9 Alfred Russel Wallace – The Early Years
Alfred Russel Wallace was born in 1823 into an impoverished middle-class family
with seven children. His father, although trained as a solicitor, had never practised and
slowly squandered his small inheritance on hopeless business ventures. The young
Wallace bonded with the natural world and he recalls his earliest childhood memories
from the village of Usk in Wales:
The form and colour of the house, the road, the river close below it, the bridge with the
cottage near its foot, the narrow fields between us and the bridge, the steep wooded bank
at the back, the stone quarry and the very shape and position of the flat slabs on which we
stood fishing, the cottages a little further on the road ... all come before me as I recall these
earlier days with a distinctness strangely contrasted with the vague shadowy figures of the
human beings who were my constant associates in all these scenes.The family regularly had to move to find cheaper accommodation and when he
was about six they moved to Hertford where he started primary school. His school
had been founded in 1617 and as Wallace describes in his biography, nothing much
seemed to have changed since that time:
It consisted of one large room. There was a master’s desk at each end, and two on other sides,
and two open fireplaces ... As we went to school even in winter at seven in the morning,
and on three days a week remained till five in the afternoon, some artificial lighting was
necessary, and this was effected by the primitive method of every boy bringing his own
candles or candle-ends.Fortunately, Wallace’s father had found a job in the Hertford town library and a100http://www.ebook3000.com