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Now that Wallace Letters Online has offically launched and in this celebratory year of all things Wallace, I will be selecting a letter from each month of the year from the catalogue and blogging about it (there may be more than one if I just can't choose between letters one month!).
The blogs will be posted on the Natural History Museum's Wallace100 blog and you can read January's selection here;
Some exciting news here at the WCP to share with you all; I've recently found 105 letters written to Alfred Russel Wallace, that we weren't originally aware of! It came about, as most discoveries do really, with a little bit of luck.
Over the past week I have been cataloguing letters received from the American Museum of Natural History. They had 49 letters relating to Wallace in their Special Collections and the majority of the correspondence is between Wallace and Theodore Dru Alison Cockerell covering the years 1890 to 1912. TDA Cockerell (1846-1948) was born in Norwood, England and was the brother of Sydney Carlyle Cockerell (who was the Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge from 1908-1937).
I have been editing transcriptions this week, which has been great fun reading about Wallace's exploits! However, I have become stuck on a word that I just can't decipher and I thought I'd ask any eagle-eyed readers out there if they would like to have a guess at what it could be!
The letter is written by Wallace to his son, William in 1901 and he is talking about overseeing the building of Old Orchard, his last home he lived in in Dorset.
It's been a while since we updated the blog, so I thought it might be nice to let everyone know how we're getting on.
Details of a voluntary opportunity that has arisen on the WCP has now been advertised on the Natural History Museum's website. We are looking for three volunteers to assist in a variety of project tasks. Details of the role and how to apply can be found here;
https://nhm.irecruittotal.com/CONFIG/NHM/StaticPages/CAC/SearchVacancy.aspx?EmploymentTypeID=0&Intranet=0
I have been cataloguing letters this week and have come across two signatures that have left me stumped! I wonder if anyone out there can determine the names of the two correspondents?
The first signature (below) is from a letter written to Wallace from the Admirality Office on 15th November 1853 (ignore the superscript 'y' at the beginning of the signature – this belongs to the word before).
On behalf of the WCP project team, I'd like to thank everyone who has volunteered to transcribe some letters for us. We have had such an overwhelming response, with over 50 expressions of interest, that we've had to limit the number of volunteers to 30 for now.
I will be keeping a reserve list of all those who have kindly responded and will be in touch should any further opportunities arise.
On Wednesday 2nd November I attended the Darwin Lecture 2011, an annual lecture jointly organised by the Society of Medicine and the Linnean Society. The Lecture, held at the Royal Society of Medicine was given by Sir David Attenborough and was entitled 'Alfred Russel Wallace and the Birds of Paradise'.
Hi, my name is Caroline and I'm the new Project Archivist for the Wallace Correspondence Project. I've been in post now for 4 weeks and have been very busy getting up to speed on the progress of the project thus far. I've begun contacting repositories who hold Wallace correspondence and will be starting to catalogue the letters onto our project database soon.
