Alfred Russel Wallace

by Peter Raby

  He rejoined that in table-rapping etc., the phenomena were manifestly governed by an intelligence like our own. The means of communication between the Unseen World and ours were few and difficult.

  Here Tennyson said, ‘A great ocean pressing round us on every side, and only leaking in by a few chinks?’ – of which Wallace took no notice, but went on to describe instances of spirit-writing on slates, by Slade and others.

  Then the conversation moved to politics, where marked disagreements with Tennyson were only too probable. Wallace, rather tactlessly, lambasted the House of Lords and the absurdity of the hereditary principle, denounced the purchase of the Duke of Marlborough’s Raphael with public money as ‘scandalous’ – ‘let wealthy men buy and present them to the nation if they think fit’ – and, on the question of Egypt, argued that the Mahdi should be left alone – ‘He is perhaps a great man, and at all events we know no harm of him,’ to which Tennyson replied, ‘I know no good of him.’ They shifted on to Tropical Nature, safer ground, which Tennyson had read, and Tennyson declaimed a passage from ‘Enoch Arden’, so Wallace recalled, in his ‘fine, deep, chanting voice’. Tennyson wanted to know if the palm trees could be seen rising distinct above the rest of the forest.

  W. – ‘Yes, on a hillside.’

  ‘What colour are they?’

  ‘Rather light – grey-green.’

  ‘Is an expanse of tropical forest dark, seen from above?’

  ‘Not particularly; less so than an English woodland.’

  T. ‘Then I must change the word “dark”.’11

  Tennyson took a close interest in scientific ideas. According to Wilfred Ward, Huxley once commented that Tennyson’s ‘grasp of the principles of physical science was equal to that of the greatest experts’. His knowledge of Wallace’s writing was not confined to his curiosity about spiritualism. He often spoke of Wallace’s genius, and was ‘disposed to think his conclusions more exact in some respects than Darwin’s’. ‘Wallace pointed out that man has a prospective brain – that he has faculties in excess of his physical needs. This would show that you can’t account for his higher faculties by natural selection.’12 A few weeks after his meeting with Wallace, Tennyson was still talking about him. ‘Wallace says the system he believes in is a far finer one than Christianity: it is Eternal Progress – I have always felt that there must be somewhere Some one who knows – that is, God. But I am in hopes that I shall find something human in Him too.’13 Tennyson, shocked by the early death of his friend Hallam, had clawed his way back to a belief in immortality only to have it rocked by the idea of natural selection in its Darwinian form; two years after his discussions with Wallace, and following the death of his son Lionel, he went to a seance, hoping to receive some kind of message from him. For individuals like Tennyson, Wallace’s ability to reconcile conviction about natural selection with belief in a spiritual dimension was both welcome and reassuring. Allingham records Tennyson’s rather different encounter with a scientist at the cutting edge:

  Gladstone and Tyndall were sitting at my table, Gladstone on my right hand, Tyndall on my left. Tyndall began talking in his loose way about ‘This Poem – or Poetic Idea – God.’ Gladstone looked at him and said with severity, ‘Professor Tyndall, leave God to the Poets and Philosophers, and attend to your own business.’ Tyndall fell quite silent for several minutes.14

  Wallace’s spiritualism might have been a disqualification so far as men like Hooker were concerned; for Tennyson and Gladstone, it was a sign of grace.

  Civil List pension notwithstanding, Wallace was not finding it easy to manage on his income. Nothing substantial in the way of ‘extras’ had come his way since Island Life, with that £50 at the end of December 1880 as an advance in royalties from Harper’s for the American edition. Australasia, a volume in Stanford’s Compendium of Geography and Travel, which he edited, brought him in some £10 a year in royalties. But there was little else of any substance: articles and talks on land nationalisation and vaccination were public and unpaid duties; and for much of 1884 an inflamed retina made reading and writing painfully slow. Typically, ‘disgusted with the utter nonsense of many of the articles on the subject in the press’, he took up the challenge of competing anonymously for a prize of £100, offered by Pears for the best essay on ‘The Depression of Trade’. The judges were impressed, but did not recommend his entry for the prize as they disagreed with the remedies suggested. Macmillan’s agreed to publish it.15 The title says it all: ‘Bad Times: An Essay on the Present Depression of Trade, tracing it to its Sources in enormous Foreign Loans, excessive War Expenditure, the Increase of Speculation and of Millionaires, and the Depopulation of the Rural Districts; with Suggested Remedies’ – all Wallace’s bugbears and panaceas rolled into one seemingly unanswerable argument. It was widely noticed, but brushed aside because of Wallace’s uncompromising involvement with land nationalisation: a little plaintively, he recalled that the Newcastle Chronicle declared it ‘the weightiest contribution to the subject made in recent times’.

