Grant Allen - Works of Grant Allen

The Collected Works of

GRANT ALLEN

(1848-1899)

Contents

Delphi Classics 2017

Version 1

The Collected Works of

GRANT ALLEN

By Delphi Classics, 2017

Collected Works of Grant Allen

First published in the United Kingdom in 2017 by Delphi Classics.

Delphi Classics, 2017.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form other than that in which it is published.

ISBN: 978 1 78656 095 7

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Kingston, Canada West (known as Ontario after Confederation). Born near Kingston in 1848, Grant Allen was the second son of Catharine Ann Grant and the Rev. Joseph Antisell Allen, a Protestant minister from Dublin, Ireland. His mother was a daughter of the fifth Baron de Longueuil.

Allen settled into a career in journalism in the mid 1870s, learning to perfect his craft on articles of science, sociology and literature. He also became popular for expounding various aspects of Darwinism. Passionate about evolutionary biology Allen formed a close relationship with Herbert Spencer, the greatest of living philosophers. Allen loved to talk about any and all subjects, often described by his peers as being most passionate and imaginative, with an endless curiosity and charm. He would stay up till all hours of the night, talking and munching on biscuits while discussing evolutionary doctrine and Darwinism.

Allen wrote of his first novel, Philistia (1884), I put my whole soul into it. I didnt write hastily, I satisfied utterly my own critical faculty, and I cant do any better. The narrative concerns the three Le Breton brothers: Ernest, the high-minded socialist; Herbert, the cynic and cad; and the saintly Ronald. The brothers are about to leave Oxford and make their way into the mundane Philistine world. Other characters include Lady Hilda Tregellis, a bold and bored young aristocrat eager to marry someone different, and Arthur Berkeley, a composer of comic operas and the first in a long line of Allens self-sacrificing heroes that love from afar.

On the whole, the novel was criticised for its smart and implausible dialogue, as the characters tend to lecture each other for whole paragraphs at a time. Another bone of contention with critics was the childish sentimentality of the love relationships. Allen was obliged by the publisher, Bradbury Evans and Co., to substitute a highly inappropriate happy ending. After Philistia failed to win critical acclaim, Allen resolved to take the downward path into middlebrow, sensational fiction. He later claimed he wrote nothing else with the same commitment, until The Woman Who Did .

The first editions title page

A later Yellowback edition of the novel

CHILDREN OF LIGHT.

It was Sunday evening, and on Sundays Max Schurz, the chief of the London Socialists, always held his weekly receptions. That night his cosmopolitan refugee friends were all at liberty; his French disciples could pour in from the little lanes and courts in Soho, where, since the Commune, they had plied their peaceful trades as engravers, picture-framers, artists-colourmen, models, pointers, and so forth for most of them were hangers-on in one way or another of the artistic world; his German adherents could stroll round, pipe in mouth, from their printing-houses, their ham-and-beef shops, or their naturalists chambers, where they stuffed birds or set up exotic butterflies in little cabinets for most of them were more or less literary or scientific in their pursuits; and his few English sympathisers, chiefly dissatisfied philosophical Radicals of the upper classes, could drop in casually for a chat and a smoke, on their way home from the churches to which they had been dutifully escorting their un-emancipated wives and sisters. Max Schurz kept open house for all on Sunday evenings, and there was not a drawing-room in London better filled than his with the very advanced and not undistinguished set who alone had the much-prized entre of his exclusive salon.