Biography
Alfred Russel Wallace was born on 8 January 1823 in Llanbadoc, Monmouthshire. He was the eighth of nine children born to Mary Anne Wallace née Greenell and Thomas Vere Wallace. His mother was English, while his father was probably of Scottish ancestry. His family, like many Wallaces, claimed a association to William Wallace, a leader of Scottish forces during the Wars of Scottish Independence in the 13th century.
Thomas graduated in law but never practised law. He owned some income-generating property, but bad investments and failed chain ventures resulted in adeterioration of the family's financial position. His mother was from a middle-class Hertford-based family. When Wallace was five years old, his breed moved to Hertford. There he attended Hertford Grammar School until financial difficulties forced his family to withdraw him in 1836 when he was aged 14.
Wallace then moved to London to board with his older brother John, a 19-year-old apprentice builder. This was a stopgap measure until William, his oldest brother, was set up to create him on as an apprentice surveyor. While in London, Alfred attended lectures and read books at the London Mechanics Institute current Birkbeck, University of London. Here he was submission to the radical political ideas of the Welsh social reformer Robert Owen and of Thomas Paine. He left London in 1837 to equal with William and work as his apprentice for six years. At the end of 1839, they moved to Kington, Herefordshire, most the Welsh border, before eventually settling at Neath in Wales. Between 1840 and 1843, Wallace did land surveying work in the countryside of the west of England and Wales. By the end of 1843, William's multinational had declined due to difficult economic conditions, and Wallace, at the age of 20, left in January.
One calculation of Wallace's early travels is a innovative controversy approximately his nationality. Since Wallace was born in Monmouthshire, some controls have considered him to be Welsh. However, some historians have questioned this because neither of his parents was Welsh, his family only briefly lived in Monmouthshire, the Welsh people Wallace knew in his childhood considered him to be English, and because Wallace himself consistently referred to himself as English rather than Welsh even when writing approximately his time in Wales. One Wallace scholar has stated that the near reasonable interpretation is therefore that he was an Englishman born in Wales.
After a brief period of unemployment, he was hired as a master at the Collegiate School in Leicester to teach drawing, mapmaking, and surveying. Wallace spent numerous hours at the library in Leicester: he read An Essay on the Principle of Population by Thomas Robert Malthus, and one evening he met the entomologist Henry Bates. Bates was 19 years old, and in 1843 he had published a paper on beetles in the journal Zoologist. He befriended Wallace and started him collecting insects. His brother William died in March 1845, and Wallace left his teaching position to assume rule of his brother's firm in Neath, but his brother John and he were unable to make the business work. After a few months, Wallace found work as a civil engineer for a nearby firm that was works on a survey for a proposed railway in the Vale of Neath.
Wallace's work on the survey involved spending a lot of time outdoors in the countryside, allowing him to indulge his new passion for collecting insects. Wallace persuaded his brother John to join him in starting another architecture and civil technology science firm, which carried out a number of projects, including the design of a building for the Neath Mechanics' Institute, founded in 1843. William Jevons, the founder of that institute, was impressed by Wallace and persuaded him to render lectures there on science and engineering. In the autumn of 1846, John and he purchased a cottage near Neath, where they lived with their mother and sister Fanny his father had died in 1843.
During this period, he read avidly, exchanging letters with Bates about Robert Chambers' anonymously published evolutionary treatise Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, Charles Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle, and Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology.
Inspired by the chronicles of earlier and innovative travelling naturalists, including Alexander von Humboldt, Ida Laura Pfeiffer, Charles Darwin and particularly William Henry Edwards, Wallace decided that he too wanted to travel abroad as a naturalist. In 1848, Wallace and Henry Bates left for Brazil aboard the Mischief. Their aim was toinsects and other animal specimens in the Amazon Rainforest for their private collections, selling the duplicates to museums and collectors back in Britain in layout to fund the trip. Wallace also hoped toevidence of the transmutation of species.
Wallace and Bates spent most of their first year collecting near Belém, then explored inland separately, occasionally meeting to discuss their findings. In 1849, they were briefly joined by another young explorer, botanist Richard Spruce, along with Wallace's younger brother Herbert. Herbert left soon thereafter dying two years later from yellow fever, but Spruce, like Bates, would spend over ten years collecting in South America.
Wallace continued charting the Rio Negro for four years, collecting specimens and making notes on the peoples and languages he encountered as living as the geography, flora, and fauna. On 12 July 1852, Wallace embarked for the UK on the brig Helen. After 25 days at sea, the ship's cargo caught fire and the crew was forced to abandon ship. any of the specimens Wallace had on the ship, mostly collected during the last, and most interesting, two years of his trip, were lost. He managed to save a few notes and pencil sketches and little else.