  But what to do about his own bad times and speculative losses? One useful source of additional income was lecturing. A lecture might bring in ten guineas, plus travel expenses, and he was building up a repertoire of natural history topics, as well as the occasional social issue: he claims not to have liked the process, but he was clearly extremely effective, with his great gift for making complex issues accessible and intelligible. He lectured widely and regularly during the 1880s, sometimes as part of a regular public series, occasionally at a college or school, such as Rugby or Harrow. In 1886, he was invited to Boston, to give a series of lectures at the Lowell Institute (he had met the American Ambassador, James Russell Lowell, at Darwin’s funeral); and there was another invitation lying on his desk, from Melbourne – perhaps he could combine the two.

  He researched the matter thoroughly. He cross-questioned other experienced lecturers, like Gerald Massey and the Reverend J. G. Wood, a Fellow of the Zoological Society. He wrote to Edmund Gosse, who had worked the American circuit successfully. Should he employ an agent, as Massey suggested? Massey recommended giving ‘only one or two lectures in each town, as ensuring by far the largest returns, – this is a point of special importance to me as it is only the prospect of realising a considerable sum that would induce me to undertake the risk & fatigue of such a tour’. Could he squeeze in one or two public lectures in Boston as well as the Lowell series? What about the Redpath Lyceum Bureau as an agency? ‘Having a very delicate throat & being very sensitive to chills, I must avoid the Eastern Winter, & my idea was to lecture if possible in October to mid of Nov. in the East, then go south & by Southern route to California.’16 Gosse was reassuring. Wallace looked at his outgoings: £66 a year to the Dorking Building Society, twelve guineas a term for Will’s school fees, now that he was starting at Cranleigh.17

  He wrote to the Lowell Institute, accepting, and settled down to write some more lectures, one on ‘The Darwinian Theory’, and three others on aspects of colour in animals and plants. He needed colour slides and diagrams, and new – and warmer – clothes for the eastern winter from which he found there could he no escape. He tried the slides out on the Charterhouse boys and masters, and tested out the opening lecture, illustrated by diagrams, at Loughton to the Epping Field Club.18 It was a crowded few months. He dashed off an article for the Fortnightly, a salvo aimed at George Romanes, just in time for its publication before the British Association met at Birmingham – ‘I think I have shown the entire fallacy of his whole argument’, he informed Meldola, who was engaged on a parallel response for Nature; he hoped Meldola would hold a brief for him at the Association. Romanes argued that species were ‘distinguished generally by useless characters’, a doctrine anathema to Wallace. He wrote his paper to expose ‘the great presumption & ignorance of Romanes in declaring that Nat. Select. is not a Theory of the Origin of Species’. Romanes was posing as the successor of Darwin, and this should be stopped ‘before the press and the public adopt h
im as such’.19

  Wallace sailed from Tower Hill, London on 9 October 1886, and a week later recorded with relief the first fine day: a cold and disagreeable passage on a rather slow steamer, chosen so that he could have a cabin to himself at a moderate price.20

  He arrived in New York on Saturday, 23 October, and went the next day to see Henry George, attending one of his public meetings on Monday. He just had time for a trip up the Hudson, to marvel at the Palisades and enjoy the autumn colours, before travelling north to Boston, where he installed himself in Quincy House, at a dollar a night. His first few days were extremely busy: seeing his prospective agent, Williams, being interviewed, testing his diagrams and slides at the Institute. His first lecture was on 1 November: ‘full audience’, he recorded. He was launched, and could begin to relax, to play chess, to receive and pay calls. The following weekend he was out at Wellesley, where William Denton had been a professor, to inspect his geological collection and his New Guinea birds. ‘Stove in every room – 2 o’clock dinner chickens fried – potatoes, & preserved fruit. Jam. took no other meal! gave me some tea!’ Then back to Boston by eight the next morning, to put up slides and prepare for the evening’s lecture on Oceanic Islands – ‘not quite full owing to President’s reception’.

