After spending some time teaching school, he remarried in 1873 and took up the impressive-sounding chair of Mental and Moral Philosophy at the experimental Government College for black students in Spanish Town, Jamaica, founded in the wake of a rebellion. He was three years in the tropics before the college, always struggling, failed. His experiences in Jamaica made a profound expression on him, and he wrote with characteristic forthrightness, "I have no exaggerated sympathy with the blacks, yet I must say the way they are regarded by the whites is simply shameful." He then returned to England and began to try to make a living from his writing, first as a popularizer of evolutionary science--he was a disciple of Herbert Spencer--and later on a variety of other subjects. Having long suffered from bronchitis, and, latterly, an undiagnosed illness (probably malaria), he died on 28 October 1899. He was survived by his second wife, Ellen (née Jerrard), and their only son, Jerrard Grant, born in July 1878.
Though his professional writing career was not much more than twenty years long, Grant Allen was enormously productive. He published more than thirty novels, half a dozen volumes of short stories, a volume of poetry, and well over thirty non-fiction books--much work published in periodicals remains uncollected--on subjects as varied as Anglo-Saxon Britain, Charles Darwin and evolutionary theory, aesthetics, anthropology, botany, socialism, the Woman Question, and the British countryside, as well as a series of popular historical guidebooks to European cities.
This is a free page. This page contains 189 words. This
biography contains 4,120 words (approx. 14 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our Grant Allen Access Pass.
