviewing it in the Humanitarian: A Monthly Review of Sociological Science, 5 (July 1894), 106-113, he challenged GA to define his program for individual redemption more closely.

[347] ‘[Review of The Lower Slopes]', Athenaeum, 24 Mar 1894, 368. Unsigned.

[348] GA, ‘Poor Little Soul', The Speaker: A Review of Politics, Letters, Science and the Arts, 9 (9 June 1894), 64.

[349] Quoted Clodd, pp.165-6. ‘

Chapter 9: Retailing The Woman Who Did

[350] Peter D. McDonald, British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice 1880-1914. Cambridge UP., 1997, pp.77-8.

[351] The readers’ reports, one (2pp) by Richard Le Gallienne dated ‘October 1893', and another (8pp) by George Moore dated ‘4 November’ [1893] are in a private collection. I am grateful to the owner for making them available.

[352] Dictated LS to John Lane, ‘Jan 14th’ and ‘Nov 19th’ [1894]. WAC.

[353] Lane’s engineered rarities are discussed in Margaret D. Stetz and Mark Samuels Lasner, England in the 1890s: Literary Publishing at the Bodley Head. Georgetown UP., 1990, p.46; and Margaret Diane Stetz, ‘Sex, Lies, and Printed Cloth: Bookselling at the Bodley Head in the Eighteen-Nineties', Victorian Studies, 35:1 (Autumn 1991), 74. GA’s response to this offer was dismissive. ‘Many thanks for your offer of copies with the old title page: but no thank you, I would prefer the new one. To tell you the truth, being an author, I prefer that my friends should have the title of the books in the way I intended it than have a mere rarity.’ Dictated LS to John Lane, ‘Jan 23rd [1894]. WAC.

The University of Liverpool Library holds an apparently unique copy of The Lower Slopes dated 1893.

[354] [W. T. Stead] ‘The Book of the Month: The Woman Who Did by Grant Allen', Review of Reviews (Feb 1895), 177.

[355] The Woman Who Did as catchphrase: The best-known fictional attempts to trade on GA’s success are Lucas Cleve [ie Adeline Georgina Isabella Kingscote], The Woman Who Wouldn~t.Simpkin, Marshall, 1895 and Victoria Cross(e) [ie Annie Sophie ‘Vivian’ Corey Griffin], The Woman Who Didn~t. John Lane, 1895. Other examples are Mrs Lovett Cameron [ie Caroline Emily Cameron], The Man Who Didn~t; or The Triumph of a Snipe Pie. Dedicated to Married Men. F. V. White, 1895; and S.C. Budd, ‘The Woman Who Did the Right Thing', Belgravia: London Magazine, 91 (1896), 337-352. A variant of the phrase was still doing service as late as 1916 with Rose Pastor Stokes’ play The Woman Who Wouldn~t.

[356] ALS, Cicely McDonald to GA, 8 Apr 1895. PSU.

[357] The Lanchester affair is discussed in, for example, David Rubinstein, Before the Suffragettes: Women’s Emancipation in the 1890s. Harvester, 1986, pp.58-63; and Karen Hunt, Equivocal Feminists: The Social Democratic Federation and the Woman Question 1884-1911. Cambridge UP., 1996, pp.94-106. For GA’s reaction, see MS Clodd Diary, entry for 22 Mar 1896: ‘Talk fell on the Lanchester case: Allen quite surprised me by his hesitation to approve in the concrete what he preaches in the abstract.’ (Leeds). Lanchester received scant sympathy from the SDF or its mouthpiece Justice either, as Hunt shows.

[358] Chris Healy, The Confessions of a Journalist. Chatto & Windus, 1904, p.31.

[359] I am grateful to John Owen Smith for these details of Flora Thompson’s reminiscences.

[360] GA, , pp.43-4. The Woman Who Did. Introduced by Sarah Wintle. Oxford UP, 1995, pp.43-44. Further page references are in the text.

