by Peter Raby
Spruce could tease Fanny, and assume that she would pass the letter on to her brother, along with best regards to the ‘famille Wallace’.20 It was not easy to challenge Wallace directly on this sensitive subject.
Inevitably, the spiritualists attracted controversy. One of Fanny Sims’s neighbours was an extremely wealthy widow, Mrs Jane Lyon, who lived in Westbourne Place in rooms above a stationer’s shop. She took a portrait of her late husband to the Sims’ shop, because she wanted it photographed. Her late husband had, she told Fanny, predicted that they would be reunited in seven years; the time was up, and she believed that 1866 would therefore see her death. Fanny Sims assured her that this need not be so; if she were a spiritualist, her husband might be able to come to her ‘while she was yet on earth’. So she packed Mrs Lyon off to Camberwell, to a psychic bookshop, whose owners put her in contact with the ‘spiritual Athenaeum’, where Daniel Home – Mr Sludge the Medium, in Browning’s version – operated. Mrs Lyon was so impressed with Home – and his wealthy social connections – that she offered to adopt him, and decided to give him £24,000. A few weeks later she changed her mind, and eventually sued for the return of the money. A lengthy and widely reported court case was finally decided in Mrs Lyon’s favour; but no one came well out of the affair, and Fanny Sims was mentioned in evidence. Wallace himself would later become a regular witness in the law courts, testifying on behalf of a series of spiritualists.21
All this was wonderfully stimulating, but it did not pay any bills – rather the reverse – and finance began to be a slight concern. Annie was pregnant, and Wallace needed to provide for a family. Stevens had prudently and systematically invested the proceeds from the Archipelago collections in Indian Railway stock, and Wallace’s annual income from investments was as high as £300 at one point. But money leaked away in the direction of the Sims family, and his mother; and although he was paid for a few pieces of scientific journalism – ‘The Philosophy of Birds Nests’ for the Intellectual Observer, ‘Disguises of Insects’ for Science Gossip – these were only odd guineas to throw into the equation. He now committed the classic mistake of accepting financial advice from his friends. In the manuscript notes for his autobiography for 1865, he underlined the ominous words ‘Began speculation’: he did not blame, or name, the first two influences. One was a fellow investigator into spiritualism, Ridsdale, who ‘held a good appointment under Government’.22 Ridsdale played the stock market himself, and thought it absurd that Wallace should have several thousand pounds lying idle. Then George Silk – old childhood friend, ‘reader’ to Archdeacon Sinclair, involved with the London Diocesan Board of Finance, pillar of the Establishment – became secretary to a group of private investors with offices in Pall Mall, who were buying up slate quarries, and forming companies to exploit them. Wallace was persuaded to buy shares, and even to be a director, on the basis of his practical knowledge as a surveyor. Finally, his friend Geach returned from the East, and encouraged Wallace to invest in lead mines. The worst losses he suffered did not occur for some years, but all these speculative investments began to dilute his capital, and cut back his regular income.
With his wife’s encouragement, he began once more to work on his eastern travels, the one major writing project that might help him financially. Newton had invited him to write the volume on Lepidoptera for a series Macmillan was planning – Bates was doing the beetles; he declined: ‘Half the time & labour it would take would write my travels, & I think pay me better & get me more credit.’ But he asked Newton to remember him if he should hear of ‘any vacant good Curatorship or Nat. Hist. Secretaryship’: ‘If sufficiently good & permanent I would give all my private collections to a local museum.’23 He also arranged an exhibition of his bird and butterfly collections in the Westbourne Grove photographic gallery, and began to offload some of them to private buyers.
