Allen Upward

Biography

Born to Welsh parents in 1863, George Allen Upward was a poet, a lawyer, a politician and a teacher.

He was trained as a lawyer at the Royal University of Dublin. While attending law school he became heavily involved in politics, once publishing a nationalistic pamphlet in support of the Irish Home Rule movement which pushed for Irish self-government within the United Kingdom in the years leading up to the First World war. He also wrote many nationalistic poems and prose essays arguing for the liberation of Ireland.  His involvement in politics would eventually carry him to the British Foreign Office in Kenya where he would serve time as a judge. He eventually returned to Britain and ran for election as a Lib-Lab candidate in the 1895 elections in Wales. After his defeat in the election he bowed out from the political sphere, focusing more on his writings.

Upward was an avid writer, dabbling in many different literary styles. He began writing and publishing from a young age anonymously.  He published two books of Poetry, translations of Confucius, and an autobiography. He also wrote multiple novels that discuss many cultural and religious themes. Much of his work was inspired by his travels through different countries and cultures. He was particularly interested in the Greek Tradition and his works are filled with many classical allusions. He contributed many essays, poems and stories to The New Age periodical. His stories treated many differing themes from philosophy to religion, to history and politics as well as literature. Much of his work is said to have elements synonymous with those of the Romantic Poets, with an emphasis on emotion, human sensitivity and the sublime—though never to their extreme.

In 1908 he self-published a book, The New World, which he believed was worthy of a Nobel Prize. In this piece he is known for the first citation of the word “Scientology” though Upward is not attributed with coining its definition. He had a lot of confidence in his own writings, even submitting his manuscripts to the British Museum. The works were rejected on account that the author was still alive and in anger and distress, Upward burned them. Despite his many publications and connections, his work was not widely known and never received the response or appreciation that he felt it deserved.

Allen Upward committed suicide in November of 1926. Years later, Ezra Pound would satirically attributed his death to his distress and disappointment that George Bernard Shaw had won the Nobel Prize in 1925.