George Allan England and Blanche, 1929. One measures a circle, beginning anywhere—and so too a Fortean.
For George Allan England’s relationship with Charles Fort and Forteanism is a case of mutual influence.
George Allan England was born 9 February 1877 in Fort McPherson, Nebraska, to George Allen and Hannah Pearl (Lyon) England. (His middle name is often misspelled Allen—which was how his father’s name was written.) The elder England was an army chaplain. In 1880, according to the census, they had three children, Paul, Florence, and young George. His father died in December 1883, in his mid-40s. At some point, George moved out to Massachusetts. He attended English High School in Boston, and matriculated at Harvard, from which his father had graduated in 1862. Probably his move east came around the time of his father’s death, and likely he stayed with family—his father had been born in Vermont.
For George Allan England’s relationship with Charles Fort and Forteanism is a case of mutual influence.
George Allan England was born 9 February 1877 in Fort McPherson, Nebraska, to George Allen and Hannah Pearl (Lyon) England. (His middle name is often misspelled Allen—which was how his father’s name was written.) The elder England was an army chaplain. In 1880, according to the census, they had three children, Paul, Florence, and young George. His father died in December 1883, in his mid-40s. At some point, George moved out to Massachusetts. He attended English High School in Boston, and matriculated at Harvard, from which his father had graduated in 1862. Probably his move east came around the time of his father’s death, and likely he stayed with family—his father had been born in Vermont.
It was there, at Harvard, that England started publishing his writing—early works appeared in “The Harvard Illustrated Magazine”—for which he eventually served as editor—in 1899 and continued to appear there until 1904. Getting through Harvard, he later said, had been difficult. He worked tutoring richer students, he said, and grinding away at his own studies—earning a Phi Beta Kappa key. He received a bachelor’s degree in 1902 and a master’s in 1903, his undergraduate degree on Petrarchism won the Bowdoin prize of $250 and he also won an award for translating a French poem. On 21 September 1903, he married Elmeda Coffin in Boston. At that time, though he was still apparently writing, his primary occupation was working for a life insurance company. The couple lived in New York.
According to his later stories, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and nephritis around this time, and needed to take a break from his work; he was told he might have only two more years to live. The outlines of what happened next are consistent in various tales he told, but the emotional valences differ quite a bit, and so it’s not exactly clear how to interpret this period in his life. In 1920 he said that Elmeda told him to go live with her people, out in the Maine woods, where he wrote for the local paper, but earned no money—until the idea struck him that he could sell stories for magazines. He wrote his first one in pencil on wrapping paper—saving the good paper for final drafts—a 5,000 word adventure story that he sold to Collier. It made $100, and he would never afterwards receive so much as a rejection letter. “I found stories everywhere, waiting and ready to be written. The farmers themselves furnished me material; their simple, narrow lives, their joys and sorrows, their absurdities, their dickerings, loves, hates, doings of all kinds. Why, here was life just waiting to be revealed!” He made $265 that first month, and more the next.
A few years later, England had a far less Romantic vision of his time in Maine. Accounting for the difference could be that in the interim he had remarried, and so looked on that ancient era somewhat differently: “Tuberculosis soon developed, and I had to give up work and go into the Maine woods. Two years of roughing it restored my health, but roughing it doesn't earn any money, so I plugged into fiction-writing; and never shall I forget the exultation of my first story check—$100 for a story sent to Collier's. That was nearly 20 years ago, and since then I have been steadily writing fiction, and have sold everything I've ever written.
“My motto then, as now, was: 'Stick to it will do it.' I was surrounded by discouragements, living with backward, illiterate people, crude and ignorant. Imagine the contrast, going from Harvard and from New York City, to associate with such barbarians; people who mocked and sneered. However, I kept on. That's really the only way to do; just know you're right, and 'Stick to it.' That in the end will always win out. And incidentally, some day I am going to write a book giving the experiences of a city chap going to live among country folk. If that book doesn't make a sensation, I miss my guess.”
