Alfred Russel Wallace

by Peter Raby

  As for the human factor, there is nothing in Darwin’s life to suggest that he was capable of such massive intellectual dishonesty, even if he was not especially generous in acknowledging his sources and debts. The question of priority did not surface only in June 1858. ‘I rather hate the idea of writing for priority,’ he admitted to Lyell in May 1856, ‘yet I certainly shd. be vexed if any one were to publish my doctrines before me.’16 Two years later, Lyell’s words of warning had come true with a vengeance. And he was vexed. And he was vexed with himself for being vexed. ‘So all my originality, whatever it may amount to, will be smashed, though my book, if it will ever have any value, will not be deteriorated; as all the labour consists in the application of the theory.’17 He found that he did mind very much about his originality. A week later, torn with worry about his desperately ill child, who was dying from scarlet fever, he confessed his painful muddle to Lyell: this was a trumpery affair. He wanted to behave honourably, not be thought base and paltry:

  Wallace says nothing about publication, and I enclose his letter. But as I had not intended to publish any sketch, can I do so honourably, because Wallace has sent me an outline of his doctrine? I would far rather burn my whole book, than that he or any other man should think that I had behaved in a paltry spirit.18

  To cast Darwin in the role of some devious machiavellian schemer in a Renaissance revenge tragedy is absurd. No doubt part of him wanted his friends to say, ‘Yes, you can publish something without being dishonourable’; but his words are the words of a man in genuine turmoil, and he adopts much the same tone of miserable helplessness years later when confronted by Samuel Butler’s hostility. Darwin, unlike Huxley and Hooker, and unlike, more surprisingly, Wallace, had no liking, no aptitude, for public controversy. His statement that ‘all the labour consists in the application of the theory’, on the other hand, could have come from the lips of Wallace.

  Naturally, there are some aspects of the joint publication that are questionable, from Wallace’s point of view. Darwin himself sounds a little surprised by the order in which the papers were presented: ‘I had thought that your letter and mine to Asa Gray were to be only an appendix to Wallace’s paper,’ he wrote to Hooker after the Linnean meeting. The sequence, a chronological sequence, was decided by Hooker and Lyell.19 Wallace, later, sounds a little ruffled, or defensive, that he never had the chance to correct a proof, though that would have caused a six-month delay in the written record of the meeting. (And he never had a proof of, for example, the Sarawak paper published in the Annals.) It is surprising that a number of key letters have vanished: Wallace’s to Darwin, for example, though that did the rounds; Lyell’s and Hooker’s responses to Darwin’s cri de cœur; Darwin’s letter of explanation to Wallace, relating the course of events from his point of view – and if anyone did ‘clean up the file’, that particular document can scarcely have formed part of the process. But while all this is frustrating for academics and biographers – and a wonderful opportunity for speculation – there is nothing necessarily sinister about the gaps in the documentation. Enough of the sequence is there to reconstruct, broadly, the contents of the missing letters; and the writers of the letters knew what was written and said, and what was done; and they knew each other. Wallace, to the British-based triumvirate of Darwin, Lyell and Hooker, was an unknown quantity, and each of them might have wondered at his possible response, aware of the prickliness of some of their fellow scientists. Hooker marvelled at Wallace’s generosity of spirit. Lyell never ceased to urge Wallace to take a greater share of the credit. Darwin warmed to Wallace’s reaction, as he warmed later to the man. Wallace, sensitive, touchy even, fully conscious of his rights, and with almost too keen a nose for injustice or inequity, never wavered, publicly or privately, in his acceptance of the arrangement. Acknowledgement and citation was a sensitive area: Wallace was later ticked off by Huxley, and by Thiselton-Dyer and Asa Gray, on separate occasions, for failing to acknowledge their work.20 Wallace might have acquired doubts about Darwin’s total transparency, and godlike reputation; but then he had quiet reservations about the whole official paraphernalia of the scientific establishment.

