All my doings and
surroundings have been commonplace!
I am now just reading a charming and ideal bit of autobiography--Robert
Dale Owen's "Threading my Way." If you have not read it, do get it
(published by Truebner and Co. in 1874). It is delightful. So simple and
natural throughout. But his father was one of the most wonderful men of
the nineteenth century--Robert 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-government 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 his 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, Wimborne. 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 Spiritualism, phrenology, anti-vaccination, and the
centrality of the earth in the universe, whose life is worth writing.
Pages:
252
253
254
255
256
257
258
259
260
261
262
263
264
265
266
267
268
269
270
271
272
273
274
275
276