[361] [W. T. Stead], ‘The Book of the Month', 185.

[362] Richard Le Gallienne, Retrospective Reviews: A Literary Log. Vol II (1893-1895). John Lane, 1896, p.225.

[363] Harold Frederic, ‘The Woman Who Did', New York Times, 17 Feb 1895, 8.

[364] D. F. Hannigan, ‘Sex in Fiction', Westminster Review, 143 (1895), 619.

[365] ‘An Unemancipated Novelist', Pall Mall Gazette, 20 Feb 1895, 4. Unsigned; but the reviewer was probably H.G. Wells.

[366] ALS, Archer to GA, 14 Feb 1895. PSU.

[367] ‘The Woman Who Wouldn’t Do (She-Note Series)', Punch, or the London Charivari, 108 (30 Mar 1895), 153.

[368] The Woman Who Did was proposed as an elaborate spoof in Lafcadio Hearn, ‘Grant Allen', Victorian Philosophy. Tokyo: Hokuseido P., 1930, pp 85-97. This is the text of a lecture given in 1900, probably after Clodd’s Memoir appeared. Millicent Fawcett, ‘The Woman Who Did', Contemporary Review, 67 (1895), 626, mentions that even in 1895 this was a speculation among her friends.

[369] [W. T. Stead], ‘The Book of the Month', 178. Stead also called it ‘a handy drawing-room tract for the extermination of certain heresies popular among advanced young persons.’

[370] Quoted in ‘Grant Allen’s Assault upon Marriage', Literary Digest, 10 (27 Apr 1895), 8. Unsigned.

[371] [Margaret Oliphant], ‘The Anti-marriage League', Blackwood’s Magazine, 159 (Jan 1896), 142.

[372] Fawcett, 630.

[373] Wells described the tone of his review in these terms in a half-apologetic letter after GA had praised The Time Machine. See The Correspondence of H. G. Wells, ed. David C. Smith. Pickering & Chatto, 1998, I, 245-6. Smith dates the letter provisionally to the late summer of 1895, just before Wells and GA met for the first time, as described years later in Wells’ Experiment in Autobiography. If that is correct, then Wells’ even more swingeing review of The British Barbarians in the Saturday Review, 80 (14 Dec 1895), 785-6 appeared after their meeting.

[374] Letter, Wells to A. T. Simmons, c. Mar 1895. Correspondence of H. G. Wells, I, 235.

[375] [H. G. Wells], ‘[Review of The Woman Who Did]', Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art, 79 (9 Mar 1895), 319-20. Unsigned.

[376] Clodd, p.155.

[377] GA, Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art, 79 (16 Mar 1895), 351. This letter to the editor was a protest against a sneer to this effect by H. G. Wells in his review.

[378] Letter of 4 July 1896, quoted in Clodd, pp.169-170. GA was President for three years up to his death. The Society dealt with broader social and scientific issues than its name suggests, and many of the intellectuals resident in the area were members.

[379] GA, ‘Woman’s Place in Nature', Forum (New York) (May 1889), 263.

[380] GA, ‘The Girl of the Future', Universal Review, 7:25 (May 1890), 52.

[381] GA, ‘A Biologist on the Woman Question', Pall Mall Gazette, 49 (11 Jan 1889), 1-2.

[382] GA’s other main polemical articles appeared as follows: ‘Plain Words on the Woman Question’ appeared in the Fortnightly Review, 46 (Oct 1889), 448-458; ‘A Glimpse into Utopia’ in theWestminster Gazette, 3 (9 Jan 1894), 1-2; ‘The New Hedonism’ in the Fortnightly Review, 61 (Mar 1894), 377-392. Conan Doyle’s anecdote is in his Memories and Adventures, 2nd ed. Murray, 1930, p.305.

[383] GA, ‘The Girl of the Future', 55.

[384] Shelley’s notes to Queen Mab: Cited from The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, eds Roger Ingpen & Walter E. Peck. Ernest Benn/Gordian, 1965, 1, 141-2.

