Oddlet: Alfred Russel Wallace · 1 min read
Nov 4, 2026
Mrs Guppy
In February 1858, delirious with malaria on Ternate, Alfred Russel Wallace drafted natural selection in two evenings; thirteen years later, at a séance on Lamb's Conduit Street, he watched Mrs Guppy thump onto the table three miles from her accounts, unconscious in her nightdress, still holding her pen.
In February 1858, on the island of Ternate, Alfred Russel Wallace lay shivering under blankets in the tropical heat, cycling through the chills and sweats of intermittent malaria. Between fever fits his mind wandered back to Malthus. Natural selection dropped in whole. He drafted the paper over two evenings and mailed it halfway around the world to Darwin.
Then Wallace took up ghosts.
He sat three times for the spirit photographer Frederick Hudson, who had been exposed as a fraud two years earlier, and identified the female figure on the third plate as his mother. In 1876 he took the witness stand at Bow Street to defend a slate-writing medium whose "spirit message" had been found written on the slate before the séance began. He was, at this point, still the man who had co-authored natural selection.
Then there was the Guppy apport. On 3 June 1871, at a séance on Lamb's Conduit Street, a journalist joked that the spirits ought to bring them Mrs Guppy. She was three miles away in Highbury, doing her accounts.
A thump on the table. Mrs Guppy, unconscious, in her nightdress, still holding her pen.
He never took back a word.
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- Wikipedia — Alfred Russel Wallace — Comprehensive biography: exact dates, expedition itineraries, specimen counts, honours, family details, financial and political life.
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — Alfred Russel Wallace — Authoritative overview of birth/death, expeditions, the Wallace Line, and independent discovery of natural selection.
- The Alfred Russel Wallace Website (Wallace Fund) — 1858 Darwin–Wallace paper — Details of the Ternate letter, dates it was written, sent, received by Darwin, read at the Linnean Society (1 July 1858) and published (20 August 1858).
- Wallace Correspondence Project — I am afraid the ship's on fire — Primary-source account of the 6 August 1852 fire on the brig Helen, the ten days in an open boat and rescue by the Jordeson.
- Psi Encyclopedia (Society for Psychical Research) — Alfred Russel Wallace — Detailed record of Wallace's séance investigations, mediums he defended (Home, Guppy, Eglinton, Slade, Katie Cook, Monck, Hudson) and his spiritualist writings.
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