Alfred Russel Wallace

by Peter Raby

  As he left the grandeur of the Rockies behind, the irritants of travel and civilisation returned. The peaches bought at the station were poor and dry: ‘Imported unripe – typical!’ Every engine that passed poured forth a column of smoke of intense blackness and density – careless stoking, and total disregard of people’s comfort. Chicago was cloudy, with mist and smoke, the buildings distressingly irregular, eight parallel lines of railroad fenced off by ugly wire fencing on the lake shore. It was as bad as London. There was one final lecture engagement, at Valparaiso, one more day’s botanising, and then he headed for Canada. In Kingston he searched for Trilliums, and made a few purchases: ‘Bought ladies’ dust brush for Annie $0.50.’ He was not too impressed by the St Lawrence: ‘not such a perceptible fall of water as in the rapids of the Rio Negro’. At Quebec, he bought a silver scarf pin – to go with the dust brush – and enjoyed a pastry and beefsteak pie: ‘the first decent domestic pie I have eaten!’

  He sailed from Quebec. The passage across the Atlantic was uncomfortable; he complained of sea sickness, a congested chest, asthma. A passenger sent him some grapes to cheer him up, which were eaten by rats. It was a relief to reach Liverpool during the night of 19 August. The next morning he sorted his baggage, wired Annie, caught an eleven o’clock train, and was sitting in a fly on the way from Godalming station to Nutwood Cottage soon after five. A few minutes later he saw smoke coming from the direction of the driver, and the man’s coat and trousers burst into flames: ‘No more curious circumstance happened during my 6000 miles of American travel!!!’31 He had come back with a net profit of £350, and an idea for his next project. He would expand his lectures on Darwinism into a book.

  13 The Future of the Race

  AMERICA INFLUENCED WALLACE profoundly. In addition to the subject of his next book, it provided him with the basis for a number of lectures, which he made good use of over the course of the next three years; and he also drew on his American notes and experiences for a number of articles: ‘American Museums’ for the Fortnightly; ‘The Antiquity of Man in North America’ for the Nineteenth Century; ‘Land Lessons from America’, an address published by the Land Nationalisation Society. More fundamentally, it revealed to him a glaring example of the dangers of development and capitalism, of the apparent triumph of might over right, and the supremacy of the dollar. The vast continent had been settled and developed so rapidly, on a grid system, that the landscape had a ‘monotonous and unnatural ruggedness’, ‘a want of harmony between man and nature’ – particularly evident in the felling of the forests, and the use of zigzag fencing. ‘Over the larger part of America,’ he commented later, ‘everything is raw and bare and ugly, with the same kind of ugliness with which we also are defacing our land and destroying its rural beauty.’1 The Americans, he argued, inherited the evil influences of Europe: religious intolerance, which they had broadly thrown off; slavery, both black and white; and the iniquitous feudal land system, delivering the greatest of natural resources into the hands of railroad magnates and corn speculators at the expense of the toiling workers. This was all too easily understandable in terms of natural selection: those who emigrated tended to be the most energetic, independent, the best, even, of their several nations; tested and hardened by two centuries of struggle against the forces of nature and the original population, and finally by a war of emancipation, it was almost inevitable that they would develop the virtues, prejudices and even vices of the parent stock – and then the advances of science in the nineteenth century catapulted them into the mad race for wealth ‘in which they have beaten the record’.2 All his reservations about ‘social Darwinism’ were intensified by his North American visit.

