Alfred Russel Wallace

by Peter Raby

  In fact, in his paper Wallace articulated an argument that sought a synthesis of the two opposing theories. To the question, did man develop from unity or from diversity, he argued for the former; but pushed that development so far back in time as to allow for a differentiated impact of natural selection between, broadly, the races of man in the northern and the southern hemispheres. In the north, for example, ‘the harsher discipline of a more sterile soil’ led to the progressive improvement of the European races, especially in intellectual and moral terms. Wallace presumably believed that he did not have to argue this point, which would have been common ground for his audience, and simply stated it:

  The intellectual and moral, as well as the physical, qualities of the European are superior; the same powers and capacities which have made him rise in a few centuries from the condition of the wandering savage, with a scanty and stationary population, to his present state of culture and advancement, with a greater average longevity, a greater average strength, and a capacity of more rapid increase, – enable him when in contact with the savage man to conquer in the struggle for existence, and to increase at his expense, just as the better adapted [more favourable] increase at the expense of the less adapted [less favourable] varieties in the animal and vegetable kingdoms – just as the weeds of Europe overrun North America and Australia, extinguishing native productions by the inherent vigour of their organisation, and by their greater capacity for existence and multiplication.47

  But Wallace went on to argue that natural selection worked on man in a different way from on other animals; mental development – deriving ‘from some unknown cause’ – ensured that man was able largely to overcome the process of natural selection in so far as it affected the body. (He even speculated about a future when, in terms of the food supply, ‘man’s selection shall have supplanted natural selection’.) Inevitably, ‘the higher – the more intellectual and moral – must displace the lower and more degraded races; and the power of “natural selection”, still acting on his mental organisation, must ever lead to the more perfect adaptation of man’s higher faculties to the conditions of surrounding nature, and to the exigencies of the social state.’ The world would once again be inhabited ‘by a single nearly homogeneous race, no individual of which will be inferior to the noblest specimens of existing humanity’. Wallace, having first argued for a unified primitive stock in antiquity, predicted progress towards a unified, and perfected, final state. For a moment, it seemed that he was embracing the most hard-edged doctrine of the survival of the fittest, a process of interracial competition in which the ‘civilised’ would sweep away the ‘savage’. But Wallace had not finished. In the Amazon forests, or on the Aru Islands, he had contemplated the nature of the savage and compared it to the civilised, and he did not accept that European society, as it currently functioned, was in fact the superior. He does not make it clear precisely when the European Golden Age occurred, but there was now a clear and indisputable mismatch between moral potential and reality. In the West, the ‘marvellous developments and vast practical results of science’ had been given to societies ‘too low morally and intellectually to know how to make the best use of them’; certainly on the surface, in terms of worldly success and increase in numbers, natural selection seemed to be advancing the mediocre, if not the low. But, being an incurable optimist and a believer in perfectibility, Wallace stated his belief in an intellectual and moral advance, although without reference to any basis for that belief. In his Utopian vision,

  the passions and propensities will be restrained within those limits which most conduce to happiness; and mankind will have at length discovered that it was only required of them to develop the capacities of their higher nature, in order to convert this earth, which had so long been the theatre of their unbridled passions, and the scene of unimaginable misery, into as bright a paradise as ever haunted the dreams of seer or poet.

  This was a bold gauntlet to toss at the feet of the Anthropologicals, and a long and heated discussion followed, with Wallace returning point for point.48

