There are currently 0 users online.
We are delighted to announce that the project has just published the first ever catalogue of all known surviving letters to and from Wallace. It contains records of 5,688 letters arranged chronologically, of which 2,748 were written by Wallace and 2,159 were sent to him. The remaining 781 are third party letters which either pertain to him (e.g.
I have produced a video of my popular talk "Alfred Russel Wallace, Charles Darwin and Natural Selection: the Real Story". You can see it on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/amUeud7ZyAU
I have been invited to give the Leicester Secular Society's Annual Darwin Anniversary Lecture 2021. It will be a public Zoom talk about Wallace's discovery of natural selection, and will take place on 14th Feb. at 18.30 UTC.
Today, 8th January 2021, is the 198th anniversary of Alfred Russel Wallace's birth. It is also the date (coincidentally) that we sent the Epsilon team the final versions of the project's letter transcripts and associated metadata for import into the Epsilon system. Our data will be released online later this month. The three year grant we have had from the John Templeton Foundation sadly comes to an end on January 31st and the project's director George Beccaloni will then begin to seek additional funding to continue the project.
Very many congratulations to Bill Bailey for winning Strictly Come Dancing 2020! What an amazing achievement!
Our funding from the John Templeton Foundation (USA) was due to end on the 31st August 2020. However, there was a surplus of unspent money in our budget, so following the helpful suggestion of The Charles Darwin Trust (which manages our grant), we asked Templeton whether the grant deadline could be extended for 4 months until December 31st. Very fortunately, they agreed.
One of the many things the Alfred Russel Wallace Correspondence Project (WCP) is trying to do is to 'electronically unite' all the items which make up what we call a "letter packet" i.e. a letter, its envelope, and any enclosures it may have contained (e.g. newspaper clippings, photographs etc). These have often become disassociated with one another over time, and may in fact have ended up in different archives/collections, sometimes on different continents. A case in point is an envelope of a letter sent by the great Scottish geologist James Croll to Wallace in 1870.
By George Beccaloni (Director of the WCP), 27th July 2020