England eventually created a kind of fiction factory. He wrote for something like six hours every day, and balanced this with physical work. At some point, he hooked up his dictionary, manuscript log, and scissors, so that he could pull them to himself as he needed while he worked. He rigged overhead brown paper with his notes on local color and dialect, pulling off each page as he used it, so that he did not repeat material. In later years, his second wife, a stenographer by trade, wrote up his manuscripts for final publication; he paid her for the work. He put out a tremendous number of stories that showed the influence of H.G. Wells, Jack London, and Algernon Blackwood as well as French authors. They appeared in Collier’s and McClure’s and All-Story and Monthly Story and Appleton’s Booklovers, and others, both prose and poetry.
England was involved with socialist politics at the time, writing for the “Appeal to Reason” out of Girard, Kansas, and “The Review of Reviews.” He may have stood for U.S. Representative on the socialist ticket in 1908. He was also doing some traveling at this time, and one of his stories was about his experiences aboard a Portland Steamer.
His family life became very complicated in 1908. On 21 October, his wife sued for divorce in Boston on the grounds that England had kidnaped their son. (There is some confusion in the report, as the boy is listed as seven years old, which puts his birth before their marriage. Also, there’s no evidence they ever had a son.) According to her, England took the boy during the summer, when they were at their summer house. He took the boy, sent the servants away, and left her alone in the woods. England counter-sued against her and a lawyer, James S. Rose, though the newspapers are unclear on why he was included in the legal spat.
The divorce does seem to have gone through—Almeda appeared in later records as divorced. But it took time, which must have been awkward for the whole family. In January of 1910, she and Isabella seem to have been traveling from England without George. And in April, when the census was taken, the family lived together. George and Almeda were documented as being married. The next census had Almeda still in Oxford, Maine, where the family had been in 1910, supporting herself by taking in boarders. She died in Pennsylvania on 17 December 1949.
Despite the turmoil, England continued his political activism and writing. In 1912, he ran for governor of Maine, as a socialist, and lost badly. He gave a talk on the horrors of food manufacturing, claiming that some 76,000 people die annually in New York because of the “Food Fakirs,” one third of them babies. The issue had come to the forefront because of Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle,” which had come out of his work with the “Appeal to Reason.” And England still stumped for that paper, though with a disconcerting personal edge now. Fred Warren—who had commissioned Sinclair’s journalistic investigation—was charged with encouraging kidnapping, because he offered a reward of $1,000 for the capture of William S. Taylor, who had been involved with the murder of William Goebel in Kentucky, subsequently fleeing to Indiana where he became involved with insurance—England’s old business—and rich. England wrote an article for “New West Magazine” that was reprinted in the “Appeal to Reason.” It was titled—and the article continually came back to the question—“Is Kidnapping Legal?”
Meanwhile, his stories continued to appear in magazines and newspapers. He put out a collection of poetry, “Underneath the Bough”; he started a series of true crime-inspired stories for “The Illustrated Sunday Magazine,” of the Louisville, Kentucky “Courier-Journal,” based on his own acquaintance with criminals and the help of a criminal lawyer, according to press reports. He continued to write for socialist publications, such as “The Review of Reviews,” “Coming Nation,” and “Hobo News.” He started combining stories from magazines into novels—1914’s “Darkness and Dawn,” for example combined three stories, telling the tale of a modern couple who wake up 1,000 years later, after Earth’s civilization had been destroyed by a meteor.
England was doing well. He traveled some; there’s a 1917 passenger list with him arriving in New York from Havana and another in 1910 with him returning from Italy. By 1920, he said, he had sold some 300 short stories, 25 serials, published 11 books, and wrote more newspaper articles and essays than he could account for. He may have maintained multiple residences, a room at the Hotel Albent, in New York, and a home in Massachusetts. According to the 1920 census, he was living with his daughter—though she is recorded by the name Elizabeth—in Brookline, Massachusetts. She was 14. On 26 July 1921, he married Blanche Porter Kennedy, a 34 year-old divorcée in Manchester, New Hampshire. He was 44.
In 1920, he applied for a passport, intent to visit Newfoundland and Miquelon, a French-controlled island off Newfoundland’s coast. (His previous passport, from 1918 had bene for travel to Cuba.) In the words of a friend, England planned to “get material and ‘local color’ for what he intends to make his most pretentious novel.” England had earlier collected examples of Maine dialect, and planned to make a study of Newfoundland slang. The work was, at least in part, commissioned by Street & Smith, the publisher (which would later be a force in science fiction magazines). From Newfoundland, he traveled to the ice floes, leaving on 8 or 9 March, 1922, to observe the seal hunt. The result of these observations was “The White Wilderness” (1922); “Vikings of the Ice” (1923); and “Dialect Dictionary of Newfoundland” (also 1923).
