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“The Busiest Man in England” This Page Intentionally Left Blank “The Busiest Man in England” Grant Allen and the Writing Trade, 1875–1900 “The Busiest Man in England” 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 Oxford (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,” Dorking, 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.
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