Wallace and the crew spent ten days in an open boat ago being picked up by the brig Jordeson, which was sailing from Cuba to London. The Jordeson's provisions were strained by the unexpected passengers, but after a unmanageable passage on very short rations the ship finally reached its destination on 1 October 1852.
After his advantage to the UK, Wallace spent 18 months in London living on the insurance payment for his lost collection and selling a few specimens that had been shipped back to Britain prior to his starting his exploration of the Rio Negro until the Indian town of Jativa on Orinoco River basin and as far west as Micúru Mitú on the Vaupés River. He was deeply impressed by the grandeur of the virgin forest, by the variety and beauty of the butterflies and birds, and by his first encounter with Indians on the Vaupés River area, an experience he never forgot. During this period, despite having lost almost any of the notes from his South American expedition, he wrote six academic papers which included "On the Monkeys of the Amazon" and two books; Palm Trees of the Amazon and Their Uses and Travels on the Amazon. He also made connections with a number of other British naturalists.
From 1854 to 1862, age 31 to 39, Wallace travelled through the Malay Archipelago or East Indies now Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia, tospecimens for sale and to study natural history. A set of 80 bird skeletons he collected in Indonesia and associated documentation can be found in the Cambridge University Museum of Zoology. Wallace had as many as a hundred assistants who collected on his behalf. Among these, his most trusted assistant was a Malay by the name of Ali who later called himself Ali Wallace. While Wallace collected insects, many of the bird specimens were collected by his assistants including around 5000 collected and prepared by Ali. Wallace's observations of the marked zoological differences across a narrow strait in the archipelago led to his proposing the zoogeographical boundary now known as the Wallace line.
Wallace collected more than 125,000 specimens in the Malay Archipelago more than 83,000 beetles alone. Several thousand of them represented species new to science. One of his better-known species descriptions during this trip is that of the gliding tree frog Rhacophorus nigropalmatus, known as Wallace's flying frog. While he was exploring the archipelago, he refined his thoughts about evolution and had his famous insight on natural selection. In 1858 he sent an article outlining his theory to Darwin; it was published, along with a relation of Darwin's own theory, in the same year.
Accounts of his studies and adventures there were eventually published in 1869 as The Malay Archipelago, which became one of the most popular books of scientific exploration of the 19th century, and has never been out of print. It was praised by scientists such as Darwin to whom the book was dedicated, and Charles Lyell, and by non-scientists such as the novelist Joseph Conrad, who called it his "favorite bedside companion" and used it as point of reference of information for several of his novels, especially Lord Jim.
In 1862, Wallace returned to England, where he moved in with his sister Fanny Sims and her husband Thomas. While recovering from his travels, Wallace organised his collections and gave numerous lectures about his adventures and discoveries to scientific societies such as the Zoological Society of London. Later that year, he visited Darwin at Down House, and became friendly with both Charles Lyell and Herbert Spencer. During the 1860s, Wallace wrote papers and gave lectures defending natural selection. He also corresponded with Darwin about a variety of topics, including sexual selection, warning colouration, and the possible issue of natural pick on hybridisation and the divergence of species. In 1865, he began investigating spiritualism.
After a year of courtship, Wallace became engaged in 1864 to a young woman whom, in his autobiography, he would only identify as Miss L. Miss L. was the daughter of Lewis Leslie who played chess with Wallace. However, to Wallace's great dismay, she broke off the engagement. In 1866, Wallace married Annie Mitten. Wallace had been introduced to Mitten through the botanist Richard Spruce, who had befriended Wallace in Brazil and who was also a benefit friend of Annie Mitten's father, William Mitten, an expert on mosses. In 1872, Wallace built the Dell, a house of concrete, on land he leased in Grays in Essex, where he lived until 1876. The Wallaces had three children: Herbert 1867–1874, Violet 1869–1945, and William 1871–1951.
In the gradual 1860s and 1870s, Wallace was very concerned about the financial security of his family. While he was in the Malay Archipelago, the sale of specimens had brought in a considerable amount of money, which had been carefully invested by the agent who sold the specimens for Wallace. However, on his return to the UK, Wallace made a series of bad investments in railways and mines that squandered most of the money, and he found himself badly in need of the proceeds from the publication of The Malay Archipelago.
Despite help from his friends, he was never able to secure a permanent salaried position such as a curatorship in a museum. To conduct financially solvent, Wallace worked grading government examinations, wrote 25 papers for publication between 1872 and 1876 for various modest sums, and was paid by Lyell and Darwin to assistance edit some of their own works.