  Wallace’s American journal is a slightly reticent document, more a record of events than a commentary, and lacking, for the most part, in the sense of wonder and in the vividness of detail that permeates his Archipelago notebooks. Absent, too, is commentary on the American intellectual community, and the current climate of scientific thinking. Asa Gray had arranged an evening at his home. Wallace went, stayed the night with the Grays, and talked to the guests on ‘What led to my Essay’. With Gray a key though absent participant in the Linnean proceedings, there must have been some informed discussion: Wallace’s only comment is ‘Slept there’. He does expand when describing his visits to museums and private collections. Alexander Agassiz showed him round the museum at Cambridge – ‘splendid arrangement’ – ‘Excellent!’ ‘It is a Museum!’ he reported to Meldola. ‘The only one worthy of the name that I have ever seen. It carries out the principles I advocated in my paper in Macmillan’s Mag. 20 years ago’ – and the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology was equally marvellous: the two together were well worth the journey from Europe for any naturalist.21 He took a keen enough interest in the other institutions he visited: once his Lowell commitments were met, he had engagements at universities and colleges such as Johns Hopkins, Williamstown and Vassar, travelling backwards and forwards from Boston. But there is an undercurrent of anxiety that appears in his notes about expenses: ‘bought paper & envelopes – dear’; and future bookings: ‘called on Williams – no engagements!’; and in the bulletins on his health: ‘Cough bad – wet compress on day & night …’ Even his personal letters do not elaborate much on the personalities he met: ‘Last night I dined in company with Dr Holmes the “Autocrat of the Breakfast Table”.’

  To set against the wearing life of an itinerant lecturer were the golden opportunities to talk to American spiritualists, both convinced practitioners and interested enquirers. He plunged happily into the New England spiritualist community, finding that there were more ‘men of science’ prepared to investigate systematically and openly. On his first weekend in Boston, he called on Ernst, the editor of the spiritualist publication the Banner of Light, and was soon in touch with the local mediums. The previous year a short paper, ‘Are the Phenomena of Spiritualism in Harmony with Science?’, his first writing in the area since his spat with Carpenter, had been reprinted in two Boston journals, so his interest was already well known. Whereas a meeting with Asa Gray and Oliver Wendell Holmes is merely recorded, an encounter with the ‘wonderful medium’ Mrs Dickinson is annotated with a series of reported anecdotes presented as facts:

  Mr D. in Rome in Feb. dried some flowers, daisies & violets, to send to his wife & enclosed them in a letter. A day before the letter arrived the flowers were found on her table, & the letter arrived later, without them! Mr D. on return home identified the flowers! Envelope unbroken.

  The combination of active mediums, unexpected leisure, and a community of interested intellectuals was too good to be missed. Wallace met William James on several occasions. James had been in England during 1882, when he met F. W. H. Myers and Henry Sidgwick, and took a major role in the foundation of the American Society for Psychical Research in 1884. Wallace discussed issues of research with him, and James was present at one of three seances Wallace attended with the well-known medium Mrs Ross.22

  At the first of these, a whole series of figures materialised, including a tall Indian in white moccasins who danced and spoke, and shook hands with Wallace and others, and a female figure holding a baby: ‘Went up and felt baby’s face, nose, and hair, & kissed it – a genuine soft-skinned baby as ever I felt.’ Wallace had already examined the room carefully, and as soon as the seance was over he inspected the wall again, which afforded ‘no room or place for disposing of the baby alone, far less of all the other figures’. At the second session, not so impressive as the first though there were ‘two good solid forms out together’, Wallace seems to have been placed in a special position – ‘I sat in the doorway’; the following day, another seance was arranged, this time with William James present. There were many forms. Wallace was especially struck by a ‘beautiful draped female’, who identified herself as having met him with Florence Cook in London: ‘She resembled the form wh. appeared most often with F. Cook, & who had often talked & joked with me! She let me feel her ear (no ear-rings) as she had done in London.’ Wallace does seem, in a mild way, to have been susceptible to the better-looking female forms; but the clincher for him on this occasion came in the shape of a rather short old gentleman with very white hair & beard, who took his hand and bowed repeatedly.

