Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) came from a rather humble and ordinary background. His father, a solicitor by training, once had property sufficient to generate a gentleman's income of £500 per annum. But the family's financial circumstances declined so the family moved from London to a village near Usk, on the Welsh borders, where Wallace was born in Kensington Cottage on 8 January 1823.

When Wallace was six years old the family moved to Hertford, north of London, where he lived until he was fourteen. Here Wallace attended Hertford Free Grammar School which offered a classical education, not unlike Charles Darwin's at Shrewsbury Free Grammar School, including Latin grammar, classical geography and "some Euclid and algebra". Wallace left school aged fourteen in March 1837, shortly after Darwin returned from the Beagle voyage. Wallace never attended university.

Wallace then left home to join his elder brother John, an apprentice builder in London. Wallace spent his London evenings in an educational "Hall of science" for working men. In this context Wallace encountered the socialist ideas of the reformer Robert Owen. Wallace was deeply impressed by Owen's utopian social ideals - with a stress on the role of environment in determining character and behaviour. Hence if the social environment were improved, so would the morals and well being of the workers. The hall of science also introduced Wallace to the latest views of religious sceptics and secularists. Although Wallace's parents were perfectly orthodox members of the Church of England, Wallace became a sceptic.

From 1837 Wallace joined his brother William as an apprentice land surveyor. Here for the first time you can see some of the original maps he contributed to click here. Wallace began to read about mechanics and optics, his first introduction to science. His days surveying in the open air of the countryside lead him to an interest in natural history. From 1841 Wallace took up an amateur pursuit of botany by collecting plants and flowers.





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Alfred Russel Wallace was born in Kensington Cottage near Usk, Monmouthshire, England (now part of Wales) on the 8th of January 1823 to Thomas Vere Wallace and Mary Ann Wallace (née Greenell), a downwardly mobile middle-class English couple who had moved there from London a few years earlier in order to reduce their living costs.


Wallace's parents. Copyright Wallace Memorial Fund.

Wallace was the eighth of nine children, three of whom did not survive to adulthood. Wallace's father was of Scottish descent (reputedly, of a line leading back to the famous William Wallace); whilst the Greenells were a respectable Hertford family. His great grandfather on his mother's side was twice Mayor of Hertford (in 1773 and 1779).

In 1828 when Wallace was five, he and his family moved to Hertford and it was there, at Hale's Grammar School, that he received his only formal education. In about 1835 Wallace's father was swindled out of his remaining assets and the family fell on very hard times. Wallace was forced to leave school in March 1837, when he was only 14*and was sent to London to lodge with his older brother John who was a carpenter.


Hale's*Grammar School (from a watercolour by Eliza Dobinson c. 1815). Copyright Tom Gladwin.


The interior of the Old Grammar School c. 1900, showing the single long room in which all the
teaching was done. *A portrait of the founder, Richard Hale, can be seen above the
door on the left.*Copyright Hertfordshire Archives & Local Studies (Photo: Mr Elsden).

By mid 1837 Alfred had left London to join his eldest brother, William, in Bedfordshire. William owned a land-surveying business, and he was to learn the trade. Wallace and his brother would do such work for the next six and a half years, roaming all over the countryside of southern England and Wales. In the autumn of 1841 the Wallace brothers moved to the Neath area of Wales and it was there that Alfred's interest in natural history really began. It started because he wanted to be able to identify the plants he saw in the countryside while out surveying. He bought his first books on how to identify them and also began to collect them, forming a collection of pressed specimens.
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Kensington Cottage
Alfred Russel Wallace was born on January 8th, 1823, the eighth child of Thomas Vere Wallace and Mary Anne Wallace. His oddly spelled middle name was the result of a mistake at the time of registering his birth, which was never corrected.

His place of birth was Kensington Cottage, which stands just across the Usk River from the city of Usk in southeastern Wales. The Wallaces, who were not Welsh, had been forced to move to Kensington as a measure of economy after Alfred's father squandered most of his inheritance on a series of poor business decisions. They had up to that time lived as an upper middle class family in Hertford just north of London.

Supposedly, the Wallaces were descendants of the Scottish warrior chieftain William Wallace, of Braveheart fame. But, in fact, Alfred left home at such an early age that as an old man he said he knew few specifics about even his more recent ancestors. One of his typically speculative comments on this topic (My Life, 1905, vol. 1, p. 5) was that on his mother's side "the family were not improbably French refugees after the massacre of St. Bartholomew in 1572."

In 1835 his father, who seems always to have been improvident in his investments, was swindled out of most of his remaining property, and the Wallaces then fell on real hard times. Alfred had to stop attending school at the early age of 13, and yet, he educated himself and was eventually the author of many books on evolution and natural history.


Walter Bates

While teaching school in Leicester in 1844, aged 21, he met Walter Bates (1825–1892). Like Wallace, Bates had left school at an early age and lacked any formal education in natural science. But both were fanatical beetle collectors, and together they scoured Leicestershire for specimens. In 1848, after reading about the adventures of famous naturalist travelers such as Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Darwin, they embarked for Brazil in hopes of a collection bonanza.