William Greenslade and Terence Rodgers (eds), Grant Allen: Literature and Politics at the Fin de Siecle (Ashgate 2005); £47.50. ISBN: 0-7546-0865-4.

Of all the late-Victorian male Spencereans who have fallen into the dustbin of history – Andrew Lang, Winwood Reade, Edward Clodd et al – Grant Allen is perhaps the most worthy of resuscitation. As Chris Nottingham observes in a deft and incisive essay on Allen’s journalism, the seemingly random outpouring of essays and other occasional pieces is in fact part and parcel of ‘the broader progressive writing of the period’, Allen being anti-aristocratic, anti-patriotic, anti-Prussian and pro-Celtic. More problematic was Allen’s espousal of women’s rights, especially in the light of his scandalous success, The Woman Who Did (1895), whose strange Darwinian melange of freedom and reaction is perceptively diagnosed here by Sabine Ernst. William Greenslade and Terence Rodgers have done an excellent job in assembling these conference papers, and their claims for Allen as a scientific writer seem well worth investigating. The editors have made a good case for considering Allen as an important, if often derivative, contributor to the wider cultural politics of the period, and their agenda is finely supported by their contributors. This book especially benefits from the sterling contributions of Peter Morton, whose highly informative biographical outline is valuably buttressed by a detailed checklist of Grant Allen’s voluminous publications. This is clearly a labour of love, and is well worth having permanently on the record for future research.

The range of essays here is impressive: thus Heather Atchison offers a sharply focused analysis of Allen’s Darwinian/Spencerean credentials, Lyssa Randolph ably dissects the racial strands in Allen’s marketable fiction, and Nick Freeman accounts for the failure of The British Barbarians (1895) in the light of the Wilde trials. The essays also extend our understanding of Allen’s work into lesser-known areas, such as the convergence of women and mass production in The Type-Writer Girl (1897), well contextualised by Leah Price, Allen’s contribution to the new cultural phenomenon of the female detective as outlined by Chris Willis, and the carefully nuanced elaboration of Allen’s anthropological theories in which Patrick Parrinder frames this work in relation to Andrew Lang, Tylor, Frazer and Wells. For Joseph Conrad, Allen was ‘a man of inferior intelligence’ whose work was definitively ‘not art’. Grant Allen is, as John Lucas concedes, ‘no hero of literature’. But Lucas’s claim for Allen as an ‘energising force’ impacting on late-Victorian and Edwardian culture is triumphantly borne out in this full and lively collection.

Roger Ebbatson (Loughborough University)

For more details, see the Ashgate website