Chapter 1
Resituating Grant Allen: Writing, Radicalism and Modernity
William Greenslade and Terence Rodgers
I
âOn the whole I was pleasantly surprised with Grant Allen; he is a simple, genial fellow, absorbed in scientific studies â caring not a rap for the kind of work by which he livesâ, wrote George Gissing to his brother in June 1895 after a weekend as the guest of Edward Clodd.1 While it was unlikely that as a fellow-guest of the trustworthy Clodd, Allen would disappoint, Gissingâs surprise could be forgiven, since on two counts alone â earnest Spencerian controversialist and potboiling novelist â Allen might have given the hard-to-please Gissing reason to be wary. What kind of man, one wonders, did Gissing expect? Quite possibly a more self-regarding, combative, self-important figure than the man who greeted him at Aldeburgh; the embattled author, certainly, of the phenomenally successful novel The Woman Who Did which had been published that February and which Allen told Gissing was currently earning him ÂŁ25 per week.2 This succĂšs de scandale and Allenâs high-profile involvement in the aftermath of its publication, offered the only possible conversational topic to rival inevitable ruminations over the sentence of Oscar Wilde the Saturday before.3
After Allenâs death in October 1899, Cloddâs Memoir and tributes paid to Allen by, for example, the man of letters Andrew Lang, and the historian York Powell, rightly emphasised his variousness as a writer, the âmost versatile, beyond comparison, of any man in our ageâ, as Lang put it.4 His extraordinary productivity was matched only by the output of Lang himself. Clodd recalled for Allenâs contemporaries just what a various career it was: ânaturalist, anthropologist, physicist, historian, poet, novelist, essayist, critic â what place is to be assigned to this versatile, well-equipped worker?â, he asked.5 Clodd and company were keen to set the record straight, but it is a record, of course, dominated by the The Woman Who Did affair and the curious solipsism of Allenâs âhill-topâ project, which he eventually abandoned after the disappointing response to his second novel of 1895, The British Barbarians. The poor reaction to it was partly at least revenge on Allen for previously enticing out of the public large sales for a work which proved a literary disappointment, and for many feminists and critics an intellectual and progressive sham. If this was all Allen could manage by writing âwholly and solely to satisfy ⊠[his] ⊠own taste and conscienceâ,6 then disenchantment was not so surprising. But there were other factors at work in these months after Wildeâs trial, not least the affinities between The British Barbarians and writerly strategies, perceived to be Wildean, as Nick Freeman shows in his examination of the novel in the context of the backlash of 1895.
No doubt Clodd and company were mightily relieved when Allen relinquished, albeit silently, his âhill-topâ aspirations. Certainly, there was relief from the Times reviewer of two of Allenâs Historical Guide Books when they appeared in 1897. Keen to acknowledge âthis clever writerâ, he spiced his praise for Allen with distaste for what had just preceded it: âwhen a man has so distinct a turn for history and science, and ⊠can do such good work in the way of showing students the right manner of approaching the history of a great city, it is a thousand pities that he should waste his time on âhill-top novelsâ and similar foolishnesses.â7
Surprisingly, until very recently Cloddâs text and a few biographical entries were all that readers could turn to for a synoptic account of Allenâs work and career.8 Part of the explanation surely lies in the hiatus created by the noisy impact of The Woman Who Did. This single novel still dominates subsequent discussion of Allen, as it would have dominated at Aldeburgh, or any literary gathering, in 1895. The dubious standing of his highest-selling work (whose title became an immediate and lasting catchphrase for its times and the subject of numerous parodies)9 has skewed subsequent commentary and has almost certainly contributed to making it less possible to see Allen plainly as a versatile fin-de-siĂšcle progressive and writer. The result of such concentration of attention, we would argue, has been to marginalise other aspects of Allenâs achievement, putting his formidably various literary career almost beyond the reach of critical scrutiny.
