by Peter Raby
Wallace had much to learn, much to catch up on, after his years of isolation; but he did not confine himself to theorists with whom he was in broad agreement and sympathy. He was in no sense exclusive in his friendships, for example dining regularly with St George Mivart, a severely anti-Darwinian evolutionist. In spite of his air of mildness and diffidence, he was never afraid of disagreement, and would always stand his ground in argument. He had a first taste of the battles that had been raging when he visited Cambridge in October 1862 for the British Association meeting. He went there as the guest of Alfred Newton, and stayed with him in Magdalene College.
Wallace had met Newton at the Zoological Society. Newton, six years younger than Wallace, held the Drury Travelling Fellowship at Magdalene. Three years later he would become the first Professor of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy at Cambridge, but at this moment he was best known for his work on birds, and especially for his research on extinct and endangered species – he had travelled to Iceland in 1858 to visit the last nesting-place of the great auk. Interestingly, he was the first person to comment in writing on the significance of the joint Linnean papers of July 1858, advising his correspondent Henry Tristram the following month, ‘But for your paper you must consult Darwin and Wallace.’20 Throughout his career he continued to link Wallace’s name with that of Darwin, referring in his address to the Biological Section of the British Association in 1876 to the ‘promulgation of a reasonable Theory of Evolution by Mr Darwin and Mr Wallace’, and describing their former labours as ‘united yet distinct’.21 Newton, who made light of a congenital hip condition, could talk birds all night in his rooms in the Old Lodge, and was just the right person to ease Wallace through the slightly daunting atmosphere, for a newcomer, of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.
Wallace enjoyed the experience. Newton had invited other ornithologists to join them at Magdalene, and the company was both knowledgeable and congenial. Wallace spent a pleasant evening at Charles Kingsley’s house – Kingsley, still working on his manuscript of The Water Babies for Macmillan, would have found in Wallace a mirror image of his scientific backwards-running giant, with a great pair of spectacles on his nose, and a butterfly-net in one hand, and a geological hammer in the other. Wallace’s simplicity of manner, and openness, made him welcome at the social gatherings. Sclater and Newton planned to hold a strictly ornithological ‘Ibis’ dinner, but so many others wished to dine that the occasion was turned into a ‘Club for Promoting Common Honesty’ – in Huxley’s words, a ‘Society for the propagation’, not of Christian Knowledge, but of ‘common honesty in all parts of the world’. The participants enjoyed a grand ‘feed’ at the Red Lion in Petty Cury, with Huxley as President and Kingsley as Vice. The Club had, initially, one rule – anyone drinking Sclater’s health was to be expelled (on Sclater’s stipulation). As soon as Sclater left, Newton proposed his health, ‘and every one drank it; whereby it is difficult to say whether the association did not thereupon dissolve itself!’22
In the scientific sessions, there was one issue that gave Wallace pause for thought. He had, of course, missed the vehement argument between Huxley and the creationist Richard Owen at Oxford in 1860, which hinged on the structure of an ape’s brain, and the subsequent annihilation of Wilberforce, who made the mistake of asking Huxley whether he was descended from an ape on his grandfather’s or grandmother’s side of the family (or words to that effect). Huxley, with his book Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature completed but not published, decided that the Cambridge meeting was the occasion to demolish Owen. William Flower, the newly appointed Conservator at the Royal College of Surgeons, acted as Huxley’s demonstrator, and dissected an ape brain to disprove Owen’s theory about the hippocampus. Huxley, by now the Hunterian Professor at the Royal College of Surgeons, presided over the session as Chairman of the Zoology Section. On 3 October, Owen read a paper ‘On the characters of the Aye-aye, as a test of the Lamarckian and Darwinian hypotheses of the transmutation and origin of species’. Owen argued that the adaptation of parts of the aye-aye could not be explained either by natural selection or by Lamarckian theory, but was the result of a guiding intelligence. Huxley reported to Darwin that those who could judge saw that Owen was ‘lying & shuffling’, while the other half regarded him as ‘an innocent old sheep, being worried by three particularly active young wolves’ – Huxley, Flower and George Rolleston.23 In Wallace’s later description, there was ‘a slight recrudescence of the evolution controversy in the rather painful dispute between Professor Richard Owen and Huxley, supported by Flower, on certain alleged differences between the brains of man and apes’.24 Wallace had had ample time to think about these questions, as he pickled orang-utans in spirits or fed and tended the baby mias in Sarawak. Wallace’s own ‘special heresy’, within the Darwinian creed, was yet to be publicly formulated. But the treatment handed out to Owen left him in no doubt about the way scientific debate was being conducted in Britain. It was a relief to get back to the ornithologists, and to speculation about the dodo and the great auk.
