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 the 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 (Dresser's 1893 A Monograph of the Coraciidae, or the Family of the Rollers), and another book could not be found in either library (Franklin's 1904 The Socialization of Humanity). 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 books with a letter is by the communist Peter Kropotkin, but it seems likely the letter is by Sydney Carlyle Cockerell, as he seems to have sent the book to Wallace (see WCP1624). HERE is an interesting letter from Wallace to Cockerell which he wrote after he had read Kropotkin's book. He wrote:
"I did not write much to Kropotkin about his "Mutual Aid", because, although the book is very interesting and instructive in bringing together the numerous cases in which animals help each other, yet I consider he is quite wrong in his conclusion that this at all affects the question of the severe struggle for existence. This is due to his actual want of practical knowledge of the facts of variation and multiplication in animals, and also to his not having fully grasped the varied modes in which the struggle acts.
He talks of the millions killed by storms, floods &c. as leaving so few that there is no further struggle, — not seeing that all such causes are part of the "struggle". He even states, as his conclusion, that in many cases there is "no competition"! I have noted a large number of cases in which he shows want of appreciation of the actual mode of evolution by natural selection."
Modern printing of the book Cockerell sent to Wallace.
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