Alfred Russel Wallace

by Peter Raby

  Wallace, like Darwin, grappled with his particular version of natural selection in the context of his own instincts and family circumstances. He had married late, though to a much younger wife, and had brought up two of his three children to adulthood – an example of ‘intellectual’ parents with a small family. The sexual drive was something he apparently discounted, at least in women; and Grant Allen’s idea, of loosening the legal ties of marriage to create a free choice for women to select their temporary partners, was deeply repugnant to him, because he saw the family, in both its narrower and wider forms, as part of being human: he believed in the collective, rather than the individual. At the same time, he had always rated women more highly than men, partly because they were on the receiving end of a disproportionate share of injustice. The Dyak women did not produce more children, so he believed, simply because of the amount of hard physical labour they had to undertake from an early age; and Western women, debarred from financial independence, were forced into unequal and distasteful marriages to keep a roof over their heads. Wallace would never have expressed himself quite so freely as Bernard Shaw, but his logic is not so far from the arguments Shaw gave to Mrs Warren. Vivie Warren, however, freed by her mother’s enterprise and by a Girton education, turns down love’s young dream in the person of Freddy, rejects sensuality and wealth in the gross form of Crofts, and scarcely considers the womanly aestheticism of Praed, for the independence of work in a London actuary’s office. Wallace’s Woman of the Future would place personal desires below the collective ideals of the new society, and select, not for physical beauty, as in Darwin’s theory, but, primarily, for intellectual and moral qualities. Wallace was extremely conscious of the wider implications of controlled selection and felt compelled to lay down a morally acceptable framework, to oppose the current ‘artificial’ processes being proposed. The question of contraception, or any other method of birth control, he preferred to sidestep in public, though he was friendly with Annie Besant. He regarded his own complex solution as inherently natural, describing it as ‘by far the most important of the new ideas’ he had given to the world.12

  He had responded encouragingly to a young Finnish researcher, Edward Westermarck, who had sent him – and Edward Tylor, at Oxford – a copy of his essay ‘The Origin of Human Marriage’. Wallace entered into detailed correspondence with him, invited him to Parkstone, and wrote a generous introductory note to Westermarck’s book The History of Human Marriage.13 He even read the proofs for him, although he had to put a brake on Westermarck’s enthusiasm: ‘Please do not send me 2nd proofs of your book. I will read either the first or the second proofs, but not both.’ He made it very clear that he was not a believer in the theory of ‘primitive promiscuity’, and recalled his own observations in the field forty years before:

  Even the completely naked women of the Vaupés showed great sense of modesty in their attitudes, always turning sideways on meeting a man, and when sitting so disposing the legs as to well conceal the pudenda … Sexual union among all peoples occurs normally at night, and there are I believe no people recorded among whom it is practised openly, at all times, and with no concealment.

  He added a cautionary postscript:

  I would add that travellers are apt to exaggerate nudity or the absence of modesty and that their statements not unfrequently apply to the exception rather than the rule.

  Wallace’s natural modesty put a self-censoring brake on his own writing whenever he addressed the subject of sexuality. He advised Westermarck to use the word ‘marriage’ at one point, rather than ‘sexual intercourse’, to avoid offending potential readers.

  Wallace’s interest in research was undiminished. It was an area of science he had never entered, but he was full of ideas about its potential. Above all, he wanted more facts about inheritance, and corresponded enthusiastically with Galton on the idea for an experimental farm. In such an institution, two major areas of uncertainty would be clarified. First,

  whether individually acquired characteristics are inherited, and thus form an important factor in the evolution of species, – or whether as you and Weismann agree, and as many of us now believe, they are not so, & we are thus left to depend almost wholly on variation & natural selection.(2) What is the amount and character of the sterility that arises when closely allied but permanently distinct species are crossed, and their hybrid offspring bred together.