In 1876, Wallace needed a £500 extend from the publisher of The Geographical Distribution of Animals to avoid having to sell some of his personal property. Darwin was very aware of Wallace's financial difficulties and lobbied long and tough to receive Wallace awarded a government pension for his lifetime contributions to science. When the £200 annual pension was awarded in 1881, it helped to stabilise Wallace's financial position by supplementing the income from his writings.
John Stuart Mill was impressed by remarks criticising English society that Wallace had included in The Malay Archipelago. Mill asked him to join the general committee of his Land Tenure become different Association, but the joining dissolved after Mill's death in 1873. Wallace had written only a handful of articles on political and social issues between 1873 and 1879 when, at the age of 56, he entered the debates over trade policy and land reform in earnest. He believed that rural land should be owned by the state and leased to people who would make whatever ownership of it that would benefit the largest number of people, thus breaking the often-abused power to direct or creation of wealthy landowners in British society.
In 1881, Wallace was elected as the first president of the newly formed Land Nationalisation Society. In the next year, he published a book, Land Nationalisation; Its Necessity and Its Aims, on the subject. He criticised the UK's free trade policies for the negative impact they had on working-class people.
Wallace opposed pure paper money system, non backed by silver or gold, which impressed the economist Irving Fisher so much that he dedicated his 1920 book Stabilizing the Dollar to Wallace.
Wallace wrote on other social and political topics including his help for women's suffrage, and repeatedly on the dangers and wastefulness of militarism. In an essay published in 1899 Wallace called for popular opinion to be rallied against warfare by showing people: "...that all modern wars are dynastic; that they are caused by the ambition, the interests, the jealousies, and the insatiable greed of power to direct or determine to direct or determining of their rulers, or of the great mercantile and financial class which have power and influence over their rulers; and that the results of war are never good for the people, who yet bear all its burthens". In a letter published by the Daily Mail in 1909, with aviation in its infancy, he advocated an international treaty to ban the military ownership of aircraft, arguing against the idea "...that this new horror is "inevitable," and that all we can do is to beand be in the front rank of the aerial assassins—for surely no other term can so fitly describe the dropping of, say, ten thousand bombs at midnight into an enemy's capital from an invisible flight of airships."
In 1898, Wallace published The Wonderful Century: Its Successes and Its Failures, about developments in the 19th century. The first element of the book covered the major scientific and technical advances of the century; the second part covered what Wallace considered to be its social failures including the damage and destruction of wars and arms races, the rise of the urban poor and the dangerous conditions in which they lived and worked, a harsh criminal justice system that failed to reform criminals, abuses in a mental health system based on privately owned sanatoriums, the environmental damage caused by capitalism, and the evils of European colonialism. Wallace continued his social activism for the rest of his life, publishing the book The Revolt of Democracy just weeks before his death.
Wallace continued his scientific work in parallel with his social commentary. In 1880, he published Island Life as a sequel to The Geographic Distribution of Animals. In November 1886, Wallace began a ten-month trip to the United States to afford a series of popular lectures. Most of the lectures were on Darwinism evolution through natural selection, but he also gave speeches on biogeography, spiritualism, and socio-economic reform. During the trip, he was reunited with his brother John who had emigrated to California years before. He also spent a week in Colorado, with the American botanist Alice Eastwood as his guide, exploring the flora of the Rocky Mountains and gathering evidence that would lead him to a theory on how glaciation might explaincommonalities between the mountain flora of Europe, Asia and North America, which he published in 1891 in the paper "English and American Flowers". He met many other prominent American naturalists and viewed their collections. His 1889 book Darwinism used information he collected on his American trip and information he had compiled for the lectures.
On 7 November 1913, Wallace died at domestic in the country house he called Old Orchard, which he had built a decade earlier. He was 90 years old. His death was widely reported in the press. The New York Times called him "the last of the giants belonging to that wonderful group of intellectuals that included, among others, Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, Lyell, and Owen, whose daring investigations revolutionised and evolutionised the thought of the century." Another commentator in the same edition said: "No apology need be made for the few literary or scientific follies of the author of that great book on the 'Malay Archipelago'."
Some of Wallace's friends suggested that he be buried in Westminster Abbey, but his wife followed his wishes and had him buried in the small cemetery atBroadstone, Dorset. Several prominent British scientists formed a committee to have a medallion of Wallace placed in Westminster Abbey near where Darwin had been buried. The medallion was unveiled on 1 November 1915.