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Grant Allen was a late 19th century Canadian author best known for writing about both science and novels. This is one of his horror tales.
Grant Allen was a late 19th century Canadian author best known for writing about both science and novels. This is one of his horror tales.
A distinguished Positivist friend of mine, who is in most matters a practical man of the world, astonished me greatly the other day at Venice, by the grave remark that Italian was destined to be the language of the future. I found on inquiry he had inherited the notion direct from Auguste Comte, who justified it on the purely sentimental and unpractical ground that the tongue of Dante had never yet been associated with any great national defeat or disgrace. The idea surprised me not a little; because it displays such a profound misconception of what language is, and why people use it.
The speech of the world will not be decided on mere grounds of sentiment: the tongue that survives will not survive because it is so admirably adapted for the manufacture of rhymes or epigrams. Stern need compels. Frenchmen and Germans, in congress assembled, and looking about them for a means of intercommunication, might indeed agree to accept Italian then and there as an international compromise. But congresses don't make or unmake the habits of everyday life; and the growth or spread of a language is a thing as much beyond our deliberate human control as the rise or fall of the barometer.
My friend's remark, however, set me thinking and watching what are really the languages now gaining and spreading over the civilised world; it set me speculating what will be the outcome of this gain and spread in another half century. And the results are these: Vastly the most growing and absorbing of all languages at the present moment is the English, which is almost everywhere swallowing up the overflow of German, Scandinavian, Dutch, and Russian. Next to it, probably, in point of vitality, comes Spanish, which is swallowing up the overflow of French, Italian, and the other Latin races. Third, perhaps, ranks Russian, destined to become in time the spoken tongue of a vast tract in Northern and Central Asia. Among non-European languages, three seem to be gaining fast: Chinese, Malay, Arabic. Of the doomed tongues, on the other hand, the most hopeless is French, which is losing all round; while Italian, German, and Dutch are either quite at a standstill or slightly retrograding. The world is now round. By the middle of the twentieth century, in all probability, English will be its dominant speech; and the English-speaking peoples, a heterogeneous conglomerate of all nationalities, will control between them the destinies of mankind. Spanish will be the language of half the populous southern hemisphere. Russian will spread over a moiety of Asia. Chinese, Malay, Arabic, will divide among themselves the less civilised parts of Africa and the East. But French, German, and Italian will be insignificant and dwindling European dialects, as numerically unimportant as Flemish or Danish in our own day.
And why? Not because Shakespeare wrote in English, but because the English language has already got a firm hold of all those portions of the earth's surface which are most absorbing the overflow of European populations. Germans and Scandinavians and Russians emigrate by the thousand now to all parts of the United States and the north-west of Canada. In the first generation they may still retain their ancestral speech; but their children have all to learn English. In Australia and New Zealand the same thing is happening. In South Africa Dutch had got a footing, it is true; but it is fast losing it. The newcomers learn English, and though the elder Boers stick with Boer conservatism to their native tongue, young Piet and young Paul find it pays them better to know and speak the language of commerce-the language of Cape Town, of Kimberley, of the future. The reason is the same throughout. Whenever two tongues come to be spoken in the same area one of them is sure to be more useful in business than the other. Every French-Canadian who wishes to do things on a large scale is obliged to speak English. So is the Creole in Louisiana; so earlier were the Knickerbocker Dutch in New York. Once let English get in, and it beats all competing languages fairly out of the field in a couple of generations.
Like influences favour Spanish in South America and elsewhere. English has annexed most of North America, Australia, South Africa, the Pacific; Spanish has annexed South America, Central America, the Philippines, Cuba, and a few other places. For the most part these areas are less suited than the English-speaking districts for colonisation by North Europeans; but they absorb a large number of Italians and other Mediterranean races, who all learn Spanish in the second generation. As to the other dominant languages, the points in their favour are different. Conquest and administrative needs are spreading Russian over the steppes of Asia; the Arab merchant and the growth of Mahommedanism are importing Arabic far into the heart of Africa; the Chinaman is carrying his own monosyllables with him to California, Australia, Singapore. These tongues in future will divide the world between them.
The German who leaves Germany becomes an Anglo-American. The Italian who leaves Italy becomes a Spanish-American.
