Today in history
Alfred Russel Wallace, co-discoverer of evolution by natural selection, died in Dorset.
On 7 November 1913, Alfred Russel Wallace died at Old Orchard, his home in Broadstone, Dorset, aged ninety.
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A quiet Dorset farewell
Alfred Russel Wallace’s death in Dorset brought to a close one of Victorian science’s most remarkable careers. His funeral followed locally on 10 November 1913. Although Westminster Abbey would later commemorate him, it was not his burial place.
Born at Usk, in present-day Wales, in 1823, Wallace worked in surveying before becoming a naturalist and collector. In 1848 he travelled to the Amazon with Henry Walter Bates; between 1854 and 1862 he explored the Malay Archipelago. Fieldwork supplied the foundations of his intellectual life.
An independent route to natural selection
In 1858 Wallace sent Charles Darwin an essay explaining evolutionary change through natural selection. Darwin had independently developed a closely related explanation but had not yet published his full account. Wallace’s distinction was therefore not discovering evolution itself, but independently identifying its central mechanism.
Charles Lyell and Joseph Dalton Hooker arranged a joint presentation of Wallace’s essay and earlier Darwin material at the Linnean Society of London on 1 July 1858. Neither naturalist attended. These were separate writings, not a collaboratively composed paper; publication followed on 20 August.
The announcement helped prompt Darwin’s fuller exposition in On the Origin of Species, published in November 1859. Wallace belongs within that decisive episode as an independent discoverer, not merely a supporting figure in Darwin’s story.
Beyond Darwin’s shadow
Wallace also helped establish biogeography: the study of where living things occur. His observations underpin Wallace’s Line, marking a major transition between Asian and Australasian animal populations. His Malay assistant, Ali, contributed to the collecting work, while The Malay Archipelago, published in 1869, brought these discoveries to British readers.
His interests reached into land ownership, workers’ rights and spiritualism. He also questioned whether natural selection alone could explain human intellectual capacities: scientific kinship with Darwin did not entail agreement on everything.
In 1915, a marble portrait relief by Albert Bruce-Joy was erected beside Darwin’s memorial in Westminster Abbey. It honoured Wallace’s place in Britain’s scientific heritage; his grave remained in Dorset.