[385] GA, ‘The Role of Prophet’ in Post-prandial Philosophy. Chatto & Windus, 1894, pp.61-62. Originally published in the Westminster Gazette, 1 (8 Mar 1893), 1-2.

[386] While wintering on the Riviera GA ordered a copy of Edward Dowden’s The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951 [2 vols., 1886]. GA ignored Dowden's quotations from the brief of Shelley’s own counsel: ‘Mr Shelley marries twice before he is twenty-five! He is no sooner liberated from the despotic chains, which he speaks of with so much horror and contempt, than he forges a new set, and becomes again a willing victim of this horrid despotism!’ Dowden quotes also Shelley’s own notes for the court, which showed that ‘he had in his practice accommodated himself to the feelings of the community.’ (Dowden, pp.343, 348). GA ignored that too. No doubt he was reacting specifically against Matthew Arnold’s notorious review-essay of Dowden’s biography (‘What a set! What a world! is the exclamation that breaks from us as we come to an end of this history of ‘the occurrences of Shelley’s private life’', etc) which appeared in the Nineteenth Century for January 1888. Perhaps it is just as well that GA did not live to see the retrieval by Hotson in 1930 of Shelley’s fairly shocking letters to his wife at the time of their separation.

[387] All these threads are traced out admirably by Keith Thomas in ‘The Double Standard', Journal of the History of Ideas, 20 (Apr 1959), 195-216.

[388] GA, ‘About the New Hedonism', Humanitarian: A Monthly Review of Sociological Science, 5 (Sep 1894), 184-5.

[389] Inheritable syphilis was by no means all a folk panic. GA presumably felt himself unable to discuss the horrors of syphilis in detail but, as Ibsen’s Ghosts (1881) and Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins (1893) had shown, the knowledge that it could be transmitted to the next generation stands behind many such vague warnings. Elaine Showalter reminds us that in this period 1500 infants a year were dying from congenital venereal diseases. (A Literature of their Own. Princeton UP., 1977, p.188). See also her ‘Syphilis, Sexuality, and the Fiction of the Fin de Si’cle’ in Reading Fin de Siecle Fictions, ed. Lyn Pykett. Longman, 1996, pp.166-183.

[390] J.A. and Olive Banks, Feminism and Family Planning in Victorian England. Liverpool UP., 1964, pp.113-115 gives several citations dating back to 1857.

[391] Keith Nield, ‘Introduction', Prostitution in the Victorian Age: Debates on the Issue from 19th Century Critical Journals. Gregg, 1973, p.4.

[392] William Edward Hartpole Lecky, History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne. 13th impression, II, 283.’ Longman’s, Green, 1899. [First ed. 1869].

[393] GA, ‘Sunday Night at Mabille', The Lower Slopes: Reminiscences of Excursions Round the Base of Helicon, Undertaken for the Most Part in Early Manhood. Elkin Mathews & John Lane, 1894.

[394] Angus McLaren, Birth Control in Nineteenth-Century England. Croom Helm, 1978 discusses the ‘motherhood as destiny’ theme in detail. According to A.R. Cunningham, the heroine of Mona Caird’s The Daughters of Danaus (1894) is unique in being the only fictional New Woman who rejects maternity on the grounds that it is yet another means of forcing women into line. See ‘The ‘New Woman Fiction’ of the 1890s', Victorian Studies, 18 (Dec 1973), 183. According to the Banks, following forty years of silence after Francis Place’s ‘diabolic handbill’ on contraception, the Bradlaugh-Besant trial of 1877 marks the beginning of the new later-Victorian ‘flight from parenthood', but, as they comment, it was largely a covert shift of opinion which finds no reflection at all in the popular novel. See Banks, Feminism and Family Planning, pp.82-4.

