by Peter Raby
The publication of Island Life could not have been better timed. Hooker was genuine in his praise for the book, and re-echoed his August commendation in a letter to Wallace – ‘you have brushed away more cobwebs that have obscured the subject than any other author’ – while questioning his comments on the Bahamas. Repeating his approval to Darwin, he added, ‘That such a man should be a Spiritualist is more wonderful than all the movements of all the plants.’59 Seizing the moment, Huxley made his approach. On 26 November, Hooker wrote again to Darwin, reporting that his views on the pension memorial had changed. The bet, in Huxley’s interpretation, ‘tells all the other way’ – Huxley believed Wallace gave the money to a charity. (This was a generous piece of misinformation.) There remained only the spiritualism – ‘which should not I think be an objection to urging his claim, – though I am doubtful as to whether it should not be mentioned privately to the Minister’. The accusation about ‘underhand’ behaviour at the British Association was no longer, apparently, an issue.60 Hooker’s consent smoothed the way. ‘I cannot see that there is the least necessity to call any Minister’s attention to spiritualism,’ wrote Darwin to Huxley; ‘or to repeat (what you said) to Gladstone – that Spiritualism is not worse than the prevailing superstitions of the country.’61 Wallace’s spiritualism was a matter of public knowledge; all the same, his writings on the subject formed no part of the application.
The memorial took shape, the list of signatories was agreed, and Darwin set to work to secure them, sending addressed envelopes with notes, one inside the other, to speed the process: Spottiswoode, President of the Royal Society; Allman, President of the Linnean Society; Flower, President of the London Zoological Society; Lord Aberdare; Ramsay, Director of the Geological Survey; Gunther, Lubbock, Sclater, Bates, Hooker, Huxley, Darwin. Darwin seemed totally preoccupied by his mission; no time should be lost, he urged his scientific friends; ‘I feel a very deep interest in the success of the memorial.’ What about the Duke of Argyll, a member of Gladstone’s cabinet, and a scientific writer, although an anti-evolutionist? ‘The D. of Argyll, hurrah, has written most civilly … to say that he highly approves of pension for Wallace.’62 Darwin was quite prepared to lead a deputation to the Prime Minister in person, but the final strategy agreed on was to send the memorial with a covering letter. The deed was done, Darwin informed Arabella Buckley on 4 January – ‘I hardly ever wished so much for anything in my life as for its success’ – ‘but as my boys would express it “it has been an awful grind” – I mean so many letters’.63 Two days later Gladstone wrote to Darwin: ‘I lose no time in apprising you that although the Fund is moderate, and is at present poor, I shall recommend Mr Wallace for a pension of £200 a year.’64 Now Darwin could break the news to Wallace: ‘twelve good men’ had signed the memorial; he hoped it would give him ‘some satisfaction to see that not only every scientific man to whom I applied, but that also our Government appreciated your lifelong scientific labour’.65 ‘Hurrah, Hurrah – read the enclosed,’ Darwin rejoiced to Huxley: wonderfully handsome, Gladstone had backdated the pension to July 1880.66 Wallace heard the news on his fifty-eighth birthday: ‘It will relieve me from a great deal of the anxieties under which I have laboured for several years.’67 He sought Darwin’s advice on the etiquette for thanking both Gladstone and his twelve supporters. Learning from Miss Buckley and Huxley of Darwin’s key role, he wrote again, more personally: ‘I must again return you my best thanks, and assure you that there is no one living to whose kindness in such a matter I could feel myself indebted with so much pleasure and satisfaction.’68 It had been a long campaign, and Darwin’s generosity and persistence had triumphed. Wallace would never be totally free from financial constraints – he was too fond of building for that – but the quarterly payments of £50 provided a reliable safety-net for the next thirty-three years.
12 The Big Trees
WITH THE SECURITY of the Civil List pension, Wallace could relax. He was fifty-eight, and he had no major idea for a natural history book to follow Island Life, and no gaping hole in his finances to make him think of one. Nutwood Cottage went up rapidly in its half-acre surrounded by hazels and oaks, on the ridge of Frith Hill, giving lovely views to the west. The soil, Wallace noted with anticipation, was lower greensand, with a useful surface layer of leaf-mould, and in the small garden and greenhouse the Wallaces managed to fit in more than a thousand plant species. A few hundred yards away was Charterhouse School, where they found pleasant friends, including one or two chess opponents such as J. W. Sharpe. Hampden surfaced, and distributed leaflets wholesale calling Wallace every kind of scoundrel, but no one seemed to pay much attention. Charles Hayward, his old Neath friend, was living close by with his nephew, whose children were much the same age as Will and Violet. William Allingham, the Irish poet, and his wife Helen, the painter and illustrator, moved into the neighbourhood, to Witley, the same year; and Gertrude Jekyll was laying out her garden at Munstead Wood a few miles away. It might have been the moment to retire to a more private pattern of life.
