The young Alfred Russel Wallace on the education of working men, his prize essay for the Kington Mechanics’ Institute and among the earliest of his writings to reach print

[PARRY, Richard.] The History of Kington; with an Appendix. By a Member of the Mechanics’ Institute, of Kington. Kington: Printed & Published by Charles Humphreys, 1845. First edition, published anonymously. Octavo, with the half-title and the folding table. Modern cloth, the edges uncut. Containing, at pages 66–70, Alfred Russel Wallace’s An Essay, On the Best Method of Conducting the Kington Mechanic’s Institution, signed “Mr. A. Wallace.” Smith S1a.

Notes

Kington, a market town on the Welsh border, was Wallace’s home from the autumn of 1839 until late in 1841. He worked there with his eldest brother William for Morris and William Sayce, land surveyors and estate agents (Wallace, My Life, 1905, I, 24, 140–42, 178). The town’s Mechanics’ Institute opened its reading-room in March 1841, with Morris Sayce as treasurer, and offered a prize for an essay on how it should be conducted. Wallace’s entry, written about 1841, is printed here under Bacon’s motto “Knowledge is power.” It presents mechanics’ institutes as a means of bringing scientific instruction to everyone, and above all to working people, and the library it proposes includes the works of Lyell, Lindley, Combe and Humboldt, authors Wallace referred to elsewhere in his writings. In October 1844 the Hereford Times reported that the prize had gone to “Mr. A. R. Wallace, one of its members” (quoted by C. H. Smith, 2020).

R. Elwyn Hughes, in the Dictionary of Welsh Biography (2008), called the essay Wallace’s “first substantial writing.” Charles H. Smith, the bibliographer of Wallace’s writings, describes it as “one of the earliest written works by Alfred Russel Wallace (1823−1913) known to have reached print.” Wallace never referred to it in later life, and his autobiography passes it over. The cause it argues stayed with him. A few years later at Neath he gave lessons in elementary physics to the town’s mechanics and drew the plans for the building of their Mechanics’ Institute, designed in 1847 (My Life, I, 245–46). Parry’s history treats the town and its government and closes with an appendix of historical documents.

A very good, untrimmed copy in modern cloth. The title-page lightly toned, with a few small spots and a faint stain in the fore-margin. Light dust-soiling and scattered foxing elsewhere, a few small marks, and the folding table mended after a tear.

References

C. H. Smith, bibliography of Wallace’s writings, The Alfred Russel Wallace Page (Western Kentucky University), S1a; C. H. Smith, “Alfred Russel Wallace Notes 14: Background for Wallace’s 1845 Kington Essay” (2020); R. Elwyn Hughes, “Alfred Russel Wallace; some notes on the Welsh connection,” British Journal for the History of Science 22 (1989), 401–418; R. Elwyn Hughes, “Wallace, Alfred Russel (1823–1913),” Dictionary of Welsh Biography (2008); A. R. Wallace, My Life: A Record of Events and Opinions (London, 1905), I, 24, 140–42, 178, 245–46.

A Herefordshire town history that holds, at pages 66 to 70, one of the earliest writings of the future co-discoverer of natural selection.

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