Grant Allen: A Centenary Reassessment

Grant Allen: A Centenary Reassessment Peter Morton Flinders University "Literature nowadays is a trade. Putting aside men of genius, who may succeed by mere cosmic force, your successful man of letters is your skilful tradesman. He thinks first and foremost of the markets; when one kind of goods begins to go off slackly, he is ready with something new and appetising. He knows perfectly all the possible sources of income. Whatever he has to sell he'll get payment for it from all sorts of various quarters; none of your unpractical selling for a lump sum to a middleman who will make six distinct profits."1 THIS IS JASPER MILVAIN, New Grub Street's cynical young literary man on the make. While George Gissing published his novel in 1891, the action opens in 1882, the year in which the literary career of the thirty-four-year-old Grant Allen was just gaining stride, and Milvain's analysis of what made for a successful tradesman-writer of the time is a fair account of the strategy which Allen pursued in real life. Back in England after a spell teaching abroad and eager to make a reputation as a scientific writer, Allen starts with a couple of technical tomes on evolutionary biology. Quickly he discovers that this is no way to earn a living. He turns to writing miscellaneous essays; he discovers editors will buy them, and over the next twenty years produces many scores of them with a facility that has few parallels in Victorian authordom. Stumbling into fiction by accident, he finds that startling short stories pay even better , so dozens of those too start to roll off his pen. Next he tries a serious novel of ideas. It fails. Instead of giving up, he responds by going for the genteelly sensational corner of the literary marketplace. Unremitting work produces more than thirty novels, of which a century later about six are still well worth the attention of cultural historians , if not literary critics. Two of them were great popular successes in their time. What's Bred in the Bone (1891), a sensational thriller, beat 20,000 entrants to win what is possibly the richest literary prize ever awarded in Britain: £1000 from George Newnes, the publishers of the 404 Morton : Grant allen magazine Tit-Bits. It sold 8000 copies in its first year, went into seventeen editions, appeared in the form of a silent movie in 1916, and was translated into Icelandic. The other, The Woman Who Did (1895), was a scandalous success of the first magnitude. Though often reviled by critics from every part of the ideological spectrum, including some of those otherwise sympathetic to New Woman fiction, this "sex problem" novel sold enormously. In the first fortnight after publication copies flew out of the bookstores at the rate of 500 a day, and it was reprinted at least twenty times in its first year. It made Allen a moderate fortune, was banned in Ireland and translated into Yiddish; it also was made into a movie some years after the author's death, and its latest edition appeared in time for its centenary under the imprint of Oxford University Press. As this summary of his career suggests, Allen knew how always to be ready with "something new and appetising." He was the embodiment of Jasper Milvain's dictum that "your successful man of letters is your skilful tradesman." Certainly he would have been the last writer to bridle at the word "tradesman." For him, the need to earn his daily bread was paramount—every penny he had came from his pen—and he had few illusions about what he needed to do to get it. Throughout his career he exhibited a remarkable if not entirely credible scepticism about his career as a fairly successful novelist, and he had interestingly mixed feelings about the profession of author itself in late-Victorian England. Allen was a prime producer of the popular novel, that first mass-produced, ubiquitous cultural artefact in history. His struggle to find a niche in a crowded market; his edgy relations with his consumers, the reading public (especially over the issue of censorship); and his remarkably articulate...