The Heretic in Darwin’s Court: The life of Alfred Russel Wallace by Ross A. Slotten, Columbia University Press, $39.50, ISBN 0231130104 Reviewed by Douglas Palmer
HE may have been only 14 years younger than Charles Darwin, but differences in class, wealth and education placed Alfred Russel Wallace much further apart within the spectrum of Victorian scientists. Darwin emerged from late 18th-century Whig gentry while Wallace (1823-1913) was a new Victorian man, albeit middle-class, who had to make his own way and survived into the modern era.
Ross Slotten’s meticulously researched biography, The Heretic in Darwin’s Court, explores Wallace’s scientifically “heretical” interests in a bunch of late Victorian “isms”, that range from socialism to spiritualism and extraterrestrial life.
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Slotten claims that Wallace was “the quintessential outsider both by birth and choice” and therefore reckons that he was “perfectly positioned to promote a revolution”. Slotten’s stated mission is to counteract the image “Darwinian spin doctors have created at the expense of another great scientific thinker of the Victorian age”.