Alfred Russel Wallace

by Peter Raby

  If you had letters almost every day about Darwinism, Spiritualism, Vaccination, Socialism, Travelling, Dog’s Tails, Cats’ Whiskers, Glaciers, Orchids, &c & had books sent to you on all these subjects to acknowledge & read, & requests for information on other subjects, and other subjects, and other subjects – and a book to write, & a garden to attend to, & 4 orchid houses, and chess to play, & visitors to see, & calls to make, and plants to name, – and – and, and, and, &c. &c. &.c., perhaps you would be a ‘miserable letter-writer’ too! Perhaps also, not!

  Wallace would courteously reply to almost every letter that came to him, and would go to huge lengths to assist a young collector such as Frederick Birch. Because of his public profile he attracted a good many cranks and eccentrics, but only in rare cases, such as a missive from a mad Baconian, would he be moved to comment ‘not worth answering’. And then here was Professor Poulton, he complained to Violet, begging him on his knees to go to Oxford next year ‘to make a speech on the putting up of a statue to Darwin!’ ‘And to him also I have to write, a kind, careful, but positive refusal, – requiring much thought, and an additional grey hair or two to my already totally grey head!’31 It was not, apparently, the honour to Darwin that he objected to, but the idea of a statue: quite ridiculous, and inappropriate. Darwin would have infinitely preferred an experimental breeding centre which could be established at Downe. That would be a proper memorial to his achievements. Perhaps Hooker would be a more appropriate central figure at the ceremony, he hinted with sly humour – Hooker rather enjoyed that sort of thing.32

  Earlier in the year, he had received some predictions in a seance. One control, an old Scotch physician, told Wallace to eat fish, and assured him that he was not ‘coming to their side’ for some years, as he had plenty of work to do first. Another control, Sunshine, an Indian girl, was much more precise: ‘You won’t live here always. You will come out of this hole. You will come more into the world, and do something public for spiritualism.’ He wrote her parting words in a notebook: ‘The third chapter of your life, and your book, is to come. It can be expressed as Satisfaction, Retrospection, and Work.’ Two months later, he received Dr Lunn’s invitation.33

  Grey hairs or not, he now found that he did have an idea for another book. Lunn had suggested the subject, and Wallace decided to expand his lecture into what became The Wonderful Century – complete, of course, with the failures (mesmerism, phrenology, spiritualism, vaccination) as well as the triumphs. He also made a great breakthrough in terms of his health. Albert Bruce-Joy, a sculptor, called at Parkstone: he was modelling a medallion of Wallace from photographs, and asked for a ‘live’ sitting. (A medallion was on a more acceptable scale than a statue; but he still had to be persuaded, and later resolutely refused to sit for a portrait.) On this occasion Wallace apologised for not looking well and explained he was suffering badly from asthma, which prevented him sleeping. Bruce-Joy recommended Dr Salisbury’s diet, which, according to Wallace, was to cut back on starchy foods, ‘especially potatoes, bread, and most watery vegetables’, and to substitute well-cooked meat, fruit, eggs and light milk puddings. Whatever the scientific basis – and Wallace claimed that Salisbury’s diet was the result of thirty years of experiment – it worked: in a week he felt much better, in a month he was well, and suddenly he was able to tackle his literary work again with all his former enthusiasm.34

  The Wonderful Century occupied him for most of 1897, and was published in June 1898: in its turn, it spawned a popular ‘reader’, and a further illustrated edition. Wallace’s gift for clear exposition never left him; he wrote simply, and straightforwardly, but without ever condescending to his readers. Also, because he wrote on so many different topics, social as well as scientific, he was constantly being asked to contribute articles in journals and newspapers, American as well as British, and to offer thoughts for the coming century as the 1890s advanced. He remained unrepentantly controversial, protesting vehemently against the Transvaal war in the Manchester Guardian, September 1899. His public reputation continued to grow, and Macmillan’s brought out a collection of his essays, Studies Scientific and Social, as well as new and enlarged editions of Darwinism and Island Life. He was more widely known now in his late seventies than he had ever been.

