by Peter Raby
His ordeal as pupil–teacher did not last long. His parents were getting ready to move to a small cottage at Hoddesdon. He was fourteen: time to learn a trade. In Mrs Cruttwell’s account book, for 18 March 1837, along with ‘Hot × Buns – 2s’ and ‘Hair cutting (27) – 6(s) 9(d)’, is the entry: ‘Alfred Wallace left’; and in the shillings column: 10, either his final reward, or a return of fees.16 Alfred was sent off to London, to lodge with his favourite brother John, now nineteen, at Mr Webster’s house in Robert Street, off Hampstead Road, between Regent’s Park and the future site of Euston station. It was an area of London he would return to later in his life, with the attraction of the Zoological Society’s gardens a short walk away.
These next few months in London were Alfred’s first taste of the adult world, and the tougher environment of an expanding city. Without any fixed occupation, he could make himself useful doing odd jobs in the workshop, and listen to the talk and the jokes. There wasn’t too much to shock a shy fourteen year old – not nearly as much swearing as he met with later; and when one of the workmen, ‘a very loose character’, went too far in describing his exploits, the foreman would ‘gently call him to order’. (At home, he had never heard ‘a rude word or an offensive expression’. There may be a touch of New Lanark idealism in these memories, but Webster’s was a well-run business, and John, a skilled carpenter, would later marry a Webster daughter. The building industry was still in the pre-factory era, and almost everything that went into the houses the firm built was made in the yard: floorboards, windows and doors, cupboards and staircases. The carpenters and joiners worked a ten-hour day, six days a week, and earned thirty shillings a week at sixpence an hour. Even a married man with children could save a little, wrote John fifty years later, a little optimistically – so long as he was frugal, and of steady habits, and so long as he kept in good health, and continued to find employment.17 If your job was on site, as a bricklayer, there was less margin, for there was no payment if bad weather stopped work. The labourers and the hod-carriers received just three shillings a day, and their wives had to work ‘out’ at washing, or whatever else they could find – so the children might be neglected as a consequence. Alfred watched, and listened, and never forgot the struggle that most people were forced to endure simply to survive, let alone prosper.
In the evenings, John might take his young brother off to look at the West End shops, and admire the window displays. But more often they would go to the ‘Hall of Science’ a few blocks away, off Tottenham Court Road, a kind of mechanics’ club. They read books and magazines, played draughts and dominoes, drank coffee, and attended lectures on the teachings of Robert Owen: secularist, socialist, agnostic, idealist. Alfred read Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason: he might have taken Paine’s statement, ‘It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself’, as part of his private gospel. On one memorable occasion he heard Owen himself, with his ‘tall spare figure, very lofty head, and highly benevolent countenance and mode of speaking’. As Wallace observed, Owen influenced his character more than he then realised. But his young mind was grappling with issues that some of his contemporaries would engage with only as adults. He struggled with the attempt to reconcile the existence of evil with the concept of a benevolent, omnipotent God; and he was struck, too, by a tract on ‘Consistency’ by Owen’s son, Robert Dale Owen, condemning the ‘horrible’ doctrine of eternal punishment. He accepted Owen’s conclusions, that orthodox religion was degrading, and that ‘the only beneficial religion was that which inculcated the service of humanity, and whose only dogma was the brotherhood of man’.18 The foundations of Wallace’s religious scepticism were complete.
In the summer of 1837, Alfred began his apprenticeship as a surveyor, a pupil to his brother William. This phase of his life would last for six and a half years, during which he not only trained in the practical details of his job, but, crucially, began to prepare himself for his future career, a preparation that was at first more instinctive than systematic. Although the survey work was quite demanding, there were also long evenings, and Sundays, to fill. The brothers lived in inns and lodgings, moving from district to district and job to job. There were few distractions, or temptations – and, in any event, no money to spare. Alfred spent long periods on his own.
