By George Beccaloni, December 2023
During 2023 I located 100+ letters to and from Wallace which the Wallace Correspondence Project (WCP) didn't previously know about. I am fairly sure that hundreds remain to be found in the archives of libraries and other institutions worldwide, but tracking them down will require a lot more time-consuming detective work. As an example of how we find 'new' letters, here is a brief account of work I did today which MAY have found four we don't have:
Our new volunteer Christine Chua, recently transcribed a typewritten list, probably produced after Wallace's death by his son William, who wanted to sell the books in Wallace's library. It is entitled "Dr A. R. Wallace's Library. List of the principal books" and images of it can be seen in the WCP's old and largely defunct website Wallace Letters Online - see HERE I saw on the list that 17 of the books contained letters from the authors to Wallace, so I decided to check whether or not we had copies of them. I knew that Wallace's library was bought by Thomas Henry Riches in 1914 for £200, and that in 1915 he donated the scientific books (300+ volumes) to the Linnean Society of London (as explained HERE), and 470 books on other 'less scientific' topics to the Hope Department of Entomology Library at the Oxford Museum of Natural History. In 1993 the Hope Library gave these books to Edinburgh University Library - see HERE and HERE
I then spent several hours looking the books up in the Linnean Society and Edinburgh Library's online catalogues and then checking whether we had the letter using EPSILON, our catalogue of Wallace's correspondence. I found that we already had 11 of the letters found in the 14 books which the Linnean Society had, but none from the two books in Edinburgh Library which I knew have (or had!) letters in them. One of the books which the Linnean had was recorded as probably stolen, and another book could not be found in either library. I have now written to librarians at the Linnean and Edinburgh libraries to ask them to kindly check the two books I identified in each library as containing letters, and if the letters are present, to please send copies to me. Interestingly one of the letters is by the communist Peter Kropotkin.
Modern printing of the book Kropotin sent to Wallace.
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