The Busiest Man in England

"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.

Preface Acknowledgments Introduction: 'The Most Hateful of Professions' Canada and Oxford (1848-1873) Jamaica (1873-1876) Setting Out the Stall (1876-1880) 'A Pedlar Crying Stuff': Selling the Wares (1880-1889) The Stock in Trade: Writing Science The Stock in Trade: Light Fiction The Prosperous Tradesman (1890-1895) Dealing With the 'Dissenting Grocer' Retailing The Woman Who Did Last Orders (1896-1899) 'We of the Proletariate...' Abbreviations in the Notes Notes and References Bibliography Index