Ruth has been with us since mid-January as Archivist for the Wallace Correspondence Project. She is perfectly suited to the role, having joined us from a similar project at the National Portrait Gallery (NPG). That project concerned the correspondence of Victorian painter and sculptor George Frederic Watts (1817-1904). Her work involved organising, cataloguing and digitising a collection of 1500 letters. There are comparisons to be drawn between Watts and Alfred Russel Wallace. Both came from a poor background, became social reformers, their interests were much wider than just the study of the arts or natural history, and since the popularity of their day, are now relatively less known.

Ruth's first introduction to using archives came whilst completing her BA in History during 2005, which inspired her to apply for a post at Lambeth Palace Library. This interest encouraged her to undertake a Archives Records Management MA at UCL, where her dissertation studied black, minority and ethnic archives.

Since Ruth has taken over as Archivist to the Wallace Correspondence project, more than 40 extra letters have been added to the online collection. One of her main responsibilities is to increase the total number that have been transcribed: currently nearly 50% have been. As well as her own contributions, she manages a team of volunteer transcribers and proof reading their work before they are added to the website.

Each year for two weeks during the summer, the Library & Archives hosts a group of Harvard students as part of their 8 week summer school programme here in the UK. So in July, Ruth will provide the next group of students with a chance to learn about the work of Wallace, by meeting scientists and specimens behind the scenes and giving them each a selection of letters to transcribe. At the end of their visit, these will then be proof read and added to the online resource.

Part of Ruth's role includes finding letters in other repositories and arranging for scans of letters to be included in the Wallace Correspondence Project.

An exciting development is that one of Wallace's notebooks from Rio Negro, which is extremely faint and therefore illegible, is being sent to the British Library (BL) to be scanned on their new spectral imaging machine. This technique was used by the BL for their Livingstone Project. Once this is complete Ruth will ensure it is added to the website, making it accessible to all.

Currently Ruth is preparing extra unpublished material including some drawings, from the Wallace collection held in the Library & Archives, to be scanned in-house and added.

With a zoologist mother and geologist sister, Ruth was already immersed in the world of natural history, but has already learnt a lot through her work here. She grew up in London and of course visited the museum as a child, but "it's so cool going behind the scenes and being here before the museum opens its doors to the public each day!".  Some of her highlights are the stain glass windows in the Central Hall, the Herbarium, the Bird Gallery and the Wildlife Garden. She, along with many others, is looking forward to seeing the new Mammoths exhibition.

Today sees the launch of a new resource that will hopefully offer users an invaluable insight into life and work of an eminent Victorian scientist; a scientist we hold dear to our hearts here at the Museum! Wallace Letters Online is an online archive of the correspondence to and from Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913), co-discoverer of the theory of evolution via natural selection and the father of bio-geography.

Above: Alfred Russel Wallace in 1848, aged 25.
© Natural History Museum, London

Wallace Letters Online brings together for the first time ever, all known surviving letters to and from Wallace, both academic and personal. This correspondence is housed in more than 100 institutions across the globe and this resource will offer an unparalleled insight into the mind of this great man; his thoughts, ideas and opinions laid bare for all to study. Highlights include the complete, surviving narrative between Wallace and Charles Darwin, letters sent and received during his Amazon and Malay Archipelago expeditions and correspondence Wallace exchanged with some of the greatest scientific minds of the nineteenth century.

Working as the Archivist for the Wallace Correspondence Project and having the privilege of reading Wallace’s letters has afforded me the opportunity to see first-hand, the great qualities he had; from his formidable intellect to his sharp and enquiring mind and a very quick wit, it’s all there in the letters, waiting to be uncovered. For me, personally, Wallace Letters Online offers another dimension, that of the exploration of Victorian communication networks.

Embedded amongst the historically and scientifically ground-breaking letters are those that pertain to the nuances of everyday life. The letters that Wallace writes confirming train times to friends who are to visit him or the enquiring letters, asking if a friend can lend him a bed for the night in London so he may attend an evening function. Put simply, these are communications that today we would send via text, tweet or Facebook message. These are also the communications that should a similar correspondence project be attempted 200 years from now would be lost and whilst one could argue that these types of letters offer no significant value, their absence would strip away a whole layer of knowledge about the social interactions of that era.

