by Peter Raby
Wallace never felt at ease as a schoolmaster – he claimed he had no vocation for teaching – but throughout his life he remained interested in the process of education, and his belief in knowledge helped him to overcome his instinctive shyness. Hill, finding Wallace knew a little Latin, gave him the bottom class to take, and offered to help him make progress with mathematics. With Hill’s assistance, he worked his way stage by stage through Hind’s Algebra and Trigonometry, but was finally baffled by the ‘almost trackless wilderness’ of integral calculus. His teaching and supervision duties still left him several hours a day free, and, with a little money to spare for the first time in his life, he paid his subscription to the town library. New horizons opened before him: he read William Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico and History of the Conquest of Peru, and William Robertson’s History of America, and, at last, Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of Travels in South America, the first book that gave him a desire to visit the tropics. Humboldt was the great inspiration of nineteenth-century travellers. Darwin had read his Travels aboard the Beagle: ‘I formerly admired Humboldt, I now almost adore him.’29 Humboldt gave such a vivid impression of the tropical forest, and from every page flowed the sense of quest, and discovery. But perhaps the ‘most important’ book Wallace read at this time, as he suggests in My Life, was Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population, which he admired for its ‘masterly summary of facts and logical induction to conclusions’: ‘It was the first work I had yet read treating of any of the problems of philosophical biology, and twenty years later gave me the long-sought clue to the effective agent in the evolution of organic species.’30 From Malthus he received that clear exposition of ‘the positive checks to increase’ of the populations of ‘savage races’, disease, accidents, war, famine, which both he and Darwin would later transfer to animal populations. That ‘twenty years’ is a kind of biblical reckoning, an obvious but interesting error, or perhaps an unconscious echo that Darwin too, as Wallace later discovered, had hit on the same Malthusian clue twenty years before the events of 1858, and their joint presentation on natural selection at the Linnean Society.31 For now, the arguments lodged in Wallace’s mind, as he shifted the focus of his self-education from literature to the natural world.
Most significantly for his future career as a naturalist, Wallace met, while at Leicester, Henry Walter Bates. Bates’s family was in the hosiery business, and Bates was working out an apprenticeship while pursuing his enthusiasm for entomology. He, too, had embarked on his own rigorous programme of self-education. They met, appropriately, at the library. Bates was two years younger, but had already contributed an article to the Zoologist. He showed Wallace his beetle collection, and a set of British butterflies. The beetles, especially, were a revelation. Almost all had been collected around Leicester. There were, perhaps, a thousand species to be found within a ten-mile radius, and some three thousand, Wallace learned, in the British Isles. Soon Wallace had added beetles to botany, bought a collecting bottle, pins and store-box, and got hold of a copy ‘at wholesale price’ of James Stephens’s Manual of British Coleoptera. The combination of Malthus and Bates marked Leicester as crucial in Wallace’s development. For the first time, too, he was wholly independent, without an older brother looking over his shoulder in disapproval at the way he spent his leisure. He and Bates went collecting together, in Bradgate Park and Charnwood Forest to the north-west, whose owner, Lord Stamford, conveniently did not ‘strictly preserve for game’.32
One other of Wallace’s enthusiasms, or obsessions, began at Leicester. He went with a few of the senior boys to see lectures and demonstrations on Mesmerism by Spencer Hall. Wallace was immediately impressed, especially since Hall’s manner was ‘serious’, not at all that of ‘the showman or conjuror’. Back at the Collegiate School the older boys carried out some successful experiments on the younger ones, and invited Wallace to see. He decided to try his own powers, and found he could ‘produce catalepsy of any limb or of the whole body, and in this state they could do things which they could not and certainly would not have done in their normal state’.33 Fortunately, his experiments were relatively low key, and he was acutely aware of the risk of physical injury. ‘For example, on the rigid outstretched arm I would hang at the wrist an ordinary bedroom chair, and the boy would hold it there for several minutes, while I sat down and wrote a short letter …’ No one seems to have considered the psychological danger, and when he informed the headmaster, Hill invited two or three friends along to observe the experiment.
