The life of the British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913) encompassed the Victorian Age in its entirety. One of the era's most productive natural scientists and social critics, Wallace also engaged most of the controversial issues that characterized the period: evolutionary biology, political reform, public health policy, mesmerism, spiritualism, and natural theology, among the most prominent. Largely because of his wide-ranging interests, Wallace remains an enigma. Despite the significance of his scientific work he is generally known merely as the cocreator (along with Charles Darwin) of the theory of evolution by means of natural selection. Furthermore, his interests in spiritualism, theism, and political reform appear like distractions to our age, shaped as it is by the ideologies of scientific materialism and expertise. Indeed, Wallace was equally perplexing to the scientific intellectuals of his own day. Darwin, Thomas Huxley, and Joseph Hooker, to name only a few, were highly critical of Wallace's forays into “nonscientific” matters, particularly since they themselves were fighting to define professional science as wholly separate from spiritual and religious discussion. To these scientific “radicals” Wallace was rejecting the secular world that they were trying so hard to create. Yet despite his theistic world view, Wallace was no friend to fundamentalist Christianity. Rather, his theism was firmly grounded in an evolutionary understanding of life's origins and rejected the natural theology of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Wallace's biographers thus face two considerable challenges; first, to find coherence within Wallace's intellectual development, and second, to situate that development within the dynamic context of Victorian culture. An Elusive Victorian does a masterful job of dealing with both. Rather than try to “explain away” Wallace's interests in spiritualism, religion, and socialism, Martin Fichman reveals the inner unity of Wallace's intellectual development. Although Wallace focused on different issues at different points in his life, Fichman argues that his “central goal of integrating these diverse concerns functioned as an anchor for Wallace's evolving intellectual and activist endeavors. His quest culminated in an overarching world view—a teleological evolutionary cosmology” (1).

Although Fichman's analysis is biographical in nature, the narrative does not follow a strict chronology. Individual chapters concentrate on those topics that Wallace devoted much of his life to integrating. Fichman begins by showing how Wallace's early work as a land surveyor and collector-naturalist led to his growing interest in the geographical distribution of species (chap. 2). The succeeding chapters then analyze the development of Wallace's theory of natural selection (chap. 3), Wallace's growing fascination with spiritualism and psychic phenomena (chap. 4), Wallace's system of ethics and commitment to socialist land reform (chap. 5), and, ultimately, the comprehensive teleological world view that gave meaning to all the rest (chap. 6).

But while Fichman's principal interest is Wallace's intellectual development, he never loses sight of Wallace as a social actor. Making substantial use of Wallace's correspondence, Fichman follows Wallace as he made his way through London society, as he developed and maintained personal and professional friendships, and as his political interests took him from the pages of the newspapers and socialist journals to the presidency of the Land Nationalization Society. Wallace fully engaged the debates of his time, and often his publications were greeted with critical outcry from multiple sources. Fichman's analysis also places Wallace at the center of public debates about the professional status of science, the relevancy of religious ideas to the understanding of nature, and the nature of ethics and politics.

Fichman has done an admirable job of addressing specialists and nonspecialists alike. He does not assume that his readers will have a prior understanding of scientific methodology or Victorian culture, and he tries to break the narrative into readily digestible sections that will guide the reader through the main arguments. It is in the structure of the analysis, however, that I find the book's one significant weakness. While each chapter is on the order of sixty-plus pages, most are divided into twenty or more subsections, sometimes consisting of a single paragraph. As a result, the coherence of the analysis is occasionally lost. I found this particularly problematic in chapter 3, where Fichman never clearly defines Wallace's understanding of epistemology and metaphysics as abstract philosophical principles.

Organization aside, An Elusive Victorian deserves to be read widely. Fichman has made a persuasive case for putting Wallace at the center of scientific activity during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Indeed, Wallace was arguably more influential than Darwin himself at popularizing evolutionary theory. Far from being merely in Darwin's shadow, Wallace crafted social and philosophical positions that, while drawing on the work of his contemporaries, were uniquely his own. Wallace is thus a figure through which we can better understand the diversity of Victorian culture, just as our understanding of Victorian society helps us better to understand Wallace.