The first contract was in the parish of Higham Gobion, Bedfordshire. The Tithe Act of 1836 had made it compulsory for all church tithes to be commuted to a cash payment, which meant lots of work for surveyors, mapping and measuring the church parishes of England and Wales. William hired rooms at the Coach and Horses at Barton-in-the-Cley, on the Luton to Bedford coach road, and each day Alfred would set out armed with a bill-hook, chain, flag, rods and pegs, and map out a section of the parish. He learned the basic rules of surveying, mapping and trigonometry. It was enjoyable, open-air work, with lunch of bread and cheese and beer under a hedge. Following William’s example, he experimented with smoking a pipe, and had such a violent headache that he never smoked again. He also began to learn a little geology, and became curious about the fossils to be found in the chalk, and in the gravels of the Ouse, much like his famous predecessor as a surveyor-turned-geologist, William Smith.
When this first assignment came to an end, Alfred walked the thirty miles home to Rawdon Cottage, Hoddesdon, and then walked back to Barton in January, and a further twenty miles beyond Bedford to Turvey, for another tithe survey. Each survey led to another, though they were doing little more than paying their way. In all the years he spent with William, Alfred hardly ever received more than a few shillings for personal expenses. Each year or so, when he went home, he would be bought new clothes if it was absolutely essential, and given ten shillings or a pound to keep him going.
On another job, at Soulbury near Leighton Buzzard, Alfred could see the three great transport systems of the 1830s in action. The mail-coach road to Birmingham and Holyhead ran two miles to the east of the Ouzel. Parallel with the river was the Grand Junction Canal, and half a mile to the west a hive of activity marked the construction of the London and Birmingham railway. On Christmas Eve 1838, Alfred and William travelled from Berkhamsted to London on the first section to be opened – third class, naturally, which meant standing in an open truck, or sitting on the floor when the wind became too cold.
A lull in survey work led to a change of plan. William had become friendly with a surveyor, William Matthews, who also ran a watch- and clock-making business at Leighton Buzzard – in addition, as a young Victorian entrepreneur, he was the engineer in charge of the town gasworks. Alfred, by now sixteen, dutifully adopted his brother’s suggestion, and went to live with the Matthews, to learn how to take watches and clocks to pieces, and repair jewellery. He liked the family, but was relieved after nine months when Matthews accepted a job in London, and William arrived to take him west to the Herefordshire/Radnorshire border. There they worked under contract for the firm of surveyors and estate agents at Kington where William had learned his trade, William and Morris Sayce. This move Wallace afterwards considered to be one of several important turning-points in his life, when he was ‘insensibly’ directed into the course best adapted to develop his ‘special mental and physical activities’.19
Here was a far more exciting landscape, Alfred wrote to George Silk, ‘to be (literally) “cutting” all over the country, following the chain and admiring the beauties of nature, breathing the fresh and pure air on the hills, or in the noonday heat enjoying our luncheon of bread-and-cheese in a pleasant valley’.20 They lodged with an old gunmaker and his wife, known to the town as Alderman Wright ‘on account of the size of his corporation’, sharing one bedroom, and one bed. ‘If you fancy Mr Pickwick with his nose a little rounder and his corporation a little larger you will have an exact idea of Alderman Wright. Mrs Wright is an old woman something like Mrs Nickleby but very Religious (in talk),’ he reported to John – and begged John to write to him with news of his adventures. Alfred’s questions to his friend George Silk
sound wistful: even the shared experience of his schooldays now held a certain attraction. ‘How does Mr Crutwell alias Crut’ll get on – Has he any more “young ’uns” yet. Are FitzJohn, Goodwin & Holdsworth there still? … Are there any more pretty girls in the Town now than there used to be. There are a pretty fair lot here. I suppose you will be looking out for a wife soon.’21
Alfred observed his Welsh surroundings with an amused and quizzical eye, but he had no intimate friend at hand to share his thoughts. The small securities and pleasures of Hertford were distant, and vanishing. The subscription library was deceased, the books sold. The Hertford Literary Society had been ‘sewed up’. He missed his games of chess with George, who was now studying learned legal tomes instead of playing hockey. Alfred hoped he wouldn’t be charged 6s 8d for reading the letter. But he never complained. When he found himself on top of a bare hill, with the wind and sleet chilling him to the bone, there would soon follow the compensating pleasure of getting indoors in the evening, and sitting down to a warming, well-cooked dinner, even if it was served to the accompaniment of Mrs Wright’s ‘pretty considerable tarnation long tongue’.22 At seventeen, he was tall, thin, unusually long-legged, slightly awkward in his movements, but mentally and physically resilient. He needed to be. One freezing February day, surveying at Rhayader on the upper Wye, he slipped into a boghole, and was trapped in the icy mud before a fellow worker managed to haul him out. His lungs were badly affected, and the local doctor insisted he should go to London, where Dr Ramage diagnosed an extensive abscess of the lungs. Dr Ramage’s methods were not wholly orthodox, and included the application of half-a-dozen leeches to Alfred’s chest at a spot marked with ink. But the key factor was a small bone breathing tube, which brought immediate relief. Alfred spent two months convalescing at Hoddesdon before he was strong enough to return to the Welsh borders. He suffered from bronchial asthma for the rest of his life.
