As tutor to the sons of Lord Huntly, he met Ellen Jerrard, whom he married in the spring of 1873. They traveled to Jamaica in June 1873, where Allen took up a position as professor of mental and moral philosophy at Government College, Spanish Town. The experience was not entirely a happy one. The college had been only recently founded when Allen arrived, and, like postrevolution Jamaica itself, was on unstable ground. He became principal shortly before the college's abolition in 1876.
He found his three years in Jamaica quite productive. In reading the Attis of Catullus with his students, for example, he opened himself up to a poem he would later translate into English (1892). He also gathered material he would incorporate into some of the scientific essays collected in The Evolutionist at Large (1881), Vignettes from Nature (1881), and Colin Clout's Calendar (1883), and into fiction such as his short stories "The Reverend John Creedy" and "Ivan Greet's Masterpiece" and his novels In All Shades (1886) and The Devil's Die (1888).
Allen came to write short stories by accident. Around 1880 he submitted to Belgravia a scientific article in which he attempted to prove man's incapacity to perceive ghosts; because of the fanciful nature of his subject, he decided to cast the article in the form of a story and to use a pseudonym, J.
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