  He pressed for a small experimental farm, breeding animals such as hares and mice, birds and ducks and insects – and there should be plant experiments as well. What about a British Association or Royal Society grant? And what about wealthy naturalists who were members of the learned societies?14

  In spite of Wallace’s increasingly outspoken, socialist and unconventional views, public honours began to come his way. In 1889, he was offered an Honorary Doctorate of Civil Law from Oxford University. ‘I have at all times a profound distaste for all public ceremonials,’ he confessed to Poulton. He had far too much work to do, so it would be impossible to rush away to Oxford, ‘except under absolute compulsion; and to do so would be to render a ceremony, which at any time would be a trial, a positive punishment’. The greatest kindness his friends could do would be to leave him in peaceful obscurity.15 (Poulton did persuade him to change his mind on this occasion.) The following year he was awarded the Darwin Medal by the Royal Society, for his ‘independent origination of the origin of species by natural selection’. In 1892, he was bombarded with, first, the Founders’ Medal of the Royal Geographical Society, and the Royal Medal of the Linnean. ‘A dreadful thing has happened! Just as I have had my medal-case made, “regardless of expense”, they are going to give me another medal! Hadn’t I better decline it, with thanks?’ He genuinely disliked the whole business. ‘Isn’t it awful?’ he complained to his daughter. ‘Two medals to receive, – two speeches to make, neatly to return thanks, and tell them in a polite manner, that I am much obliged, but rather bored!’ The medals were being presented back to back, first the Geographical, then the Linnean. He fantasised a scenario of the Tuesday programme. In the morning, there was the Horticultural Exhibition, and a visit to Bull’s Orchids – much more to his taste. Next, an inescapable meeting of examiners, an annual chore he was still fulfilling. Then he would rush off in a cab to Burlington House – ‘arrive just too late! Medal stolen!! Forged letter telling Council I am ill!!!!! Can’t come!!! Bearer to receive it for me!!!! Great excitement!!!!! Universal collapse!!!!!!!!’ He moved on to reality, with practical advice to Violet about her pending examinations at the Froebel Institute. ‘Tell Madame it is absolutely necessary for success in Exams, on Wednesday & Thursday, that you have perfect mental rest on Monday & Tuesday. You may teach kids – but nothing more.’16

  Perhaps he was just rather bored by the formal rituals of the scientific establishment; and certainly he never lost his instinctive aversion to public speaking, though he did not flinch from it when it was essential. If he had to go to London, he would rather visit old friends such as George Silk at Chapman’s the publishers, or drop in to his sister Fanny’s at West Brompton for tea, or wander round the hothouses at Kew. A certain edge, too, can be detected in his correspondence with official bodies, a residue of minor slights and disagreements accumulated in the past, on occasions when he might have been overlooked or bypassed. A month before the announcement about the Founders’ Medal, for example, he wrote to Scott Keltie at the Royal Geographical, pleading his utter inability to send him anything special for the Journal about Bates, who had just died:

  I really know less than scores of others as to his life & work, though we went to the Amazon together … Owing to my having lived in the country for the last 25 years I very rarely met him, & therefore knew very little of his life & work in London. On the Amazon too we were only together for the first 6 months or thereabouts, & after that only met once or twice. Even as to personal reminiscence I could give hardly anything, as my memory of the details of that long-ago time are but dim, and I do not think I
have a single letter of Bates.17

  By way of commentary on Wallace’s friendship with Bates, this seems remarkably ungenerous, as well as inaccurate. In fact, Wallace had already written an obituary of Bates for Nature, and much later expanded on his relationship with him in his autobiography, once he had retrieved some of his own letters from Bates’s widow to add to the letters from Bates that he had preserved, so his refusal is more likely to be a gloss on his relationship with the Royal Geographical Society, whose assistant secretary he had failed to become. Overtures from the Royal Society followed. Joseph Hooker and William Thiselton-Dyer wished to propose him for fellowship, and sounded him out, a process that involved him in some tortuous semantics. ‘I think you somewhat misunderstood me,’ Wallace corrected Thiselton-Dyer. ‘You asked me, I think, whether I had any objection to being a fellow, & of course I said, “none at all”, but that did not imply that I wished to become one.’ In any event, he had left it so long that it hardly seemed worthwhile, and he now lived so far away that he could never attend the meetings, and so on.18 Hooker and Thiselton-Dyer eventually persuaded him, with a head-on appeal: ‘To disassociate yourself from the Royal Society really amounts to doing it an injury.’19 Wallace gave in, having, consciously or unconsciously, made the point that the honour might have come his way twenty-five years before. He might also have been making a private point with Hooker. Earlier in 1892 he had asked Hooker to head up a memorial, in an attempt to obtain a Civil List pension for his father-in-law; Hooker declined, offering instead to investigate buying Mitten’s collection for Kew. Wallace, irritated by such coolness, was quite capable of keeping the Hookers and Thiselton-Dyers of the scientific world dangling for a while, before deciding to accept. Conscious of how he himself had been helped by Darwin, he did his utmost to reciprocate when he came across a deserving case.