Whilst we celebrate Wallace as a great man of science and one of the greatest natural history collectors of all time, his correspondence also reveal the many, many different subjects and causes he wrote on and campaigned for. He became a Spiritualist in the late 1860s and published over a hundred writings on the subject. He became a vocal campaigner and supporter of Land Nationalisation, becoming the first President of the Land Nationalisation Society in 1881 and he was fervent in his opposition of compulsory vaccination in the closing years of the nineteenth century. All of these topics and more are featured in the letters in Wallace Letters Online. It also affords us a privileged glimpse into his family life, with letters digitised from Wallace to his two children, William and Violet. These letters reveal the affection towards but also the high standards Wallace held his children to.

Above: Extract of a letter from Wallace to his son William.
© Natural History Museum, London

Fortunately for us, Wallace had beautiful handwriting (as seen above) which makes reading his letters all the more enjoyable. Whether for research, curiosity or pleasure, you can now step back in time and read first hand his thoughts, opinions and arguments; you might be surprised at what you find. The catalogue will continue to be added to over the coming months with more letters from repositories around the world. We are also always extremely happy to hear from anyone who may own a Wallace letter or knows of some letters held in a private collection; please contact me with any details.

2013 also sees the Museum celebrating the life and legacy of Wallace, who died 100 years ago this coming November. To see what the up and coming Wallace events are at the Museum this year, head over to the Wallace100 pages of the website to find out more. We're also tweeting about Wallace over at the Library and Archives Twitter feed; follow us for a weekly dose of all things Wallace!

“I am afraid the ship’s on fire.” These fateful words were uttered by the Captain of the Brig Helen on 6th August 1852, which was sailing from South America to London, as a fire broke out in the ship’s hold. The dramatic events of the fire and subsequent rescue of the ship’s crew and passengers are recorded in a letter from the great Victorian naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913), who had spent the previous four years travelling through the Amazon, to his friend Richard Spruce (1817-1893).

(Right) Page one of the eight page letter to Spruce

© Natural History Museum

The letter was written from the Brig Jordeson on 19th September 1852, the vessel that saved the stricken survivors after they had endured ten harrowing days and nights in a small row boat, 200 miles from the nearest land, with water seeping into the boat from numerous holes. Wallace describes how he was “scorched by the sun, [his] hands nose and ears being completely skinned, and [was] drenched every day by the seas and spray”. They finally anchored ship at Deal, Kent, on 1st October with Wallace rejoicing to Spruce “Oh! Glorious day! Here we are on shore at Deal where the ship is at anchor. Such a dinner! Oh! Beef steaks and damson tart, a paradise for hungry sinners.” The joy at being back on dry land in England is clear to see, made even more poignant by the terrible storms they had to endure in the English Channel the night before they anchored; storms, in which “many vessels were lost”.  

Alfred Russel Wallace was born in Usk, Monmouthshire on 8th January 1823, the eighth of nine children. Leaving school at 14 due to his family’s financial constraints, he trained as a land-surveyor, working with his brother William until 1843, when, owing to a down-turn in work, he lost his job. This turn of fate led him to meet budding young amateur naturalist Henry Walter Bates (1825-1892) in Leicester, Bate’s hometown, after Wallace accepted a job at the Collegiate School there. Wallace moved to Neath, Wales in 1845, but kept in regular contact with Bates, and it was this friendship that first stirred in Wallace an interest in entomology.

A seed was sown in Wallace’s mind after reading William Henry Edward’s book A Voyage up the River Amazon, and early in 1848 he began making plans with Bates for their own voyage to South America. This idea came to fruition as the two young, eager friends set sail from Liverpool on 26th April 1848 bound for Pará (Belém).      

For Wallace the aim of their Amazon trip was two-fold. Firstly, they were to go and collect specimens of birds, insects and other animals not only for their private collections, but also to sell to collectors and museums across Europe. Secondly, Wallace went with the aim of attempting to discover the mechanism of evolution. Having read the controversial Vestiges of Natural History of Creation by Robert Chambers in 1845, he became convinced of the reality of evolution, which was then known by the term of transmutation. Indeed, in a letter to Bates in 1847, he asserted that he sought to “take one family, to study thoroughly- principally with a view to the theory of the origin of species”.    

