Alfred Russel Wallace

In 1858, Alfred Russel Wallace, aged 35, 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 biography of Wallace traces the development of one of the most remarkable scientific travellers, naturalists, and thinkers of the 19th century. 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-20s 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

Author Biography

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).