Instead, Wallace found a new subject, or series of subjects: land reform, and, specifically, land nationalisation, which he focused on as the key to social reform and therefore to social progress. The question of the ownership of the earth had never been far from his thoughts, ever since Spencer’s Social Statics and its discussion of ‘The Right to the Use of the Earth’ had impressed itself on him in the interval between the Amazon and the Archipelago. Throughout his travels in the East, his interests were roused by the various systems of land ownership and cultivation he encountered, and he toyed with the need to balance individual freedom with collective benefits, and the need for evolution and development. His clarion call at the close of The Malay Archipelago prompted a response from John Stuart Mill, and at Mill’s invitation he joined the Land Tenure Reform Association: Wallace went to meetings, and offered ideas, but the Association folded with Mill’s death. Spencer’s ideas, though not his solutions, remained in his mind, and many of the key issues resurfaced during the Epping Forest campaign. The fate of Epping Forest involved matters of deep principle for Wallace; but much more pressing was the Irish land problem, and the terrible injustices suffered by the Irish tenants at the hands of their landlords during the agricultural depression of the 1870s. In November 1880, he published a closely argued essay in the Contemporary Review, ‘How to Nationalise the Land: a radical solution of the Irish Land Problem’.1 It was both radical and complicated, and in it Wallace sought, as so often, to maintain a balance between the rights of the individual and the rights of society. He suggested that an individual could possess land temporarily, but that the state should acquire the ground ownership, while the buildings and fittings, the value added, remained the property of the tenants, and could be sold. The ingenious pattern of proposals caught the public attention, and Wallace found himself besieged by correspondents. The following year, the Land Nationalisation Society was formed, with Wallace as its first, if slightly reluctant, President.
Land reform, expressed in its most urgent form within the context of Ireland, dominated social thinking during the 1880s. The economic slump of 1879, unemployment, rising population despite a quarter of a million emigrants a year, brought the underlying structure of property into sharp focus. Lady Bracknell’s comments – that ‘land has ceased to be either a profit or a pleasure. It gives one position, and prevents one from keeping it up’ – offers a retrospective lament for the old land-owner order; and the socialists seized on land nationalisation as a first principle. Wallace was drawn to the topic like a moth to one of his own lights. He attended meetings, contributed to policy, decided that there was no satisfactory introductory handbook to the subject, and settled down to supply one. ‘Land Nationalisation: its Necessity and its Aims’ gave, in his own words,
the only general account of the evils of our land system as it exists in England, Ireland, and Scotland; a comparison with other countries or places in which a better system prevails, together wi
th a solution of the problem of how to replace it by the only just system, without any confiscation of property or injury to any living individual.2
This assault on the topic was highly characteristic, containing most of the Wallace trademarks: an uncompromising analysis of the situation from a moral standpoint; the contrast between Britain and examples of other systems, drawn largely from Europe, where they ordered things better; and a simple solution which could rectify the injustice without anyone suffering, as a result of which the whole country would benefit, morally and in terms of a better quality of health and life. Henry George, the American economist, arrived in England in 1881, with the reputation of his book Progress and Poverty preceding him. Wallace met George, and warmed to him, and George spoke at a number of land nationalisation meetings. George’s book was immediately added to Wallace’s collection of sacred writings.
He even attempted to convert Darwin to his new enthusiasm. Had he read Progress and Poverty, he enquired, ‘the most startling novel and original book of the last 20 years’ – since The Origin of Species, was the implication; it would be as influential as Adam Smith.3 Darwin remained, as always, polite and equivocal: ‘I read many years ago some books on political economy, and they produced a disastrous effect on my mind, viz. utterly to distrust my own judgement on the subject and to doubt much everyone else’s judgement.’ All this delving about in social matters was difficult – too difficult, he implied. He hoped Wallace would not ‘turn renegade to natural history’, even though he supposed that politics were ‘very tempting’.4 While Wallace dabbled in social science, and socialism, Darwin, as though to prove his point, published his latest and last book, on Worms. In April 1882, he died at the age of seventy-three, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Wallace, ‘that perennial afterthought in the Darwinian story’,5 brought up the rear as a pall-bearer, following Spottiswoode, the President of the Royal Society, and Lubbock, the President of the Linnean, Hooker and Huxley. Darwin, who had lost his Christian faith but was content to call himself an agnostic, was given the fullest national recognition by Church and State; and every pulpit and newspaper column proclaimed reassurance that his theories were quite compatible with orthodox religious faith. Wallace, following the coffin, must have reflected once more on his own role in the affair, and on his own sharply differentiated intellectual position.
One of the benefits of the Epping Forest business was his growing friendship with Raphael Meldola. He stayed at Meldola’s when he needed to spend a night in London, happy to play chess with Meldola’s mother if his host was busy. Meldola often came to Godalming for the weekend, and he and Wallace spent a delightful week at Lyme Regis, hunting for fossils with Will. He was even lured down as a spare man for social occasions: ‘I am desired to ask if you will like to go with Mrs Wallace and Violet to Mrs Haywards on Tuesday January 19th as Mrs H. is going to have a crush with dancing …?6 The friendship continued after Meldola’s marriage, and Meldola never wavered in his admiration and support for the older scientist.