There is another and still more striking way of looking at the rapid increase of English. No other language will carry you through so many ports in the world. It suffices for London, Liverpool, Glasgow, Belfast, Southampton, Cardiff; for New York, Boston, Montreal, Charleston, New Orleans, San Francisco; for Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, Hong Kong, Yokohama, Honolulu; for Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, Kurrachi, Singapore, Colombo, Cape Town, Mauritius. Spanish with Cadiz, Barcelona, Havana, Callao, Valparaiso, cannot touch that record; nor can French with Marseilles, Bordeaux, Havre, Algiers, Antwerp, Tahiti. The most commercially useful language in the world, thus widely diffused in so many great mercantile and shipping centres, is certain to win in the struggle for existence among the tongues of the future.
The old Mediterranean civilisation teaches us a useful lesson in this respect. Two languages dominated the Mediterranean basin. The East spoke Greek, not because Plato and ?schylus spoke Greek, but because Greek was the tongue of the great commercial centres-of Athens, Syracuse, Alexandria, Antioch, Byzantium. The West spoke Latin, not because Catullus and Virgil spoke Latin, but because Latin was the administrative tongue, the tongue of Rome, of Italy, and later of Gaul, of Spain, of the great towns in Dacia, Pannonia, Britain. Whoever wanted to do anything on the big scale then, had to speak Greek or Latin; so much so that the native languages of Gaul and Spain died utterly out, and Latin dialects are now the spoken tongue in all southern Europe. In our own time, again, educated Hindoos from different parts of India have to use English as a means of intercommunication; and native merchants must write their business correspondence with distant houses in English. To put an extreme contrast: in the last century French was spoken by far more people than English; at the present day French is only just keeping up its numbers in France, is losing in Canada and the United States, is not advancing to any extent in Africa. English is spoken by a hundred million people in Europe and America; is over-running Africa; has annexed Australasia and the Pacific Isles; has ousted, or is ousting, Dutch at the Cape, French in Louisiana, even Spanish itself in Florida, California, New Mexico. In Egyptian mud villages, the aspiring Copt, who once learnt French, now learns English. In Scandinavia, our tongue gains ground daily. Everywhere in the world it takes the lead among the European languages, and by the middle of the next century will no doubt be spoken over half the globe by a cosmopolitan mass of five hundred million people.
And all on purely Darwinian principles! It is the best adapted tongue, and therefore it survives in the struggle for existence. It is the easiest to learn, at least orally. It has got rid of the effete rubbish of genders; simplified immensely its declensions and conjugations; thrown overboard most of the nonsensical ballast we know as grammar. It is only weighted now by its grotesque and ridiculous spelling-one of the absurdest among all the absurd English attempts at compromise. The pressure of the newer speakers will compel it to make jetsam of that lumber also; and then the tongue of Shelley and Newton will march onward unopposed to the conquest of humanity.
I pen these remarks, I hope, "without prejudice." Patriotism is a vulgar vice of which I have never been guilty.
* * *
Charles Grant Blairfindie Allen was born on February 24th, 1848 at Alwington, near Kingston, Canada West (now part of Ontario). Home schooled until 13 when his family moved to England, Grant was to become a highly regarded science writer who branched out to a fiction career and became enormously popular. His work helped propel several genres of fiction and whilst his career was short it was enormously productive. Grant's scientific background enabled him to root much of his work in a plausibility that was denied to others. He had little fear in challenging a society that treated women as second class citizens and creating best sellers from such works. On October 25th 1899 Grant Allen died at his home in Hindhead, Haslemere, Surrey, England. He died just before finishing Hilda Wade. The novel's final episode, which he dictated to his friend, doctor and neighbour Sir Arthur Conan Doyle from his bed appeared under the appropriate title The Episode of the Dead Man Who Spoke in 1900.
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Grant Allen was a late 19th century Canadian author best known for writing about both science and novels. This is one of his horror tales.