Two aspects of Wallace’s experience in Wales held particular significance for his later development. Much of the surveying work he and his brother were engaged in arose out of the Tithe Act; but one particular survey at Llandrindod Wells was in connection with the General Enclosure Act. The underlying principles – or lack of principles – outraged Wallace. The cottagers who held common rights over the moors and mountain, enabling them to keep a horse, or a cow, or a few sheep, found these stripped from them. Anyone who actually owned land received a miserable compensation; but in the case of tenants or leaseholders, it was a case of ‘simple robbery’. ‘If this is not obtaining land under false pretences –’, Wallace wrote years later, still steaming with indignation, ‘& legalised robbery of the poor for the aggrandisement of the rich, who were the lawmakers – words have no meaning.’23 This sense of the injustice visited by the strong on the weak, coupled with a belief that every individual had a fundamental right to a share in the earth’s resources, never left him, surfacing specifically in his long campaigns for land nationalisation. At the time, he assumed there must be some ‘right and reason’ for enclosure, though recognising that the process was unjust, unwise and cruel. Meanwhile, he breathed the pure air of the moorland, read Byron’s ‘The Age of Bronze’ to stoke his indignation, and in the evening settled down to the unforgettable taste of a Welsh leg of mutton.
He also made full use of the educational opportunities that Kington and, later, Neath offered. Throughout Britain, mechanics’ institutes were being founded, and the Kington Institute was opened in 1841, with Morris Sayce as Treasurer. Wallace, eighteen now, wrote a five-page article ‘on the best method of conducting the Kington Mechanics’ Institute’. With an epigraph from Bacon, ‘Knowledge is power’, Wallace argued for the primary place of science within the institution’s organisation. Instead of the Penny Magazine and the Magazine of Science, he proposed a subscription to the Annual Reports of the British Association; and his suggestions for the library included Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, Roderick Murchison’s Silurian System, John Lindley’s Natural System of Biology, and Humboldt’s and Bonpland’s Personal Narrative of Travels.2 This was a formidable wants list, indicating a systematic programme of study into the history of the Earth and its systems of life. By reading Lyell’s Principles, Wallace would have access to an interpretation of geology as the first historical science, an account of the development of the Earth that would serve as the foundation for The Origin of Species; and, through Humboldt’s great South American explorations, an alluring perspective on the natural world outside Europe. It was, Wallace argued, through science that the human race could develop. ‘How know we that we have not a Herschell [sic], a Stephenson, a Simpson, or a Watt within this town; who want but the means of acquiring that knowledge which they might give back one hundred fold to the world?’25 Very early in his life Wallace expressed confidence in the limitless power of the individual mind, so long as it was fed by favourable opportunities to accumulate knowledge. There is something of the restless, questing, striving spirit of Goethe’s Faust in his optimism and intellectual hunger, or, to turn to one of his favourite authors, Byron’s Manfred.
