He was born in Birmingham, 18 April 1803. He was the son of a button-manufacturer, and as a boy followed his father"s business. But at about fifteen years of age he was articled to an elder brother, a general engraver in Birmingham, and about three years later he began his artistic training by attending the drawing classes of John Vincent Barber.
Allen, together with William and Edward Radclyffe and the Willmores, belonged to a school of landscape-engravers which arose in Birmingham, where there were numerous engravers working on iron and steel manufactures. In 1824 he came to London, and soon found employment in the studio of the Findens, for whose "Royal Gallery of British Art he engraved at a later period Trent in the Tyrol, after Augustus Wall Callcott. He died after a long illness at Camden Town, London, 10 January 1876.