There followed in the twenties more writing and travel, especially, it seems, through the Caribbean. He went on fishing expeditions in Florida. He was well-known the country over for his writing, and a glib, jokey manner—I find no evidence of his writing socialist articles in the 1920s, though is works sometimes had socialist themes. Often, his writing was light and playful. In 1931, he made news for saying he was going to quit writing and become a poultry farmer in Key West, because there was no more money in authorship—this after putting out some half-million words per year, by his own account. Newspapers tut-tutted the announcement. After all, this was the beginning of the Depression, and chicken farmers weren’t doing well. Not even a week later, he announced he was only kidding.
England wrote in a number of forms, adventure tales and fantastic ones, crime and mystery, and also what would later become the science fiction genre. “Darkness and Dawn” was an example of the science-fiction trope of the sleeper awakening. In 1914, he serialized a novel in “All-Story Cavalier Weekly” called “Empire of the Air” about mysterious globes and things fro, the fourth dimension that prey on humans—and their defeat by scientists and pilots. In 1923, he wrote “The Thing from—‘Outside,’” which Hugo Gernsback published (in “Science and Invention”), and then re-purposed in the first issue of the seminal science fiction magazine “Amazing Stories.” That issue was dated April 1926.
After his appearance in “Amazing Stories,” though, he published mostly in detective magazines, as well as some adventure and mainstream magazines—including “Blue Book” and “Saturday Evening Post.” These continued to appear after his supposed retirement. There were also a handful of articles exposing fake charities in “Real America.”
England’s last few years were sickly. He tried to organize a treasure hunting expedition in the Caribbean, but it fell through, probably because of illness. Around August 1933, he entered the New Hampshire State Hospital, where he would stay for almost three years; he would be cremated at Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and his ashes “scattered to the four winds.”
George Allan England died 26 June 1936 in Concord, New Hampshire. He was 59.
****************************
George Allan England and Charles Fort developed similar ideas, England in his fiction Fort in his hybrid of fiction and non-fiction. For Sam Moskowitz, the similarity of the ideas strongly suggests that Fort poached England’s ideas and repurposed them as his own. For England himself, it showed two minds working in parallel. Given the state of fantastic literature at the time, the ground from which both England and Fort developed, this seems likely.
The surrealist Paul Buhle wrote, “The chief contribution of American literature is horror. From first to last it had illustrated what C.L.R. James calls the uncertainties of life and the ultimate doom of Western civilization’s claim to escape the universal human fate. This is a negative romanticism, to be sure, for no more hope is given for the collective promise of the lower classes than for the pretentious optimism of the bourgeoisie. But it contains a revolutionary kernel, nonetheless. In a society infatuated with the illusion of progress, horror speaks to a human essence beyond history. Poet and writer strive to regain their ancient role: the magic storyteller who gains coherence thought hte use of universal symbols, offering a break with current existence and all its limitations. . . Ambrose Bierce sketched out a comic diabolism that deprived the Civil War of its crusader’s mission, the ‘winning of the West’ of its pseudoheroic spirituality, the entire American Dream of its claims to virtues and happiness. . .
“This is the final horror and the final drawing of the political implications that had been centuries in the making. The intended American escape from the Old World past to the frontier, the search for a timeless small-property Republic, proves to be not only an illusory but a mad and self-destructive concept for those who believe in it. Pessimistic about alternatives, writers of the political catastrophes etched into American self-consciousness the portent of a true twentieth-century dilemma: socialism or barbarism. . . Socialist novelist George Allan England, in his _Darkness and Dawn_ (serialized just before World War I in _Munsey’s Magazine_), conveyed the expectation of disaster in contemporary popular literature. At a time when socialists are on the verge of creating a new society, the entire society is blotted out (England’s commentary on the world conflict?), and hero and heroine find themselves alone in surviving a vast and mysterious destruction. Only after trials and agonies, stumbling through laughable architectural wreckage and inhuman mutation, does the couple help to found a new order in which all is pure and socialistic. The moral: first Armageddon, where America pays for its sins; afterward, with luck, the rebuilding a new and more universal basis.”
