“The Busiest Man in ” This page intentionally left blank “The Busiest Man in England” Grant Allen and the Writing Trade, 1875–1900

Peter Morton “THE BUSIEST MAN IN ENGLAND” © Peter Morton, 2005. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2005 978-1-4039-6626-1 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-52939-1 ISBN 978-1-4039-8099-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781403980991 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Morton, Peter, 1946 Apr. 10- The busiest man in England : Grant Allen and the writing trade, 1875–1900 / Peter Morton. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index. 1. Allen, Grant, 1848–1899. 2. Allen, Grant, 1848–1899—Authorship. 3. Authors, English—19th century—Biography. 4. England—Intellectual life— 19th century. 5. Authorship—History—19th century. I. Title. PR4004.A2Z78 2005 821Ј.914—dc22 2004050853 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: April 2005 10987654321 This book is for Heather This page intentionally left blank Now see how long a letter I have written unto you, going the Apostle one better, with my own left hand: only the busiest man in England could have found time to do it. Grant Allen to “Fiona Macleod,” 1894 This page intentionally left blank Contents

List of Plates xi Preface xiii Acknowledgments xvii

Introduction “The Most Hateful of Professions?” 1 1 Canada and (1848–1873) 13 2 Jamaica (1873–1876) 27 3 Setting out the Stall (1876–1880) 45 4 “A Pedlar Crying Stuff”: Selling the Wares (1880–1889) 73 5 The Stock in Trade: Writing Science 95 6 The Stock in Trade: Light Fiction 111 7 The Prosperous Tradesman (1890–1895) 125 8 Dealing with the “Dissenting Grocer” 133 9 Retailing The Woman Who Did 147 10 Last Orders (1896–1899) 173 Conclusion “We of the Proletariate . . .” 187

Abbreviations in the Notes 197 Notes 199 Bibliography 225 Index 245 This page intentionally left blank List of Plates

Facing Page 1 Grant Allen, ca. 1890.

Between Pages 110 and 111 Allen’s home “The Nook,” , Surrey. The drawing room of Allen’s home “The Nook.” A cartoon illustrating Allen’s assertion that it would be more profitable to buy a good broom and “annex a vacant crossing” than to take up a career in “literature.” A cartoon illustrating Allen’s point about the relative earnings of the novelist and the scientific writer. The King’s House, Spanish Town, Jamaica. The rewards of authorship: Allen’s final home, “The Croft.” This page intentionally left blank Preface

“With coat-sleeve turned back, so as to give free play to his right hand and wrist, revealing meanwhile a flannel shirt of singular colour, and with his collar unbuttoned (he wore no tie) to leave his throat at ease as he bent myopically over the paper, he was writing at express speed, evidently in the full rush of the ardour of composition. The veins of his forehead were dilated, and his chin pushed forward in a way that made one think of a racing horse.” Thus are we introduced to Sykes, one of the most desperate of the literary hacks for hire in George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891). We are left in no doubt that, down there in the Darwinian nether world of late-Victorian authorship, success is defined as the survival of the fastest. No one knew better than Gissing that nearly all Victorian writers with no resources but their pen lived anxious and arduous lives. They walked a pre- carious path. With some talent and a modicum of luck, they could hope that their path lay upward—toward a bare living for most, cozy comfort for a small minority, luxurious affluence for a tiny few. Quite often, though, the path led downward—toward penury, the meager charitable pension, the workhouse, the gutter. The path could change direction with shocking abruptness, and how far writers advanced along it either way depended, externally, on one thing only: the readiness with which the public would lay down its money to read what they had written. Authors might hope, in the long run, to create and train an audience to appreciate them; but meanwhile they had to live. Many of them—a surprisingly high proportion of those in Grant Allen’s generation who still have a reputation—were financially buffered in one way or another from the most brutal pressures of the market. But, for all the rest, whether you were George Eliot or an anonymous penny- a-lining drudge, the laws of supply and demand ruled, and, in the absence of any safety net of social security, fellowships, or sinecures, they ruled supreme. That was the regimen under which Grant Allen lived for the whole of his career. This sounds too obvious to be worth stating, and so it would be if applied to a butcher, a baker, a candlestick maker. But in the case of the literary pro- ducers of the later nineteenth century, the economic facts of life rarely have been given their full weight. The spirit of our age is against it. In a climate which has celebrated the death of the author and the autonomy of the text, it can seem crass to find it interesting whether, a hundred years ago, any particular author died in a feather bed or on a workhouse pallet. xiv P reface