[395] The first unambiguous mention of contraception in respectable fiction is said to be in a ‘George Egerton’ story, ‘Virgin Snow’: see Patricia Stubbs, Women and Fiction: Feminism and the Novel 1880-1920. Harvester, 1979, p.123. She may have overlooked The Strike of a Sex, a fable, or novel-tract, by George Noyes Miller, published by the Malthusian League in 1891. It was virtually ignored.

[396] Richard Soloway, Birth Control and the Population Question in England, 1877-1930. U. North Carolina P., 1982, p.20.

[397] Figures on the fecundity of early marriages are from Ogles and Mathews Duncan, quoted by R. Ussher, Neo-Malthusianism: An Enquiry into That System with Regard to Its Economy and Morality. Gibbings, 1898, p.226.

[398] GA, ‘A Glimpse into Utopia', reprinted in Post-prandial Philosophy. Chatto & Windus, 1894, pp.192-197.

[399] Criticisms of Allen: see, for instance, ‘Normal or Abnormal', The Englishwoman’s Review of Social and Industrial Questions, 20 (14 Dec 1889), 533-538. Signed ‘M.A.B.’

[400] For the Whethams, class suicide and four children per family see Soloway, Birth Control, p.37.

[401] GA, ‘The Girl of the Future', 58.

[402] Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward 2000-1887. Signet, nd, p.179.

[403] Frederic Harrison, ‘The Emancipation of Women', Fortnightly Review, 50 (Oct 1891), 445.

[404] A. R. Wallace’s articles on eugenic gatekeeping are ‘Human Selection', Fortnightly Review, 48 (Sep 1890), 325-337; ‘Human Progress: Past and Future', Arena, 5 (Jan 1892), 143-159. ‘Human Selection’ analyses and dismisses GA’s two papers.

[405] [Havelock Ellis], ‘The Changing Status of Women', Westminster Review, 128 (Oct 1887), 826-7.

[406] Wallace, 'Human Selection', 333.

[407] Quoted in Sarah A. Tooley, ‘Heredity and Pre-natal Influences: An Interview with Dr Alfred Russel Wallace', Humanitarian, 4 (Feb 1894), 87.

[408] Wallace, ‘Human Progress', 157.

[409] Wallace, 'Human Selection', 337.

[410] GA, ‘The Girl of the Future', 61.

[411] H.P. Blavatsky, ‘Mr Grant Allen’s Ideal of Womanhood', Lucifer, 6 (July 1890), 353; also Review of Reviews, 2 (Aug 1890). 155.

[412] [W.T. Stead], ‘A False Prophet of Coming Ill. Mr Grant Allen’s Vision of the Future', Review of Reviews, 1 (May 1890), 511.

[413] The debate over the role of women as eugenic gatekeepers (or ‘sexual selectors’) is discussed briefly in Lucy Bland, Banishing the Beast: English Feminism & Sexual Morality, 1885-1914. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995, pp.83-4. For primary references to the concept, see Ethel Cobbett, ‘Woman and Natural Selection', Humanitarian: A Monthly Review of Sociological Science, 4 (Apr 1894), 315-319, and S.A.K. Strahan, ‘Woman and Natural Selection', Humanitarian: A Monthly Review of Sociological Science, 4 (Mar 1894), 190, and again in 4 (May 1894), 396-398.

[414] H.G. Wells, Tono-Bungay, Book 2, Chapter 4. First published 1908.

[415] Le Gallienne, Retrospective Reviews, p.227.

[416] W.T. Stead, ‘The Death of Grant Allen', Review of Reviews, 20 (Nov 1899), 447. Stead was almost alone, then or later, in noticing this publicly.

[417] Susan Budd, Varieties of Unbelief: Atheists and Agnostics in English Society 1850-1960. Heinemann, 1977, p.163.

[418] TLS, GA to Stead [undated; 1895]. Allen/Stead Correspondence, Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge, fol 5. By his reference to ‘wretched creatures', GA might have meant Sala, Edmund Yates, late editor of the society sheet The World, who had once written under the name of Le Flaneur; or Henry Labouchere, or, conceivably, all three. All were notorious libertines.

