Summary
Composition: Books, illustrations, photographs, letters and manuscripts
Authors/Artists:
- Alfred Russell Wallace (1823–1913)
The Alfred Russel Wallace collection
The naturalist and explorer Alfred Russel Wallace
Our collection contains a significant number of letters and manuscripts from the renowned naturalist, explorer and collector Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913).
Wallace is recognised as the father of evolutionary biogeography, whose achievements include co-discovering the theory of evolution by natural selection. Around the world his scientific contributions are recognised with many species named in his honour and for his groundbreaking work in the field of biogeography with the ‘Wallace Line’, the conceptual boundary he proposed that marks the difference between species found in Asia and Australia.
What does the Wallace Collection contain?
Throughout much of his life Wallace was a prolific letter writer. Over 5,600 of his letters are known to survive and a significant proportion of these are preserved in our collection.
The Wallace collection includes personal and related family papers, correspondence, accounts of expenditure, publisher's proofs, reprints, photographs, certificates, pamphlets, press-cuttings, lecture notes and obituaries. These include Wallace’s fish drawings and notes from the Rio Negro, which were among the only surviving possessions he saved when the ship he was voyaging on tragically caught fire and sank with Wallace narrowly escaping with his life.
We also hold books from Wallace’s personal library, which include a copy of his own publication ‘The Malay Archipelago’ that was published in 1869.
The collection provides fascinating insights on a variety of social and scientific subjects such as glaciology, anthropology, astrobiology, socialism, land reform and spiritualism. It also reveals Wallace's post-publication thoughts and reactions to the work of others, notably Charles Darwin.
Correspondence
The correspondence contained within the Wallace collection includes letters to and from other naturalists including Richard Spruce and Henry Walter Bates, as well as some letters to the Clarion newspaper.
There are also many family letters including those to his children William and Violet, as well as his siblings with whom he corresponded, such as his older brothers William and John, older sisters Eliza and Frances (Fanny) and younger brother Herbert Edward. All these letters provide a highly personal insight into Wallace’s family life.
The Wallace correspondence project
Given the quantity, variety and significance of the material held in our collection, a project was developed in 2003 with the aim of digitising and transcribing the correspondence. With funding from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation, the John Templeton Foundation and the Alfred Russel Wallace Memorial Fund, the Wallace Correspondence Project aimed to locate, digitise, catalogue, transcribe and interpret all of Wallace’s extant correspondence and provide searchable transcriptions for them.
With the help of a large team of volunteers, the project resulted in the letters and transcriptions being made available through a Natural History Museum hosted site called Wallace Letters Online which included all of the correspondence held in our collections.
Alongside our collection, letters held in the British Library, the Oxford Museum of Natural History, and the University Libraries at Oxford and Cambridge were also scanned for the project. Our involvement in the Wallace Correspondent project is no longer active but we remain grateful to all the supporters who made its existence possible.
Access to the full content of the Wallace Letters Online dataset website is no longer possible, but access to the Museum’s Wallace manuscript collection remains through our Discovery Layer.
The Wallace Family papers are catalogued here with the hierarchy of the collection here. Access to transcriptions or booking an appointment to view the physical collections can be arranged through the Library and Archives.
All of the collections in the Wallace Correspondence Project are discoverable via the Epsilon database that has been developed by the University of Cambridge.