by Janet Browne
Much of Darwin’s shock apparently hinged on realising he had been thoroughly mistaken about the man. His years of dedicated research at Down House left him unprepared for seeing his hard-won insights reiterated, as he thought, by a nobody from nowhere.
Who was this person making such a leap into the intellectual dark from Ternate?
IV
Wallace certainly came from the other side of the Victorian cultural divide, a man of great “personal magnetism” and “lofty ideals,” said his friend E. B. Poulton. His relatively humble background and progressive social convictions in fact made him a much more probable candidate than Darwin to come up with a radical doctrine like evolution. He was fourteen years younger than Darwin, a likable, mild-mannered man, full of visions for a reformed society, at times endearingly innocent of the ways of the world, full of “boyish joyous exuberance,” energetic and endlessly curious about the things around him. He had “an abounding interest … in human knowledge in all its phases, especially new ones,” continued Poulton.33 Unconventional ideas almost ran in his veins. Later on he would speak vehemently against vaccination, become embroiled in a debate about life on Mars, defend the reality of séances and spiritualism, and support socialism and the urgent need for land nationalisation, as well as take a lifelong public stand in defence of evolution by natural selection. Even dyed-in-the-wool conservative newspapers like the Christian Commonwealth celebrated his reforming ardour.34 So similar to Darwin in his intellectual grasp of the inner meanings of biology and so dissimilar in almost every other way, he was destined to become Darwin’s alter ego, the other man of the evolutionary story. He was to captivate, intrigue, and exasperate Darwin for the rest of his life.
Wallace had none of the opportunities available to gentlemen’s sons.35 His father was a provincial solicitor, at that time a relatively lowly occupation, who slipped into financial disarray and led his family from place to place in search of ever-diminishing employment. They were “old-fashioned religious people belonging to the Church of England,” he said. In the end the family survived almost entirely on Wallace’s mother’s small inheritance. Wallace’s father died in 1834. The older brothers left home when they reached thirteen or fourteen to become apprenticed as land surveyors, builders, watchmakers, and draughtsmen: respectable, craft-based professions for young men who needed to make their own way in life with no patrimony. Wallace’s sister learned French and became a teacher and then a governess, the only acceptable path for unmarried women of her background. Wallace himself, born in Usk, in Wales, in 1823, the fifth living child of the family, accompanied his widowed mother to live in southeast England and attended Hertford Grammar School before spending six months working in London (aged fourteen) with his older brother John and then assisting another brother, William, a land surveyor, during the Midlands railway boom.
It was an itinerant existence. Wallace tramped the countryside with his brother William for several years and moved in and out of the surveying profession as the need arose. He never really had a base, although he felt affectionate about the town of Neath, near Swansea, where he spent several formative years; and his experiences there, walking the Welsh landscape, gave him a pronounced taste for science and natural history.36 In 1844, aged twenty-one, he temporarily tried his hand at teaching elementary arithmetic and English in the Collegiate School in Leicester, but he returned to surveying when the next flush of railway development came along. Such a life offered few benefits. With considerable poignancy he afterwards listed his mental and physical deficiencies at this time, regretting his inability to hold a tune or learn a language, his shyness and “want of confidence,” his lack of “physical courage” and “love of solitude.” When he was old and famous he liked to recollect that his first trip on a railway train was in the section reserved for third class, standing up in an open truck like cattle with other working men. Another “wretched third class carriage” followed by a damp bed in their Bristol lodgings proved fatal to his brother William, who died of congested lungs in 1846. Wallace deplored this unnecessary death, symptomatic of the class divide in British society and buttressed by widespread Malthusian assumptions that working people were plentiful in number, irresponsible, and dispensable. He remembered the few good meals he ate during those early years of adversity. For him, as for the vast majority of the populace, the hungry 1840s were a dreadful ordeal.
Wallace’s mental development was therefore grounded in the provincial, industrialising countryside of the mill-hands, weavers, factory inspectors, railway men, itinerant labourers, poor law commissioners, and sanitary engineers of Victorian Britain, the same rural manufacturing worlds brought to life in Mrs. Gaskell’s Mary Barton and Cousin Phillis. He was self-educated in the sciences. From the first, he was a high-minded early socialist, greatly influenced as a young man by listening to lectures in the Hall of Science in London’s Tottenham Court Road on Robert Owen’s industrial democracy at New Lanark, and devoting himself to learning popular doctrines like phrenology and mesmerism which promised mental and social improvement for all. “I have always looked upon Owen as my first teacher in the philosophy of human nature and my first guide through the labyrinth of social science.”
