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In 1858, Alfred Russel Wallace, aged thirty-five,
weak with malaria, isolated in the Spice Islands, wrote
to Charles Darwin: he had, he said excitedly, worked out
a theory of natural selection. Darwin was aghast -- his
work of decades was about to be scooped. Within two weeks,
his outline and Wallace's paper were presented jointly in
London. A year later, with Wallace still on the opposite
side of the globe, Darwin published On the Origin of
Species.
This new biography of Wallace traces the
development of one of the most remarkable scientific travelers,
naturalists, and thinkers of the nineteenth century. With
vigor and sensitivity, Peter Raby reveals his subject as
a courageous, unconventional explorer and a man of exceptional
humanity. He draws more extensively on Wallace's correspondence
than has any previous biographer and offers a revealing
yet balanced account of the relationship between Wallace
and Darwin.
Wallace lacked Darwin's advantages. A largely
self-educated native of Wales, he spent four years in the
Amazon in his mid-twenties collecting specimens for museums
and wealthy patrons, only to lose his finds in a shipboard
fire in the mid-Atlantic. He vowed never to travel again.
Yet two years later he was off to the East Indies on a vast
eight-year trek; here he discovered countless species and
identified the point of divide between Asian and Australian
fauna, "Wallace's Line."
After his return, he plunged into numerous
controversies and published regularly until his death at
the age of ninety, in 1913. He penned a classic volume on
his travels, founded the discipline of biogeography, promoted
natural selection, and produced a distinctive account of
mind and consciousness in man. Sensitive and self-effacing,
he was an ardent socialist -- and spiritualist. Wallace
is one of the neglected giants of the history of science
and ideas. This stirring biography -- the first for many
years -- puts him back at center stage, where he belongs.
Peter Raby lectures in Drama and English
at Homerton College, University of Cambridge. He is the
author of the widely praised biography Samuel Butler;
Bright Paradise: Victorian Scientific Travellers
(Princeton); Fair Ophelia: A Life of Harriet Smithson
Berlioz; and Aubrey Beardsley and the 1890s. He
also writes extensively on theater and is editor of The
Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde and The Cambridge
Companion to Pinter (forthcoming).
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