In January 1863, Wallace reached the milestone of his fortieth birthday. Each time he visited his new acquaintances – Darwin, Huxley, Kingsley – he remarked on the happiness of their domestic life. To his intimate friends, such as George Silk or Richard Spruce, he had sometimes discussed the prospect of marriage in a guarded way, writing from his celibate isolation in the Archipelago. ‘I am very sorry,’ he commented to Silk, ‘that you have not been fortunate in your “affaires du coeur”. All I can say is “try again”. Marriage has a wonderful effect of brightening the intellect’ – it had even made his own brother John witty.25 On his return to London he wrote to Spruce to find out when he planned to return, enquiring as to whether some ‘moça of the mountains’ was holding him captive there.26 (Ten years before, a letter from Spruce suggested that he was not living an entirely ‘bachelor existence’ on the Rio Negro.) Wallace, both shy and modest, though certainly with an eye for beauty, gives no hint that he had ever formed such a liaison himself, but confessed his present ambitions. ‘By the bye,’ Spruce replied, ‘have you, acting on the principle of Natural Selection, yet taken unto yourself “a Signorina, to take care of the tea, shirt-buttons etc”, as you once hinted to me you proposed doing? Recollect “There is a tide in the affairs etc” and though yours cannot now be “taken at the full”, it may still be taken ere it ebbs out completely.’27 His other Amazon fellow traveller Bates, as Wallace must have known, was already the father of a baby daughter, Alice, and married her mother, Sarah Ann Mason, on 15 January 1863. It was now or never. He was feeling more himself again, and sent his brother John a new photograph to prove it, taken when the Christmas beef and pudding and a little champagne ‘had somehow restored that ancient jollity’.
In his autobiography, Wallace spends several pages narrating his courtship of ‘Miss L—’ – far more, in fact, than he devotes to the account of his eventual marriage.28 His chess-playing friend, Lewis Leslie, was a widower with a son and two daughters, and Wallace had the opportunity to spend a little time with them before or after his regular games. The elder, Marion, twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old, was ‘very agreeable, though quiet, pleasant-looking, well educated, and fond of art and literature’. Wallace began to feel ‘an affection’ for her, and to hope that she would become his wife. Some time during 1863, thinking he was ‘sufficiently known’, he wrote to her describing his feelings, being too shy to make a spoken proposal, and asking whether she could in any way respond to his affection. Her reply let him down gently – clearly she was taken by surprise; but she begged him not to break off his visits to her father because of her refusal. Wallace interpreted this request as tacit encouragement. A year passed. He thought he detected signs of a positive change in her attitude to him. This time he wrote formally to her father. He was interrogated about his means, informed that Marion had a small income, and asked to settle an equal amount on her. Agreement was reached, engagement followed. Wallace, co
nfident about his status with the family, wrote to Newton, introducing Lewis Leslie junior, who was going up to Queens’ – ‘a pleasant young fellow, but I am sorry to say utterly unconscious of natural history’.29 Marion called on Fanny Sims and on Mrs Wallace. Wallace visited the Leslies two or three times a week. His life in England was beginning to take shape.
