Biography as a two-edged sword
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Biography as a two‑edged sword Patrick Armstrong: Alfred Russel Wallace. London: Reaktion Books, 2019, 208 pp, US$19.00 PB Charles H. Smith1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Patrick Armstrong’s Wallace biography is part of the “Critical Lives” series that treats in brief (about 40,000 words of text here, by my estimate) major figures in history, and as such must in part be judged for what it cannot do: provide extended insight. On the whole, however, the biography does deliver a slickly written, reasonably comprehensive, and well-balanced account of Wallace’s life, no small achievement for such a complex subject. With the aid of a large number of judiciously chosen illustrations and quotations, Armstrong presents a story that the average layperson or undergraduate student can easily appreciate, and to that extent it can be recommended for such a readership. For those with a more consuming interest in Wallace, however, the work is more problematic. The devil here is not so much in the details as it is in its appreciation of the broader picture. Still, some details as given are in fact in error, and these mistakes, though mostly small ones, are symptomatic. A few: (1) As a significant matter of chronology, Wallace’s older brother died in 1845, not in 1846 as Armstrong states twice. (2) During his North American tour, Wallace did not visit Canada on his way back to England only; indeed, the lectures he gave there were part of a special side-trip he made while staying in Washington D.C. before venturing westward. (3) Wallace was not, with Huxley, the last of the early evolutionists remaining when Darwin died (Joseph Hooker was also still alive). (4) The Malay Archipelago has probably never been out of print (notwithstanding the remarks of Van Wyhe (2015), who confuses the date of an imprint with its extended state of availability, and ignores the existence of several Chinese and Japanese imprints from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s). (5) Wallace did not publish his first writing on spiritualism “a few months” after attending his first séance, but over a year later. (6) Wallace could not have turned to spiritualism because of any depression over the death of his mother or being jilted by his fiancée, as his mother died nearly 3 years after the time of his first séance, and he had * Charles H. Smith [email protected] 1
Professor Emeritus, Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, KY, USA
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already been seeing his wife-to-be Annie for several months by that date. Nothing earth-shaking here, but nothing to instil confidence either. Of more concern are Armstrong’s attempts to provide perspectives on Wallace’s character in the limited space he has been given. This results in both suppression of relevant information, and misguided pronouncements. For example, he states unequivocally that there is “not the slightest evidence” that, as some have suggested, Wallace may have resented the way he was treated by Darwin, Lyell, and Hooker in the 1858 Linnean Society presentation. There is, in f
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