Wallace had already come across the subject of phrenology. William had introduced him to George Combe’s writing, and after reading the Scottish lawyer’s The Constitution of Man, a popular account of natural religion, he explored some of Combe’s specialist writing on phrenology. At Hall’s lecture he had seen a demonstration ‘of exciting the phrenological organs by touching the corresponding parts of the patient’s head’. As Wallace did not possess a chart, he now bought a phrenological bust, and continued his investigations. When he touched a particular point on his subject’s head, the expression on his face would correspond with the ‘natural’ expression of the emotion controlled ‘by the phrenological organ situated at that part’: combativeness, fear, wonder. Wallace’s temperament was a mixture of rationality, enthusiasm and naïvety. If he believed something was true, because of the evidence of his own eyes, he would not be easily shaken from the explanation in which he had placed his faith. ‘The importance of these experiments to me’, he wrote defiantly,
was that they convinced me, once for all, that the antecedently incredible may nevertheless be true; and, further, that the accusations of imposture by scientific men should have no weight whatever against the detailed observations and statements of other men, presumably as sane and sensible as their opponents, who had witnessed and tested the phenomena, as I had done myself in the case of some of them.34
This is the kind of justification that could be applied to a personal religious experience. The independence, obstinacy, persistence, that stood Wallace in such good stead in formulating his theories about species (an area in which, oddly, he was prepared to adapt and rethink) would make him in later years impervious to opposing arguments concerning some of his spiritualist and psychological convictions. These Mesmerist experiments, continued in the Amazon, retained their hold in his thinking, and helped to prepare the way for his later interest in spiritualism.
Early in 1845, he learned of his eldest brother’s sudden and unexpected death. William perished, an indirect victim of railway mania. He was on his way back to Neath from London, where he had been giving expert evidence as a surveyor before a committee on the South Wales Railway Bill. Travelling at night in an open third-class carriage, he caught a chill which swiftly developed into a fatal attack of pneumonia. Alfred and John went to Neath for the funeral – Fanny was in America, teaching at a college in Macon, Georgia – and discovered that William’s business was a little more substantial than they had realised. In one of his sudden entrepreneurial fits, Alfred negotiated to leave the Collegiate School at Easter 1845, and returned to Neath to sort out William’s affairs. He and John did the rounds of William’s creditors, before John returned to London, leaving Alfred free to botanise, and to pick up any surveying and building work he could find. He seems to have been rather out of touch with William in the months before his death, a little hurt, perhaps, by being cast off so abruptly. He had locked himself into his own affairs at Leicester where he was ‘altogether out of the business world’, and never even read a newspaper, so knew nothing of the railway boom.35 He knew now. A civil engineer in Swansea was on the look-out for surveyors: two guineas a day, with all expenses paid, including hotels – real money at last.
A railway line was being proposed, to run from the Vale of Neath to Merthyr Tydfil, and bring coal and iron down to the port of Swansea. Wallace was in his element. He did not know the south-east side of the valley, and the route took him up ‘one
of the wildest and most picturesque glens’: Wallace and his workforce had to clamber over huge rocks, scale cascades, and take levels up steep banks and densely wooded precipices.36 Far more railway lines were surveyed than were ever completed, but while the speculation lasted there was good money for surveyors and engineers. Wallace worked relentlessly through the summer and autumn, and then found himself temporarily accommodated in a London hotel in the Haymarket – a rare luxury – while the report on the railway proposal was being drafted in November 1845. In his leisure moments, he ploughed on with his reading, bombarding Bates with questions and suggestions.
In Neath, Alfred had secured comfortable and central lodgings with the Sims family, and in January 1846 he persuaded John to join him. Although they had a tough time squeezing money out of William’s debtors, they were confident that they could make a living. Eventually, they rented a cottage next to Llantwit church, a mile from town, overlooking the canal and river, complete with a garden, sheds and henhouses. Their mother came now to live with them, and Herbert, who was unhappy in his apprenticeship to a London luggage-maker, found an opening at the Neath Abbey ironworks; John, when business was slack, built a boat, light enough to be carried from canal to river and back again, and spacious enough to ferry the whole family down to Swansea.