[419] GA, ‘The Woman Who Did [letter to the editor]', Westminster Gazette, 5 (23 Feb 1895), 2.

[420] GA, ‘The Worm Turns', Athenaeum, 30 July 1892, 160.

[421] The extreme rarity of the name Botheway/Bootheway, which is virtually exclusive to a small area of the Midlands, alone made it possible to obtain these details from the directories, parish records and Leicestershire census records held at the County Archives Centre at Wigston, Leics.

[422] H.G. Wells, Tono-Bungay, Book 2, Chapter 1. First published 1908.

[423] GA, Philistia. New ed. Chatto & Windus, 1895, pp.113-115.

[424] ALS to E.W.B. Nicholson, Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS.Top.Oxon.d.120, fol. 65. The letter is undated, but is one of several about the business of the Oxford University Magazine and Review (1869-70) which the two friends jointly edited. GA was then living in rooms in a terrace house at 9 South Street, off Thurloe Square.

[425] Andrew Lang, ‘At The Sign of the Ship', Longman’s Magazine, 34 (Dec 1899), 183-192.

[426] Information on GA’s first marriage supplied by Lang and Powell: Contained in ALS dated ‘1900’ in another hand and ‘1 Jan 1900’ respectively, bound in Clodd’s copy of his Memoir. Leeds.

[427] Clodd, p.17.

[428] Clodd, p.26.

[429] Clodd, p.152.

[430] Acton is quoted by Eric Trudgill, Madonnas and Magdalens: The Origins and Development of Victorian Sexual Attitudes. Heinemann, 1976, p.291, who discusses the rise and fall of this cult in detail.

[431] ‘In the Night Watches', The Lower Slopes.

[432] Clodd, p.151.

[433] GA, ‘The Trade of Author', Fortnightly Review, 51/45 (Feb 1889), 269. Unsigned.

[434] ‘[Review of The Lower Slopes]', Athenaeum, 24 Mar 1894, 368.

[435] Introduction', The British Barbarians. John Lane/G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1895, p. xi.

Chapter 10: Last Orders

[436] ‘Got from lib.’: Diary entry of 3 June 1893; ‘Grant Allen I liked’: Diary entry of 6 June 1895. London and the Life of Literature in Late Victorian England: The Diary of George Gissing, Novelist, ed. Pierre Coustillas. Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1978, pp. 306, 375.

[437] Letter to Algernon Gissing, 9 June 1895. Collected Letters of George Gissing, eds. Paul F. Mattheisen, Arthur C. Young & Pierre Coustillas (Ohio UP., 1990-8), V, 347.

[438] Letters to Henry Hick, 16 June 1895 and Morley Roberts, 29 June 1895. Collected Letters of George Gissing, V, 349-50, 354.

[439] ’Hill-top Novels’ and the Morality of Art', Spectator, 23 (Nov 1895), 722.

[440] H. G. Wells, ‘[Review of The British Barbarians]', Saturday Review, 80 (14 Dec 1895), 785.

[441] Richard Le Gallienne, ‘Grant Allen', Attitudes and Avowals With Some Retrospective Reviews. John Lane, 1910, p.208; Clodd, Grant Allen, p.175.

[442] ‘Introduction', The British Barbarians. John Lane/G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1895, p. xi.

[443] Grant Richards, Author Hunting By an Old Literary Sportsman: Memories of Years Spent Mainly in Publishing, 1897-1925. Hamish Hamilton, 1934, 4-5.

[444] ‘Erotomaniac literature’ is James Ashcroft Noble’s phrase, from his ‘The Fiction of Sexuality', Contemporary Review, 67 (Apr 1895), 490-498. Noble was a kindly, struggling journalist and a good friend of the Allens; some attractive letters he wrote to them survive. GA is not mentioned as one of the erotomaniacs in Noble’s article.