Those lectures by Robert Owen took a prominently anti-Malthusian line. In his New View of Society (1813) Owen explained that Malthus’s deadly checks were not inevitable. Greater agricultural production was possible, argued Owen, if reforms in the use and ownership of land were made. Mankind could be educated out of distress, and self-governing communities would moralise and civilise the new industrial workers. In essence, Wallace encountered Malthus in a different way from Darwin. This argument for the malleability of the human mind, and its advance under appropriate external conditions, created a lasting impression. He displayed a lifelong curiosity about the workings of the psyche, and in time learned to perform hypnotism on his acquaintances.37
As he wandered the country, Wallace attended lectures on these and other topics in public meeting halls and made good use of the reading rooms provided in the Free Libraries and Mechanics’ Institutes opening up in towns all over the provinces, soaking up the reforming political views of men like Cobden and Bright from cheap printed pamphlets.38 He came to the conclusion that “the orthodox religion of the day was degrading and hideous, and that the only true and wholly beneficial religion was that which inculcated the service of humanity, and whose only dogma was the brotherhood of man. Thus was laid the foundation of my religious scepticism.”39
What little religious belief Wallace possessed “very quickly vanished” under such influences, particularly after he studied a fourpenny booklet summarising David Friedrich Strauss’s Life of Jesus, one of the texts most likely to sow doubt in the minds of British church-goers in the first half of the nineteenth century. Ever afterwards Wallace entertained advanced, completely secular views on human and social progress. He read George Combe’s phrenological and socially prescriptive Constitution of Man, Alexander von Humboldt’s travels, Lyell’s Principles of Geology, Malthus’s Essay on Population, and Darwin’s Journal of Researches—in short, anything of a scientific, radical, or philosophical nature that he could lay his hands on.40
These kinds of activities would not have brought Wallace into contact with high science had it not been for his chance meeting at a Mechanics’ Institute library with the man, other than Darwin, who was to affect his life most deeply. Henry Walter Bates was an apprentice hosiery manufacturer in Leicester, roughly Wallace’s age, and “an enthusiastic entomologist.”41 Bates introduced him to the outdoor delights of beetle and butterfly collecting (Wallace was already interested in plant collecting), and they began making local excursions together. Their subsequent letters to each other were filled with youthful erudition and ambitious talk about books and travelling together collecting specimens.42 At first they recognised that this was just talk. Nonetheless, in 1845, they discussed Vestiges, which they both read closely, and Wallace began reflecting on the origins of the human
race. “I well remember the excitement caused by the publication of the Vestiges, and the eagerness and delight with which I read it,” he remarked.43 Men like Wallace were ideal targets for Vestiges’ heady mix of individual self-education, transmutation, and political reform—a text generated and judged by standards different from those of elite science. Wallace was captivated by the book’s theory of self-generated change, and he wholeheartedly committed himself to the idea of transmutation.
Two years later, the friends resolved to cut loose from Britain and earn their living collecting natural history specimens on the River Amazon. This was an adventurous move made possible only by having nothing to lose. What decided them was reading W. H. Edwards’s Voyage up the Amazon, after which “Bates and myself at once agreed that this was the very place for us to go.” Like many other relatively unknown figures in nineteenth-century natural history, they planned to capitalise on the growing commercial opportunities presented by science and sell rare materials to collectors and museums on their return. To this end, they haunted the British Museum and the outer rim of London’s scientific societies, asking questions, meeting curators, and learning their clientele’s wishes, swiftly followed by the acquisition of a natural history agent, Samuel Stevens of Bloomsbury, who put them under contract and advanced the money for them to go.44 Stevens served the pair well during their absence. He kept potential purchasers in the British Museum and Entomological Society gently on the boil and published short notices about the travellers’ achievements every so often in natural history journals. But money was tight. Most independent collectors needed four or five affluent subscribers lined up before feeling secure enough to set sail and usually took advantage of some form of semi-official support system, as in letters and contacts supplied by patrons or bodies like the Horticultural Society. Wallace and Bates depended on personal enterprise and the market economy alone.
They sailed for Brazil in the spring of 1848. Wallace stayed until 1852, while Bates, who more or less accompanied him for the first two years, persevered until 1859. These years were full of hardship, disease, and distress for both men; their experiences were as physically remote from Darwin’s Beagle voyage as could be imagined. Wallace’s younger brother Herbert came out to assist him, only to die in his arms of a fever; towards the end of his time Wallace met and became friends with Richard Spruce, a collector employed by Kew Gardens to prospect for rubber and cinchona as well as botanically unusual species. Wallace, Bates, and Spruce apparently discussed the transmutation of species, for all three had noticed the impossibility of drawing lines of separation between geographical variants and had come to regard the fecund world of nature around them as a continuum, devoid of boundaries. For all the deprivations and ordeals, Wallace found the lush green beauty of the Amazon completely thrilling. In his old age he still spoke of it with admiration and wonder.
This first tropical exploration ended in shipwreck when the cargo ship on which Wallace was returning to England caught fire and sank. Except for a box of drawings and skins, and a parrot which fled the burning ship, all the specimens that were travelling with him were destroyed—all his hundreds of new species, some £500 worth of saleable material, his private collection, and his journals and notes as well, “all lost with the ship.”45 The survivors huddled miserably in a rowing boat for days, nearly charred by the sun and salt, until they were picked up by a passing brig. The next ship Wallace boarded was an old wreck carrying timber from Cuba that creaked and groaned and shipped water, and nearly went down in mid-Atlantic too. When he arrived at Deal (“Oh, beefsteaks and damson tart”), he vowed never to trust himself on the ocean again.
