Peter Raby: Alfred Russel Wallace: A Life

By JOHN McCRYSTAL

You wander down to the letterbox one day, and there's a fat envelope in there. Your heart flutters. Relax, you tell yourself. Just paranoia.

Half an hour later, you're sobbing brokenly. You had the idea 20 years ago, and have spent the past two decades collecting the evidence with which to furnish an unshakable argument. You're on the brink of publication, and yet here it is, your idea, fully formulated and set down in another's hand.

Such was Charles Darwin's position in June 1858, on the eve of the publication of his theory of natural selection. The letter in question had been written by a young naturalist from his sickbed in the Spice Islands.

The enclosure was his own articulation of Darwin's theory, independently arrived at and set down in a spirit of high excitement which Wallace respectfully asked the senior naturalist to share.

When we think of the theory of natural selection, Darwin's name springs to mind right away; few have heard of Wallace. What happened?

Darwin was devastated, and wrote to close friends asking what his obligations were. He would rather burn his nearly completed manuscript than publish it, he wrote, if to publish it might attract the accusation that he had behaved in a paltry spirit. In fact, at their instigation, a paper setting out Darwin's theory was presented jointly with Wallace's to the Linnean Society on July 1, 1858.

Although Darwin's claim to priority was only subtly pressed, Wallace's was slowly leached away in his lifetime and all but forgotten after his death.

Partly, as Peter Raby shows, this was Wallace's fault. Because of his low birth and circumstances, he held the well-connected Darwin in such high esteem that he was delighted simply to be associated with the great man.

And while Wallace was a first-rate naturalist, he had an unfortunate tendency to nail his colours to the mast of doomed causes: once his collecting days in the wild parts of the world were over and he was resettled in England, Wallace became an outspoken advocate of such weird science as spiritualism, phrenology and - worst of all - socialism. After his death, these allegiances were used to discredit him.

What didn't happen is a conspiracy between Darwin and his friends Sir Charles Lyell and Sir William Hooker to suppress Wallace and promote Darwin. Raby's sane riposte to this kind of wild speculation, which has become popular - where else? - in America, forms the climax to this pleasantly written, authoritative account of Wallace's life and character.

It's a good example of how biography ought to be done: it's a presentation of evidence inviting the reader to join the dots, rather than an artist's impression built up with broad strokes of speculation.

Both Wallace and Darwin come out of the matter well: Wallace's self-effacement seems almost superhuman, and Darwin's apparently sincere wish to do the right thing illuminates a noble sentiment that too many of his biographers have ignored.

General readers may struggle to sustain their interest through what is, deliberately, an unsensational narrative. But for those with an interest in the field, or simply in biography, it's a book you finish with a genuine affection for Wallace, an admiration for the author's craftsmanship and a gratifying sense that justice has been done.

* John McCrystal is an Auckland freelance writer.

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