"The Busiest Man in England": Grant Allen and the Writing Trade, 1875–1900, and: Grant Allen: Literature and Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle (review)

Grant Allen's failings must be conceded. That, at any rate, is one of the repeating notes in these two new books on his life and work. In adopting a mildly apologetic attitude, the writers get at the crux of resuscitating Allen's work for current scholarship. Allen—popular fiction writer, would-be scientist, evolutionist, socialist of sorts, and frighteningly prolific freelancer—may have been wrong-headed (he thought Herbert Spencer was the greatest genius ever to have lived, for example) and embarrassingly orthodox in some of his unsavory views. Yet, as these studies demonstrate, Allen is an endlessly fascinating figure whose writing (in addition to fiction, he published works on evolutionary biology, psychology, physics, natural history, tourism, and the anthropology of religion) deserves to be known better.

Peter Morton's excellent new biography of Allen, the first published since shortly after his premature death in 1899, takes as its controlling idea Allen's position as a freelancer in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Morton emphasizes the economic context of writing for a mass readership at the time that literature became a trade. The biography is written with the knowledge and judgment that we would expect from the author of The Vital Science (1984). No one has read more of Allen than Morton. He has tracked down the greater part of Allen's prodigious output of articles and stories (a bibliography of which Morton has previously made available online).

Morton's stance ranges from admiration for Allen's ability and versatility to admissions of his mediocrity. We get good insight into Allen's psychology: Morton portrays both Allen's attractive personal qualities—his charm, his scrupulous honesty—and his weaknesses—his tendency, for instance, to swing between self-deprecation and self-importance. We also get a picture of Allen's extraordinary productivity. In his twenty-two years as a freelancer, Allen produced seventy-seven volumes of writing. He wrote hundreds of essays—102 for Cornhill alone—and perhaps 200 stories, in addition to dozens of books. Morton's "sociology of authorship" (3) offers a detailed account of what Allen wrote, for which venues, and what pay, along with other information on the socioeconomics of late-Victorian authorship.

We learn more, through Morton's impressive digging, about what and how Allen published than about his personal life. The account of Allen's first marriage to a working-class woman (perhaps a former prostitute) is speculative beyond the bare-bones facts available in public records, because "there is not a single direct mention of it anywhere in his writings" (21). Morton provides guesses, and he persuasively employs literary evidence to fill in the gaps. I was left wondering why so little information about Allen's intimate relationships is available, although the book manages without those personal details to convey a strong sense of Allen's character.

The biography is structured by chapters that cover specific years in Allen's life, which are interspersed with three chapters on particular aspects of his writing: fiction, science, and his best-seller The Woman Who Did (1895). Morton knows Victorian science well, and his chapter on Allen's scientific writing may be the best in the book. It is here that Morton finds the most to admire: "As a scientific popularizer, synthesizer, and middleman, Allen was without peer in his own day" (106).

Allen began writing fiction when he discovered that it paid far more than scientific journalism. He "spoke of himself as declining into fiction 'as many men drop into drink, or opium-eating'" (112) and wrote bitterly about his pandering: "'I am trying with each new novel...