  In the first years at Corfe View, while Wallace was busy establishing the garden, he found it difficult to get away for more than a few days. He and Annie ransacked the garden at Godalming (Nutwood Cottage was still let), so there were lots of treasures to be transplanted. Gertrude Jekyll sent hundreds of primroses. Thiselton-Dyer invited Wallace to send in a list of plants he wanted from Kew, an invitation impossible to resist. Wallace’s correspondents round the world were on the receiving end of a stream of requests: bulbs and tubers arrived in Parkstone from Australia and the Transvaal, orchids from Ridley at the Singapore Botanic Gardens. Wallace had four separate orchid houses. He battled against aphis in the greenhouse and caterpillars in the gooseberries. There was a pond to be enlarged and warmed for the water-lilies, and one of his newts, being ignorant of cement, crawled out of the water and was found dying the next morning: ‘New cement is pisen!’20 It was practically a full-time job.

  Holidays usually had a botanical or geological objective. The Wallaces visited the Lake District in July 1893. They went up Bowfell, with two ponies and a shepherd as guide – ‘grand rocks at top, fine!’ – and took rooms in Mrs Woods’s temperance hotel at Patterdale, living in luxury for six shillings a day each, and strolling about seeing waterfalls and tarns.21 On Tuesday, 1 August, Wallace’s diary records: ‘Up ridge beyond Patterdale to Hart Crag & Fairfield, 2860 ft., very fine walk grand crags & valleys – down very steep to Griesdale Tarn & down Griesdale to Patterdale’. ‘And when we got home, having walked 12 miles, ascended & descended about 3000 feet, & been on our legs over 9 hours we were pretty tired,’ he reported to his father-in-law, who had been moss-hunting in Wales. Annie was disappointed not to find any rare ferns, and alpines were scarce; but he found Saxifraga stellata [stellaris], and Saxifraga nivalis on the high tops, and Alchemilla alpina and Thalictrum alpinum on some rocks above Stickle Tarn that reminded him of the Devil’s Kitchen in Switzerland.22 He was delighted with the mountain scenery and the glacial phenomena that he was looking out for. (The first-hand evidence of his own eyes filled in a crucial corner in his thinking, and contributed to his influential articles on ‘The Ice Age and its Work’, which appeared in the Fortnightly Review in November and December 1893.) Then he and Annie travelled on by steamer up Ullswater, coach to Penrith, and railway to Appleby and Settle, and stayed at the Golden Lion hotel for three nights, where Violet joined them, with her new chameleon, ‘a fine fellow’: Violet was twenty-three, and working as a kindergarten teacher in Liverpool. Dreading Sunday and bank holiday at an inn, they took the train back to Parkstone, where Clianthus dampieri had a splendid head of flowers, and an Australian orchid showed pink buds, but would not open: ‘Another plant of the same has seed-pods & dried flowers, but no one saw the flower! Can it be a horrid self-fertilising brute that never opens?’23 The events of the garden filled his letters to friends and family, especially treasures such as the blue poppies or the pink water-lily. ‘One bud looks as if it would open tomorrow. A little while ago the big spider appeared! sitting on a water-lily leaf, & since two or three times. This morning it is sitting on the edge of the pond with its fore feet in the water.’24 He was content to look and wonder.

