At the age of 14 Wallace was taken away from school, and until something
could be definitely decided about his future--as up to the present he
had no particular bent in any one direction--he was sent to London to
live with his brother John, who was then working for a master builder in
the vicinity of Tottenham Court Road. This was in January, 1837, and it
was during the following summer that he joined his other brother,
William, at Barton-on-the-Clay, Bedfordshire, and began land surveying.
In the meantime, while in London, he had been brought very closely into
contact with the economics and ethics of Robert Owen, the well-known
Socialist; and although very young in years he was so deeply impressed
with the reasonableness and practical outcome of these theories that,
though considerably modified as time went on, they formed the foundation
for his own writings on Socialism and allied subjects in after years.

As one of our aims in this section is to suggest an outline of the
contrasting influences governing the early lives of Wallace and Darwin,
it is interesting to note that at the ages of 14 and 16 respectively,
and immediately on leaving school, they came under the first definite
mental influence which was to shape their future thought and action. Yet
how totally different from Wallace's trials as a pupil teacher was the
removal of Darwin from Dr. Butler's school at Shrewsbury because "he was
doing no good" there, and his father thought it was "time he settled
down to his medical study in Edinburgh," never heeding the fact that
his son had already one passion in life, apart from "shooting, dogs, and
rat-catching," which stood a very good chance of saving him from
becoming the disgrace to the family that his good father feared. So that
while Wallace was imbibing his first lessons in Socialism at 14 years of
age, Darwin at 16 found himself merely enduring, with a feeling of
disgust, Dr. Duncan's lectures, which were "something fearful to