Grant Allen

Grant Allen

Portrait of Grant Allen, by Elliott & Fry
Born Charles Grant Blairfindie Allen
(1848-02-24)24 February 1848
Kingston, Canada West
Died 25 October 1899(1899-10-25) (aged 51)
Hindhead, Haslemere, England
Occupation Writer
Nationality Canadian
Alma mater Oxford
Notable works The Woman Who Did
The Evolution of the Idea of God
The British Barbarians
Children Jerrard Grant Allen

Charles Grant Blairfindie Allen (February 24, 1848 – October 25, 1899) was a Canadian science writer and novelist, and a proponent of the theory of evolution.[1]

Biography

Allen was born near Kingston, Canada West (known as Ontario after Confederation), the second son of Catharine Ann Grant and the Rev. Joseph Antisell Allen, a Protestant minister from Dublin, Ireland.[2] His mother was a daughter of the fifth Baron of Longueuil. He was educated at home until, at age 13, he and his parents moved to the United States, then to France and finally to the United Kingdom.[3] He was educated at King Edward's School in Birmingham and at Merton College in Oxford, both in the United Kingdom.[4] After graduation, Allen studied in France, taught at Brighton College in 1870–71 and in his mid-twenties became a professor at Queen's College, a black college in Jamaica.

Despite being the son of a minister, Allen became an agnostic and a socialist. After leaving his professorship, in 1876 he returned to England, where he turned his talents to writing, gaining a reputation for his essays on science and for literary works. A 2007 book by Oliver Sacks cites with approval one of Allen's early articles, 'Note-Deafness' (a description of what became known as amusia, published in 1878 in the learned journal Mind).[5]

His first books dealt with scientific subjects, and include Physiological Æsthetics (1877) and Flowers and Their Pedigrees (1886). He was first influenced by associationist psychology as expounded by Alexander Bain and by Herbert Spencer, the latter often considered the most important individual in the transition from associationist psychology to Darwinian functionalism. In Allen's many articles on flowers and on perception in insects, Darwinian arguments replaced the old Spencerian terms, leading to a radically new vision of plant life that influenced HG Wells and helped transform later botanical research. On a personal level, a long friendship that started when Allen met Spencer on his return from Jamaica grew uneasy over the years. Allen wrote a critical and revealing biographical article on Spencer that was published after Spencer's death.

After assisting Sir W. W. Hunter in his Gazeteer of India in the early 1880s, Allen turned his attention to fiction, and between 1884 and 1899 produced about 30 novels. In 1895, his scandalous book titled The Woman Who Did, promulgating certain startling views on marriage and kindred questions, became a bestseller. The book told the story of an independent woman who has a child out of wedlock.[6]

In his career, Allen wrote two novels under female pseudonyms. One of these, the short novel The Type-writer Girl, he wrote under the name Olive Pratt Rayner.

Another work, The Evolution of the Idea of God (1897), propounds a theory of religion on heterodox lines comparable to Herbert Spencer's "ghost theory".[7] Allen's theory became well known and brief references to it appear in a review by Marcel Mauss, Durkheim's nephew, in the articles of William James and in the works of Sigmund Freud. The young G. K. Chesterton wrote on what he considered the flawed premise of the idea, arguing that the idea of God preceded human mythologies, rather than developing from them. Chesterton said of Grant Allen's book on the evolution of the idea of God "it would be much more interesting if God wrote a book on the evolution of the idea of Grant Allen".[8]

Allen also became a pioneer in science fiction, with the 1895 novel The British Barbarians. This book, published about the same time as H. G. Wells's The Time Machine (which appeared January–May 1895, and which includes a mention of Allen[3][9]), also described time travel, although the plot is quite different. Allen's short story The Thames Valley Catastrophe (published 1901 in The Strand Magazine) describes the destruction of London by a sudden and massive volcanic eruption.

Many histories of detective fiction mention Allen as an innovator. The illustrious Colonel Clay is a precursor of other gentleman rogue characters, notably bearing a strong resemblance to Maurice Leblanc's Arsène Lupin, introduced some years later; and both Miss Cayley's Adventures and Hilda Wade feature early female detectives.

Allen married twice and had one son, Jerrard Grant Allen (1878-1946), a theatrical agent/manager who in 1913 married the actress and singer Violet Englefield. They had a son, Reginald "Reggie" Grant Allen (1910-1985).

Grant Allen died of liver cancer at his home on Hindhead, Haslemere, Surrey, England on October 25, 1899.[10] He died before finishing Hilda Wade. The novel's final episode, which he dictated to his friend, doctor and neighbor Sir Arthur Conan Doyle from his bed appeared under the appropriate title, The Episode of the Dead Man Who Spoke in the Strand Magazine in 1900.

An annual festival celebrating Canadian mystery fiction takes place annually on Wolfe Island, near Kingston, Allen's birthplace.

Partial bibliography

The British Barbarians, 1895

Selected articles

References

  1. ↑ "Grant Allen Biography". The Literature Network. Retrieved September 26, 2013.
  2. ↑ Rand, Theodore H. (1900). Treasury of Canadian Verse. New York: Dutton. p. 387.
  3. 1 2 John Robert Colombo, ed. (1979). "Grant Allen – The Child of the Phalanstery". Other Canadas An Anthology of Science Fiction and Fantasy. McGraw-Hill Ryerson. p. 30. ISBN 0-07-082953-5.
  4. ↑ Head, Dominic (2006). The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English. Cambridge University Press. p. 19. ISBN 0-521-83179-2.
  5. ↑ Sacks, Oliver (2007). Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. Pan Macmillan (published 2011). ISBN 9780330471138. Retrieved 2015-11-29. The first extended description of amusia in the medical literature was an 1878 paper by Grant Allen in the journal Mind [...] Allen's lengthy paper included a superb case of a young man whom he had 'abundant opportunities of observing and experimenting upon' - the sort of detailed case study that established experimental neurology and psychology in the latter part of the nineteenth century.
  6. ↑ Cameron, Brooke (2008). "Grant Allen’s The Woman Who Did: Spencerian Individualism and Teaching New Women to Be Mothers," English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, Vol. 51, No. 3, pp. 281-301.
  7. ↑ Review in The Journal of Religion, January 1899
  8. ↑ Chesterton (1926). The Everlasting Man. London: Hodder and Stoughton, p. 20.
  9. ↑ Chapter V of the Heinemann text and Chapter VII of the Holt text
  10. ↑ Cotton, J.S.; Van Arsdel, Rosemary T. (October 2005). "Allen, (Charles) Grant Blairfindie (1848–1899)" (Online edition). Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/373. Retrieved 9 August 2015.

Further reading

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