(Left) Alfred Russel Wallace, 1848. © Natural History Museum

  
Wallace and Bates parted company whilst there to focus on different areas, with Wallace travelling around the Amazon basin and Rio Negro. It was here he made beautifully intricate drawings of fish species he found on the Rio Negro, and also used his land surveying skills to create a wonderfully detailed map of the Rio Negro; so detailed and accurate that it became the standard map of the river for many years.

Wallace decided to leave the Amazon in 1852 after becoming quite poorly. He sadly lost his brother, Edward, in June 1851 to yellow fever, after Edward had joined Wallace and Bates early on the expedition. Wallace boarded the brig Helen on 12th July, sailing for 26 days before disaster struck.Wallace describes very candidly in his letter to Spruce the frantic moments after the discovery of the fire and the realisation that they would need to abandon ship. He managed to run back to his cabin and collect some items together in a small tin box. He tells Spruce he felt “foolish” in saving his watch and money. However, once aboard the life-boat his regrets at not having “saved some new shoes, cloth coat and trousers” are clear to see. Tragically, Wallace lost all of his natural history specimens, so painstakingly collected over the previous two years; the specimens he collected during the first two years having been successfully posted back to his agent, and he recounts this tragedy to Spruce in the letter:

(Below) One of the intricate fish drawings Wallace was able to save before abandoning the Brig Helen © Natural History Museum

“My collections however were in the hold and were irrevocably lost. And now I begin to think, that almost all the reward of my four years of privation and danger were lost. What I had hitherto sent home had little more than paid my expenses and what I had in the “Helen” I calculated would realise near £500 (around £30,000 in today’s money). But even all this might have gone with little regret had not far the richest part of my own private collection gone also. All my private collection of insects and birds since I left Pará was with me, and contained hundreds of new and beautiful species which would have rendered (I had fondly hoped) my cabinet, as far regards American species, one of the finest in Europe”

A few gems from this trip, however, do survive, and are preserved by us here at the Museum, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and The Linnean Society. When in his cabin, frantically trying to fit as much as he could in his tin box, Wallace scooped up the drawings he had made of the fishes of the Rio Negro and of Amazonian palms. The Library’s Special Collections now hold the four volumes of fish drawings, with the palm drawings held by the Linnean. The specimens of palms collected, which are now housed in Kew’s Herbarium were sent back during the first two years of the expedition.

At the end of his letter to Spruce, written from London on 8th October, Wallace muses about his next trip. He mentions the Andes or the Philippines as possible destinations for his next collecting expedition. However, Wallace, in 1854, headed out to explore the islands of the Malay Archipelago (Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia), spending eight years there and finally realising his aim of uncovering the mechanism of evolution – a theory that came to him as he was recovering from fever in Ternate in early 1858. An essay followed; one that was sent to Charles Darwin, received in June 1858, and which was read on 1st July at the Linnean Society in London, alongside Darwin’s own paper on the subject, and which led to the “Darwin-Wallace Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection”. The rest they say, is history.

This letter caught my imagination as soon as I read it, as it highlights the real danger faced by those who travelled to far flung corners of the world in the hope of advancing our understanding of the natural world, in sometimes dangerous and harsh conditions. I also really feel for Wallace having lost the fruits of his hard fought labour. However, every story has a silver lining and Wallace’s Malay Archipelago trip certainly must have helped heal the wounds of the lost Amazon collections. The result of eight years hard work in south-east Asia was an unrivalled collection of 110,000 insects, 7,500 shells, 8,050 bird skins, and 410 mammal and reptile specimens, including well over a thousand species new to science. His book The Malay Archipelago, first published in 1869, is the most celebrated travel book of that region and has not been out of print since it was first published.

The letter to Spruce forms part of the Wallace Collection held in the NHM Library & Archives, and is included in the Wallace Correspondence Project, a three year project based in the Library & Archives, which aims to create a catalogue of all known surviving correspondence to and from Wallace and to make the catalogue available online. You can find out more about the project here Wallace Correspondence Project and look out for the catalogue of correspondence which will be launching this autumn on the Museum’s website.

A well-earned reward for the 7 undergraduate Harvard students working on the Wallace Correspondence Project in the Library.

They had the chance to meet Sir David Attenborough who was visiting the Museum. He is also the patron of the Wallace Correspondence Project.