The brothers then moved for some months to the Brecon hills – young Herbert received a rhyming letter charting their progress. There Alfred was at the source of the Usk, beside which he had been born, and lodged happily for a while on his own, among Welsh speakers, while he surveyed the valleys and enjoyed long expeditions over the Brecon Beacons. From the Beacons they travelled down the valley to Neath, in the autumn of 1841, to undertake yet another parish survey. For a year or so they stayed at a farm, Bryn-coch, just north of the town – home-baked bread, butter and eggs, fresh milk and cheese – before moving closer to town. Once the first parish survey was complete, William travelled about, trying to drum up business, and Alfred was left to occupy himself. Because he had been trained to use a sextant, he experimented with astronomy, making simple observations and constructing a home-made telescope. But his chief area of study was botany. Starting with a shilling paperback published by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, he graduated to Lindley’s Elements of Botany (something of a disappointment, as it did not distinguish British plants). But he borrowed a copy of John Claudius Loudon’s 1836 Encyclopaedia of Plants, and annotated Lindley from it. He bought his copy of Lindley in 1842, and transcribed two passages from Darwin’s Journal of the Voyage of the Beagle into it, including the following:
I am strongly induced to believe that as in music, the person who understands every note will if he also possesses a proper taste more thoroughly enjoy the whole so he who examines each part of a fine view may also thoroughly comprehend the full and combined effect. Hence a traveller should be a Botanist, for in all views plants form the chief embellishment.26
He began to create his own herbarium, learning how to dry specimens effectively, and spending his evenings identifying the treasures he brought back from his long mountain walks. William did not approve, as Alfred learned in a letter from his mother. But he persisted, slowly building up a picture of species, genera and orders. This focus on species was to be at the centre of his scientific thinking, and although he would later be better known for his work on butterflies and birds, plants were his first love. This time, he afterwards reflected, was ‘the turning-point’ of his life, ‘the tide that carried me on, not to fortune, but to whatever reputation I have acquired, and which has certainly been to me a never-failing source of much health of body and supreme mental enjoyment’.27 On 30 September 1842, he bought William Swainson’s 1835 volume, A Treatise on the Geography and Classification of Animals – two of his later preoccupations – and annotated it vigorously. Swainson’s attempts to bring zoology and geography into line with the Bible seemed absurd to Wallace: ‘To what ridiculous theories will men of science be led by attempting to reconcile science to scripture!’28
Thomas Wallace died in May 1843, leaving his wife with very little money, and young Herbert still to educate. In Neath, paid jobs remained scarce. Surveying contracts dried up, an
d William scratched around for building opportunities. He and Alfred took soundings of the river, and designed and supervised the construction of warehouses. William did secure one major contract, to extend and renovate the town gaol, but there was not really enough income to justify keeping Alfred. Clearly, William failed to appreciate how drying wild flowers was going to lead to success – it must have seemed only too like one of their father’s profitless enthusiasms; and Alfred’s attempts at journalism – he wrote an article on ‘The South Wales Farmer’ – did not seem likely to earn any money (though in retrospect this seems evidence of a mind relentlessly enquiring into whatever subject lay to hand – it was his first attempt at anthropology). Alfred would be twenty-one in January 1844, and would come into a small legacy of £100: it was time for him to stand on his own. Their sister Fanny’s little school at Hoddesdon was failing, and she began to look for teaching posts abroad. They gathered for a last family Christmas at Hoddesdon. The cottage was given up. Mary Wallace accepted an engagement as a housekeeper, and Alfred went to share John’s lodgings in London while he hunted for work. Scouring the agencies, he discovered a teaching vacancy that called for drawing, mapping and surveying skills. He took along a coloured map of Neath and some sketches to the interview, and was offered the job. The headmaster, a young clergyman called Abraham Hill, was friendly, and Wallace was soon on his way to the Collegiate School, Leicester, where he would live in the Hills’ house, supervise the boarders’ evening preparation, and have a modest salary of £30 or £40 a year. Conscientiously, uncomplainingly, he settled down to yet another possible career.
