LETTERS from SELBORNE
Dispatched to London over "rocky hollow lanes" two centuries ago, the Reverend Mr. White's observations would change forever the way that people wrote, thought,
and looked upon the natural world.
by Fred Strebeigh, originally published in Audubon, November 1988
It was the late 18th century, no time for a naturalist to sit stuck in the ruts of a small town in the south of England. Out rounding the globe with Captain Cook, Joseph Banks was botanizing Tahiti and Australia. Naturalists like Thomas Pennant were herbalizing the Hebrides and Cairngorms, or sending proxies where they could not go themselves. And in Sweden, Linnaeus, system-builder to the whole natural world, sat like a spider at the center of his web. To him from the Swedish consulate in Algiers came--in the form of abundant samples of flora and fauna--wide stretches of northern Africa. To him, in similar form, by agreement with Britain's Royal Society, came North America. And, by treaty with the King of Spain, came South America. It was the late 18th century, the Age of Reason. It was the age that sought to "ransack all the globe" to know its "innermost secrets," as one zealot urged, the age that sought to crate all the world's creatures into boxes and box all the world's creatures into categories.
Yes, it was the late 18th century. But ruts and ruts alone led to the village of Selborne, 50 miles southwest of London, home to the Reverend Gilbert White. The ruts, ancient roads fretting ever deeper since Saxon days, ran sixteen and eighteen feet beneath the surface of the earth. Overhead hung leaves, branches, trunks, boles, taproots, whole trees of oak and beech. Roots twisted down from above towards shoulder height, perforating ragstone and sandstone, reaching past strange ferns and rare hellebores. Even in dry summer, timid horsemen shuddered to enter these narrow gorges, paved with slick stone. In winter, the ruts hung with ice or ran with torrents, turning their cartways into ice-slides or watercourses. The ruts cut Selborne off from the civilized world.
A bit over two centuries ago, late in the 1760s, some letters from the Reverend White began leaving Selborne, travelling up the ruts or, as White called them, the "rocky hollow lanes." They headed for London and beyond. Exactly two centuries ago, in December of 1788, the letters appeared for the first time in public. Smartly published by members of the White family, they carried the unwieldy title, The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne in the County of Southampton. But their journey out from the ruts of Selborne did not end with the familial printing of a few hundred copies. In the century that followed, Selborne became the most frequently printed book in English on man and the natural world. It went on to alter the way people wrote, thought, looked--and perhaps even the way they lived--upon the world beneath their feet.
* * *
In Selborne, the year 1768 began cold. Thrushes froze. Horses died. Near the mid-point of the village street, the confluence of all the unnavigable ruts, sat the family home of Gilbert White. In his study, White took notes.
Jan. 3. It freezes under people's beds.
Jan. 4. Meat frozen so hard it can't be spitted.
Jan. 8. Moles work. Cocks crow. Crows crie.
The notes of 1768 marked year forty-seven for Gilbert White's reflections on the village of his birth, year eighteen for his steady note-keeping there, but year one for the checkerboard-like pages in which he now wrote. His new notebook, entitled The Naturalist's Journal, had just been invented--at least, that was the opinion of the Honourable Daines Barrington, the self-assured theorizer who had given the notebook to White and who styled himself its "inventor."
The Journal's pages, like their rationalist inventor, knew what natural history amounted to--observing the world and putting its contents into a checkerboard of boxes. Each checkered page charted seven days. Each day's boxes made precise demands: Note wind. Mark weather. Check thermometer and barometer. Record inches of rain or size of hail. Each day's boxes called also for notes on flora and fauna: What mosses had just vegetated? What flowers bloomed? What trees had leaved or unleaved? What birds had come or gone?