  When the paper was published, Wallace sent copies to Spencer, Lyell, Hooker and Darwin. Spencer approved; Lyell applauded – though correcting him about his comments on the mound-builders of the Mississippi valley, and questioning whether Wallace quite appreciated the length of time available for the development of man. Lyell also commented, ‘The manner in which you have given Darwin the whole credit of the theory of Natural Selection is very handsome, but if anyone else had done it without allusion to your papers [sic] it would have been wrong.’49 A comment by Wallace about Owen sounded alarm signals for Hooker. Wallace had written, ‘We can thus understand how it is that, judging from the head and brain, Professor Owen places man in a distinct sub-class of mammalia …’ Was Wallace deserting the Darwin–Huxley camp, was he about to commit apostasy and return to Owen’s creationist views? Wallace wrote to put Hooker right; he had rather mistaken his meaning ‘as to the systematic classification of man’: Wallace did not agree at all with Owen’s system, but there was some reason to class man apart from the rest of organic nature, on account of man’s reason and moral faculties as opposed to the ‘mental faculties’ of the whole of the animal world. Man, he argued, does not differ as much from the chimpanzees as the chimpanzee does from the aye-aye or the lemurs, so, zoologically, Wallace would class man as forming a distinct family of the same order which contains them all. Then, as if he had disposed of this slight misinterpretation, he changed the subject; seizing advantage of Hooker’s position at Kew, he asked if his brother-in-law Thomas Sims could have permission to take photographs there – was there a back entrance that a cab could come in by with the apparatus?50

  Wallace remained something of an enigma to Hooker. ‘I am struck with his negation of all credit or share in the Natural Selection theory,’ Hooker commented to Darwin after reading the paper in the Anthropological Review, which referred exclusively to ‘Mr Darwin’s celebrated theory’, ‘which makes me think him a very high-minded man.’ Wallace had, apparently, no difficulty with the idea that man had transmuted from the apes, nor with all the theological implications that followed, and could not comprehend why ‘scientific men’ – such as Hooker and Darwin – remained so reticent on the subject. ‘It is all very well for Wallace to wonder at scientific men being afraid of saying what they think,’ Hooker complained to Darwin.

  He has all ‘the freedom of motion in vacuo’ in one sense. Had he as many kind and good relations as I have, who would be grieved and pained to hear me say what I think, and had he children who would be placed in predicaments most detrimental to children’s minds by such avowals on my part, he would not wonder so much.51

  Darwin was enthusiastic about Wallace’s ‘great leading idea’ on the distinction between man’s body and his mind, or brain; it was ‘grand and most eloquently done’. Darwin always praised Wallace’s style, even when he had misgivings about his argument. Darwin had his own theory as to the agent of change in man, and offered his view that ‘a sort of sexual selection has been the most powerful means of changing the races of man’.52 He even offered to show Wallace his notes on man, a generous suggestion that Wallace declined.

  In the spring of 1864, Wallace considered applying for the Assistant Secretaryship of the Royal Geographical Society, and found he was in competition with Bates. Bates, married and with a child, had already been passed over for a post in the British Museum in April 1862, the Trustees deciding to appoint Albert Gunther, who had the voice of the Superintendent, Richard Owen. Another opening at the Museum came up the following year, and again Bates was bypassed, in favour of the eighteen-year-old poet Arthur O’Shaughnessy. Men like Bates and Wallace, with years of highly successful experience in fieldwork, might have been thought ideal candidate material, to be welcomed with open arms by the scientific establishment. On the contrary, ‘It is extremely difficult to establish a footing in London scientific society,’ Hooker advised Bates. ‘It is all along of the law of the st
ruggle for life!’ Besides, he added, ‘remember that entomologists are a poor set!’53 This time, Bates could look for the active support of Darwin, who had not only been impressed by Bates’s paper on mimicry, but had recommended Bates’s Amazons book to John Murray, the publisher. Darwin had gathered all the facts about Bates’s finances – £100 a year from his brothers, in exchange for his share of the hosiery business; £23 a year from investments; and anything he could make from his writing – Murray had sent him an advance of £250, but the book had taken him two years to write. Darwin wrote to Murray, and Murray pushed hard for Bates. Among Bates’s other assets were his knowledge of German, and his early experience of business and administration. Bates’s appointment was unanimous. Wallace must have decided against a formal application; his name does not appear in the list of candidates.54 What he omits to mention in his autobiography is that he was actually interviewed for the job in June 1863, when Bates was not a candidate, and failed to win the appointment: when the position became vacant again unexpectedly, there was a second round of interviews. Whatever his private disappointment, Wallace expressed no resentment, acknowledging Bates’s stronger claims; but this was only the first of several such posts that he investigated, and failed to obtain.

