The Busiest Man in England

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xviii

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2. Introduction

   • Peter Morton

   Pages 1-11

3. Canada and Oxford (1848–1873)

   • Peter Morton

   Pages 13-26

4. Jamaica (1873–1876)

   • Peter Morton

   Pages 27-43

5. Setting out the Stall (1876–1880)

   • Peter Morton

   Pages 45-71

6. “A Pedlar Crying Stuff”: Selling the Wares (1880–1889)

   • Peter Morton

   Pages 73-93

7. The Stock in Trade: Writing Science

   • Peter Morton

   Pages 95-110

8. The Stock in Trade: Light Fiction

   • Peter Morton

   Pages 111-124

9. The Prosperous Tradesman (1890–1895)

   • Peter Morton

   Pages 125-132

10. Dealing with the “Dissenting Grocer”

    • Peter Morton

    Pages 133-145

11. Retailing The Woman Who Did

    • Peter Morton

    Pages 147-171

12. Last Orders (1896–1899)

    • Peter Morton

    Pages 173-185

13. Conclusion

    • Peter Morton

    Pages 187-196

14. Back Matter

    Pages 197-251

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This book is a critical biography of Grant Allen, (1848-1899), the first for a century, based on all the surviving primary sources. Born in Kingston, Ontario, into a cultured and affluent family, Allen was educated in France and England. A mysterious marriage while he was an Oxford undergraduate wrecked his academic career and radicalized his views on sexual and marital questions, as did a three-year teaching stint in Jamaica. Despite his lifelong ill health and short life, Allen was a writer of extraordinary productivity and range. About half - more than 30 books and many hundreds of articles - reflects interests which ran from Darwinian biology to cultural travel guides. His prosperity, however, was underpinned by fiction; more than 30 novels, including The Woman Who Did , which has attracted much recent attention from feminist critics and historians. The Better End of Grub Street uses Allen's career to examine the role and status of the freelance author/journalist in the late-Victorian period. Allen's career delineates what it took to succeed in this notoriously tough profession.

• fiction
• novel
• Victorian era
• British and Irish Literature

"Remembered today mainly for his best-selling 'sex-problem' novel The Woman Who Did, Grant Allen was the most versatile man of letters in late Victorian London, and one of the most controversial. An outspoken atheist, socialist, evolutionist, sexual radical, and polymath, he was one of the chief shapers of the iconoclastic mentality of the 1890s.

For reasons which have long been mysterious, Allen, from a wealthy Canadian family, was dependent upon the new mass market for popular fiction to keep the wolf from the door. Peter Morton, having combed through dusty archives with the energy of a Sherlock Holmes, has emerged, not only with a solution to the mystery, but also with an unsurpassed knowledge of Grant Allen and his times. His beautifully-written biography - the first for more than a century - of this remarkable and unjustly neglected figure throws a brilliant new light on the entire literary-cultural scene of late nineteenth-century England."-Nicholas Ruddick, University of Regina

PETER MORTON currently teaches in the School of Humanities at Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia. His previous books include The Vital Science, a study of Darwinism and the literary imagination; and After Light, a history of early modern Adelaide. Morton also served as scientific historian to the Australian government for three years while writing the prizewinning Fire Across the Desert, the story of the Anglo-Australian joint project that established the rocket town of Woomera in the 1940s.

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