Alfred Russel Wallace Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Illustrations

  Maps

  Title Page

  Foreword and Acknowledgements

  1 Introduction

  2 The Evolution of a Naturalist

  3 Apprenticeship on the Amazon

  4 Hunting the White Umbrella Bird

  5 Planning the Next Expedition

  6 The Land of the Orang-utan

  7 Heading East

  8 In Search of Paradise Birds

  9 The Return of the Wanderer

  10 Wallace Transformed

  11 Man and Mind

  12 The Big Trees

  13 The Future of the Race

  14 The Last Orchard

  15 The Old Hero

  Picture Section

  Notes

  Sources and Selected Bibliography

  Abbreviations

  Index

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Peter Raby is Research Reader in English and Drama at Homerton College, Cambridge. His previous books include Fair Ophelia; a Life of Harriet Smithson Berlioz and the widely praised biography, Samuel Butler, as well as Bright Paradise: Victorian Scientific Travellers, and a recent study, Aubrey Beardsley and the 1890s. He also writes for the theatre and is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde. He lives near Cambridge, on the edge of the Fens.

  Illustrations

  Black and White Plates

  1 Alfred Russell Wallace, aged 24 (Wallace, My Life)

  2 Thomas Vere Wallace (Wallace, My Life)

  3 Mary Anne Wallace (Wallace, My Life)

  4 Wallace’s birthplace, near Usk (Elizabeth Raby)

  5 The house in Hertford (Elizabeth Raby)

  6 Hertford Grammar School (Wallace, My Life)

  7 Wallace’s sketch of Derbyshire (private collection)

  8 Neath Mechanics Institute (Elizabeth Raby)

  9 Lantwit Cottage (William Weston Young, Neath Antiquarian Society)

  10 Mandobé, Upper Rio Negro (Wallace, Natural History Museum, London)

  11 Butterflies from the Amazon (W.C. Hewitson, Transactions of the Entomological Society, 1852)

  12 Night adventure with alligator (H.W. Bates, The Naturalist on the River Amazons)

  13 Wallace’s Amazon diary (Natural History Museum, London)

  14 A Sarawak tree (Wallace, private collection)

  15 Acorns (Wallace, private collection)

  16 Honeysuckle (Wallace, private collection)

  17 Flying Frog, Borneo (Wallace, private collection)

  18 Santubong Mountain (Elizabeth Raby)

  19 The Three Wise Men: Darwin, Hooker and Lyell (Royal College of Surgeons, London)

  20 Ali, Wallace’s assistant, 1862

  21 Wallace in the Wild (Royal College of Surgeons, London)

  22 Wallace and Geach in Singapore, 1862

  23 Orang attacked by Dyaks (Wallace, The Malay Archipelago)

  24 Treeps, Hurstpierpoint (watercolour, private collection)

  25 Annie Mitten (private collection)

  26 Wallace with his son Bertie (private collection)

  27 Architectural drawing of The Dell, Grays (Wallace, private collection)

  28 The Dell (Elizabeth Raby)

  29 Tree kangaroo and New Guinea birds (Wallace, Studies Scientific and Social, I)

  30 Plan of the National Museum of Natural History (Wallace, private collection)

  31 Profile of the Museum (Wallace, private collection)

  32 Corfe view (Watercolour, private collection)

  33 The Old Orchard, Broadstone (private collection)

  34 Family picnic at Badbury Rings (private collection)

  35 Wallace (Drawing by William Rothenstein, private collection)

  36 Wallace’s funeral (private collection)

  37 Alfred Russel Wallace (Commemorative portrait by Roger Remington, 1998, for The Linnean Society of London)

  Illustrations in the Text

  Upstream on the Usk (Elizabeth Raby)

  Trichius fasciatus (Elizabeth Raby)

  Umbrella Bird (H.W. Bates, The Naturalist on the River Amazons)

  Trees near Pará, December 1848 (Wallace, Natural History Museum, London)

  View of Santarem (Richard Spruce, Notes of a Botanist on the Amazon and Andes)

