Characteristics 



have come into close relations with hardly any eminent men. 

 All my doings and surroundings have been commonplace ! 



I am now just reading a charming and ideal bit of auto- 

 biography — Robert Dale Owen's '' Threading my Way." If 

 you have not read it, do get it (published by Triibner and 

 Co. in 1874). It is delightful. So simple and natural 

 throughout. But his father was one of the most wonder- 

 ful men of the nineteenth century — Eobert Owen of New 

 Lanark — and this book gives the true history of his great 

 success. Then R. D. Owen met Clarkson and heard from 

 his own lips how he worked to abolish the slave trade. 



Then he had part of his education at Hofwyl under 

 Fellenberg, an experiment in education and self-govern- 

 ment wonderfully original and successful. He afterwards 

 worked at '' New Harmony " with his father, and met 

 during his life almost all the most remarkable people in 

 England and America. 



This book only contains the first twenty-seven years of 

 kis life and I am afraid he never completed it. Such a 

 book makes me despair! — Yours very sincerely, 



Alfred R. Wallace. 



When " My Life " was published, he wrote to the same 

 old and valued friend : 



Broadstone, Wimhorne. November 7, 1905. 



My dear Mrs. Fisher, — ^The reviewers are generally very 

 fair about the fads except a few. The Review invents a 

 new word for me — I am an " anti-body " ; but the Outlook 

 is the richest : I am the one man who believes in Spiritual- 

 ism, phrenology, anti-vaccination, and the centraKty of the 

 earth in the universe, whose life is worth writing. Then it 

 points out a few things I am capable of believing, but which 

 everybody else knows to be fallacies, and compares me to 

 Sir I. Newton writing on the prophets! Yet of course he 

 praises my biology up to the skies— there I am wise — every- 

 where else I am a kind of weak, babyish idiot ! It is really 

 delightful ! 



Only one is absolutely savage about it all— the Liverpool 

 p 225 