  That autumn, Wallace’s sister Fanny Sims died, of cancer. Distressed by her pain, Wallace paid for medical treatment and found comfort through a medium, validated by the usual kinds of question: ‘Who gave her the silver Indian brooches?’ ‘Alfred.’25 He had no doubt that Fanny lived on in spirit: she had loved him more than anyone else in the world, and he missed her, and his visits to her in London. His brother John died two years later in California, also of cancer, leaving Alfred as the only surviving Wallace of his generation. Violet was independent. William was in Newcastle now. He had struggled a little on his course in London, and failed to find a place with any of the London electrical engineering firms, but his father found an apprenticeship for him through a friend: £200 in advance for two years. He worked from 6 a.m. to 5.30 p.m., and received an apprentice’s wages of one penny and three farthings an hour. But he liked the work, and bicycled all over Northumberland at the weekends.26

  With both children launched on careers, Wallace was able to take life a little more slowly. In December, his old friend Richard Spruce died in his small Yorkshire cottage in Coneysthorpe, with its grand view of Castle Howard – someone else who had received rather less than his due from the scientific establishment. Of that great triumvirate of Amazon naturalists, Wallace, Bates and Spruce, Wallace alone survived.

  In 1894, Wallace and Annie holidayed in Devon, where the banks and walls south of Dartmoor were smothered with ferns – ‘Ma could hardly be got along’27 – and the following year Wallace and Mitten undertook a serious plant-hunting trip to Switzerland: Lucerne, Andermatt, the Rhône glacier, Grimsel pass, Meiringen, the Aar gorge, and the Wengern, ten continuous days of fine weather among the high Alps. Nature exacted revenge for the pillaging of flowers and mosses, and Wallace and Mitten were so dreadfully persecuted by swarms of blood-sucking flies that they cut short their holiday. Annie, left in charge of the garden, received boxes of plants from the Furka pass, including two species of glorious gentians; and extremely detailed instructions for looking after them. In 1896, Wallace was in Switzerland once again, but in a rather different context. Violet had spent a summer there in 1894, with Dr Henry Lunn’s family; now Lunn invited Wallace to give a lecture as part of the programme of talks he had instituted at Davos. In spite of his previous decision about lecturing, this was too good an opportunity to miss. Annie went out separately with Violet to Adelboden, while Wallace lingered in Dorset to sort out the garden and coach Kate, the orchid-sitter. Wallace received his ‘very superior’ tickets in a blue leather case with gorgeous luggage labels: he was travelling first class with seven others, three gentlemen and four ladies: ‘Among them is Mr Le Gallienne, a minor poet, & I think a Socialist, so we shall no doubt get on. He lectures the evening before me on the absurd topic – “The Persecutions of Beauty” – and that is in the Scientific Department!’28 He feared Davos would be an awful place, a perfect city: there were fifteen large hotels listed in his guidebook. But the old socialist rather enjoyed hi
mself at the Hotel Victoria. His subject was ‘Progress in the 19th Century’. He mischievously added ‘a kind of set-off’ in ‘discoveries which had been rejected and errors which had been upheld’ – namely, phrenology and vaccination. There were several doctors in the audience, who showed their disapproval ‘in the usual way’. Wallace, unabashed, assured them they would live to see the whole medical profession acknowledge vaccination to be a great delusion. Just as he was in the area of spiritualism, he remained quite unmoved by disagreement or ridicule, and left in great good humour to spend a week with his family in Adelboden, ‘the sanatorium and alpine garden of overworked Englishmen’.29

  There was an air of fragmentation about his intellectual life at this period – the liveliness was undiminished, but lacked a sustained focus. An article in the Fortnightly on ‘The Expressiveness of Speech’ put forward a radical theory of the roots of language, extending the principle of onomatopoeia; in June 1896, he summoned the energy to write a significant paper for the Linnean, on ‘The Problem of Utility’, in which he took issue especially with Romanes’s views: he always enjoyed a tilt at Romanes. He stayed in London, as often, with Raphael Meldola, and the day after the lecture enjoyed a leisurely breakfast with his host, who had invited Poulton, and Francis Darwin, to join them. The party sat and talked far into the morning, until Wallace rose at last to go and catch his train: ‘Well, I should like to go on in this way all day!’30 At gatherings like these, he was at his most relaxed; but this was the last paper he read before a scientific society.

  He seemed to sense that his daily preoccupations were too diffuse. Violet told him off for being a poor correspondent.