[445] Dictated LS to George Bedborough, in Nellie Allen’s hand, is dated 12 May 1899. PSU. See also A. Calder-Marshall, Lewd, Blasphemous and Obscene. Hutchinson, 1972.

[446] ALS to Allen, Chatto to GA, 25 Feb 1896.CW

[447] Two letters from H.G. Wells to GA in 1896 allude to a further hill-top novel. In one Wells says he is looking forward to ‘that third novel of yours--of the Hill Top strain', and the other (undated) says ‘I’m very sorry to hear the third novel [illegible word].’ See The Correspondence of H. G. Wells, ed. David C. Smith. Pickering & Chatto, 1998, I, 264, 274-5.

[448] ALS to Allen, Chatto to GA, 13 Oct 1898.CW.

[449] Quotations from H. D. Traill, The Barbarous Britishers: A Tip-top Novel. John Lane, [1896] are from pp.4, 41-2, & 91-2.

[450] Female detectives figured in at least two novels as early as the 1860s. GA may have known Catherine Pirkis's The Experiences of Loveday Brook, Lady Detective, which first appeared in six short stories in the Ludgate Monthly, Feb-July 1893. George R. Sims' Dorcas Dene, Detective: Her Adventures was published in 1897.

[451] GA, 'The Episode of the Wife Who Did Her Duty', Strand, 17 (May 1899), 520.

[452] 'Excursus II', The Attis of Caius Valerius Catullus. Translated into English Verse, with Dissertations on the Myth of Attis, on the Origin of Tree-worship, and on the Galliambic Metre. David Nutt, 1892, p.52.

[453] Quoted Clodd, p.174.

[454] Andrew Lang, 'The Evolution of the Idea of God', Contemporary Review, 72 (Dec 1897), 768-781. The anonymous Athenaeum review (20 Nov 1897, pp.700-1) was by Joseph Jacobs.

[455] ‘I am making sumptuous hay of you’: ALS to Allen, undated [probably 1890]. Poetry/Rare Books Collection, State University of New York at Buffalo Library.

[456] Academy, 57 (14 Oct 1899), 429. Unsigned.

[457] David Duncan, Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer. Methuen, 1908, p.415.

[458] MS Winifred Storr diary, Haslemere Museum. The Rayner Storrs of Haslemere were on intimate terms with the Allens, and the young Winifred Storr (b.1885) records a constant coming and going between the two houses on social engagements.

[459] A. Conan Doyle, Memories and Adventures, 2nd ed. Murray, 1930, p.304.

[460] ‘How It Feels To Die. By One Who Has Tried It’, Pall Mall Gazette, 3 Sep 1892, 2.

[461] Clodd, pp.167-8.

[462] Ward is quoted in Frank Miller Turner, Between Science and Religion: The Reaction to Scientific Naturalism in Late Victorian England. Yale UP., 1974, p.16.

[463] GA, ‘Luigi and the Salvationist', Pall Mall Magazine, 19 (Dec 1899), 489-501.

[464] ‘Obituary. Mr Grant Allen', Daily News, 26 Oct 1899, 6.

[465] The two wills are mentioned in Reginald Pound, The Strand Magazine 1891-1950. Heinemann, 1966, p.68. According to his will (GRO), the gross value of GAs estate was L6455 pounds, three shillings and threepence, and the net value of his personal estate 3500 pounds nineteen shillings.

[466] Quoted in Wallace G. Breck, ‘The Le Moynes: Longueuil, Kingston and Wolfe Island', Historic Kingston, 37 (1989), 40.

[467] TLS, 28 Aug 1906. GRA.

[468] Quoted from ALS, 23 June 1912 and 1 Jan 1913. Dreiser/Jerrard Grant Allen Correspondence, Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania, MS Coll. 30, folder 80.

Conclusion: 'We of the Proletariate'

[469] Richard Le Gallienne, 'Grant Allen', Attitudes and Avowals With Some Retrospective Reviews. John Lane, 1910, p.210.

