Grant Allen

BOOK REVIEWS apparatus preceding the text includes useful short biographies of correspondents , a chronology, and an illuminating introduction. Indeed, this volume proves the enduring value of good editorial scholarship. For the careful collection and collation of these letters, scattered as they are around the globe in both public and private collections , brings to the library shelf of the student, the enthusiast, and the academic what would otherwise be quite beyond their reach. Moreover, the scrupulous attention to the minutiae of these letters, which underpins their presentation, will enable scholars for generations to come to explore the world Conrad inhabited in ways previously impossible. KATHERINE BAXTER London Grant Allen William Greenslade and Terence Rodgers, eds. Grant Allen: Literature and Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle. Burlington: Ashgate, 2005. ix + 252. $94.95 ON THE FACE OF IT, the scholarly revival of the late-Victorian science journalist and hack novelist Grant Allen is a rather curious thing. Allen himself issued some rather disarmingly honest assessments of the low merit of his literary work. He gave up putting any energies into writing serious "literary" novels almost at the start of his career in 1884 and told his close friend, the ethnologist Edward Clodd, that he was aiming with each new book "to go a step lower to catch the market." He poured out hack literary fictions on the passing concerns and obsessions of the day: Gothic horrors and ghost hunting, Russian anarchists, dastardly jihadists, suicidal New Women and fictions about heredity. In 1892, he advised those harbouring literary ambitions: "Don't take to literature if you've capital in hand to buy a good broom, and energy enough to annex a vacant crossing." Many of his contemporaries thought his literary efforts appalling and his scientific theories reductive or wrongheaded. All of his work was written in blind obedience to Herbert Spencer's synthesis of all knowledge under the developmental hypothesis just as Spencer's work was being challenged and displaced by professionally trained biological scientists. Allen's cherished theory of physical force was rubbished by the new generation of university physicists. His evolutionary theory of the origin of religion was also crushed out of existence by the mightier pens of J. G. Frazer and Andrew Lang. His most famous polemical novel, The Woman Who Did, created a sensation in the Year of the New Woman, but only for the intensity of the vilification heaped upon it. 455 ELT 49 : 4 2006 After he died in 1899, Clodd wrote a short memoir of his friend and Richard Le Gallienne placed him as one of the quintessential jobbing writers of the explosion of newspapers in the 1890s. Recollections by his nephew the publisher Grant Richards and by H. G. Wells in his autobiography in the 1930s were brief returns from utter obscurity. He lived on only in the interstices of more significant writers: Gissing 's envy at the £25 a week earned by The Woman Who Did; Conrad's definition of literary writing against the drivel issued by Allen or Hall Caine or Marie Corelli; Wells's echoings and borrowings from Allen in his scientific romances. Despite this record of failure, The Woman Who Did was reissued in the Oxford Popular Fiction series in 1995, and this has been followed by Barbara Melchiori's Grant Allen: The Downward Path that Leads to Fiction (2000) and Peter Morton's The Busiest Man in England (2005). This collection is, then, the third major scholarly contribution to the revival of Allen's career in the last five years. What is it about Allen? One of the reasons must be the extraordinary act of recovery in the ongoing bibliographic project of Peter Morton. His bibliography of Grant Allen's work, issued in 1999 (and updated on the web at http:// ehlt.flinders.edu.au/english/GA/BiblioCheck.htm), revealed the astonishing productivity of Allen as an essayist, polemicist, and moralist, as well as his popular work as an anthropologist, biologist, folklorist, evolutionary theorist, travel writer and inveterate book reviewer. Allen is transformed from the half-forgotten writer of the risqué 1890s who made a splash with The Woman Who Did and announced the arrival of "The New...