One might assume that the death of Darwin would release Wallace to pursue his own lines of scientific enquiry; it seems to have had the opposite effect. At the end of the decade, he would produce his own tribute, with his book on Darwinism. But, this apart, he wrote very little on science or on natural history during the 1880s, with the exception of reviews. Land nationalisation ruled his thoughts. For whereas Darwin or Spencer preferred to place faith in the laws of natural selection, leaving them to work themselves to fruition in the process of time, and Huxley trusted that improvement and progress would eventually flow from better education, Wallace believed in the possibility of rapid social evolution. To him, it was all so simple. Man’s higher nature allowed control over natural selection, made it possible to give scope for individual fulfilment while altruistically attending to the rights of all. Give everyone in the country an acre, and a million people would be lifted from poverty to happiness. ‘Surround the poorest cottage with a spacious vegetable garden, with fruit and shade trees, with room for keeping pigs and poultry, and the result invariably is untiring industry and thrift, which soon raise the occupiers above poverty, and diminish, if they do not abolish, drunkenness and crime,’ he wrote in ‘The “Why” and the “How” of Land Nationalisation’.7 There is a disarming naïvety in his ‘catch-all’ proposals: ‘The question of house property in towns cannot now be discussed,’ he commented, referring his readers to an appendix in a new edition of his book. But his analysis of the problem is direct, stark, uncompromising, as he sets out the terrible facts about the Irish injustice, the Highland clearances, or the desperate condition of the English poor. The debate rumbled on, and the issues would be redissected in the meetings of the Fabian Society, and in the early formulations of British socialism. Wallace shared many concerns and idiosyncrasies with Bernard Shaw – among them, a contempt for official statistics and a distrust of vaccination – but he lacked Shaw’s wit, and mobility of mind. At this point, Wallace placed complete faith in his own programme of land reform; all other good would follow, once it was implemented. The yellow vans of the Land Nationalisation Society quartered the country, and its lecturers spread the word, patiently educating the masses ‘in the certainty of a future and not distant success’.8
A similar conviction attached to his beliefs in spiritualism, as demonstrated in his conversations with Tennyson, that other great Victorian interrogator of the meaning of life. William Allingham was the link between Wallace and Tennyson. Allingham, a better conversationalist than he was a poet, was a close friend of the Carlyles and the Tennysons, and moved apparently effortlessly in literary and artistic circles: the Burne-Joneses and the Morrises, the Holman Hunts and Bodichons and Brownings opened their houses and their intimate thoughts to him. His diaries have spontaneity and vividness, based on his eye and ear for significant detail, and give a strong sense of the flow of everyday life and the preoccupations of his subjects. According to Allingham, these included a great many conversations about God, and the afterlife – perhaps he brought up the subject; but eternal truths were never far away from the thoughts of Tennyson or Carlyle. For example, he records Carlyle speaking about Darwinism in 1878:
‘I don’t care three ha’pence for the Darwinian Theory.’ By and by he said, ‘It is impossible to believe otherwise than that this world is the work of an Intelligent Mind. The Powet which has formed us – He (or It – if that appears to anyone more suitable) has known how to put into the human soul an ineradicable love of justice and truth. The best bit for me in Kant is that saying of his. “Two things strike me dumb with astonishment – the Starry Heavens and the Sense of Right and Wrong in the Human Soul.”
‘These physical gentlemen ought to be struck dumb if they properly consider the nature of the Universe.’9
In those views, Carlyle was not far from Wallace’s own position, as he straddled the gap between being a ‘physical gentleman’ and a believer in Intelligent Mind, an afterlife, and perfectibility.
Allingham and his family visited the Wallaces in August 1884, and their children raced about with Will and Violet while Wallace showed off his garden – the Californian tulip, the Canadian lily, three kinds of eucalyptus. Then they sat under a tree and the talk ranged through spiritualism, apparitions and mediums, and Wallace gave an account of the state of spirits in the next world. He asked Allingham if he ‘visualised’ his thoughts: ‘“Yes, always.” “I do not at all (he said) – my mind has only thoughts.” Then he spoke of Galton’s division of all minds into the visualising and non-visualising class.’10 Allingham reported Wallace’s conversation to Tennyson, and later in the year escorted Wallace by train from Godalming to Haslemere in response to an invitation – something of a royal command – from the Poet Laureate, who had been made a peer earlier that same year. Hallam Tennyson met them with the pony carriage at the station, and drove them to Aldworth. After lunch, and an inspection of the conifers in the grounds, they settled down in the study.
W. gave details o
f table-rapping, table-prancing, and so forth, his own experiences and other people’s. He never doubts any statement whatever in favour of ‘Spiritualism’, and has an answer to every objection. ‘Maskelyne and Cooke do wonderful things.’ – ‘Yes, partly by the help of mediumship.’
‘The “Spirits” often give foolish and misleading answers.’ ‘Yes, as might be expected; that only proves them to be human beings.’
W. said it was absurd to suppose that Matter could move itself. I ventured to remark that Matter, so far as we can penetrate, does move itself, indeed is perpetually in motion.