  Butterfly Fish, Pteroglossum scalare (Wallace, Natural History Museum, London)

  Channel among granite rocks (Wallace, Natural History Museum, London)

  A malocca

  Ferns on Mount Ophir (Wallace, The Malay Archipelago)

  Sugar palm, Arenga saccharifera (Wallace, Natural History Museum, London)

  Baby mias (Wallace, The Malay Archipelago)

  Brooke’s bungalow on the Sarawak river (Edward H. Cree, 1843)

  Ternate volcano (Wallace, private collection)

  The village of Dobbo (Wallace, The Malay Archipelago)

  Wallace’s hut at Bessir (Wallace, The Malay Archipelago)

  The Red Bird of Paradise (Wallace, The Malay Archipelago)

  Great Birds of Paradise (Wallace, The Malay Archipelago)

  Violet, viola riviniana (Elizabeth Raby)

  California Horned Lizard, Phrynosoma coronatum frontale(Elizabeth Raby)

  Redwood leaf, Sequoia sempervirens (Elizabeth Raby)

  Gentiana verna (Elizabeth Raby)

  Blue Puya (Marianne North, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew)

  Birdwing Butterfly, Ornithoptera croesus (Elizabeth Raby)

  Maps

  The Amazon and the Rio Negro

  The Indonesian Archipelago

  Foreword and Acknowledgements

  Writing is a solitary occupation, but writing a biography inevitably brings the writer into contact with a great many people, and I have been extremely fortunate in the help that I have been given: Wallace inspires affection and admiration in successive generations. My first, and greatest, thanks is to Wallace’s grandsons, John and Richard Wallace, and their families. They have made their family papers and archives available, in a most generous and unpressured way, given me permission to use material, answered my questions patiently, and offered me encouragement and hospitality in large measures.

  Wallace’s letters, notebooks and specimens are scattered through the world, and it would be a long journey to visit them all. This makes the assistance of librarians and archivists the more vital, and I am grateful for the prompt and helpful way they have responded to my enquiries. My local library, at Cambridge University, has been most frequently in the firing line, not only because of its Wallace holdings, such as his letters to his agent Stevens and to his friends Charles Darwin and Alfred Newton, but because of the siting there of the Darwin project. It is a nice irony that so many of the key holdings of books in the field, including Wallace’s autobiography and published letters, as well as those of Bates and Spruce, are on permanent loan to the project, in service as it were to Darwin, and have to be tracked down and consulted in a special area. One can imagine a wry comment on the subject from Wallace to Professor Poulton. There are, of course, benefits to this arrangement, not least the company and help of the Darwin research team.

  I should like in particular to thank the Trustees, curators, librarians, archivists and staff of the following institutions for their assistance, and for permission to quote from material in their keeping: the British Library; Cambridge University Library; City of London Record Office; Hertford County Archives; Imperial College, London; Leicester County Archives; the Linnean Society (and especially Gina Douglas); Natural History Museum, London; Neath Public Library; Oxford Museum of Natural History (and especially Stella Brecknell, of the Hope Entomological Collection); Royal Geographical Society; Roya
l Botanic Gardens, Kew (and especially Lesley Price); Royal Geographical Society; San Jose Public Library; Surrey History Centre; University College, London; Zoological Society, London.