  If it is believed that history was, initially, distorted, then the record should be put right. It is true that Darwin was, first, elevated into one of the Victorian Titans (an enterprise in which Wallace himself played a full part). Canon Tristram complained sarcastically to Alfred Newton about the God Darwin and his prophet Huxley, and how no one was allowed to oppose them.21 More recently, a whole series of major biographies, and the exhaustive notation to the correspondence, has made Darwin known in a detail accorded to no other British scientist. To set against that, any alternative myth needs to be sharply defined, and preferably sensational. Even the limited publicity surrounding the appeal to restore Wallace’s grave trailed the conspiracy theory bait in front of press and radio: unsurprisingly, they seized on it. Wallace still remains an absentee in some key accounts of Darwin’s achievements. In the Darwin-dominated exhibition at the London Natural History Museum, a representative and official explanation of natural selection, Wallace’s name, let alone his contribution, is not even mentioned, in contrast to the French account in the Jardin des Plantes.

  But Wallace was not a victim, and he did not see himself as a victim. To promote a hypothetical reconstruction of events, for which there is absolutely no concrete and positive evidence, diminishes both Darwin and Wallace. Wallace’s reputation, and significance, does not rest on whether he preceded Darwin, but on the (relative) independence and individuality of his discovery; and on his later writing on the subject, together with all his other achievements; just as Darwin’s reputation vis-à-vis natural selection does not depend on the Linnean Society meeting, but on The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man: on the application of the theory. The most interesting aspect of the Wallace–Darwin, or Darwin–Wallace, publication is their subsequent relationship, both personal and intellectual.

  Whereas Darwin saw only too clearly the implications of natural selection, how it would rock the foundations of religious faith, what its impact on attitudes towards society might be, Wallace appeared serenely insulated from such anxieties. Holding an Owenite vision of man’s perfectibility, the keystone of natural selection was something he needed to fit into his world-view, into his philosophical system. The orthodox Anglican Darwin moved towards agnosticism, if not materialism, saw natural selection as one of a number of complex factors affecting evolution, and was content to see man as a highly evolved animal. Wallace, who had ceased to take the Christian religion seriously, gradually acquired an unshakeable belief in the spiritual dimension, and in life, and progress, after death; and he fitted a ‘pure’, even rigid doctrine of natural selection within a framework that elevated man towards the angels. Even in a world in which the genetic coding of a human being is completely known, the polarisation of the two opposing views continues. Through the wrestling minds of Darwin and Wallace, the joint protagonists, the lines of the animal/human, materialist/spiritualist debate can be followed like the traces of some Promethean struggle.

  Wallace used to draw parallels between himself and Darwin, recalling that each of them began as beetle-hunters: and the same law that gave rise to the beetle gave rise to man. But perhaps the butterfly, or the bird of paradise, is a more appropriate symbol for Wallace, and for the race of naturalists whom he represents. Wallace’s exploits in the Malay Archipelago have impressed themselves on the European literature of the area, for example in Somerset Maugham’s story ‘Neil Macadam’. Conrad, especially, mined Wallace for background, and re-created Wallace’s emotions at the capture of a butterfly in his portrait of the merchant and entomologist Stein, in Lord Jim:

  One step. Steady. Another step. Flop! I got him! When I got up I shook like a leaf with excitement, and when I opened these beautiful wings and made sure what a rare and so extraordinary perfect specimen I had, my head went round and my legs became weak with emotion that I had to sit on the ground.
I had greatly desired to possess myself of a specimen of that species when collecting for the professor. I took long journeys and underwent great privations; I had dreamed of him in my sleep, and here suddenly I had him in my fingers – for myself!

