Two names stand out in the history of modern evolutionary biology: Charles Darwin and his lesser known confrère, Alfred Russel Wallace. So much has been said of the former that it has become an acknowledged ‘industry’. Wallace's historiography pales by comparison. Nevertheless, Wallace is playing catch-up with biographies like Peter Raby's Alfred Russell Wallace: A Life (2001), Michael Shermer's In Darwin's Shadow: The Life and Science of Alfred Russel Wallace (2002), Martin Fichman's An Elusive Victorian: The Evolution of Alfred Russel Wallace (2004), and Ross A. Slotten's The Heretic in Darwin's Court: The Life of Alfred Russel Wallace (2004), adding to Amabel Williams-Ellis's classic Darwin's Moon: A Biography of Alfred Russel Wallace (1966). Do we really need another? The answer, in this case, is yes.
Unlike the other biographies just mentioned, this one is notable for presenting the life of this complex but fascinating evolutionist in an easily accessible and compact format. Brevity is a daunting task for any writer who would recount the life of a man who spent four years (1848–1852) exploring South America and eight years (1854–1862) traversing the Malay archipelago (today maritime South East Asia); who shocked Darwin on 18 June 1858 with a letter from the island of Ternate outlining a theory of natural selection, prompting the Down House recluse to come out of hiding with his Origin of Species seventeen months later; who lived nearly ninety-one years, publishing twenty-two books and more than five hundred scientific papers; and who ventured outspoken opinions on a wide range of social, political and metaphysical topics from socialism to spiritualism. Yet this book rises to the challenge.
In nine succinct, well-organized chapters Armstrong deftly describes a man who surmounted substantial difficulties – a devastating shipwreck, bouts of malaria, the death of his nearly seven-year-old son Bertie, financial hardships, a psychopath's stalking, to name a few – rising to become honoured by every major scientific society of England, including the award of the prestigious Order of Merit by its founder, King Edward VII. The qualities that earned these recognitions were established early. Armstrong observes that Wallace possessed
a zeal for self-education, wide reading, the constant relating of theoretical study to the practical, a questioning approach, and enthusiasm for collecting, naming and classification (to an almost obsessive degree), the giving and attending of lectures at mechanics’ halls and elsewhere, and the organisation of his thoughts into sustained writing. (p. 22)
The final chapter, ‘Some thoughts on Wallace's mind and character’, seeks to explain the psychology of this complicated naturalist, biologist, ecologist, anthropologist, biogeographer and social critic. Taking his cue from Andrew Berry's ‘Ardent beetle-hunters’ chapter in Charles H. Smith and George Beccaloni's Natural History & Beyond (2008), Armstrong proposes the intriguing theory that Wallace may have suffered from Asperger's syndrome. Wallace's eccentricities – his reported social awkwardness, his difficulties with employment, his purported lack of empathy – are explained as those of a ‘“high-functioning” individual who had some of the traits of the syndrome to a certain degree’ (p. 154).
This diagnosis is interesting but speculative. Armstrong's assertions of Wallace's ‘lack of empathy’ appear countered by his passion for stronger labour laws to protect the beleaguered Victorian working class and his disdain for the harsh and insensitive treatment of the vulnerable, whether poor farmers in Wales or the indigenous peoples he encountered in Brazil or the South Pacific. Furthermore, the telltale social ineptitude so typical of Asperger's syndrome seems lacking in Wallace. He had long and enduring friendships with colleagues like Charles Lyell, Richard Spruce, St George Mivart and others. At home his surviving children (Violet and Will) describe their father as fun to be around with a clever sense of humor. Awkwardness around the opposite sex seems noticeably absent in the man who in 1866 married Annie Mitten, with whom he remained for the next forty-seven years. Whether in darkened parlors with female mediums and clairvoyants or with outspoken women's rights advocates like Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who stayed at the Wallaces’ home during her visit to England in 1896, Wallace enjoyed the company of interesting and intelligent women. Wallace was a close and long-time friend of Lyell's former secretary and science author/editor, Mrs Arabella Fisher (née Buckley). While touring North America, Wallace spent a week being guided up Grays Peak, Colorado by twenty-eight-year-old self-taught botanist Alice Eastwood. The common interests of the young woman with her sexagenarian companion failed to raise even Victorian eyebrows, but it is hard to imagine this from a man suffering from Asperger's syndrome or, for that matter, a young woman's willingness to endure it. Wallace could be a heterodox contrarian, but different doesn't always mean disorder. Where Armstrong sees pathology others might see a man uninhibited in his distrust of a rigid Victorian class system and dismissive of its strict social conventions.
Armstrong's psychologizing aside, this brief but engaging book offers an excellent introduction to the life and work of a towering figure in Victorian/Edwardian science. An extremely useful ‘Chronology’ of Wallace's life (pp. 161–163) amply recompenses the reader for a ‘Select bibliography’ that is perhaps a bit too ‘select’. Overall, this nicely illustrated and handsome but economically bound volume should be a welcome addition to any library at home or on campus covering this rich period in the biological sciences.
