page_title: Alfred Russel Wallace
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: Alfred Russel Wallace / Biography / Early life
caption_attribution_description: English: Photo of building Wallace and his brother designed and built for Mechanics Institute of Neath in the 1840s.
context_page_description: Alfred Russel Wallace OM FRS was a British naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist, biologist and illustrator. He is best known for independently conceiving the theory of evolution through natural selection; his paper on the subject was jointly published with some of Charles Darwin's writings in 1858. This prompted Darwin to publish On the Origin of Species.
  Like Darwin, Wallace did extensive fieldwork; first in the Amazon River basin, and then in the Malay Archipelago, where he identified the faunal divide now termed the Wallace Line, which separates the Indonesian archipelago into two distinct parts: a western portion in which the animals are largely of Asian origin, and an eastern portion where the fauna reflect Australasia.
  He was considered the 19th century's leading expert on the geographical distribution of animal species and is sometimes called the "father of biogeography". Wallace was one of the leading evolutionary thinkers of the 19th century and made many other contributions to the development of evolutionary theory besides being co-discoverer of natural selection.
context_section_description: Alfred Wallace was born in the Welsh village of Llanbadoc, near Usk, Monmouthshire. He was the eighth of nine children of Thomas Vere Wallace and Mary Anne Greenell. Mary Anne was English; Thomas Wallace was probably of Scottish ancestry. His family, like many Wallaces, claimed a connection to William Wallace, a leader of Scottish forces during the Wars of Scottish Independence in the 13th century. Thomas Wallace graduated in law but never practised law. He owned some income-generating property, but bad investments and failed business ventures resulted in a steady deterioration of the family's financial position. His mother was from a middle-class English family from Hertford, north of London. When Wallace was five years old, his family moved to Hertford. There he attended Hertford Grammar School until financial difficulties forced his family to withdraw him in 1836 when he was aged 14.
  Wallace then moved to London to board with his older brother John, a 19-year-old apprentice builder. This was a stopgap measure until William, his oldest brother, was ready to take him on as an apprentice surveyor. While in London, Alfred attended lectures and read books at the London Mechanics Institute (current Birkbeck, University of London). Here he was exposed to the radical political ideas of the Welsh social reformer Robert Owen and of Thomas Paine. He left London in 1837 to live with William and work as his apprentice for six years.
  At the end of 1839, they moved to Kington, Hereford, near the Welsh border, before eventually settling at Neath in Glamorgan in Wales. Between 1840 and 1843, Wallace did land surveying work in the countryside of the west of England and Wales. By the end of 1843, William's business had declined due to difficult economic conditions, and Wallace, at the age of 20, left in January.
  One result of Wallace's early travels is a modern controversy about his nationality. Since Wallace was born in Monmouthshire, some sources have considered him to be Welsh. However, some historians have questioned this because neither of his parents was Welsh, his family only briefly lived in Monmouthshire, the Welsh people Wallace knew in his childhood considered him to be English, and because Wallace himself consistently referred to himself as English rather than Welsh (even when writing about his time in Wales). One Wallace scholar has stated that the most reasonable interpretation is therefore that he was an Englishman born in Wales.
  After a brief period of unemployment, he was hired as a master at the Collegiate School in Leicester to teach drawing, mapmaking, and surveying. Wallace spent many hours at the library in Leicester: he read An Essay on the Principle of Population by Thomas Robert Malthus, and one evening he met the entomologist Henry Bates. Bates was 19 years old, and in 1843 he had published a paper on beetles in the journal Zoologist. He befriended Wallace and started him collecting insects. His brother William died in March 1845, and Wallace left his teaching position to assume control of his brother's firm in Neath, but his brother John and he were unable to make the business work. After a few months, Wallace found work as a civil engineer for a nearby firm that was working on a survey for a proposed railway in the Vale of Neath.
  Wallace's work on the survey involved spending a lot of time outdoors in the countryside, allowing him to indulge his new passion for collecting insects. Wallace persuaded his brother John to join him in starting another architecture and civil engineering firm, which carried out a number of projects, including the design of a building for the Neath Mechanics' Institute, founded in 1843. William Jevons, the founder of that institute, was impressed by Wallace and persuaded him to give lectures there on science and engineering. In the autumn of 1846, John and he purchased a cottage near Neath, where they lived with their mother and sister Fanny (his father had died in 1843).
  During this period, he read avidly, exchanging letters with Bates about Robert Chambers' anonymously published ev
caption: A photograph from Wallace's autobiography shows the building Wallace and his brother John designed and built for the Neath Mechanics' Institute.
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