  That passage seems to reflect Wallace’s capture of Ornithoptera croesus in Batchian. But Conrad then goes on to play with the contrast between butterfly and man, in a way that could almost be a commentary on Wallace’s intellectual life. He gives these words to Stein:

  ‘We want in so many different ways to be,’ he began again. ‘This magnificent butterfly finds a little heap of dirt and sits still on it; but man he will never on his heap of mud keep still. He wants to be so, and again he wants to be so …’

  He moved his hand up, then down … ‘He wants to be a saint, and he wants to be a devil – and every time he shuts his eyes he sees himself as a very fine fellow – so fine as he never can be … In a dream …’22

  Wallace went into the forest to solve the ‘mystery of mysteries’, the origin of species, searching for the elusive butterfly of his thoughts. He will always be honoured for his role in the doctrine of natural selection, but his significance is not restricted to that moment, because he went on thinking, and dreaming, about man. Perhaps it was his Celtic birth, if not his Celtic blood. As traveller, field naturalist, geographer, bio-geographer, anthropologist, his achievements are substantial enough in their own right. As an author, he wrote two great books, The Malay Archipelago and Island Life, and many good ones. As a scientific philosopher, he made a massive contribution to ideas about the natural world, and about man, and his intuitive thinking again and again probed fundamental questions, even if his answers might not always have been proved correct by subsequent research and evidence. As a man, he was agreeably full of contradictions: and he changed, evolved, from a shy, stooping, diffident, tentative individual to someone who was intellectually confident, able to appear socially secure, and in the end perfectly clear and content about his role in the scientific world. What never changed, only strengthened, was his intense interest in people, and peoples, and his burning drive towards social justice. In this respect, he was unique, in combining profound scientific knowledge, and specialist expertise, with an acute and radical social analysis. As he created successive lodges for his family in as much wilderness as he could find in Essex, Surrey or Dorset, he never stopped concerning himself about the disadvantaged or threatened members of his own species. He championed the rights of the unprivileged, the exploited, the deprived, the dispossessed: the rural poor in Wales, the indigenous peoples of the Amazon or Papua New Guinea, the urban workers of London tenements, the victims of colonial oppression and misgovernment and militarism. Among the letters he kept, many from correspondents unknown to him, and including several he can have kept only because of his delight in the whimsical and bizarre, is one that says: ‘If you know the old hero Wallace, give him my best wishes.’23 There is, finally, something heroic about a man who independently constructs a theory of natural selection, which can be written, in its simplest form, as the accidental survival of the fittest, and spends the rest of his life proclaiming the ideals of co-operation and altruism as the way to hasten the perfecting of the human.

  Alfred Russel Wallace, aged 24

  Thomas Vere Wallace

  Mary Anne Wallace

  Wallace’s birthplace, near Usk

  The house in Hertford

  Hertford Grammar School

  Wallace’s sketch of Derbyshire

  Neath Mechanics Institute

  Lantwit Cottage, by William Weston Young

  Wallace’s drawing, Mandobé, Upper Rio Negro

  Butterflies from the Amazon, collected by Wallace

  H.W. Bates, ‘Night adventure with alligator’

  Wallace’s Amazon diary

  Wallace, a Sarawak tree

  Acorns

  Honeysuckle

  Flying Frog, Borneo

  Santubong Mountain

  The Three Wise Men: Darwin, Hooker and Lyell

  Ali, 1862

  Wallace in the wild

  Wallace and Geach in Singapore, 1862

  Orang attacked by Dayaks

  Treeps, Hurstpierpoint

  Annie Mitten

  Wallace with his son Bertie

  Architectural drawing of The Dell, Grays

  The Dell

  Tree kangaroo and New Guinea birds

  Plan of the National Museum of Natural History

  Profile of the Museum

  Corfe view

  Old Orchard, Broadstone

  Family picnic at Badbury Rings

  Wallace, by William Rothenstein

  Wallace’s funeral

  Alfred Russel Wallace, by Roger Remington, 1998

  Notes

  1 INTRODUCTION

  1. ARW to Henry Walter Bates, 11 October 1847; ML, 144 (WFA).

  2. MA, 342.

  3. Grant Allen, ‘The Celt in English Art’, Fortnightly Review, 1 February 1891, 267.

  4. Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies first appeared in Macmillan’s Magazine from August 1862 to March 1863, and was revised and expanded by Kingsley before it was published as a book in the summer of 1863. Wallace spent an evening with Kingsley at Cambridge during the British Association’s meeting in 1862. The section about the ‘poor, seedy, hard-worked old giant’, butterfly-net in one hand, geological hammer in the other, running backwards as fast as he could, added for the expanded version, is clearly an amalgamated and satirical construction, but fits Wallace particularly well.