Such a dismissive attitude has been exacerbated by the ahistorical slant of much modern literary scholarship, but it is not, in fact, a new attitude. Even in the closing decades of the Victorian era some writers and critics thought it irrelevant and irreverent to display much interest in bank balances and the rewards of the “trade.” It pained Henry James to hear his colleagues crying from the house tops their sense of solidarity with grocers and shoemakers. Edmund Gosse, critic and poet, protested against some of his fellows’ unseemly interest in cash on the table, rates of production, deals with publishers, or what different periodicals paid per line. Yes, of course, Gosse conceded, business had to be done, contracts signed. But “there should be a little modesty, one feels, in this pursuit of the guineas. . . . These functions should be performed in private, not flaunted before the public. I no more desire to know what my neighbour the poet makes by his verses that I crave to see the account books for my other neighbor the lawyer.” Many did, in fact, desire to know. Gosse’s attitude was not uncommon, but it existed in the late Victorian era alongside a hungry interest in writers’ bank balances, houses, activities, and opinions on everything. We see the same paradox in our time: attempts to de-historicize literature somehow manage to coexist with an unassuagable appetite for big literary biographies that are more candid and inclusive than ever before. And, at the more schol- arly level, studies in literary history have proven to be remarkably resilient over the last twenty years or so, especially in the area of the socioeconomics of Victorian writing and publishing. Peter Keating said rather gloomily in 1989 that the literary history, or more exactly the historical sociology of literature, which was then being written, was of an unadventurous and unenterprising kind. Keating’s own The Haunted Study did much to counter that, and other studies of the caliber of those by Nigel Cross (1985), Michael Anesko (1986), Peter McDonald (1997), and Graham Law (2000) have continued the good work. One particularly welcome effect of this has been to direct attention to writers below the first or second rank, among whom the struggle for existence may be studied in its grimmest and most telling specificity. This book had its origin in my earlier The Vital Science: Biology and the Literary Imagination, 1860–1900. That book is a study of the creative uses to which writers put the ambiguous data of biology in the immediate post- Darwinian years, and I grew interested in the way in which scientific popu- larizers interacted with their readers, and how some of them turned to fiction to dramatize their ideas. Grant Allen figured in a minor way in the earlier book, and I wished I had been able to explore his career further when I discovered how much he had written and how broad his interests were. But other projects drew me away, and there matters rested until 1999, the cente- nary of Allen’s death, when a celebratory conference was planned at Bristol. Preparing the keynote address for that conference caused me to investigate his bibliography more thoroughly, and I grew astonished at the productivity and versatility of the man. He labeled himself proudly “the busiest man in England,” and he seems to have been entitled to the label: given what he P reface xv achieved in a career lasting hardly more than twenty years, it is rather alarm- ing to consider what he might have done if he had had a career twice as long. I was particularly intrigued by his own vigorous, acerbic, and frequently witty examination of the professional freelance writer’s lot, and this had a personal resonance too, for I had labored for a time in that same vineyard, just a century after Allen, and I found what he had to say about the trials and tribu- lations, and the rewards, of such a life was no less thought-provoking now than it was then. The occupational disease of the biographer, said Macaulay, is the lues Boswelliana, the fever of admiring overstatement. I have been careful, I hope, not to catch that infection. Time has placed Grant Allen as an author of the third rank, and I expect him to remain there; it is not my task to reinstate him as an unjustly neglected writer or even to mount a case for bringing very much of his work back from obscurity. Much of his work—not quite all, to be sure—was done for the day and has vanished with the day. I hope to show, however, that his career gives us some insight into the opportunities and rewards available in late-Victorian England for the most industrious writers of the type to which Allen belonged—and that is not a type that has been closely investigated. Readers may wonder why, in a book that deals so much with money, I have made so little attempt to indicate its modern purchasing power. Inflation tables readily show, for example, that the literary prize of £1,000 that Allen won in 1891 was equivalent to £64,341 in 2003 British pounds. But as a guide to what such a sum “meant” in terms of what it would buy, such a con- version is wholly misleading. It ignores on the one hand the multitude of goods not then available at any price (effective medicine and domestic tech- nologies, for instance), and on the other the relative abundance of other goods and services 120 years ago (relatively cheap land and basic building materials; very cheap unskilled and semiskilled labor; readily accessible, untouched countryside). It ignores the effect of modern taxes, direct and indirect, which were low or nonexistent then. This is an omission so serious that it has been said that a Victorian income, after being adjusted for inflation, should then be tripled to give a real idea of its buying power at the time. I know of no reliable way of adjusting for these factors. As a substitute, I have occasionally indicated some specific late-Victorian goods and services that might have been bought with a particular sum that Grant Allen earned by his pen.

Adelaide November 4 This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments

The resources of the internet have transformed scholarly endeavor. Some of the primary research and virtually all of the exchange of ideas and informa- tion that stand behind this book have been handled via the web and email. No matter how recondite their interests, constant participation in worldwide discussion groups is available to all scholars now, and I have used these resources to the utmost. Even the internet has its limits, however, and a good part of the primary research for this biography was carried out in the British Library and else- where in England in 2001 during an Outside Studies Program provided by Flinders University, Adelaide. Other grants from Flinders’ Faculty Research Budget relieved me of some teaching duties, contributed to the cost of conferences, and supported several foraging expeditions into libraries in the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States in 2002/2003. Numerous institutions have allowed me to use their holdings: a complete list is provided in the Bibliography. Many people connected with these insti- tutions, and others, have shared their knowledge with me, and although we shall probably never meet in person it is good to know that we have met, and will meet again, in cyberspace. Among them I wish to thank the following par- ticularly: Victor Berch for many obscure leads on Allen’s short fiction; Angela Kingston of Adelaide for several rare and important finds; Nicholas Ruddick for our extended and enjoyable discussions about various aspects of The Woman Who Did, of which he was preparing an edition; Alex Scala of Kingston, for much information about that city as Grant Allen knew it; and Sandra Stelts, the curator of the Special Collections Library, Pennsylvania State University, for generous and repeated help over a long period. My thanks also to the following people for their specialized help on other aspects of Allen’s life and career: Mike Ashley and the Fictionmags forum; Pierre Coustillas, Sabine Ernst, Donald Forsdyke, William Greenslade, Richard Landon, Mark Lasner, Graham Law, Xavier Legrand- Ferronnière, Bernard Lightman, Barbara Arnett Melchiori, Christine Nelson, Patrick Parrinder, Lyssa Randolph, Terence Rodgers, Christopher Sanguinetti, Jay Shorten, John Owen Smith, Jonathan Smith, Jean Soudé, Phil Stephensen-Payne, Richard Sveum, Sue Templeman, Greta Turner, Rebecca Venable, and Chris Willis. And a final thanks to Tony Twohig for the use of his house in Blackheath at a critical juncture. Grant Allen. This photograph was probably taken ca. 1890. Reproduced courtesy of Educational Museum.