The Journal knew where its notes should lead. Like the 18th-century system-builders, it sought a big picture: nothing less than the filling in, by hundreds of scribes like the Reverend White, of thousands of checkerboards holding millions of boxes. Eventually the boxes would interlock to form, as Barrington explained in his inventor's preface, "the very best and accurate materials for a General Natural History of Great Britain." And that great general volume, in the 18th-century view, would presumably constitute but one crucial box in the checkerboard of a still greater work: the vast, finally categorized and systematized, natural history of the earth. These were heady, world-measuring days.
Sitting in his study with the Journal before him in 1768, Gilbert White seemed to have the ideal view for a scribe--narrow and short.
Jan. 8. Birds pull the moss from the trees.
Jan. 9. Lambs begin to fall.
Jan. 12-16. A cock-pheasant appeared on the dunghill at the end of my stable; tamed by hunger.
Looking across his property, perhaps peering out his study window, White could see stables, orchards, and gardens. Beyond lay hay fields, a great oak, and then, rising suddenly to 300 feet above him, a vast escarpment of chalk. Hung with beech trees and called simply "the Hanger," it cut short his view.
Long before, Gilbert White had chosen this short view, chosen to live within the narrow scope of the village of his birth. But there had been other possibilities, openings to a wider world.
There had, assuredly, been Oxford. As an undergraduate at Oxford's Oriel College, he had known the bon-vivance typified by his witty friend John Mulso and their comrade, the pre-Romantic poet William Collins. There White apparently read the first of the great regional histories of Britain, Robert Plot's Natural History of Oxfordshire, a work he would keep in his sights as he wrote Selborne. There, too, he read Alexander Pope, who had urged writers to "follow Nature" and who, at White's degree ceremony in 1743, presented White with a six-volume edition of his Iliad (for reasons now unknown). Even after White had completed his degrees and been ordained an Anglican priest, Oxford kept its hold, for Oriel elected him a fellow of the college, entitling him to a considerable income and welcoming him often to rejoin collegial camaraderie. Once, he ran for provost of the college, a post that might have tied him to Oxford forever. But he lost the election and did not try again to make his home within Oriel's walls.
Or there had been roaming. Often on horseback, White had explored the southern counties. He travelled north to the fens above Cambridge, east to the coastal marshes of the Essex shore, and west to Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain. He spent so much time on horse that, to his friend Mulso, White seemed less man than centaur--a man's mind, perhaps, but propelling the body of a horse over marsh and moor.
There had, too, been literary London. To London Collins went to seek poetic glory, and from there Mulso, staying with his family, wrote letters rich with bookish chat. There one of White's brothers settled as a publisher in Fleet Street, there another worked as a merchant before inheriting a fortune and becoming an essayist for the Gentleman's Magazine, and there White would visit all his life.
And there had been, it seems, romance. There was young Jenny Croke in his Oxford days--Jenny the haberdasher's daughter, Jenny whom his friends thought might snare him. There was "Hecky" Mulso, little sister to his good friend John and later famous herself as the writer Hester Chapone--Hecky who had called him her favorite bachelor and teased him with his Oxford name of "Busser" (Kisser) White, Hecky who applauded but rebuffed his poetic "Invitation to Selborne," letting him know she planned instead an excursion to visit the novelist Samuel Richardson. And, later, there would be greying flirtations: letters to a "maiden" niece and poems to the young heiresses--"dear nymphs," he called them--who one summer played like sylphs through his home and grounds.
Perhaps most plausibly, there had been the possibility of "livings," available from wealthy institutions and patrons to ordained clergymen--providing a church to preach in, a vicarage to reside in, and a healthy income to live on. His friend Mulso took one near London, and livings were available to White. But they had a clear drawback: none would make him vicar of Selborne. That living, which his grandfather had held and which had brought the White family originally to Selborne, belonged to a different Oxford College, Magdalen. When White finally did accept an Oriel living, for little Moreton Pinkney in Northamptonshire, he took it on the condition that he need not live there. Instead, following common but controversial practice, he appointed a curate to minister in his place.