One small indication of his growing insecurity about money occurs in his dealings with the British Museum over a sum of £5 owed to him, which he now called in. He was asked to send a stamped receipt in advance – but when the money came on 25 June 1867, by postal order, the office had deducted the cost of the order (sixpence) and sent him £4 19s 6d. Wallace, outraged, decided against either a County Court summons, or a protracted correspondence, but preserved the ‘incriminating documents’ for his later public revenge over what he described as both official meanness and ‘petty larceny’. He was not always so restrained when it came to going to court.24
But he had much more important things on his mind in June 1867: on the 22nd Annie gave birth to Bertie, christened Herbert Spencer – Herbert in memory of his younger brother, Spencer in honour of the social scientist. Within a few weeks, the Wallaces had left London, letting the house near Regent’s Park and moving to Hurstpierpoint, where Annie’s mother and sisters could help her with the baby, and where Wallace could work on his book. Wallace locked himself away for three months in quiet concentration, with Richard Spruce, still lodging in the village, for additional company.
He allowed himself a pleasant break in the autumn. First he went to Wales, with his father-in-law, botanising; next he attended the British Association meeting in Dundee, revelling in a geological excursion with Sir Archibald Geikie, and calling on Chambers at St Andrews, where the two men shared their spiritualist certainties. Spruce moved to Welburn in Yorkshire that October, and Wallace visited him there after going to Newcastle to give a public lecture (another indication of his strained finances, as lecturing was not a comfortable process for him, however well he knew his subject). Then he returned to Hurstpierpoint, where he continued to organise his eastern material, and to enjoy being a father. Here at last was the kind of quiet, contented life he had dreamed about.
Through the rest of the winter of 1867, and the following spring, he was hard at work, reshaping the materials of his journey in the Archipelago. From the very start, in January 1864, he had felt overwhelmed by the prospect, confessing to Darwin that he was ‘a very bad hand at writing anything like narrative’, and regretting dreadfully his lack of ‘copious notes on common everyday objects, sights and sounds and incidents’, which he imagined he could never forget, but now found it impossible to recall with any accuracy.25 He was also highly conscious of Bates’s brilliant success. In February 1868 he could report to Darwin – who never failed to mention the subject in his letters – that he had been for some time ‘hammering away’ at his travels, but still feared he would ‘make a mess of it’.26 This was not just conventional modesty on his part: he genuinely mistrusted his narrative and descriptive powers, as opposed to his ability to argue logically and clearly, however strange that might seem to most readers. He scanned all the secondary material he could lay his hands on, drawing on the accounts of the early European travellers as well as more recent books such as Sir Thomas Raffles’s The History of Java and John Crawfurd’s History of the Indian Archipelago, together with two recent publications, J. W. B. Money’s Java: or, How to Manage a Colony, and Eduard Dekker’s novel Max Havelaar. For primary material, he had his notebooks and four field journals, which he could refine and expand on, supplemented by his letters home and the regular accounts to Stevens, sections of which had already appeared in print. He had, too, by this time published some thirty papers on aspects of his collections, mostly for the Linnean, Zoological and Entomological Societies. His main problem was not material – in contrast to the Amazon experience, there was almost too much – but structure. A strictly chronological account might be puzzling – the pattern of his fourteen-thousand-mile journey was dictated by weather and transport; besides, a chronological sequence would not enable him to address one of his main themes, the geographical distribution and peculiarities of the islands’ animals and of their human inhabitants. So he adopted ‘a geographical, zoological and ethnological arrangement’, taking the reader from one island group to another. (This is, coincidentally, the broad scheme adopted by Bates, who describes the Amazon locality by locality.) By adopting this structure Wall
ace, characteristically, places the Archipelago in the foreground, while his own activities often assume second place to the orang-utan, the Dyak, and the bird of paradise. All traces of his role in the theory of natural selection are omitted: it is the journey, not the scientific papers from Sarawak and Ternate, that he puts forward as the central and controlling incident of his life.