The vow lasted only eighteen months. None of the advantages that he hoped would accompany his return from Brazil ever materialised. There was no income—his best specimens were on the seabed. There was no applause—his Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro (1853), a unique narrative about the largest river system in the world that he pieced together from memory, failed to excite attention and was remaindered by the publisher.46 Darwin, who read everything in the natural history line, was unimpressed by Wallace’s account, barely bothering to make more than a half-page of notes from a borrowed copy and complaining about the lack of facts.47 Wallace’s next book, on palms, suffered much the same fate in Joseph Hooker’s botanical hands. There was scarcely any mingling with new intellectual companions either—Wallace found it difficult to get beyond the closed doors of London’s most elite learned scientific societies. When he did, he felt out of place. He was alternately shocked and impressed by the showy theatrics of educated men, among them Thomas Henry Huxley, whose “complete mastery of the subject and his great amount of technical knowledge” amazed him. Huxley was so self-confident that Wallace thought he must be several years older than himself. Reading between the lines, it seems clear that he preferred the perils of the rain forest to the predatory jungle of metropolitan science.
In 1853 he embarked again, hoping to recoup his losses and provide for his future by collecting more specimens. This time he ambitiously set sail for Malaysia and Indonesia, “the very finest field for an exploring and collecting naturalist,” combining wanderlust with sensible business projections. He anticipated that material from Malaysia would sell well because British naturalists knew very little about these impenetrable regions, dominated for centuries by the trading empires of the Dutch and Portuguese. Moreover, his imagination was fired by the idea of shimmering islands wreathed in creepers, the ginger-haired orang-utan, the vast, interchangeable surfaces of sea and forest, and the elusive bird of paradise, so strange and beautiful. This time, too, he wanted to search out primitive tribes and pursue his ideas about human origins, stirred by his fleeting encounters with the forest peoples of the Amazon as much as by the concept of transmutation he had found in Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. His inclinations drew him towards the study of mankind in its widest sense. His reading of Vestiges told him that mankind emerged from apes, perhaps from the mysterious orang.
The enterprise was dangerous. Only a man who had hacked his way through the South American rain forest could have faced it with any degree of optimism. Even before he left London he felt as if he were negotiating with his own variety of foreign tribe, placating the elders of Victorian science, promising gifts, observing and bargaining with chieftains. At last he managed (with the help of Sir Roderick Murchison at the Royal Geographical Society) to get a free government passage on a ship to Singapore, from where he travelled independently to Borneo. Together with a young English assistant called Charles Allen (according to Wallace more of a burden than anything else) and a Malay servant called Ali, who afterwards took Wallace’s name, he set sail to the various islands in turn, pushing as far east as the Moluccas and Papua New Guinea, crossing and retracing his steps according to the seasons and the accessibility of particular sites. Counting his voyages up afterwards he thought he must have made some sixty or seventy separate expeditions, travelling about fourteen thousand miles within the region. These eight years of wandering, as he later put it, “constituted the central and controlling incident” of his life. He abandoned himself to the risks, freedom, and fecundity of tropical island life as few other Victorians ever had.
His first port of call was Sarawak, the independent sliver of territory on the north coast of Borneo, then ruled by the eccentric English rajah Sir James Brooke. Brooke was by far the most colourful European in the archipelago, a man whom Wallace had met in London and from whom he readily accepted an invitation to visit.48 Wallace remained in this minute tropical kingdom for fourteen months, collecting a wealth of unusual specimens. There were rarely more than one or two visiting Europeans in the country, and for a while he stayed with Brooke and his assistant secretary in their colonial bungalow. “The Rajah was pleased to have so clever a man with him,” said the secretary with just a hint of relief. “It excited his mind and brought out his brilliant ideas.… if [Wallace] could not convince us that our ugly neighbours, the orang-outa
ngs, were our ancestors, he pleased, delighted and instructed us by his clever and inexhaustible flow of talk—really good talk.”
Brooke arranged for Wallace to rent a cottage from which he could explore and collect on a daily basis. The beetles were truly wonderful, Wallace wrote to his agent Stevens. Wallace also lived for some weeks in a longhouse with a family of indigenous Dyaks, the notorious head-hunters of European legend. This meeting of cultures proved an intensely interesting experience, and Wallace emerged from it convinced of the essential unity of all races of mankind. Like Darwin, he regarded himself as the real curiosity in these undertakings, and told his sister how the wild men of the forest could easily beat him at the children’s game of cat’s cradle. They were just as sophisticated in mental activity as himself. The only difference was the absence of the trappings of civilisation. It was here that the roots of all Wallace’s later thoughts about human progress and the universality of mental powers were laid down.