His passion was aided by his new job, as being a surveyor meant long walks through the British countryside which he could explore at his leisure. It was at this time that he first expressed an interest in evolution, and wrote in a letter to Bates from 1847 that he grew dissatisfied with the local selection of bugs and that he would like to take one family of insects and study it thoroughly “with a view to the theory of the origin of species.” He corresponded frequently with Bates and had become an insect collector himself. He left his teaching position in Leicester and went to Neath where William’s surveying company was located and assumed control of the business.ĭuring these years, Wallace’s interest in the natural world increased greatly.

Bates and Wallace struck a friendship together and the former sparked the latter’s interest in entomology.Īlfred’s life took a turn in 1845 when his brother William died suddenly. He was only 19 years old, but already had a paper on beetles published in the scientific journal The Zoologist. At the time, Bates was somewhat of a celebrity in the entomology world. This proved to be a crucial moment for Wallace because he met a man who would have an enormous influence on his life – Henry Walter Bates. From Wikimedia Commons: A photograph of Henry Walter Bates. In 1844, he managed to parlay his experience into a teaching position at the Collegiate School in Leicester where he taught surveying and mapmaking. The two Wallace brothers worked as surveyors for six years until business slowed down so much that Alfred, once again, had to find new employment. Alfred only stayed there for a few months, though, before leaving the capital and moving in with another of his brothers, William, who could take him on as an apprentice land surveyor. They could not afford to keep Alfred in school anymore so, instead, they sent him to London to live with his older brother, John, who found an apprenticeship as a carpenter. When Alfred was a teenager in 1837, his family’s financial situation went from bad to worse after his father basically lost everything in a swindle. Wallace never went to college because he never had the money, but this did not stop him from becoming a first-class naturalist and explorer.

Young Alfred enrolled at Richard Hale’s Grammar School where he received the only formal education of his life. When Wallace was five, his parents once again set off for greener (and cheaper) pastures and relocated to Hertford. Instead, he relied on an inheritance for the first half of his adult life, and, when that ran out, he attempted various business ventures that usually proved unsuccessful and left the family worse off than it was at the start. Thomas Wallace had a law degree but, for some reason, never went into practice. Before he was born, his parents lived in London but relocated to Monmouthshire to lower their cost of living. Speaking of him, we do have a video on William Wallace, if you want to check it out in the link below.īack to Alfred, when he was young, his family moved around due to money troubles that would plague Wallace for most of his life. His mother was English while his father was Scottish and claimed to be a descendant of the famed William Wallace, although this was never attested conclusively. He was the eighth of nine children of Thomas Vere Wallace and Mary Anne Greenell.

This might sound inconsequential to us, but some people have argued that this would make Wallace Welsh, while others believed that he was English, including Wallace himself who always referred to himself as an Englishman. Early YearsĪlfred Russel Wallace was born on January 8, 1823, at Kensington Cottage near the town of Usk, Monmouthshire, which is in Wales today, but back then was located in more of a gray area that some considered part of Wales and others part of England. Today, Alfred Wallace receives some of the recognition he richly deserves as we take a look at the life and career of one of the luminaries of natural history. And, to top it off, he was an autodidact – he was self-taught, more out of necessity than desire because he didn’t come from money and couldn’t afford a good education.

And he was more than just a naturalist, as he also studied geography, anthropology, ecology, and even astrobiology. Alfred Wallace was one of the most notable scientists of the 19th century.

Alfred russel wallace