This was the top-prize-winning novel from 20,000 entries in one of the richest literary awards ever offered in Britain. Its convoluted and colorful plot turns on questions of heredity and atavism: the ancestry of the Waring twin brothers and of Elma Clifford. Elma comes on her mother's side from a line of gypsy snake dancers, and she displays a periodic urge to dance wildly with a feather boa in her bedroom. A murderous judge, multiple mistaken identities and scenes of tribal life in South Africa decorate this extraordinary novel, which is certainly a testament to Grant Allen's versatility and grasp of the popular market.Excerpt: "Elma felt sure she was mad that night. And, if so, oh, how could she poison Cyril Waring's life with so unspeakable an inheritance for himself and his children? She didn't know, what any psychologist might at once have told her, that no one with the fatal taint of madness in her blood could ever even have thought of that righteous self-denial. Such scruples have no place in the selfish insane temperament; they belong only to the highest and purest types of moral nature."In his biography of Allen, Professor Peter Morton says about this book: "Twice in his career Allen finds he has a great popular success on his hands. What's Bred in the Bone (1891), a sensational thriller written to order at top speed, secures him one of the largest literary prizes ever awarded in Britain: a thousand pounds from George Newnes, the publishers of the magazine Tit-Bits. What's Bred in the Bone comes first in a field of 20,000 entrants to take the prize. It sells hugely in its first year, goes into seventeen impressions, appears in the form of a silent film in 1916, and is translated into several languages, including Icelandic. Nothing demonstrates better Allen's cold-blooded judgment in analysing and meeting the popular taste." The novel was published serially in 1890 and 1891.(Reference: Peter Morton's website about Grant Allen https://sites.google.com/site/petermortonswebsite/.)
"Madelyn spent years in a marriage built on lies, loving a man whose heart had never been hers. It had always belonged to her adopted sister, Rebecca. When the truth came crashing down, everything she believed in shattered with it. Broken and betrayed, she walked away, determined to reclaim the pieces of her life. But just when she thought she was finally free, Jason returned, eyes full of regret, pleading for another chance. ""Can we go back to the way things were?"" Now, torn between the pain of the past and the ghost of love, Madelyn must decide: trust him again or finally choose herself."
Everyone in town knew Amelia had chased Jaxton for years, even etching his initials on her skin. When malicious rumors swarmed, he merely straightened his cuff links and ordered her to kneel before the woman he truly loved. Seething with realization, she slammed her engagement ring down on his desk and walked away. Not long after, she whispered "I do" to a billionaire, their wedding post crashing every feed. Panic cracked Jaxton. "She's using you to spite me," he spat. The billionaire just smiled. "Being her sword is my honor."
Cornered, Melinda cut a desperate deal with the man she most hated-Declan, the ex‑husband who bankrupted her family for another woman's revenge. Days were spent enduring that woman's petty cruelties; nights found her submitting to Declan's cold desire while she hunted the truth. He later watched, unmoved, as his beloved pushed Melinda from a rooftop. Years on, she returned a self‑made billionaire, child in arms, and crushed his fortune. Choked with emotion, he begged, "I was wrong-remarry me." Looping her arm through his rival's, she answered, "Never." Declan looked at the miniature version of himself in her arms and shattered.
To the public, she was the CEO's executive secretary. Behind closed doors, she was the wife he never officially acknowledged. Jenessa was elated when she learned that she was pregnant. But that joy was replaced with dread as her husband, Ryan, showered his affections on his first love. With a heavy heart, she chose to set him free and leave. When they met again, Ryan's attention was caught by Jenessa's protruding belly. "Whose child are you carrying?!" he demanded. But she only scoffed. "It's none of your business, my dear ex-husband!"
Elliana, the unfavored "ugly duckling" of her family, was humiliated by her stepsister, Paige, who everyone admired. Paige, engaged to the CEO Cole, was the perfect woman-until Cole married Elliana on the day of the wedding. Shocked, everyone wondered why he chose the "ugly" woman. As they waited for her to be cast aside, Elliana stunned everyone by revealing her true identity: a miracle healer, financial mogul, appraisal prodigy, and AI genius. When her mistreatment became known, Cole revealed Elliana's stunning, makeup-free photo, sending shockwaves through the media. "My wife doesn't need anyone's approval."
At their wedding night, Kayla caught her brand-new husband cheating. Reeling and half-drunk, she staggered into the wrong suite and collapsed into a stranger's arms. Sunrise brought a pounding head-and the discovery she was pregnant. The father? A supremely powerful tycoon who happened to be her husband's ruthless uncle. Panicked, she tried to run, but he barred the door with a faint, dangerous smile. When the cheating ex begged, Kayla lifted her chin and declared, "Want a second chance at us? Ask your uncle." The tycoon pulled her close. "She's my wife now." The ex gasped, "What!?"
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