One aspect of this horror, as Terry Harpold has noted, was a fear of things coming from “up above.” In a period ranging from just before the turn of the twentieth century to around World War I, a number of stories appeared about horrors that existed in the upper atmosphere—this at a time when air flight was just taking off. (As the technology improved, the horrors were pushed further into space.) Arthur Conan Doyle wrote, for example, “The Horror of the Heights,” which appeared in “Everybody’s Magazine.” The French author Maurice Renard wrote “Le Péril Bleu” in 1910 about invisible creatures in the upper atmosphere that fish for humans. It was adapted into English by John N. Raphael as “Up Above,” which ran in “Pearson’s Magazine.” England could have known it either from its French version or its American incarnation when he wrote “The Empire of the Air.”
Moskowitz convincingly shows that Fort probably read England’s story. It developed themes in which he was interested, and was published by Munsey, to whom Fort sold some of his stories. “Inherent in,” ‘Empire of the Air,’ Moskowitz said, “were the Fortean concepts of disappearances into the air, moving balls of energy, unidentified flying objects, and superior beings to whom we are less than insects. Fort may well have read it.” But whether this story inspired Fort, or was more proof of ideas with which he was already working is hard to know. As Ian Kidd has pointed out, Fort said he started collecting data—in 1906—to test a theory. We don’t know what the theory was, exactly, but can assume it is related to his later work, meaning that Fort was working along lines the England would develop later.
England later discovered Fort’s works, though I do not know when, exactly. It’s worth noting Boni & Liveright published both “The Book of the Damned” and England’s translation of Eduardo Zamacois’s “Their Son and the Necklace” the same week in 1919, meaning the were advertised together. This connection may have been enough to alert England to Fort’s work. At any rate, according to Moskowitz, England was not upset by the similarity of ideas and did not suspect stealing. Indeed, he may have even been influenced by Fort himself when he wrote “The Thing from—‘Outside’,” which bore a resemblance to Algernon Blackwood’s ‘The Wendigo’ but also had an explicit reference to Fort, which science fiction historian Mike Ashley thinks suggests an influence. In the story, a party of explorers are heckled by some unseen force in northern Canada. The origin of the “things” are never explained, but one member offers a Fortean possibility:
“What was it,” Jandron asked, “that destroyed all those people in Valladolid, Spain, that time so many of 'em died in a few minutes after having been touched by an invisible Something that left a slight red mark on each? The newspapers were full of it.”
“Piffle!” yawned Marr.
“I tell you,” insisted Jandron, “there are forms of life as superior to us as we are to ants. We can't see 'em. No ant ever saw a man. And did any ant ever form the least conception of a man? These Things have left thousands of traces, all over the world. If I had my reference-books—“
“Tell that to the marines!”
“Charles Fort, the greatest authority in the world on unexplained phenomena,” persisted Jandron, “gives innumerable cases of happenings that science can't explain, in his 'Book of the Damned.' He claims this earth was once a No-Man's land where all kinds of Things explored and colonized and fought for possession. And he says that now everybody's warned off, except the Owners. I happen to remember a few sentences of his: 'In the past, inhabitants of a host of worlds have dropped here, hopped here, wafted here, sailed, flown, motored, walked here; have come singly, have come in enormous numbers; have visited for hunting, trading, mining. They have been unable to stay here, have made colonies here, have been lost here.”
“Poor fish, to believe that!” mocked the journalist, while the Professor blinked and rubbed his bulging forehead.
“I do believe it!” insisted Jandron. “The world is covered with relics of dead civilizations, that have mysteriously vanished, leaving nothing but their temples and monuments.”
“Rubbish!”
“How about Easter Island? How about all the gigantic works there and in a thousand other places!—Peru, Yucatan and so on—which certainly no primitive race ever built?”
“That's thousands of years ago,” said Marr, “and I'm sleepy. For heaven's sake, can it!”
“Oh, all right. But how explain things, then!”
“What the devil could one of those Things want of our brains?” suddenly put in the Professor. “After all, what?”