  Family life was a continuous source of pleasure, and sometimes of concern. The garden was a joint enterprise; Annie was an accomplished water-colourist, and there were frequent visits from her parents and sisters, when they would all visit some local beauty-spot, which Annie would paint. Thomas Sims, Fanny’s husband, was in financial difficulties: his photographic business was sold because of arrears of rent, and he was, Wallace told Meldola, in danger of absolute starvation in the workhouse; he was utterly unbusinesslike and had depended wholly on Fanny for all money matters. Did Meldola know of any opening for a good photographer at some scientific institution?35 Violet came to stay in the school holidays, and letters flowed freely, in spite of her complaints, to herself and William. Wallace did not spare his advice, though he was careful not to impose his views too firmly. ‘There are, I believe, a good many spiritualists in Manchester,’ he informed Will, who happened to be working there, ‘and a Spiritualist Society of some kind, so if you care about joining you might perhaps see something; but unless you really feel a special interest in the subject it is hardly worth while …’36 When a smallpox epidemic threatened, his advice was to ‘take a hot bath for about 20 minutes, then drink a half pint of tolerably strong salt and water (a small teaspoonful in a tumbler) repeat twice a day, bath & salt, & you will probably be well in two or three days’.37 Later, William and his friend McAlpine went to America. They worked first on an electric railway near Boston, then diverted to the Adirondacks, potato-digging and house-painting. Eventually Will reached the prairies, bicycling from Chicago to Denver, and paying his way by wiring telegraph poles, with the cold freezing up his beard and moustache. His father sent him detailed instructions from the British Museum on how to skin and preserve small mammals: it would be particularly easy, too, to collect skeletons in Colorado, where the atmosphere was so dry. Buy some traps in Denver, he urged him, and practise: ‘and be very careful about the labels of which you should take a lot with you, all ready with string to tie on. I should not wonder, if you get to do them nicely, & get boys or hunters to help you, you might make nearly as much as by climbing telegraph poles!’ He enclosed a drawing of the kind of pliers required for stuffing skins: ‘If you can’t get them in Denver you might make them yourself.’38 Violet was going to Germany on holiday, and she too was advised to collect animals for the British Museum: ‘As she will have nothing to do it will be a nice occupation for her, and help to pay her expenses.’

  With his energy restored, and royalties and fees coming in from unexpected directions, Wallace’s old restlessness revived: what had seemed ideal at the time of purchase – location, climate, soil, prospect – began to pall. The Corfe View paradise was under threat. He no longer felt that he was in the country, as more and more new houses surrounded the property, just as had happened in Godalming. This time Wallace was in more expansive mood. The way to secure himself from new building once and for all was to buy an estate, and he floated a scheme for, as he put it, a ‘kind of home-colony of congenial persons’. He and two partners, A. C. Swinton, a land nationalisation enthusiast, and Roland Shaw, began to inspect a variety of properties, ‘in order to secure the advantages of a country home, in a healthy district, with picturesque surroundings, which can be permanently preserved, and within one to two hours of London’. They were ready to put in a thousand pounds each, and hoped to find enough friends to bring in another seven to ten thousand pounds. Once a suitable property had been bought, Dr Wallace, ‘as being the originator of the plan and having spent much time in the search’, would take the dwelling house and adjacent grounds, and then act as agent and surveyor for everyone else till the whole estate was occupied. The sites would be from two to ten acres, according to the amount invested, and the woods a
nd wilder portions would be preserved as a natural park for the enjoyment of all the residents. Any thoughts that the scheme went against the principles of the land nationalisation society were dispelled by one of the clauses: surplus land might be sold to offset the initial investment, but any further profits would be spent for the benefit of all. The proposal was printed and circulated – Sclater at the Zoological Society received one39 – but not enough volunteers came forward, perhaps because they felt that Wallace’s own interests, however well justified, seemed to loom a little too large in this grandiose Utopian project.