Revisiting the journals and notebooks activated Wallace’s thinking on a whole range of issues, especially on the agency of organic life, and on the development of the human races. The year or so that he spent largely at Hurstpierpoint saw an astonishing burst of productivity, when one remembers that he was simultaneously drafting his Travels, investigating mediums, and enjoying his first years of marriage and being a father. He published ‘Mimicry, and other Productive Resemblances among Animals’, in the Westminster Review of July 1867: a lengthy survey of facts and arguments about colour, which came down firmly on the law of utility, though with a glance towards the emphasis Darwin placed on sexual selection. He ended the article with a summary that disposed of either mere chance or ‘the direct volition of the Creator’ as satisfactory explanations of so many much neglected details, indicating that all the instances he cited were part of the subjection of the phenomena of life to the Reign of Law. He meant by this term, obviously, natural selection; but it was also a reference to the title of the Duke of Argyll’s response to The Origin of Species, a work that appealed strongly to the creationists. Wallace disposed of Argyll in a lengthy, closely argued but courteous demolition job published in the Quarterly Journal of Science.27
Darwin’s new book excited Wallace. The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication appeared in January 1868. The first volume was especially heavy with details, he commented to Newton, though there were hosts of valuable and interesting facts; but the second volume was much more interesting and novel, and the hypothesis of ‘Pangenesis’ grand and suggestive, and to him ‘extremely satisfying’. ‘Darwin has gone a step beyond Spencer, & has offered a practical working solution of a problem infinitely more difficult & unintelligible than the mere “origin of species”’ – it explained ‘such a vast mass of the most curious and extraordinary phenomena of reproduction’. This was the kind of rational speculation Wallace warmed to: something that offered a key to the issues of generation and reproduction. As for ‘the miserable, weak, ignorant, & sneering article’ in the Athenaeum – who could have the impudence to be the writer? ‘“Specific characters never vary”!!!’ The Athenaeum ought to be cut by every naturalist for admitting such an article.28 To Lyell, Wallace wrote with equal enthusiasm about pangenesis, Darwin’s solution to the heredity of acquired characters:
The hypothesis is sublime in its simplicity and the wonderful manner in which it explains the most mysterious of the phenomena of life. To me it is satisfying in the extreme. I feel I can never give it up, unless it be positively disproved, which is impossible, or replaced by one which better explains the facts, which is highly improbable.29
Wallace looked for certainties; once convinced of a position, it took a great deal to dislodge him – in this particular instance, Galton’s later experiments on blood transfusion with rabbits, and, eventually, August Weismann’s theories. Meanwhile, no one championed natural selection, and Darwin, more bravely and vigorously than Wallace. Darwin was much in Wallace’s mind this year, as he relived, and continued to develop, his own intellectual odyssey. At the British Association meeting that August, with Hooker as President, Darwin and Darwinism were at the forefront of the agenda. Carl Vogt from Geneva told Wallace that the Germans were being converted by Darwin’s Variation. Wallace went to stay with Darwin at Down, coinciding on this occasion with Edward Blyth, back from Calcutta, one of the few readers who had been alert to the implications of Wallace’s Sarawak paper.
Wallace still had the time and energy to pursue his interests in spiritualism. His sense of justice, and personal pride, was roused by a correspondence in the Pall Mall Gazette in May. Tyndall wrote about the medium Home, claiming that he had never been properly investigated by scientists; and G. H. Lewes joined in, suggesting a method of objective investigation. Wallace was indignant. He had invited both Tyndall and Lewes to seances, with a view to just such an investigation. Tyndall had come once, Lewes never. Besides, Home had been investigated by a scientist, Cromwell Varley, who pronounced himself satisfied that nothing fraudulent was involved. Wallace put together a six-page letter, in response to Lewes, and was furious when the editor, who had had enough of spiritualism, refused to publish it. Wallace then accused Lewes of deliberately carrying on a controversy in a journal that gave no right of reply. After this parting shot, he set off for the Continent for a long holiday with Annie, leaving the baby to be cared for by the Mitten family at Hurstpierpoint.