While Wallace was conducting his gentle courtship of Miss Leslie, he occupied himself with the methodical organisation of his collections and the writing of scientific papers. Hooker and Darwin, however, could not quite make up their minds about his intellectual stamina. Hooker commended Wallace’s interventions at a Linnean Society meeting, where he ‘made a very few remarks worth all the paper’, but still found cause to wonder why Wallace did not ‘fructify as Bates does’.30 Bates fructified with a vengeance that summer through the publication of The Naturalist on the River Amazons. Darwin acted as godfather to the book, encouraging Bates into action, reading the first chapters, recommending the book to John Murray, the publisher of both Origin and of Lyell’s Antiquity of Man. Darwin’s criticisms, he assured Bates, could be condensed into a single sentence: ‘It is the best book of Natural History Travels ever published in England’ – praise he repeated to Hooker, Lyell and Asa Gray.31 What was more, Bates had spoken out boldly on species. Darwin drew Hooker’s notice to the ‘d …d’ Athenaeum, which coolly drew attention to a key issue in a review of Bates’s book.32 In his preface, Bates described a principal object of the journey he and Wallace had embarked on as gathering facts ‘towards solving the problem of the origin of species’; and the Athenaeum commented, ‘He thinks he has found such a solution in adopting Mr Darwin’s theory and making many of his facts bend to it.’
This public suggestion that Bates had somehow contrived to write Darwinist natural selection into his narrative retrospectively was intriguing to Darwin and Hooker: the ghost of priority flickered briefly between the lines of their correspondence. Hooker admitted that the book was charming, but yet – it was evident that Bates’s ‘Darwinistic explanation of what he sees etc are after-thoughts – It is too bad to say that his facts are therefore twisted – but he says here & there, or leaves the impression of saying, in 1849, “We did so & so which is of such importance ‘au point de vue’ of N. Selection or of Variation & N & S.” whereas he never knew aught of these till 1859 –’33 (Hooker, of course, had no knowledge of any discussions, or correspondence, between Bates and Wallace.) Darwin took up Hooker’s cue in his reply: ‘With respect to Bates’ Wallace having distinct views on species during their Journey; what does astonish me is the extreme poverty of observation on this head in Wallace’s book; with one discussion on very dissimilar Birds feeding alike showing, as it seemed to me, complete misunderstanding of the economy of nature.’34 Darwin was here, perhaps, revealing the reason why he had originally discounted Wallace as a first-class theorist.
Darwin now classed Wallace and Bates in the ranks of the ‘half-a-dozen real downright believers in modification of species in all England’ who dared – and this was the crux – speak out boldly, along with himself, Hooker, Huxley and Lubbock.35 Wallace was welcomed as an ally, and reaffirmed by Darwin as a co-owner of the theory of natural selection in a letter to the Athenaeum, 9 May 1863:
Whether the naturalist believes in the views given by Lamarck, by Geoffroy St-Hilaire, by the author of the Vestiges, by Mr Wallace and myself, or in any other such view, signifies extremely little in comparison with the admission that species have descended from other species and have not been created immutable …36
Wallace rose to the role of champion. In October, for example, he shredded Samuel Haughton’s paper, ‘On the form of the cells made by various wasps and by the honey bee; with an appendix on the origin of species’ in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History37 – successfully enough for Asa Gray to tell Darwin that he had read Wallace’s exposé ‘with gusto’. Gray drew Darwin’s attention to some choice anti-Darwinian writing by Louis Agassiz: ‘Pray set Wallace upon these articles.’38 Wallace was slowly taking up his rightful place in scientific circles, and offered a paper on one of his special topics, ‘On the Geographical Distribution of Animal Life’, at the British Association meeting in Newcastle that autumn. He was in the ascendant.