  One of the estates the Wallaces investigated was The Grange, near Amersham. It would cost £15,000, but then as a building estate it would be worth four times as much. They urged Violet and William to go and view it. Will, down in London temporarily, was sent detailed instructions with timetables and London railway maps, and the key stations circled in blue; or perhaps he could cycle – it was only thirty miles or so. Late in November the Wallaces travelled up to London, booked in at a hotel for two nights, and made their own visit. The house was two hundred years old: outside, there was a bowling green, a kitchen garden, an orchard, a park, and extensive beech woods – seventy acres or so. Wallace’s grand plans for Epping floated across his mind as he tramped through the woods in the fog. With the open glades, and some careful replanting, there would be beautifully sheltered sites for the houses of the other shareholders in his little English paradise; and the soil was friable, a tertiary sand with little lime in it, so it would do for rhododendrons. The country round was as pretty and perfectly rural as any he knew, and owned by great estates who objected to building. ‘I never expect to find a better place or a better investment,’ he told Will. The owners, the Gurneys, had been immensely hospitable and jolly, and insisted on giving them lunch of cold pheasant and rabbit pie. They travelled back to Paddington, met Violet at Baker Street, saw her ‘diggings’, met Madame Michaelis, Violet’s employer, looked over the school rooms, and were escorted back by tube to their hotel.40 But although he was wholly convinced about the Grange’s ‘immense capabilities’, the sums did not add up.

  All through the spring and summer of 1901, the search went on, and he had almost despaired when he came upon a site only four miles from Parkstone, an old orchard of apple, pear and plum trees in a grassy hollow with good views, and only half a mile from the station. ‘At last the deed is done!’ he rejoiced to Violet. ‘“I’ve met the Douglas in his Hall, – the Lion in his den!” and have come out safely. His roar was terrible! but he ended as mildly cooing as any sucking dove!’ The Lion was Paterson, Lord Wimborne’s ‘mighty agent’.41 Wallace secured his three acres, and Paterson’s complaisance, by agreeing to pay the whole of the purchase money as soon as the conveyance was drawn up. There was an acre of grass, two beautiful bits of wood, with Spanish chestnuts and oaks and a fine old fir tree, and a view right over Poole Harbour to the Purbeck hills in one direction, and to the Old Harry rocks in the other, south and south-east. They sold Nutwood Cottage, and Wallace lost himself once more in the delights of planning a new house and garden, and supervising the building. This was work he loved, though it had its frustrations. He wanted to put up a ‘true low bungalow’ in wood, in Swiss-chalet style, to blend with the quiet beauty of the landscape. But Lord Wimborne and ‘the authorities’ insisted on red brick. The grounds required constant labour and supervision: plants were moved from Corfe View, a thousand shrubs and trees were bought from a small nursery that was closing down, and presents arrived from all over the world, including a special consignment from Sir Thomas Hanbury’s gardens in northern Italy. He purchased a donkey and cart to shift clay from the site and bring in leaf mould and loam – but the donkey kicked and bit, so he had to make do with manual labour when the men could be spared from building work. He fussed over the details of the stoves, and overrode the architect by altering the line of the drawing-room chimney. Finally, and thankfully, he and Annie moved into the Old Orchard at Christmas 1902, just before his eightieth birthday.

  14 The Last Orchard

  GRADUALLY, VERY GRADUALLY, Wallace was getting things straight in the house and garden, he reported to Meldola – ‘especially in the garden which has been for a year a wilderness of clay heaps & builder’s rubbish’.1 The customary requests went out to the world’s botanic gardens. He was especially keen to obtain seedlings, or seeds, of one of Marianne North’s favourite flowers, the blue puya from Chile, Thiselton-Dyer was informed – and had he seen the note in the Garden about the rare flowering of Nymphaea gigantea?2 But the site was so beautiful and the views so charming, that he was quite satisfied to replant gradually. His study was ideal, and everything about the house was picturesque and characteristic, with verandas and balconies, gables and dormer windows, all red brick and tile and white woodwork, homely but comfortable. Violet had joined up with a friend, taken a house at Wadhurst near Tunbridge Wells, and was hoping to find a few children to board and teach. Wadhurst was five hundred feet above sea level, and already Violet was feeling the benefit of the move from London. Will, still with the Houston Thompson electrical engineering firm, had been transferred from Newcastle to Rugby, which made it much easier for him to visit. Wallace himself was very well in health – better than for some years, and was looking forward to a few more years of ‘fully occupied repose’.

