Alfred Russel Wallace – The Early Yearsbedroom, where a fire was lit every afternoon in winter, so that, with the exception of one
hour with the boys and half an hour at supper with Mr. and Mrs. Hill, my time after four or
five in the afternoon was my own.Leicester also had a mechanics’ institute and lending library where Wallace could
find books on his favourite subjects – botany, butterflies and insects. It was in 1844
and probably on one of his ramblings that Wallace met Henry Walter Bates, a young
man his own age who shared an interest in the natural world around their home town.
Bates had been forced to leave school at twelve to work as an apprentice to the hosiery
trade, but his passion was for beetles. He proudly showed Wallace his large, neatly
arranged collection and a thick book with the descriptions of more than 3000 British
species of beetle. Unknown to almost everybody except Henry Walter Bates there
existed around Leicester thousands of different species of beetle, of all shapes, colours
and sizes. This took Wallace completely by surprise as he wrote:
If I had been asked before how many different kinds of beetle were to be found in any small
district near a town, I should probably have guessed fifty, or at the outside a hundred ...
Now I learnt that ... there were probably a thousand ... within ten miles.Wallace obtained a collecting bottle, pins, a store-box and in order to learn their
names and classification he managed to purchase ‘at a wholesale price’ a copy of James
Stephens’ Manual of British Coleoptera. Both young men were fortunate to have
found each other at this stage in their lives. They shared their free time roaming the
countryside around Leicester hunting beetles and discussing books they were reading
on natural history. They both read Charles Darwin’s Journal of Researches from the
voyage of the Beagle. Wallace was impressed by Darwin’s accessible language and
he wrote to Bates saying: ‘His style of writing I very much admire, so free from all
labour, affectation, or egotism, and yet so full of interest and original thought’.
They both read Alexander von Humboldt’s multi-volume Personal Narrative of
Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent and discussed his travels
in South America and the glories of the tropical rainforest. Humboldt saw that in the
natural world no single fact can be considered in isolation. He invented the web of
life and the concept of nature as we know it today, including the concept of human-
induced climate change. After the publication of his works Humboldt travelled to
England where he met Sir Joseph Banks, now president of the Royal Society, who
showed him his huge herbarium with its unique Australian specimens. Humboldt, Sir
Joseph Banks and Charles Darwin were heroes to the young Wallace and Bates, yet
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