“Well, what do we want of lower forms of life? Sometimes food. Again, some product or other. Or just information. Maybe It is just experimenting with us, the way we poke an ant-hill. There's always this to remember, that the human brain-tissue is the most highly-organized form of matter in this world.”
Ashley believes that England probably wrote “The Thing” for one of his usual markets, but was rejected—though England himself denies ever being rejected—as too unusual. But Gernsback was looking, at just this time, for something different in exact this way, and may have contacted England who was, as Ashely notes, second only to Arthur Conan Doyle in popular acclaim for his “scientific romances.” The story “was unlike anything Gernsback had previously published, brining in both a higher literary quality and a strong story-line, not just a discourse on inventions.” A case can be made that this was the first example of modern science fiction, and it would influence other, later seminal works of the genre, particularly “Who Goes There?,” by John W. Campbell, editor of the important science fiction magazine “Astounding.” (Campbell’s story was later filmed several times under the title “The Thing.”) That England’s story appeared in the first modern science fiction magazine furthers the case.
And so there was Fort, his work intersecting with the first versions of science fiction—there was Fort mentioned in the first science fiction story in the first science fiction magazine.
According to his later stories, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and nephritis around this time, and needed to take a break from his work; he was told he might have only two more years to live. The outlines of what happened next are consistent in various tales he told, but the emotional valences differ quite a bit, and so it’s not exactly clear how to interpret this period in his life. In 1920 he said that Elmeda told him to go live with her people, out in the Maine woods, where he wrote for the local paper, but earned no money—until the idea struck him that he could sell stories for magazines. He wrote his first one in pencil on wrapping paper—saving the good paper for final drafts—a 5,000 word adventure story that he sold to Collier. It made $100, and he would never afterwards receive so much as a rejection letter. “I found stories everywhere, waiting and ready to be written. The farmers themselves furnished me material; their simple, narrow lives, their joys and sorrows, their absurdities, their dickerings, loves, hates, doings of all kinds. Why, here was life just waiting to be revealed!” He made $265 that first month, and more the next.
A few years later, England had a far less Romantic vision of his time in Maine. Accounting for the difference could be that in the interim he had remarried, and so looked on that ancient era somewhat differently: “Tuberculosis soon developed, and I had to give up work and go into the Maine woods. Two years of roughing it restored my health, but roughing it doesn't earn any money, so I plugged into fiction-writing; and never shall I forget the exultation of my first story check—$100 for a story sent to Collier's. That was nearly 20 years ago, and since then I have been steadily writing fiction, and have sold everything I've ever written.
“My motto then, as now, was: 'Stick to it will do it.' I was surrounded by discouragements, living with backward, illiterate people, crude and ignorant. Imagine the contrast, going from Harvard and from New York City, to associate with such barbarians; people who mocked and sneered. However, I kept on. That's really the only way to do; just know you're right, and 'Stick to it.' That in the end will always win out. And incidentally, some day I am going to write a book giving the experiences of a city chap going to live among country folk. If that book doesn't make a sensation, I miss my guess.”
England eventually created a kind of fiction factory. He wrote for something like six hours every day, and balanced this with physical work. At some point, he hooked up his dictionary, manuscript log, and scissors, so that he could pull them to himself as he needed while he worked. He rigged overhead brown paper with his notes on local color and dialect, pulling off each page as he used it, so that he did not repeat material. In later years, his second wife, a stenographer by trade, wrote up his manuscripts for final publication; he paid her for the work. He put out a tremendous number of stories that showed the influence of H.G. Wells, Jack London, and Algernon Blackwood as well as French authors. They appeared in Collier’s and McClure’s and All-Story and Monthly Story and Appleton’s Booklovers, and others, both prose and poetry.
England was involved with socialist politics at the time, writing for the “Appeal to Reason” out of Girard, Kansas, and “The Review of Reviews.” He may have stood for U.S. Representative on the socialist ticket in 1908. He was also doing some traveling at this time, and one of his stories was about his experiences aboard a Portland Steamer.
His family life became very complicated in 1908. On 21 October, his wife sued for divorce in Boston on the grounds that England had kidnaped their son. (There is some confusion in the report, as the boy is listed as seven years old, which puts his birth before their marriage. Also, there’s no evidence they ever had a son.) According to her, England took the boy during the summer, when they were at their summer house. He took the boy, sent the servants away, and left her alone in the woods. England counter-sued against her and a lawyer, James S. Rose, though the newspapers are unclear on why he was included in the legal spat.