  The previous two years had been largely given over to the corrections and additions to Island Life and The Wonderful Century. Now he was free to turn to new fields, and immediately found one in the universe, or rather in its relationship to man – an original but popular subject. The house had cost a lot, and this was an attempt to clear the balance. All Wallace’s subjects, however disparate they might seem, or driven by circumstances, were closely connected, first teasing out the relationship between man and the rest of animate life, and then moving on to consider the physical conditions that gave rise to life in time and space; or seeking systems to improve the ways individuals and races shared the earth’s resources more fairly, so that moral and intellectual progress, and happiness, could follow. It was logical to address the bigger issues, and Wallace, who had read widely in order to include chapters on ‘Spectrum Analysis’ and ‘Astronomy and Cosmic Theories’ in The Wonderful Century, celebrated his ninth decade with ‘Man’s Place in the Universe’, published in the New York Independent and in the Fortnightly and expanded into a 300-page book for Chapman and Hall later in the year.3 For all the authorities cited – ‘Professor Simon Newcomb, of Washington, assures us’; the Italian astronomer Schiaparelli ‘arrives at the same result’; ‘Sir John Herschel’s testimony’ – the article is, in essence, a philosophical, or theological, assertion of intelligent cause and design over chance, or, as Wallace puts it with his usual clarity, ‘of the right and exact combination of matter and its complex forces occurring after an almost infinite number of combinations that led to nothing’. Wallace would not accept that life was accidental, because he refused any explanation whose corollary was that man would die out by the continued operation of the same laws that had allowed man to evolve in the first place. After surveying the evidence of the new astronomy, he concluded:

  Of course the relation here pointed out may be a true relation of cause and effect and yet have arisen as the result of one in a thousand million chances occurring during almost infinite time. But, on the other hand, those thinkers may be right who, holding that the universe is a manifestation of Mind, and that the orderly development of Living Souls supplies an adequate reason why such a universe should have been called into existence, believe that we ourselves are its sole and sufficient result, and that nowhere else than near the central position in the universe which we occupy could that result have been attained.4

  There was no doubt about which thinkers Wallace thought were right. The book was widely read, and went through numerous editions both in Britain and in the United States. Wallace was impatient for some ‘good all-round man’ to review it for one of the monthly or quarterly periodica
ls – ‘not a specialist astronomer, as these are quite unfitted to discuss the whole subject’: someone like Prince Kropotkin, whom he admired, or Lord Kelvin, who would not be afraid to form an independent judgement.5 Four years later, Wallace pursued the theme in Is Mars Habitable?, a sharp riposte to Professor Lowell’s book on Mars and its ‘Canals’: there was no room in Wallace’s scheme of things for other forms of intelligent life; but he had fun in demolishing Lowell’s method of argument. ‘He began by thinking the straight lines are works of art, and as he finds more and more of these straight lines, he thinks that proves more completely that they are works of art, and then he twists all other evidence to suit that.’6 He could almost be describing his own defence of certain spiritualist happenings.

  Wallace the campaigner was still alive. ‘Anticipations and Hopes for the Immediate Future’, written for the Berliner-Lokal-Anzeiger, was rejected – ‘too strong’, Wallace commented – and appeared instead in the Clarion. He wrote against militarism and capital punishment, and in favour of personal suffrage and nationalising the railways; and thought always about the future: ‘If there were a Socialist Government – How should it Begin?’7 Literature, especially poetry, still spoke to him powerfully. He had ransacked his library, and badgered his friends, for suitable excerpts as epigraphs to each chapter in The Wonderful Century: lines from Tennyson preceded ‘Geology’:

  The hills are shadows, and they flow

  From form to form, and nothing stands;

  They melt like mist, the solid lands,

  Like clouds they shape themselves and go.

  and A. H. Hume’s chilling verse heralded ‘Vaccination A Delusion’:

  Today in all its dimpled bloom,