Historic Day for the Wallace Correspondence Project

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. In particular funds are needed to work on and publish volume 1 of The Correspondence of Alfred Russel Wallace in time for the 200th anniversary of Wallace's birth in 2023. We have already done perhaps two thirds of the neccessary work on the transcripts we plan to publish in this book. Doing the last third will take two people about two years to complete. Volume 1 will contain all the letters from Wallace's childhood, up until his return from the 'Malay Archipelago' in 1862. It would be a wonderful and important contribution to the worldwide cellebrations we expect to see in 2023.