The divorce does seem to have gone through—Almeda appeared in later records as divorced. But it took time, which must have been awkward for the whole family. In January of 1910, she and Isabella seem to have been traveling from England without George. And in April, when the census was taken, the family lived together. George and Almeda were documented as being married. The next census had Almeda still in Oxford, Maine, where the family had been in 1910, supporting herself by taking in boarders. She died in Pennsylvania on 17 December 1949.
Despite the turmoil, England continued his political activism and writing. In 1912, he ran for governor of Maine, as a socialist, and lost badly. He gave a talk on the horrors of food manufacturing, claiming that some 76,000 people die annually in New York because of the “Food Fakirs,” one third of them babies. The issue had come to the forefront because of Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle,” which had come out of his work with the “Appeal to Reason.” And England still stumped for that paper, though with a disconcerting personal edge now. Fred Warren—who had commissioned Sinclair’s journalistic investigation—was charged with encouraging kidnapping, because he offered a reward of $1,000 for the capture of William S. Taylor, who had been involved with the murder of William Goebel in Kentucky, subsequently fleeing to Indiana where he became involved with insurance—England’s old business—and rich. England wrote an article for “New West Magazine” that was reprinted in the “Appeal to Reason.” It was titled—and the article continually came back to the question—“Is Kidnapping Legal?”
Meanwhile, his stories continued to appear in magazines and newspapers. He put out a collection of poetry, “Underneath the Bough”; he started a series of true crime-inspired stories for “The Illustrated Sunday Magazine,” of the Louisville, Kentucky “Courier-Journal,” based on his own acquaintance with criminals and the help of a criminal lawyer, according to press reports. He continued to write for socialist publications, such as “The Review of Reviews,” “Coming Nation,” and “Hobo News.” He started combining stories from magazines into novels—1914’s “Darkness and Dawn,” for example combined three stories, telling the tale of a modern couple who wake up 1,000 years later, after Earth’s civilization had been destroyed by a meteor.
England was doing well. He traveled some; there’s a 1917 passenger list with him arriving in New York from Havana and another in 1910 with him returning from Italy. By 1920, he said, he had sold some 300 short stories, 25 serials, published 11 books, and wrote more newspaper articles and essays than he could account for. He may have maintained multiple residences, a room at the Hotel Albent, in New York, and a home in Massachusetts. According to the 1920 census, he was living with his daughter—though she is recorded by the name Elizabeth—in Brookline, Massachusetts. She was 14. On 26 July 1921, he married Blanche Porter Kennedy, a 34 year-old divorcée in Manchester, New Hampshire. He was 44.
In 1920, he applied for a passport, intent to visit Newfoundland and Miquelon, a French-controlled island off Newfoundland’s coast. (His previous passport, from 1918 had bene for travel to Cuba.) In the words of a friend, England planned to “get material and ‘local color’ for what he intends to make his most pretentious novel.” England had earlier collected examples of Maine dialect, and planned to make a study of Newfoundland slang. The work was, at least in part, commissioned by Street & Smith, the publisher (which would later be a force in science fiction magazines). From Newfoundland, he traveled to the ice floes, leaving on 8 or 9 March, 1922, to observe the seal hunt. The result of these observations was “The White Wilderness” (1922); “Vikings of the Ice” (1923); and “Dialect Dictionary of Newfoundland” (also 1923).
There followed in the twenties more writing and travel, especially, it seems, through the Caribbean. He went on fishing expeditions in Florida. He was well-known the country over for his writing, and a glib, jokey manner—I find no evidence of his writing socialist articles in the 1920s, though is works sometimes had socialist themes. Often, his writing was light and playful. In 1931, he made news for saying he was going to quit writing and become a poultry farmer in Key West, because there was no more money in authorship—this after putting out some half-million words per year, by his own account. Newspapers tut-tutted the announcement. After all, this was the beginning of the Depression, and chicken farmers weren’t doing well. Not even a week later, he announced he was only kidding.
