Alfred Russel Wallace (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
At a glance:
- Author: Peter Raby
- First Published: 2001
- Type of Work: Biography, history of science, natural history, and science
- Time of Work: 1823-1913
- Setting: England, Brazil, and Indonesia
- Principal Characters: Alfred Russel Wallace, Charles Darwin, Henry Walter Bates, Charles Lyell
- Genres: Nonfiction, History, Biography, Nature writing, Science and technology
- Subjects: Nineteenth century, Science or scientists, Asia or Asians, England or English people, Brazil or Brazilians, Spiritualism, Shipwrecks, Anthropology or anthropologists, Evolution, Natural history
- Locales: England, Brazil, Indonesia
Peter Raby’s new biography of Alfred Russel Wallace uses the tools of modern scholarship to create a truthful yet sympathetic portrait of a paradoxical man in his folly and nobility. Raby wisely recognizes that he cannot improve on nature by overplaying his subject’s foibles and downplaying his idealism, and his biography consequently depicts neither a saint nor a sinner but a richly realized man. For Raby, Wallace is much more than the independent discoverer of natural selection and the primary stimulus for Darwin’s writing On the Origin of Species (1859): He was also a...
[The entire page is 2000 words long]
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