Wallace’s autobiography gives the impression that his time at Neath was a rather fractured, temporary business, a brief prelude before the main purpose of his life became clear. But he was based there for some six years in all, and for nearer three than two in this second phase.37 Optimistic as always, resilient in the face of setbacks, he tackled another tithe commutation survey, in conjunction with the agent of the Gnoll Estate. Much to his disgust, he found himself landed with the additional task of extracting payment from the farmers, both difficult and uncomfortable since many were poor, spoke no English, and could not be made to understand what it was all about. Building work was more agreeable, and here John’s expertise could be put to good use. The Wallace brothers built a cottage for a client, and failed to get the contract to design a new town hall for Swansea; but they did design and supervise the construction of the new Mechanics’ Institute at Neath, which was officially opened in 1848, after Alfred had left for the Amazon.
Wallace took a more active part in the intellectual life of Neath during his second stay, much of it revolving around the Mechanics’ Institute, founded by a friend of his brother’s, William Jevons. Over the course of two winters, he gave a series of lectures on basic science at the Institute. The town library was pretty good, but frustratingly it would have no works but those of general interest. However, he became Curator of the Neath Philosophical and Literary Institute – it was a ‘nice little Museum but they have little to spare for books’ – while at the Philosophical Society at Swansea there was a good selection on natural history, though scarcely one on entomology. He was in correspondence with Lewis Weston Dillwyn, of Sketty Hall, one of the leading naturalists of South Wales; but, he complained to Bates, he did not know a single person in Neath who studied any one branch of natural history: ‘I am all alone in my glory in this respect.’38 He wanted to specialise, and achieved his first mention in a scientific journal, in the Zoologist of April 1847. ‘Capture of Trichius fasciatus near Neath – I took a single specimen of this beautiful insect on a blossom of Carduus heterophyllus near the falls at the top of the Neath Vale. Alfred R. Wallace, Neath.’ This was the fruit of Bates’s training, even if the editor’s comment was a little dismissive: ‘The other insects in my correspondent’s list are scarcely worth publishing.’39
The beetle was a memorable, and symbolic, capture. In June 1846, Alfred and John had walked up the valley from their Neath lodgings, then followed the western branch to the Rocking Stone, where he discovered Trichius fasciatus – the only time, Wallace commented, that he ever captured it. They went as far as the Gladys and Einon Gam falls, retraced their route, and walked on to Ystrad-fellte for the night: a leisurely twenty miles or so. Next morning, they climbed up the Beacons, and ate their picnic by a spring on the southern slope, the source of the river Taff; then back again to Ystrad-fellte – but only to eat, not sleep. They headed instead for Porth-yr-Ogof, a limestone cavern where the river Mellte runs underground. According to Wallace, ‘We had both of us at this time determined, if possible, to go abroad into more or less wild countries, and we wanted for once to try sleeping out-of-doors, with no shelter or bed but what nature provided.’40 They had a little food, and they lit a fire, just as they had done in the woods at Usk in early childhood. For a while, they could enjoy the romantic aspects: the flickering flame on the cavern roof, the glimmer of the stars through the trees outside, the gentle murmur of the water. These pleasures soon palled. Wallace confessed that, while in health, he had never passed a more uncomfortable night. But there was a common understanding between the brothers. England and Wales were crowded, competitive: even in Neath, with a population of under six thousand, ‘Wallace and Wallace’ formed only one entry on a list of eight surveyors. The two men had proven skills, energy, and a sense of adventure. As they lay on the turf their imaginations moved beyond the mountains and valleys to the Bristol Channel, and on to the opportunities offered by Australia, New Zealand, North and South America. Three years later, Alfred would be a thousand miles up the Amazon, and John in the California goldfields.