  Apart from this setback, life was full of promise. Wallace attended the British Association at Bath, where he heard Lyell’s gratifying reference to his concept of the ‘two provinces of animal life’ in the Archipelago, the concept enshrined in Wallace’s line. He also read a paper ‘On the Progress of Civilisation in Northern Celebes’. His understanding with Marion Leslie became a formal engagement. Dresses were ordered, the wedding programme settled, and invitations sent out. Richard Spruce, Wallace’s old scientific friend, returned from Peru in time for the great day. Suddenly, and without, according to Wallace, the slightest warning, ‘the whole affair was broken off’. Wallace called one afternoon as usual at Rothsay Villa, to be told by the servant that Miss Leslie was not at home. She had gone away that morning, and would write. The next day, a letter from Mr Leslie arrived, saying that his daughter wished to break off the engagement. ‘The blow was very severe,’ Wallace wrote some forty years later, ‘and I have never in my life experienced such intensely painful emotion.’55 He wrote to Marion, strongly, ‘perhaps bitterly’, trying to express his feelings, assuring her that he had never had a moment’s thought of anyone else. He had no reply, and never saw her or any of the family again.

  The only explanations he ever received were that he was ‘silent’ about himself and his family, that he seemed to have something to conceal, and that he had told Marion nothing about a ‘widow lady’, a friend of his mother’s, that he had, it was claimed, almost been engaged to – for Wallace, she was someone as utterly remote ‘from all ideas of marriage as would have been an aunt or grandmother’. The information, or misinformation, about the ‘widow’ can have come only from his mother or sister, or less probably from George Silk. The charge that he was largely ‘silent’ about himself was, Wallace admitted, true. There may, too, have been other, unstated, reasons for Marion Leslie’s change of heart, or mind. The Leslies lived in Kensington, the Wallaces in Notting Hill. Leslie was an auctioneer, but with offices in Mayfair. Wallace, for all his scientific reputation, was far from affluent, and still had no obvious prospects, even two years after his return from the East; he lived above an unsuccessful photographer’s shop. The Leslies’ neighbours in Campden Hill included the Duke of Argyll, the Earl of Antrim, and the artists Holman Hunt and Augustus Egg. Were Wallace’s social credentials a little too fragile? Or was his lack of an official job seen as a disadvantage? Apart from his investments, he had no regular income beyond the bits and pieces he could pick up in journalism, such as writing for the newly established organ of the radical scientists, the Reader.

  Conceivably, some aspect of Wallace’s controversial, or at least unorthodox, views may have reached the Leslie family. Whatever the reasons, the bitter blow of the broken engagement fell on Wallace in the autumn of 1864, soon after he returned from Bath. His confidence was shattered, and his intellectual energies temporarily crushed. He had met with, he confided later to Newton, ‘that “tide” Shakespeare speaks of, which I had thought to have taken at the flood & been carried on, not to fortune but to happiness’ – to descend from metaphor he had been ‘considerably cut up’, to such an extent that he had done nothing – scientifically speaking – for the last six months. Work on his eastern journey was suspended: his theory of man put on ice. But, he promised in February 1865, the first time he worked at birds again it would be with the ‘Ibis’ in his eye. ‘I am now working a little at insects, & am also preparing for moving, as I leave here in March & do not yet know where I am going.’56 Westbourne Grove was too close to the scene of his disappointment. He leased a house just north of Regent’s Park in St Mark’s Crescent – only a few minutes’ walk from the Zoological Gardens – and moved there with his mother in April 1865.