  At first I did not recognise him. But he bowed & looked pleased, not being able to speak. Then it flashed upon me that he was like the last Photos of my cousin Alg. Wilson, only older. Then the likeness both in face, figure & dress became more clear & I said ‘Is it Algernon’ to which he nodded earnestly, seemed much pleased, shook my hand strongly patted my face … The likeness was unmistakable, but I had been thinking of my father, or some other friends, Darwin, etc & so did not see it at first …

  A spiritualist encounter with Darwin would have made history. But Wallace’s account of the different stages in identifying his cousin shows clearly how someone seeking to be convinced can actively contribute to, if not lead, the process. The next day, Wallace attended a special dinner given by John Murray Forbes at Parker’s Hotel. The guest list was studded with distinguished names: Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, Edward Waldo Emerson, James Freeman Clarke, William James, Asa Gray, General Francis Walker, Charles Norton, Sir William Dawson: presidents of universities, professors, writers. There was a first-rate dinner, flowers in profusion, no speeches, and plenty of conversation on politics, travel, Sir James Brooke, and spiritualism. The following evening Wallace left for Washington by sleeper in a snowstorm.

  For the next three months, Wallace marked time. He gave a number of lectures, for instance, ‘Oceanic Islands: Their Physical and Biological Relations’ to the American Geographical Society on 11 January; another in New York; and, in March, there was a scatter of engagements in Canada, when he took the opportunity of seeing the wonders of the Niagara Falls: ‘Grand, but not so awfully grand as I had expected,’ he told his daughter. He talked on ‘The Great Problems of Anthropology’ to the Women’s Anthropological Society, and attended the Washington Literary Society: the reception he met – ‘honour & pleasure never expected’; ‘read my books all their life’ – left him ‘dumb!!!’ He spent hours in the Smithsonian, paid a visit to the Observatory, and enjoyed evenings at the Cosmos Club. He wrote a long review of Edward Cope’s The Origin of the Fittest for the New York Independent, and calculated the profits: ‘About 2900 words @ 6$ for column of 725 words shd be about 24$.’ He was s
oon receiving invitations, from Major John Wesley Powell, Charles Nordhoff, General Lippitt. Powell was a man with whom he had much in common; he had led a nine-hundred-mile descent of the Colorado river through the Grand Canyon, was a former Director of the Geological Survey, and head of the Smithsonian Bureau of Ethnology. Wallace also enjoyed the company of Elliott Coues: Coues was Professor of Anatomy at Columbia, Secretary and Naturalist of the Geological and Geographical Survey, a noted ornithologist – and he had a keen interest in psychical phenomena. Through Coues and Lippitt he found himself welcome once more on the seance circuit.

  Back in Boston, meanwhile, there was a spiritualist scandal. The Rosses were pounced on in mid-session. At a given signal, when a young man in the party was ‘conversing’ with a materialised spirit, he seized it by the hand and yanked it into the middle of the room. The light was turned on, a ‘stalwart man’ grabbed Charles Ross just as he drew his revolver, while others secured Hannah Ross, plus the ‘spooks’ in the cabinet: the contents of the cabinet turned out to be four boys and a little girl in different states of undress. According to the New York Times, close investigation revealed an ‘ingenious mechanical contrivance’ which operated a hidden door in the cabinet. William James – who was not present on this particular occasion – was cited as having described Mrs Ross as one of ‘the wonders of the nineteenth century’. James, incensed by the way his name was used by the press, wrote to the Banner of Light to make his position clear, and described in detail the Ross seances he had attended, including the one with Wallace. On his first visit, he examined the walls and floors carefully, and did not see any suspicious circumstances, so concluded that Mrs Ross was ‘better worth spending time upon’ than any of the other ‘materialises’ he had visited.