ABSTRACT
Grant Allen’s impressive creative output – his philosophical musings, his reflections
on nature, his fiction, even his writings on art and travel – is imbued with
evolutionary ideas. But what kind of evolutionist was Allen? In the post-1859
struggle for supremacy between Darwinians, Spencerians, Lamarckians and others,
where did his loyalties lie? In his many scientific essays, brought together in
collections such as The Evolutionist at Large (1884), Science in Arcady (1892) or Flashlights on Nature (1898), his voice is resolutely Darwinian; his starting point a simple, often common observation, by which, using his reconstructive imagination
and evolutionary logic, he reveals the interconnectedness and finely balanced
intricacies of the natural world.