  After catching up on his correspondence and reading, and settling down to work on Darwinism, Wallace began to consider another move. Nutwood Cottage was becoming enclosed. New building obscured the view, a large house blocked off the south sunlight, and yet the garden was uncomfortably exposed to the wind: his asthma was bad, and he seemed to catch cold after cold. He and Annie spent their 1888 summer holiday doing some serious research into alternatives in the south-west. They looked around Penzance for a week – ‘no decent houses are to be had’ – and were attracted by the beautiful scenery around Monmouth, ‘perhaps the most beautiful in the world’ – some nice houses, with land, very cheap, but all of them far too remote from towns and railway stations.3 They visited Tintern Abbey, and the Forest of Dean, which would be a splendid place for mothing. At Symond’s Yat he had one notable entomological success:

  We were walking on a broad path in the wood when on the ground before me, with wings expanded, I saw, for the first time in my life, a living Purple Emperor! I just stopped my wife from walking over it, then knelt down, & gently touching the tips of the wings with my outstretched fingers, made him raise them for an instant & then neatly caught him between fingers & thumb, pinned him in my hat & brought him home safely for Willie.4

  This was a good omen. They moved on to Alderley in Gloucestershire. Marianne North, the great botanical painter, who had been exchanging plants with Annie for some time, had invited them to stay in her lovely cottage, once again in most beautiful country, where they coincided with the Galtons; and Miss North had made a garden in the two years she had been there which ‘already seemed twenty years old’. Wallace had some good talks with Galton, he told Meldola, about variation and sundry matters – and he was pleased to see from Nature that he and Edward Poulton were ‘having a little shindy’ with Romanes. The Wallaces were very tempted by a large house in good repair at a nominal rent, with eight acres of land, an orchard, a wood, a trout stream – but there was one drawback: a derelict cloth mill in the grounds, which would have to be demolished. Miss North longed for them to have it, but it needed £500 spent on it: ‘It would be splendid! But I can’t,’ he wrote regretfully to his sister, for once bowing to reality.5

  Darwinism came out in May 1889. Poulton had read the proofs for him, and Wallace replied to his inevitable critique:

  I am quite aware my views as to Man will be – as they have been – criticised. I have referred to Weismann’s opinion further on: but I doubt if his view or yours will really account for the facts. Of course we look at the question from different standpoints. I (think I) know that non-human intelligences exist – that there are minds disconnected from a physical brain – that there is, therefore, a spiritual world. This is not, for me, a belief merely, but knowledge founded on the long-continued observation of facts – and such knowledge must modify my views as to the origin and nature of human faculty.6

  As Poulton commented later, Wallace’s mind was ‘a continuous whole, whose varied activities influenced one another’. Wallace spared his friend the last sheet of the proofs, which would only horrify him still more.

  The house search continued, closer to home first, in the country between Godalming and Portsmouth, and then a little further to the west towards Bournemouth and Poole. They found a pretty, sheltered house at Parkstone, to let with an option to buy: there were some healthy specimens of eucalyptus, and no reports of any skating for twenty years, both positive signs. They let Nutwood, and moved to Corfe View, Parkstone, in the midsummer of 1889, just after the publication of Darwinism. They liked the place so much that they decided to buy, extending the house and creating a fine garden. Wallace was especially excited by the prospect of growing heaths and rhododendrons in the sandy, peaty soil, though he learned by hard experience that this was not so kind to a great many other of his favourite plants. The countryside and the Dorset shoreline promised all kinds of new pleasures, being rich in fossils, and archaeological remains, while the New Forest and the river valleys extending into the chalklands of Dorset and Wiltshire offered new habitats to explore. A request to Lord Wimborne, of Canford Manor, the following spring to ‘go all over the fields & woods in search of flowers’ was met by a crisp refusal: the breeding season was just coming in, and considerable disturbance to the nesting would be caused.7 The country’s greatest na
turalist, a fervent believer in the right to roam, had to bow before the estate’s shooting interests.

  At the age of sixty-seven, and with a major new project in his Corfe View house and grounds, Wallace might have decided to ease off a little from his public commitments. No major publications occupied him during the first half of the 1890s, apart from the volume of essays Natural Selection and Tropical Nature, which was really an amalgam of two previous collections with some added material. In February 1890, he lectured for the last time, at Sheffield and Liverpool, retiring from this lucrative sideline ‘partly from disinclination and considerations of health’, partly because he believed he could do more good with his pen.8 The pen was extremely active. He continued to write on spiritualism, and land nationalisation; and he spent a long time preparing evidence to the Royal Commission on vaccination.