England wrote in a number of forms, adventure tales and fantastic ones, crime and mystery, and also what would later become the science fiction genre. “Darkness and Dawn” was an example of the science-fiction trope of the sleeper awakening. In 1914, he serialized a novel in “All-Story Cavalier Weekly” called “Empire of the Air” about mysterious globes and things fro, the fourth dimension that prey on humans—and their defeat by scientists and pilots. In 1923, he wrote “The Thing from—‘Outside,’” which Hugo Gernsback published (in “Science and Invention”), and then re-purposed in the first issue of the seminal science fiction magazine “Amazing Stories.” That issue was dated April 1926.
After his appearance in “Amazing Stories,” though, he published mostly in detective magazines, as well as some adventure and mainstream magazines—including “Blue Book” and “Saturday Evening Post.” These continued to appear after his supposed retirement. There were also a handful of articles exposing fake charities in “Real America.”
England’s last few years were sickly. He tried to organize a treasure hunting expedition in the Caribbean, but it fell through, probably because of illness. Around August 1933, he entered the New Hampshire State Hospital, where he would stay for almost three years; he would be cremated at Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and his ashes “scattered to the four winds.”
George Allan England died 26 June 1936 in Concord, New Hampshire. He was 59.
****************************
George Allan England and Charles Fort developed similar ideas, England in his fiction Fort in his hybrid of fiction and non-fiction. For Sam Moskowitz, the similarity of the ideas strongly suggests that Fort poached England’s ideas and repurposed them as his own. For England himself, it showed two minds working in parallel. Given the state of fantastic literature at the time, the ground from which both England and Fort developed, this seems likely.
The surrealist Paul Buhle wrote, “The chief contribution of American literature is horror. From first to last it had illustrated what C.L.R. James calls the uncertainties of life and the ultimate doom of Western civilization’s claim to escape the universal human fate. This is a negative romanticism, to be sure, for no more hope is given for the collective promise of the lower classes than for the pretentious optimism of the bourgeoisie. But it contains a revolutionary kernel, nonetheless. In a society infatuated with the illusion of progress, horror speaks to a human essence beyond history. Poet and writer strive to regain their ancient role: the magic storyteller who gains coherence thought hte use of universal symbols, offering a break with current existence and all its limitations. . . Ambrose Bierce sketched out a comic diabolism that deprived the Civil War of its crusader’s mission, the ‘winning of the West’ of its pseudoheroic spirituality, the entire American Dream of its claims to virtues and happiness. . .
“This is the final horror and the final drawing of the political implications that had been centuries in the making. The intended American escape from the Old World past to the frontier, the search for a timeless small-property Republic, proves to be not only an illusory but a mad and self-destructive concept for those who believe in it. Pessimistic about alternatives, writers of the political catastrophes etched into American self-consciousness the portent of a true twentieth-century dilemma: socialism or barbarism. . . Socialist novelist George Allan England, in his _Darkness and Dawn_ (serialized just before World War I in _Munsey’s Magazine_), conveyed the expectation of disaster in contemporary popular literature. At a time when socialists are on the verge of creating a new society, the entire society is blotted out (England’s commentary on the world conflict?), and hero and heroine find themselves alone in surviving a vast and mysterious destruction. Only after trials and agonies, stumbling through laughable architectural wreckage and inhuman mutation, does the couple help to found a new order in which all is pure and socialistic. The moral: first Armageddon, where America pays for its sins; afterward, with luck, the rebuilding a new and more universal basis.”
One aspect of this horror, as Terry Harpold has noted, was a fear of things coming from “up above.” In a period ranging from just before the turn of the twentieth century to around World War I, a number of stories appeared about horrors that existed in the upper atmosphere—this at a time when air flight was just taking off. (As the technology improved, the horrors were pushed further into space.) Arthur Conan Doyle wrote, for example, “The Horror of the Heights,” which appeared in “Everybody’s Magazine.” The French author Maurice Renard wrote “Le Péril Bleu” in 1910 about invisible creatures in the upper atmosphere that fish for humans. It was adapted into English by John N. Raphael as “Up Above,” which ran in “Pearson’s Magazine.” England could have known it either from its French version or its American incarnation when he wrote “The Empire of the Air.”
