The Wallace Correspondence Project (WCP) has just catalogued its 6000th item - a letter written in 1863 by Alfred Russel Wallace to John Henry Gurney (1819 - 1890) - see image below. Gurney was a partner in Gurney's bank of Norwich for 30 years, a Liberal M.P. for King’s Lynn, and an amateur ornithologist.
During Phase 2 of the WCP, which began in December 2017, we have found and added 416 items new to our database, of which 330 are letters and 86 other documents, such as notebooks, drawings by Wallace etc. As of today, our database holds records for 5528 letters and 472 other documents - most of which I know for a fact have never been studied by Wallace scholars. What gems there must be hidden among all this treasure! I have already found a few, such as THIS ONE, but there must be many, many others (I have only read a fraction of the letters).
There are still 176 documents still to add, so by the end of Phase 2 on 1st September 2020 we will have added a total of 592 new items to our database.
200 institutions or private collections
majority unstudied
Here is the database record for the 6000th item:
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