[470] Chris Healy, The Confessions of a Journalist. Chatto & Windus, 1904, p.217.

[471] Quoted in Elizabeth A. Sharp, William Sharp (Fiona Macleod): A Memoir. 2 vols. Heinemann, 1912, II, 151.

[472] Letter to Edward Clodd, 7 Nov 1899. Collected Letters of George Gissing, eds Paul F. Mattheisen, Arthur C. Young & Pierre Coustillas (Ohio UP., 1990-8), VII, 397.

[473] Andrew Lang, 'Grant Allen', Argosy, 71 (Aug 1900), 415.

[474] A self-description in a letter to William Sharp. Sharp, II, 18.

[475] ALS to Grant Richards, 'Wednesday' [1896]. GRA, Reel 50: Correspondence: Allen.

[476] Letter to W.E. Henley. Grant Richards Archives, 1897-1948. Reel 50: Correspondence: Allen. Archives of British Publishers on Microfilm. Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1979.

[477] Oliver Elton, Frederick York Powell: A Life and a Selection from His Letters and Occasional Writings. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon P., 1906, I, 187.

[478] [W. T. Stead], 'The Biography of a Rebel', Review of Reviews, 22 (July 1900), 92.

[479] Andrew Lang, 'Mr Grant Allen. In Memoriam', Daily News, 28 Oct 1899, 7.

[480] 'The Writer's Trade', Academy, 59 (7 July 1900), 15-16. Unsigned.

[481] Richard Le Gallienne, 'Grant Allen' in Attitudes and Avowals With Some Retrospective Reviews. John Lane, 1910, p 204.

[482] ‘Mr Grant Allen', Athenaeum, 28 Oct 1894, 589. Unsigned.

[483] Grant Richards, ‘'Mr Grant Allen', Athenaeum, 4 Nov 1894, 621.

[484] Clement Shorter, ‘'The Late Grant Allen', Critic [New York], 36 (Jan 1900), 40.

[485] Clodd, pp.207-208.

[486] ‘'Obituary. Mr Grant Allen', Daily News, 26 Oct 1899, 6. Unsigned.

[487] [Review of] The Scallywag', Bookman, 5 (Oct 1893), 26-7. Unsigned.

[488] ‘'A Scribbler’'s Apology', Cornhill Magazine, 47 (May 1883), 543.

[489] Arthur Machen, The Autobiography of Arthur Machen. With an Introduction by Morchard Bishop. Richards Press, 1951, pp.187-8.

[490] Machen, pp.130-1.

[491] Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography. Williams & Norgate, 1946, pp.189-90. First published 1883.

[492] Raymond Blathwayt, Through Life and Round the World: Being the Story of My Life. New York: E. P. Dutton, [nd;:1917?], pp.154, 157.

[493] Simon Eliot, Some Patterns and Trends in British Publishing 1800-1919. The Bibliographical Society, 1994, p.14.

[494] ALS, Chatto to GA, 22 Feb 1892. CW.

[495] Grant Richards, '‘Mr Grant Allen and His Work', Novel Review, 1 (June 1892), 266.

[496] GA, ‘A Scribbler’s Apology', Cornhill Magazine, 47 (May 1883), 538-550. Unsigned.

[497] Leslie Stephen to GA, 10 Sep 1882. PSU.

[498] GA, 'The Trade of Author', Fortnightly Review, 51/45 (Feb 1889), 261-274. Unsigned.

[499] The reprint market is discussed by Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800-1900. 2nd ed. Ohio State UP., 1998, pp.308-310. He quotes Arnold's essay 'Copyright', Fortnightly Review, 27 (1880), 327-8.

[500] Walter Besant, ‘Literature as a Career', Forum, 13 (Aug 1892), 696.

[501] GA, The Woman Who Did. Introduced by Sarah Wintle. Oxford UP., 1995, p.101.

[502] 'Introduction', The British Barbarians. John Lane/G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1895, p. xxiii.