Pathfinders: Alfred the Great

Dr. Charles Smith, who runs The Alfred Russel Wallace Page http://tinyurl.com/q6cqnqt comments: Thanks for writing, and the tip.  I am glad that this piece has found its way to the socialist readership, and agree largely with the *general* points you make.  However…  Unless you have some new information I don’t, there are a lot of—too many–factual errors in what is written below, as well as a number of dubious conclusions on specific matters (for example, where did you see that Wallace met Bates at a “social reform” meeting—does Bates say this?  Bates had little or no interest in politics, and  Wallace said he thought they met in the town library at Leicester.  Wallace says nothing that I know of about any interests in social issues while he was at Leicester).  I can live with a bit of literary license, but Wallace did not, for example, lose *all* his Amazon collections, nor was he penniless on his return,  because of a substantial insurance policy—he even had time and resources for a while to vacation in France. Please don’t ask me to comment individually on all the inaccuracies I perceive, as it would take more space than the essay itself! Well, maybe I’m just being too picky, but it seems a pity to make some good points (especially in the last paragraph) and surround them with a caricature of factuality—this is at best lazy, and at worst counter-informative.  And in Wallace’s case, the facts are just as interesting as any inaccurate embroidery. All of this leaves me with mixed feelings… CHS. P.S.:  Despite his early experiences with Owenists, Wallace did not consider himself a socialist until his reading of Bellamy in 1889.  He was not interested in Marxist socialism, though he seemingly knew about it at least as early as the time of Marx’s death in 1883.