Nor has Allen been favoured with bibliographical attention, for again, until quite recently, there has been no reliable record of his writings, still less of the location of his papers and manuscripts.10 However, a number of writers, notably Peter Morton, with an industry worthy of its subject, have made progress in filling this gap.11 Thus for example, there is now an accurate entry, by Joanne Shattock, in the revised Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (1999),12 and with Peter Mortonâs synoptic essay, âGrant Allen 1848-1899: A Centenary Reassessmentâ and Barbara Arnett Melchioriâs study, Grant Allen: The Downward Path Which Leads to Fiction (2000), critical re-evaluation and recovery of Allenâs work is well under way.13
After Allenâs death a great deal of his work, non-fiction as well as fiction, was assimilated into the interests of the specialist by, for instance, devotees of scientific rationalism and readers of the imprints of the Rationalist Press for whom The Evolution of the Idea of God (1897) (which had sold 55,000 copies by 1903), with its improbable Spencerian theory of ancestor-worship, was kept alive in Wattsâs Rationalist Press through until the 1940s and beyond by a variety of niche publishers.14 But Patrick Parrinder develops in his essay a more complex and unusual line of influence in which, as he puts it, the âghost of Allenâs theory lingered onâ into Sigmund Freudâs elevation of the father, and beyond into Harold Bloomâs âanxiety of influenceâ. From the 1970s, readers of late-Victorian science fiction, ghost stories and detective fiction, would have found odd stories appearing by Allen in a variety of specialist anthologies, and occasional reprints.15 And there is at least one fascinating case of fin-de-siĂšcle homage, that of Michael Moorcock in his trilogy of novels The Dancers at the End of Time (1983).16
In the first half of the twentieth century Grant Allen received slight and mixed notice. Respectful treatment was extended by Holbrook Jackson in a typically well-informed assessment in his (for its time definitive) The Eighteen Nineties (1913), and briefly, in Malcolm Elwinâs Old Gods Falling (1939). By contrast, in a collection of essays published in 1930, Allenâs work was dismissed as âdifficult by any effort of the imagination to reanimate todayâ and was conspicuously overlooked a few years later in Frank Swinnertonâs personal reminiscences of early twentieth-century literary life and the late Victorian influences upon it.17 There was little other attention except from those who had a stake in putting the record straight, such as Allenâs nephew, the publisher, Grant Richards, whose affectionate memories of the literary fin de siĂšcle, Memories of a Misspent Youth, appeared in 1932, or Allenâs rival H.G. Wells, in a somewhat guilt-laden account in his Experiment in Autobiography (1934). Overall, Allen seems to be an extreme case of a writer whose entrance into the academy, even at the most junior of levels, was destined to be indefinitely postponed.
Indeed, not until the 1970s was Allenâs work to attract serious academic attention. In that decade, and the years which followed, the rise of feminist criticism, coupled with a heightening interest in womenâs movements, non-canonical fiction, radical politics and in the wider, particularly scientific, intellectual culture of the late nineteenth century, gave impetus to serious consideration of Allenâs work, although the selection was limited.18 Nonetheless for studies of the woman question and the New Woman in literature and cultural politics, The Woman Who Did, and essays such as âPlain Words on the Woman Questionâ (1889), âThe Girl of the Futureâ (1890) and âThe New Hedonismâ (1894), quickly became, and have remained standard reference points. Of these studies John Goodeâs treatment of The Woman Who Did in his essay âWomen and the Literary Textâ was amongst the most important. For Goode the novel was an âinstructiveâ text, which showed how the âideology of the project can demolish the coherence of its fictional realizationâ.19 It was difficult for subsequent critics to contest the fact that this earnestly promoted serious fiction to which he so publicly nailed his literary credentials, was an artistic disaster. It was simple enough to conclude that in the area of serious fiction, at least, Allen was not so much the man who didnât, as the man who, in the end, couldnât. In a later essay, Goode enlisted Allen as one of a number of late nineteenth-century âdisaffected intellectualsâ dominated by the ânew spiritâ, hovering on the margins, a protagonist of the age of post-Darwinian revolt.20 Of these, Havelock Ellis, Edward Carpenter, Olive Schreiner and Karl Pearson, to name a few of his radical contemporaries, eventually received their due attention, albeit some more so than others.21 Allen, however, was left behind; how is this to be explained?
Part of the reason surely is that Allenâs Spencerianism has dated as relentlessly as has the reputation of his mentor, Herbert Spencer (1820-1903). The political philosopher D.G. Ritchie argued in 1905 against the âdogmatismâ of writers such as Allen who apply âsome one conception with which he has worked successfully in his own space, to unlock all mysteriesâ â the generation of synthesisers and generalisers of which Allen represented a late example.22 As Morton shows in his essay, Allenâs unswerving commitment to âscience as organised commonsenseâ made him vulnerable to criticisms of oversimplification, while defects in the empirical basis of his anthropology, biology and physics left his armchair science open to attack from the new professional academy. Similarly Parrinder, in his essay, provides a full exposition of Allenâs own persistence in propagating what was later held to be mistaken anthropological theory, derived from Spencer, as in The Evolution of the Idea of God, where, in Parrinderâs words, he âreplaces the belief that God is the origin of everything with a theory attributing a huge range of cultural phenomena to ghosts and the fear of the deadâ.
Yet notwithstanding these blind alleys and confusions in Allenâs thinking, much recent scholarship on the literature, politics and culture of the fin de siĂšcle continues to underline his enduring presence as a figure of controversy. Allenâs representative significance as a writer and cultural mediator in his time â as novelist, educator, successful scientific populariser, social philosopher and exponent of radical cultural politics â invites critical revaluation.
II
As Lyssa Randolph suggests in her essay, Allenâs relationship with the literary marketplace was fraught with difficulties and contradictions as he sought to balance the financial rewards that came from professional writing with his desire to accrue âcultural capitalâ in the shape of a literary reputation. Ostensibly, Allen had few illusions about the quality of the bulk of his fiction, or his motives for writing it: âI never cared for the chance of literary reputationâ, he told his friend George Croom Robertson, âexcept as a means of making a livelihood for Nellie and the boy.â He was, he said, âlearning to do the sensational things which will please the editors. I am trying with each novel to go to a step lower to catch the market.â23 Following the disappointing sales of his first serious novel Philistia (1884), Allen had concluded that only less than serious fiction would pay. Robertson had suggested that Allen t...