Crucially, in Bates Wallace had found a fellow enthusiast, someone with whom to exchange monthly lists of captures, to share ideas and reactions to reading. In 1845, Wallace read Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, the popular book that, for all its wild speculations, alerted him to a new perspective on the formulation of species. Bates was more critical; but, Wallace responded,
I do not consider it as a hasty generalisation, but rather as an ingenious speculation strongly supported by some striking facts and analogies but which remains to be proved by more facts & the additional light which future researches may throw up on the subject – It at all events furnishes a subject for every observer of nature to turn his attention to; every fact he observes must make either for or against it, and it thus furnishes both an incitement to the collection of facts & an object to which to apply them when collected –
I would observe that many eminent writers give great support to their theory of the progressive development of species in animals & plants.41
The anonymous author of Vestiges, Robert Chambers, was just the man to strike a resonant chord with Wallace. His work was popular, unstuffy, and uncompromising, with one grand idea, transmutation, at its centre, even if he did not identify the mechanism: ‘It being admitted that the system of the Universe is one under the dominion of natural law, it follows that the introduction of species must have been brought about in the manner of law also.’42 As propounded by Vestiges, species changed, developed, progressed. Also, the author was not afraid to discuss man as a species, something that appealed strongly to Wallace. Read Lawrence’s Lectures on Man, he advised Bates. William Lawrence’s lectures, now published ‘in a cheap form’ – that is, in an unauthorised edition – argued, as did James Prichard, that ‘the varieties of the Human race have not proceeded from any external cause but have been produced by the development of certain distinctive peculiarities in some individuals which have become propagated through an entire race’.43 Wallace, focused on man, concluded that the Negro, the Red Indian and the European were distinct species of the genus Homo. Most professional scientists ignored the huge sales and interest, and preferred to jump on the book’s numerous errors; its championing of evolution, following Jean Baptiste Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin, was confidently dismissed. The idea of creation, or of a succession of creations, still held.
The exchanges continued: Bates was reading Lyell, perhaps on Wallace’s recommendation. Wallace was re-reading Darwin’s Journal. He could have ordered the revised 1845 edition for the Neath Philosophical & Literary Society. In this edition he might have remarked on Darwin’s more expansive comments on the Fuegians; and
on the hints about the ‘little world within itself’ of the Galapagos Islands, where, ‘but in space and time, we seem to be brought somewhat near to that great fact – that mystery of mysteries – the first appearance of new beings on this earth’.44 Of the thirteen species of the ‘most singular group of finches’, all peculiar to the archipelago, Darwin commented, ‘Seeing this gradation and diversity of structure in one small, intimately related group of birds, one might really fancy that, from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends.’45 Such hints were not lost on Wallace, who stored away the Galapagos comment for future reference. By April 1846, Wallace was keeping a natural history journal – ‘a sort of day book in which I insert all my captures in every branch of Natural Hist. with the day of the month, locality etc and any remarks I have to make on specific characters, habits, etc’.46 He accepted Bates’s invitation to exchange monthly lists.
Wallace was gearing himself up for his new career. Bates came and stayed with him in Wales, where they hatched their idea of a joint expedition – ‘rather a wild scheme’. Bates’s apprenticeship had come to an end, and he was working as a clerk for Allsopp’s, the brewers, at Burton-on-Trent. In the autumn of 1847 Wallace travelled to London to meet his sister, back from Georgia, and, armed with a letter of introduction from Bates, he spent part of the last week of September looking at the collections in the British Museum. He had bought a small collection of American insects, and spent five hours going through the coleoptera in an attempt to identify and name them. Then he went with French-speaking Fanny to Paris, his first trip abroad. He loved the atmosphere, he reported enthusiastically to Bates, the style, the elegance – and the free access to museums and galleries, libraries, public buildings and churches – ‘a great contrast to our own capital where there is little to be seen without favour or payment’. He was impressed, too, by the natural history collections, and spent two whole days at the Jardin des Plantes. Inspired by what he had seen there, he returned to the great issue: ‘I begin to feel rather dissatisfied with a mere local collection – little is to be learnt by it. I shd. like to take some one family, to study thoroughly – principally with a view to the theory of the origin of species,’ he added, with engaging frankness. ‘By that means I am strongly of opinion that some definite results might be arrived at. One family of moderate extent would be quite sufficient – can you assist me in choosing one that it will not be difficult to obtain the greater number of the known species?’47