  One major comfort was the return of Richard Spruce. Spruce was Wallace’s closest friend, the ideal companion who had sustained him in his Amazon sickness, a man whose cast of mind and temperament he shared, and whose dry sense of humour and irony he appreciated; he was, too, bound to him emotionally through the loss of his brother Herbert, and the happy times they shared at Santarem and Barra. Besides, because Spruce specialised in plants, and above all mosses, there was no danger of direct competition, as there was from time to time with Bates. Spruce had been marooned in Peru, a prisoner to a complete breakdown in physical health – sitting at a table was so painful that he spent most of the day in his hammock – and, mentally, he was depressed and slightly bitter. Particularly hurtful, he had confided to Wallace, was a letter from Sir William Hooker ‘filled with ungenerous taunts and insults’: ‘I only regret that he did not write me that letter several years earlier – my fate would assuredly have been different – and I might not have had (as I have now) to pass my last days in poverty, sickness and neglect.’57 Clearly, he held Hooker responsible for involving him in an arduous expedition to obtain chinchona plants and seeds for the Indian government, for the absence of proper financial reward, and for the subsequent events that led to his extended stay in Peru. But Wallace’s letter of 1862, announcing his safe return to England, had helped to shift his despondency. When it reached him, Spruce was ‘expecting to start soon for “that undiscovered country, from whose bourne etc”‘, a journey for which he was preparing by packing up his collections and gathering together his manuscripts.58 A year later, in November 1863, he signalled that he might have the strength and will to head for England the following spring: ‘I can hardly hope to live to publish a connected account of my own wanderings, but I hope,’ he hinted, ‘to leave my Mss in such a state that someone else may do it.’

  In the early autumn of 1864, Spruce was back in England at last, moving between London and the Sussex village of Hurstpierpoint. This was the home of William Mitten, pharmacist and bryologist, who had undertaken to classify Spruce’s vast collection of mosses and lichens. (He was taking his time about it, too, much to Spruce’s irritation.) Wallace visited Spruce at Hurstpierpoint, where he met the Mittens, and their four daughters, Annie, Rose, Flora and Bessie. Wallace’s ‘affaires du coeur’ were apparently public knowledge. In October 1864, Mitten was enquiring where Spruce proposed to ‘hybernate’, and confessed to him that ‘we are occasionally haunted by our curiosity as to Mr Wallace’s matrimonial prospects which we hope are brighter’.59 In the spring of 1865, emerging from his winter of gloom, Wallace renewed his visits to Spruce. The Mitten family shared a love of wild flowers. Wallace was amazed to see in their house a vase full of orchids – the butterfly and fly orchids – and delighted to be taken to the woods at the foot of the Sussex downs to observe them in the wild, together with bee orchids, giant cowslips, dyer’s broom, and a host of other interesting plants. The Mittens’ house, Treeps, stands on a ridge on the south side of the village street, and the land falls away sharply i
nto steep meadows, so that the view from the garden looks over a lush green valley to the line of the south downs. The hurts of Kensington were healed in the fields of Hurstpierpoint, as Wallace botanised with the Mittens, and especially with the eldest daughter, Annie.

  10 Wallace Transformed

  AT ABOUT THE same time that Annie Mitten came into his life, Wallace plunged into another transforming experience. His sustained interest in spiritualism in the years to come is a major factor, affecting not only his inner happiness and his personal relationships, but his public and professional standing, even, arguably, the course of his scientific thinking. After his intense burst of writing in the first six months of 1864, with its focus on man, the emotional turmoil of his engagement and subsequent rejection left him so flat that he produced, for him, very little scientific or literary work in 1865: a list of land-shells, and a description of twenty-one new Malayan birds for the Zoological Society; ‘Pigeons of the Malay Archipelago’ for the Ibis, in October; ‘Progress of Civilisation in Northern Celebes’ for the Ethnological; and, in June, ‘How to Civilise Savages’ at Spencer’s request for the Reader – all spun out of existing material – although he strengthened his language on the subject of the civilised and the savage: ‘The white men in our colonies are too frequently the true savages, and require to be taught and Christianised quite as much as the natives.’1 That summer, however, he embarked on a new voyage into unknown territory, as he began to attend seances.