  Many others have given me help, advice, information and encouragement, at different stages. I would like to mention specifically George Beccaloni, at the Natural History Museum, who has shared his knowledge and enthusiasm with me; John Beer, for doing some research on my behalf in Boston; Michael Brooke, for ornithological advice; Andrew Carter; John Dickenson, for information on Wallace and Bates and the Royal Geographical Society; Robert Dimsdale, for his knowledge of Hertfordshire, and of vaccination; Robert Francis, who was our guide in Sarawak; David Hanke, for reading and commenting on sections of the text; Walter Henderson; Richard Ironside; Bob Lashmar; Perry O’Donovan, of the Darwin project; Michael Pearson, for drawing several articles to my attention, and for providing me with a typed transcript of Wallace’s American journal; Christopher Roper, and Landmark Information Group, Exeter, for making available Ordnance Survey maps and information on Wallace’s houses at Gray’s, Essex, and Broadstone, Dorset; Sister Rita; Peter Searby; John Webb, of the Thurrock Local History Society; John Wilson, for his generous help; and Christopher Wells, for many conversations and insights. Elizabeth, my wife, as well as organising my trip to Singapore and Sarawak, and acting as photographer on that and many other expeditions, has had to live patiently and, luckily for me, happily with Wallace for a number of years. My editors, Jenny Uglow at Chatto and Windus and Sam Elworthy at Princeton University Press, have been wonderfully supportive, and I would like to thank Jenny Uglow for her suggestions and comments at every stage; these, however painful at the time, invariably led to something better (a true Wallace principle).

  Names: I have usually retained the names used by Wallace in his writing, and indicated the modern equivalent in brackets on the first occasion, for example Barra (Manaos), Gilolo (Halmahera). One exception to this practice is the river Vaupés, where Wallace uses ‘Uaupes’, a form I struggled with. Spelling on the maps also generally follows Wallace’s practice.

  1 Introduction

  ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE wrote to his friend Henry Walter Bates in 1847 after spending a week beetle-hunting with him in Wales,

  I begin to feel rather dissatisfied with a mere local collection, little is to be learned by it. I should like to take some one family to study thoroughly, principally with a view to the theory of the origin of species. By that means I am strongly of opinion that some definite results might be arrived at.1

  He was twenty-four, training himself as a field naturalist, and enjoying a self-administered crash course in scientific theory. Three years earlier, he had been introduced to the wonders of beetles by Bates, and was amazed to discover that there were perhaps a thousand different kinds to be found within ten miles of Leicester. Only one year after writing this letter, in 1848, he and Bates would be plunging through the rain-forest on the banks of the Amazon, catching beetles, spiders, butterflies and birds. A further decade on, and Wallace would mail an elegant, tightly argued essay to England from the Spice Islands, in which he laid out his independent explanation of the way species evolve by natural selection. He sent this with a covering letter to Charles Darwin.

  Wallace’s achievements are spectacular. He made independent, courageous journeys up the Amazon, and through the length of the Malay Archipelago, and wrote about them vividly. He became an expert field naturalist, collecting countless species and discovering or identifying many for the first time: insects, birds, fish. But he was, too, as that letter to Bates indicates, a theoriser, travelling and observing minutely in order to test a theory, seeking always to understand the world more clearly, to fit each minute piece of knowledge, each fact, within a pattern that was logical and harmonious. He was in love with the natural world: the Alpine flowers, the richness of the forest fauna, rare fish in the black waters of the Rio Negro, the dazzling beauty of a bird of paradise or an elusive butterfly moved him to wonder. Capturing a female of the species Ornithoptera croesus, he describes the intense excitement when he first took it from his net: ‘My heart began to beat violently, the blood rushed to my head, and I felt much more like fainting than I have done when in apprehension of immediate death.’2 This was not hyperbole: apprehension of immediate death was something he frequently experienced.

  He was equally interested in man. Although he cherished solitude, he responded to the vitality and culture of cities as diverse as Paris, Cairo, Singapore and San Francisco, and he observed and recorded the remote peoples among whom he lived quite as minutely as he described the habits of a bird or insect. He was, in many ways, as much an anthropologist as a field naturalist, recording customs, languages and artefacts, and speculating about the development, and the chances of survival, of particular races. He tested the categories of the ‘civilised’ and the ‘savage’, from the point of view of someone who was sharply critical of many aspects of so-called civilisation, and who rated the intellectual and moral dimension more highly than material success. In the second half of his life he wrote as much about society as about the natural world, and took every opportunity to justify his conviction that man’s destiny and development lay in co-operation rather than competition.