  Wallace had been a fervent anti-vaccinationist for over a decade. He was convinced that the medical statistics in favour of vaccination were corrupt and unreliable, and his analysis of them was thorough and robust: ‘Forty-five Years of Registration Statistics, proving Vaccination to be both Useless and Dangerous’. He was, in fact, invited to be a Member of the Royal Commission, but preferred to present evidence before it, insisting that, as he was not medically qualified, he would only offer comments on the figures. He became more and more annoyed and frustrated by the Commissioners, who continued to ask him medical questions, and seemed to know nothing about statistics. What really incensed him was the fact that vaccination was compulsory:

  When almost every week I read of men fined or imprisoned for refusing to subject their children to a surgical operation which they (and I) believed to be, not only useless, but injurious and dangerous, I felt impelled to aid, if ever so little, in obtaining a repeal of a cruel and tyrannical law …9

  Institutionalised injustice always found a response in Wallace. Eventually, his research resulted in a pamphlet that was circulated to every member of the House of Commons before the debate on the new Vaccination Act later in the decade. His title took no prisoners: ‘Vaccination a Delusion: Its Penal Enforcement a Crime, proved by the Official Evidence in the Reports of the Royal Commission’.

  Human concerns, and the future of society, preoccupied his thinking, and while he continued to write for Nature and Natural Science, his articles flowed more freely into journals with broader social and political concerns, such as the Fortnightly Review and the Nineteenth Century, and, later, the Clarion. His September 1890 essay on ‘Human Selection’ for the Fortnightly, which contained a significant addition to his own particular version of natural selection, is a good example of his speculative thinking.10 He accepted Weismann’s position on heredity – that qualities acquired by an individual after birth could not be passed down to the next generation – and so needed to find a solution that would allow for the improvement and progress of the race, because he refused to accept either a ‘brute force’ theory, or that natural selection, in its Wallacean ‘higher morality’ form, might not operate. He examined a number of proposals, all equally unsatisfactory or distasteful to him. Galton advocated ‘a system of marks for family merit, both as to health, intellect, and morals’, with high scorers being encouraged by state funding to marry and breed early. This, though less objectionable than some schemes (at least as he stated it), was unlikely to be effective: it might increase the numbers of the ‘highest and best’, but would leave the bulk of the population unaffected. Hiram Stanley offered a much more radical solution; instead of encouraging the fittest, he proposed regulation by trained specialists, so eliminating (though no more than hinting at the method) ‘the drunkard, the criminal, the diseased, the morally weak’: nothing, wrote Wallace, could possibly be more objectionable, even if it might be effective. Grant Allen – ‘The Girl of the Future’; ‘Plain Words on the Woman Question’ – offered a kind of reverse solution, possibly even more objectionable to Wallace: abolish all legal restrictions to marriage, and train girls to believe that the duty of all healthy and intellectual women is to be the mothers of as many and as perfect children as possible; they should select the finest, healthiest and most intellectual men as temporary husbands in a kind of rolling sperm-donor programme, so ensuring the continued advancement of the human race. Detestable, pronounced Wallace, because it struck at the basis of a secure family life, and promoted ‘pure sensualism’ (he was always sceptical about the importance of sexual selection).

