Perhaps best known today as a catalyst to, or coincidental co-developer of, Darwin’s theory of natural selection, a man whose life Steven Jay Gould laments as a “permanent footnote” in the popular history of science, Alfred Russel Wallace was actually a prominent scientist in his own right, deserving at his death the laudatory claims made by recent biographers: Martin Fichman hails Wallace as “one of the greatest Victorian naturalists” (11), and Gould describes him as “one of the most brilliant biologists and interesting men of nineteenth-century science” (xi). Though “all but vanished from popular consciousness” in the twenty-first century (n.p.), Wallace made numerous contributions to Victorian scientific thought, even besides that famous theory so striking in its simultaneous accordance with, and entire independence from, the work that would become Darwin’s Origin of Species. Other of...
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Citation: Wooden, Shannon R.. "Alfred Russel Wallace". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 25 January 2011 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5574, accessed 15 December 2025.]
