The Alfred Russel Wallace Correspondence Project

Now that Wallace Letters Online has offically launched and in this celebratory year of all things Wallace, I will be selecting a letter from each month of the year from the catalogue and blogging about it (there may be more than one if I just can't choose between letters one month!).

The blogs will be posted on the Natural History Museum's Wallace100 blog and you can read January's selection here;

http://www.nhm.ac.uk/natureplus/community/walla

Some exciting news here at the WCP to share with you all; I’ve recently found 105 letters written to Alfred Russel Wallace, that we weren’t originally aware of! It came about, as most discoveries do really, with a little bit of luck.

I was cataloguing some letters we recently received from the American Philosophical Society and one of them was from Wallace to Swan Sonnenschein & Co., the book publishers.

Last week, I bade farewell to 9 Harvard students who had spent the last two weeks hard at work transcribing letters for the Wallace Correspondence Project.

Over the past week I have been cataloguing letters received from the American Museum of Natural History. They had 49 letters relating to Wallace in their Special Collections and the majority of the correspondence is between Wallace and Theodore Dru Alison Cockerell covering the years 1890 to 1912. TDA Cockerell (1846-1948) was born in Norwood, England and was the brother of Sydney Carlyle Cockerell (who was the Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge from 1908-1937).

I have been editing transcriptions this week, which has been great fun reading about Wallace's exploits!

It’s been a while since we updated the blog, so I thought it might be nice to let everyone know how we’re getting on.

I have been in post now just over 6 months (the project has officially been going for over 17 months now) and what a busy time it has been! There is plenty to do, but we’ve covered a lot of ground already and there’s never a dull moment. We now have letters from 57 institutions worldwide in the catalogue.

Details of a voluntary opportunity that has arisen on the WCP has now been advertised on the Natural History Museum's website. We are looking for three volunteers to assist in a variety of project tasks. Details of the role and how to apply can be found here;

https://nhm.irecruittotal.com/CONFIG/NHM/StaticPages/CAC/SearchVacancy.aspx?EmploymentTypeID=0&Intranet=0

The closing date is midnight on 31st January.

I have been cataloguing letters this week and have come across two signatures that have left me stumped!

On behalf of the WCP project team, I’d like to thank everyone who has volunteered to transcribe some letters for us. We have had such an overwhelming response, with over 50 expressions of interest, that we’ve had to limit the number of volunteers to 30 for now.

I will be keeping a reserve list of all those who have kindly responded and will be in touch should any further opportunities arise.

On Wednesday 2nd November I attended the Darwin Lecture 2011, an annual lecture jointly organised by the Society of Medicine and the Linnean Society.