In the first months of 1864, Wallace made the most controversial statement of his views since his return. Everyone else had written their big books: Huxley had published Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature, Lyell his Antiquity of Man, Herbert Spencer First Principles, all in 1863. The time was ripe for him to speak out, not just on birds and butterflies, but on the subject that remained central to him, man. He was still single, had no immediate dependants: he had recovered his health, and his intellectual energy. He was more than holding his own at the learned societies, and Huxley, as swift to praise as he was willing to condemn, had given Wallace the most generous of public tributes in Man’s Place:
Once in a generation a Wallace may be found physically, mentally and morally qualified to wander unscathed through the tropical wilds of America and of Asia; to form magnificent collections as he wanders; and withal to think out sagaciously the conclusions suggested by his collections.39
Wallace was ready to deliver. The first half of 1864 produced a spate of papers and articles: one on Malay butterflies for the Linnean; another on parrots of the Malayan region for the Zoological; notes and articles for Newton’s Ibis; ‘On some Anomalies of Zoological and Botanical Geography’ – a reprint of his Newcastle paper – for Huxley’s Natural History Review. He was even ready to tackle his travels. ‘I am at last making the beginning of a small book on my Eastern journey,’ he confided to Darwin on 2 January 1864, a ringing New Year resolution.40
Wallace saw his ‘Eastern journey’ as a whole, an integrated set of experiences that provided him with material from which the major scientific and philosophical questions could be answered, or on the basis of which informed theories might be constructed. Quite consciously and systematically, he had studied the varieties and races of man during his travels as closely as he had charted the geographical distribution of species. ‘You ask whether I shall discuss “man”,’ Darwin had written to him in 1857, guarding his position, ‘I think I shall avoid whole subject …’41 Wallace had no such inhibitions. ‘Let Ethnology be your hobby,’ he advised George Silk in November 1858, in the euphoria of his Linnean publication. He was already preparing to take issue with the established experts such as Robert Latham, who were laying down ethnological grids for the whole world:
If I live I shall come out strong on Malay and Papuan races, & astonish Latham, Davis etc. etc.… I am convinced no man can be a good ethnologist who does not travel, & not travel merely but reside as I do months & years with each race, becoming well acquainted with their average physiognomy & moral character, so as to be able to detect crossbreeds which totally mislead the hasty traveller, who thinks they are transitions!! Latham I am sure is quite wrong on many points.42
Wallace was poised now to spell out the implications of natural selection for man, basing his argument on all the facts he had noted during his extended fieldwork. Lyell was asking him for references on his observations in the Malay Archipelago, so that he could incorporate a few sentences into his presidential address for the British Association later that year,43 and Wallace was suggesting that an expedition should be raised to explore the caves of Borneo ‘for fossil anthropomorphs & the missing link’.44 For Wallace, the laws of varieties and species were quite as applicable to man as they were to the rest of the animal world, as he had suggested as early as December 1845, in a letter to Bates. He outlined his current thinking in two successive papers, ‘Varieties of Man in the Malay Archipelago’, read to the Ethnological Society in January 1864, and, on 1 March, a more radical and wide-sweeping argument, ‘The Origin of Human Races from the Theory of Natural Selection’, which he read to the Anthropological Society.
His choice of platform was itself controversial. The Anthropological Society was cont
rolled by white supremacists, led by James Hunt and Charles Carter Blake, who took a fervently pro-South and pro-slavery stance over the American Civil War, as opposed to the stoutly abolitionist position of the longer-established Ethnological Society. The men who controlled the Anthropological held that white and other races had descended from different stocks; the Ethnological that all men derived from one common ancestral stock or form. Huxley wrote to Wallace explaining that his objections to the ‘Anthropological people’ would not allow him to attend the meeting.45 (Huxley had resigned his honorary fellowship after the Anthropological Review had attacked Man’s Place in Nature in highly offensive terms.) As to Huxley’s opinion of Hunt, Wallace pretty well agreed – ‘I do not think he is fit to be President’ – but he thought the few meetings he had attended ‘quite equal to that of the rival Society’. However, he refused to accept Huxley’s opinion that ‘there was not the slightest reason’ for the Anthropological’s existence. It was a necessary protest against the Ethnological being made a ladies’ society, as the Geographical had also been: ‘Consequently many important & interesting subjects cannot possibly be discussed there.’46 (For ‘important and interesting’, Wallace presumably meant topics such as sexual behaviour.) Besides, the Ethnological met on the same evenings as the Zoological, ‘which I always like to attend’, and so having given his first paper to the Ethnological, ‘I give the next to the Anthrop’. Wallace was, as often, quite unrepentant in the face of criticism or opposition.