  In any event, he argued, all these schemes shared a fatal flaw, proposing to intervene in the social system without addressing the fact that the present state of social development was not only extremely imperfect but ‘vicious and rotten at the core’. The plight of women, in particular, was appalling; a large proportion was forced to work long hours for the barest subsistence, while another proportion was forced into uncongenial marriages as the only means of securing some amount of ‘personal independence or physical well-being’. Look at the society newspapers, and see how the lives of the wealthy were portrayed – look at the advertisements in the Field and the Queen, and their ‘endless round of pleasure and luxury, their almost inconceivable wastefulness and extravagance’ – a thousand pounds spent on the flowers for a single entertainment! And then look at the terrible conditions of millions of workers – ‘as detailed in the Report of the Lords Commission on Sweating, on absolutely incontestable evidence’. If a legislature could do nothing about that mass of injustice and corruption, how could it conceivably dare to intervene in the marriage tie and the family relation? First, it was necessary to create a society based on equality of opportunity: instead of proposing land nationalisation as the panacea, Wallace borrowed the broad scheme of Edward Bellamy’s Utopian novel, Looking Backward, a book he regarded as inspirational.11 Bellamy’s society of the future is organised along the lines of a great family, in which all comforts and enjoyments are equally shared. As in Robert Owen’s vision, education is the keystone, with the fullest and best training available to both sexes until the age of twenty-one, followed by three years of industrial service, so allowing everyone to make a proper choice of future occupation; while everyone receives a common share of public ‘credit’, so that there is no poverty.

  Here Wallace anticipated a major objection to his plan. Would not all this idealism result in a population explosion, if the normal Malthusian checks – war, pestilence, famine – were removed by a near-perfect system? There would be fewer restraints to early marriage; the population would rise, and in a few generations outstrip the food supply – and the Malthus theory would reassert itself. Wallace was ready with a raft of answers. Firstly, marriage would occur at a later average stage, partly through public opinion and education, partly because of the extended period of education and training: because ‘the mental and physical powers will be trained and exercised to their fullest capacity, the idea of marriage during this period will rarely be entertained’. Secondly, most women, relieved from ‘sordid cares and the struggle for mere existence’, would surely delay marriage until they had had a few years experience of the world – and the fertility ratio between women of twenty-five and thirty was about 8 to 5, according to Galton. Thirdly, there would be an overall diminution of fertility: highly intellectual parents tended to have smaller families, and if everyone had their ‘higher faculties’ fully cultivated and exercised throughout life, there would be a slight diminution of fertility. Mental powers and moral progress would triumph over the old Malthusian laws.

  But the central factor around which Wallace based his argument was the defining role of women, a factor he described as ‘the agency of female choice in marriage’. Many women now married for security, rather than choice. If all women were financially independent, and had nothing to gain materially from marriage, they would exercise their choice much more carefully. It would be considered degrading to marry a man who could not be loved and esteemed. Men, in whom ‘the passion of love is more general, and usually stronger’, and who, in this ideal society, would have no way of gratify
ing this passion except by marriage, would ensure that all women had plenty of offers – and so a powerful selective agency would rest with the female sex. The idle and the selfish would be rejected. The diseased and the weak in intellect would usually remain unmarried; and anyone who showed any tendency to insanity or hereditary disease, or who had a congenital deformity, would find no partner. It would be considered an offence against society ‘to be the means of perpetuating such diseases and imperfections’.

  Wallace was wrestling with the same problem that had exercised him from his first formulation of evolution by natural selection: how to reconcile the idea of survival of the fittest with, firstly, the development of higher, moral, spiritual attributes, and, secondly, his belief in the improvement and perfectibility of the human race. As he phrased it in this essay, ‘the survival of the fittest is really the extinction of the unfit’, a weeding out, which was the way the animal and vegetable worlds had been improved. But this ‘wholesome process’ had been checked as regards mankind, because humanity – ‘the essentially human emotion’ – had caused us to save the lives of the weak and the suffering: an attribute antagonistic to our physical and even intellectual race development, but crucial to our moral development, making us human, rather than animal. So, how would this apparent flaw be remedied? (Wallace never doubted that all this would eventually come to pass; the alternative was too dreadful to contemplate.) First, by the elimination of poverty, and a recognition that all citizens had an equal right to their share of the common wealth; after that, the ‘far greater and deeper problem of the improvement of the race’ could be safely left ‘to the cultivated minds and pure instincts of the Women of the Future’.