Moskowitz convincingly shows that Fort probably read England’s story. It developed themes in which he was interested, and was published by Munsey, to whom Fort sold some of his stories. “Inherent in,” ‘Empire of the Air,’ Moskowitz said, “were the Fortean concepts of disappearances into the air, moving balls of energy, unidentified flying objects, and superior beings to whom we are less than insects. Fort may well have read it.” But whether this story inspired Fort, or was more proof of ideas with which he was already working is hard to know. As Ian Kidd has pointed out, Fort said he started collecting data—in 1906—to test a theory. We don’t know what the theory was, exactly, but can assume it is related to his later work, meaning that Fort was working along lines the England would develop later.
England later discovered Fort’s works, though I do not know when, exactly. It’s worth noting Boni & Liveright published both “The Book of the Damned” and England’s translation of Eduardo Zamacois’s “Their Son and the Necklace” the same week in 1919, meaning the were advertised together. This connection may have been enough to alert England to Fort’s work. At any rate, according to Moskowitz, England was not upset by the similarity of ideas and did not suspect stealing. Indeed, he may have even been influenced by Fort himself when he wrote “The Thing from—‘Outside’,” which bore a resemblance to Algernon Blackwood’s ‘The Wendigo’ but also had an explicit reference to Fort, which science fiction historian Mike Ashley thinks suggests an influence. In the story, a party of explorers are heckled by some unseen force in northern Canada. The origin of the “things” are never explained, but one member offers a Fortean possibility:
“What was it,” Jandron asked, “that destroyed all those people in Valladolid, Spain, that time so many of 'em died in a few minutes after having been touched by an invisible Something that left a slight red mark on each? The newspapers were full of it.”
“Piffle!” yawned Marr.
“I tell you,” insisted Jandron, “there are forms of life as superior to us as we are to ants. We can't see 'em. No ant ever saw a man. And did any ant ever form the least conception of a man? These Things have left thousands of traces, all over the world. If I had my reference-books—“
“Tell that to the marines!”
“Charles Fort, the greatest authority in the world on unexplained phenomena,” persisted Jandron, “gives innumerable cases of happenings that science can't explain, in his 'Book of the Damned.' He claims this earth was once a No-Man's land where all kinds of Things explored and colonized and fought for possession. And he says that now everybody's warned off, except the Owners. I happen to remember a few sentences of his: 'In the past, inhabitants of a host of worlds have dropped here, hopped here, wafted here, sailed, flown, motored, walked here; have come singly, have come in enormous numbers; have visited for hunting, trading, mining. They have been unable to stay here, have made colonies here, have been lost here.”
“Poor fish, to believe that!” mocked the journalist, while the Professor blinked and rubbed his bulging forehead.
“I do believe it!” insisted Jandron. “The world is covered with relics of dead civilizations, that have mysteriously vanished, leaving nothing but their temples and monuments.”
“Rubbish!”
“How about Easter Island? How about all the gigantic works there and in a thousand other places!—Peru, Yucatan and so on—which certainly no primitive race ever built?”
“That's thousands of years ago,” said Marr, “and I'm sleepy. For heaven's sake, can it!”
“Oh, all right. But how explain things, then!”
“What the devil could one of those Things want of our brains?” suddenly put in the Professor. “After all, what?”
“Well, what do we want of lower forms of life? Sometimes food. Again, some product or other. Or just information. Maybe It is just experimenting with us, the way we poke an ant-hill. There's always this to remember, that the human brain-tissue is the most highly-organized form of matter in this world.”
Ashley believes that England probably wrote “The Thing” for one of his usual markets, but was rejected—though England himself denies ever being rejected—as too unusual. But Gernsback was looking, at just this time, for something different in exact this way, and may have contacted England who was, as Ashely notes, second only to Arthur Conan Doyle in popular acclaim for his “scientific romances.” The story “was unlike anything Gernsback had previously published, brining in both a higher literary quality and a strong story-line, not just a discourse on inventions.” A case can be made that this was the first example of modern science fiction, and it would influence other, later seminal works of the genre, particularly “Who Goes There?,” by John W. Campbell, editor of the important science fiction magazine “Astounding.” (Campbell’s story was later filmed several times under the title “The Thing.”) That England’s story appeared in the first modern science fiction magazine furthers the case.
And so there was Fort, his work intersecting with the first versions of science fiction—there was Fort mentioned in the first science fiction story in the first science fiction magazine.