‘Wallace minor runs everywhere,’ his grandfather reported to Spruce, ‘and in the pursuit of his investigations has discovered that strawberries and green gooseberries are used as food, as well as earth, stones, sand, leaves, coals, and cockchafers with which he varies his diet.’30 The Wallace parents were at Chambéry; ‘they have taken papers and boards to express the juices of all the rare alpine plants’, and boxes and pins for the butterflies. They were practically the only visitors in a huge new hotel, and walked out each day to look for flowers. Then they crossed over the St Bernard, and walked down to Aosta, from where they ascended the Becca de Nona, a long day’s excursion by mule; Wallace climbed the last thousand feet alone, finding two species of androsaces near the summit before moving on to Interlaken and Grindelwald. They returned at the end of June with lots of plants, including saxifrages, primulas, aquiligia, and four species of gentian. ‘Wallace couldn’t dry the plants as well as he hoped & Annie got nausea when she went up high,’ reported Mitten.31 His daughter was in the early stages of her second pregnancy.
Back in England, Wallace continued to work on his book. It cried out for illustration, and Wallace liaised with artists such as J. G. Keulemans (the birds of paradise); Joseph Wolf (the frontispiece of the orang-utan attacked by Dyaks); Thomas Baines, the African traveller, and Walter Fitch from Kew, who had illustrated his book on Amazonian palms. Some of the illustrations were based on photographs, and some on Wallace’s original sketches. Then there was the question of the dedication. ‘It will give me very great pleasure if you will allow me to dedicate my little book of Malayan Travels to you,’ he wrote to Darwin in January, ‘although it will be far too small and unpretending a work to be worthy of that honour.’32 Darwin accepted graciously.
Wallace’s stock was high. In November, he had been awarded the Royal Medal by the Royal Society, perhaps the most public acknowledgement so far of his scientific contribution. But his financial worries weighed heavily on him, as Annie’s pregnancy advanced. Soon there would be two children to care for, and educate. He could not go on living indefinitely in his parents-in-law’s house, now that his book was finished; and, with the death of his mother on 15 November, he was that much freer to move out of London at last. He needed to find a place to settle, and put down roots. More importantly, with no certainty that The Malay Archipelago would sell any better than Travels on the Amazon, he badly needed a job. There were plans to reorganise the national collections of the British Museum, spinning off the natural history sections to a new location. Wallace, full of ideas about proper arrangement and display since he first visited the collections of London and Paris, put together a number of schemes, including full-scale drawings, and wrote a long article for Macmillan’s Magazine, ‘Museums for the People’. He circulated a memorial, and wrote to thank Hooker for signing; Wallace hoped it would not be forgotten ‘when the British Museum comes to be moved and reconstituted’.33 With the backing of Hooker, and Darwin and Lyell, together with the publicity over his new book, he was confident of securing some official salaried post. On 27 January 1869, his daughter Violet was born; and on 9 March, only a week after the final agreement with Macmillan was signed, the two volumes of The Malay Archipelago
were published, in an edition of 1,500 copies. He received an advance of £100, and a royalty of 7s 6d a copy after the first 1000: a second edition of 750 copies was printed in October. The reviews were as positive as the sales.
11 Man and Mind
DARWIN PURRED WITH pleasure at Wallace’s dedication in The Malay Archipelago – ‘To Charles Darwin, author of The Origin of Species, I dedicate this book, not only as a token of personal esteem and friendship, but also to express my deep admiration for his genius and his works’ – and wrote to congratulate the author both on the dedication, and the whole appearance of the book – quite beautiful: he had received one of twenty-five copies which Macmillan had had specially cut and gilded. ‘As for the dedication, putting quite aside how far I deserve what you say, it seems to me decidedly the best expressed dedication which I have ever met.’1 By 22 March, he had finished reading it: excellent, and most pleasant to read. ‘That you have returned alive is wonderful after all your risks from illness and sea voyages, especially that most interesting one to Waigiou and back. Of all the impressions which I have received from your book, the strongest is that your perseverance in the cause of science was heroic.’2 But even as he praised the account of the journey out of which those two crucial papers on species had emerged, Darwin knew that Wallace was preparing an unwelcome addendum, as part of his forthcoming review of the tenth edition of Lyell’s Principles. Darwin was ‘intensely curious’ to read what Wallace had to say. ‘I hope you have not murdered too completely your own and my child.’