  In an article on ‘The Celt in English Art’, Grant Allen added Wallace to his long list of imaginative, artistic Celts – William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, and social thinkers such as Annie Besant and Henry George – on the grounds that his name meant Welshman and that he was born in Usk, and commented: ‘The Celt comes back upon us with all the Celtic gifts and all the Celtic ideals – imagination, fancy, decorative skill, artistic handicraft; free land, free speech, human equality, human brotherhood.’3 The contrast Allen makes is with Teutonic, or Teutonised, England. Whether or not Allen was strictly correct in claiming Wallace as a Celt, the company with whom he aligns him alerts us to his artistic, aesthetic and sympathetic nature and temperament. Wallace shared many ideals and ideas with Morris and Shaw, and believed with Wilde that Utopia was a country worth visiting. Accompanying the energy and curiosity that led to the diversity of his discoveries is the continuously challenging and probing quality of his thinking. He wanted to know what was there in the forest, but he also wanted to know why, and at the same time longed to understand the facts in as much detail as possible. To help him answer those questions, he constructed his own programme of study, shifting outwards from botany to every area of natural history, moving back in time through a growing understanding of geology, and onwards, towards overarching scientific and philosophical concepts. His was an astonishing intellectual odyssey, fed by the Victorian institutions of self-help, the mechanics’ institutes and local lending libraries, popular journals and magazines, but without any systematic discipline, and with limited and erratic access to state-of-the-art scientific thinking.

  To this driving intellectual curiosity can be added resilience, persistence, self-reliance, and an incurable optimism, and behind these positive-sounding virtues, the shadow of other, harder-edged traits: obstinacy, ruthlessness, self-absorption, obsessiveness – qualities that drove him forward, brushing aside obstacles, refusing to allow him to be deflected from his goals, ensuring his survival, and his success. He had very few material advantages in life, in terms of wealth, education, or social connections, and had an uncertain feel for those subtle networks that guided the progress of his contemporaries and competitors through the maze of nineteenth-century scientific Britain. Like Willie Loman’s Uncle Ben in Death of a Salesman, he went out into the jungle, and came back with the diamonds.

  There are several paradoxical aspects to Wallace. He was by his own admission extremely shy, and in public appeared reserved, even awkward at times. He had little small talk. He was reticent, especially about his personal life. He positively enjoyed travel, and welcomed solitude, which was just as well. His dream, whenever he was exhausted by illness and the wearing routines of continuous travel, was to marry,
build a house, create a garden, and settle down to enjoy and write up his collections, a modest enough ambition. Things did not work out quite so simply. For such a pragmatic and practical man, with twenty-five years or so of independence in four continents behind him, Wallace remained strangely innocent, even naïve, both in his personal affairs and in his public life. Tall, gangly, spectacled, he might have been the model for the scientist in The Water-Babies, ‘the simplest, pleasantest, honestest, kindliest old Dominie Sampson of a giant that ever turned the world upside down without intending it’.4 He got into scrapes. He took people to court. He frittered money away in disastrous financial ventures. He became embroiled in public controversies and social issues, some of which – spiritualism, vaccination, land nationalisation – probably harmed him in the eyes of the Victorian great and good, who distributed influence and made recommendations about appointments.

  This diversity of interest was a source of strength, and a sign of his integrity. He was very tough, tough on himself, and tough on the people he worked with – his young assistant Charlie Allen had a difficult time in Singapore and Sarawak – and quite tough, as well as very loving, towards his children. He takes himself to task for lack of assertiveness, but a quick glance through his correspondence shows him ready, almost too ready at times, to take up the cudgels, with opponents such as William Carpenter over spiritualism, or George Romanes, but also with friends such as Alfred Newton, over classification of species. He suggests that words did not come easily to him – ‘I rarely find the right word of expression to confirm or illustrate my argument’5 – yet he was ready to enter into public discussions of his own papers, at the meetings of the Anthropological or Geographical Societies, or at the annual gatherings of the British Association. He accuses himself of being lazy: he wrote twenty-two books, and some seven hundred articles, published letters and notes. He gives himself no credit for physical courage, but repeatedly on his journeys faced and overcame severe illness, countless hardships, and extreme dangers.