  5. ML, 116.

  6. ‘The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame/Came whiffling through the tulgey wood’: Lewis Carroll, Alice Through the Looking-Glass. Carroll was one of Wallace’s favourite authors, and his daughter Violet remembered her father’s jokes about Boojums and Jabberwocks. Later, Violet lived for a time with her pupils in ‘Tulgey Wood’, next to the Old Orchard, Broadstone.

  2 THE EVOLUTION OF A NATURALIST

  1. Entry in the Wallace family prayerbook (WFA). For many years, Wallace believed he was born on a different date, 1822, and in general he is often vague about precise dates, especially in connection with his early life, no doubt a result of his family’s and his own subsequent many moves.

  2. ML, 5. A large proportion of My Life, the first nine chapters, is devoted to Wallace’s origins and his early life up to his departure for Brazil, and is the main source for the description. Quotations are from the later, one-volume edition except where indicated.

  3. ML, 1 – the opening words of the autobiography.

  4. ML, 16–17.

  5. ML, 6. Wallace states that Rebecca Greenell died in 1828, though the date on the family tomb is 18 October 1826. But the family may not have moved to Hertford immediately.

  6. See Len Green, Alfred Russel Wallace, His Life and Work (Hertford and Ware Local History Society, Occasional Paper No. 4, 1995), which includes interesting background material about Hertford. Also Jean Purkis, The Courts and Yards of Hertford, Hertford Oral History, 1997.

  7. ML, 21.

  8. Mary Wallace to Thomas Wilson, 5 July 1835 (WFA).

  9. ML, 28.

  10. ML, 31.

  11. Inconveniently for this association, ‘Ode to Mr Malthus’ did not appear in Hood’s Comic Annual.

  12. There are two main surviving lists of Wallace’s library, one in WFA of his scientific books, and one at the Oxford Museum of Natural History, the latter consisting predominantly of literature and works on religion and spiritualism.

  13. ML, 42.

  14. ML, 33.

  15. ML, 34; ML, 586.

  16. See account books, apparently belonging to C. H. Cruttwell, headmaster of Hale’s Grammar School (Hertfordshire County Archives, D/2 113 A1/1–A5).

  17. John Wallace, essay of 30 June 1892, ‘The Work Problem 50 years ago by a Worker’ (WFA). See also ML, 44, 67.

  18. Robert Dale Owen, quoted in ML, 46.

  19. ML, 73.

  20. ML, 75.


  21. ARW to George Silk, 12 January 1840 (WFA).

  22. ARW to John Wallace, 11 January 1840 (WFA).

  23. ML, 80.

  24. See R. Elwyn Hughes, ‘Alfred Russel Wallace; some notes on the Welsh connection’, British Journal of the History of Science, 1989, 22, 401–18. See also J. R. Durant, ‘Scientific naturalism and social reform in the thought of Alfred Russel Wallace’, British journal of the History of Science, 1979, 12, 31–58.

  25. Quoted in R. Elwyn Hughes, see note 24.

  26. The passage comes in the conclusion, and Wallace has underlined and capitalised the word ‘botanist’. See McKinney (1972), 3.

  27. ML, 105.

  28. McKinney (1972), 6.

  29. Darwin to J. S. Henslow, 18 May 1832 (Darwin Collection, 1, 237).

  30. ML, 123–4.

  31. If Wallace first read Malthus at Leicester, it was fourteen years or so before he made such significant use of him in Ternate and Gilolo (Halmahera) in February 1858. Later, in ML (190), he refers to his recollection of Malthus ‘which I had read about twelve years before’. Wallace may have had in mind Darwin’s letter to him of 1 May 1857, ‘This summer will make the 20th year (!) since I opened my first note-book, on the question how & in what way do species & varieties differ from each other.’ Consciously, and sometimes perhaps unconsciously, Wallace drew attention to the parallels between himself and Darwin.