Catalogue of Alfred Russel Wallace's Correspondence Published

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. a letter from Richard Spruce to William Jackson Hooker which mentions why Wallace and Bates went their separate ways in the Amazon), or are letters written by Wallace's close relatives which contain information useful to scholars interested in Wallace's life. Preliminary transcripts of all these letters can be seen in the project's Epsilon database (see it HERE).

I estimate that the catalogue took 8-10 person years of work to produce. First, the letters had to be tracked down (in 245 collections around the world, and in 245 articles and books) and scans of them obtained. They then had to be databased and the metadata carefully checked and edited. The catalogue can be seen and downloaded, free of charge, HERE or HERE

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Scratchpads developed and conceived by (alphabetical): Ed Baker, Katherine Bouton Alice Heaton Dimitris Koureas, Laurence Livermore, Dave Roberts, Simon Rycroft, Ben Scott, Vince Smith