But finally, Gilbert White did not yield to any of the charms--not collegial Oxford or literary London, not hectic romances or easy livings--that could have settled him far from home. Winding past all temptations were the high roads and cart ways that led, ultimately, back to familiar ruts and Selborne.
(Above: the church at Selborne)
There he would improve the family home and grounds, known as "The Wakes." There also he would serve as occasional curate for Selborne and, more steadily, as curate for the neighboring parish, Faringdon. White would act, in spirit if not title, as rural vicar.
And so he remained at home, as the 1760s became the 1770s and as his 40s became his 50s--preaching sermons, planting melons, performing weddings, brewing beer, filling the boxes of a checkerboard.
March 31 [1768]. Black weather. Cucumber fruit swells. Rooks sit.
He rode the hollow lanes to his church at Faringdon. He climbed the Hanger to his thatched retreat, the "Hermitage," with its vast prospect of home and village.
At first, his Journal notes stayed short. The boxes forced pith.
April 17 [1768]. Rooks have young. Young ravens fledged.
Such notes seemed mere sketches. Cruel winters. New nestlings. Evening stars. But White had a larger goal.
His purpose may have eluded his neighbors. Not one of them cared for the study of nature. But still they pitched in to help the little curate, sharp-eyed and sharp-witted, forever poking with his stick through lanes and hedges. They told him stories. They brought him specimens.
May 21 [1768]. Red-backed butcher-bird, shot near the village. It's gizzard was full of the legs & parts of beetles.
May 29 [1768]. The female viper has a string of eggs with her as large as those of a blackbird: but no rudiments of the young are yet formed within the egg.
As White poked about, his thoughts ranged wide, but also narrow.
June 3 [1769]. Saw the planet Venus enter the disk of the sun . . . . Nightingale sings; wood-owl hoots; fern-owl chatters.
Joseph Banks, whom White had met the year before, pursued this transit of Venus across the Pacific Ocean. As Venus entered the sun, Banks watched from Tahiti. White watched at home. Grounded. Engaged in what he called "watching narrowly." Seeking what the world-roamers and system-builders did not see.
June 11 [1769]. Great species of bat appears; it flies very high.
This was the noctule bat (vespertilio altivolans, White named it), its first sighting in Britain.
But White sought more than first sightings, and certainly more than the name-giving and box-filling that went with them. He disparaged such easy work, "done at home in a man's study." The real naturalist should be not sedentary but active, should inhabit not city but country, should demand not bare description but "investigation of the life and conversation of animals"--the "life and soul of natural history."
Barrington's checkerboard offered no box for "life and soul." In mid-1770, White spread a long footnote across a bottom margin.
July 24 [1770]. I saw a young cuckow, nearly fledged, on the ground in the nest of a titlark: it was become much too big for the nest . . . . was very pugnacious and would pursue a person's hand to some distance from the nest, buffeting, & sparring, & sticking up its feathers like a gamecock. The dupe of a [titlark] dam was attending at a distance in a solicitous manner with food in her mouth.
With marginalia and footnotes and inserted pages, White was breaking out of the checkerboard. And, eyes to the ground, he began to discover what others had missed. Another footnote:
Sept. 22 [1774]. Worms seem to eat earth, or perhaps rotten vegetables turning to earth . . . . Without worms, perhaps vegetation would go on but lamely . . . .
* * *
He began also to write as others had not written. At about the time he received the Journal and its blank checkerboard, late in 1767, White for the first time entered discussion with another British naturalist. Like much thoughtful exchange of the day, this conversation did not go on face to face. It went on from letter to letter, by post. After years of intellectual solitude, White finally had someone to talk with--Thomas Pennant, encyclopedist and traveller, author of a growing compendium on mammals and birds called British Zoology. Pennant also gained from his new contact. In revising his Zoology, he relied on local scribes--"parochial Geniuses," he called them. White seemed perfect: he came from a region Pennant did not know, could help Pennant correct errors that he had already published, and could add species to the Zoology that Pennant had missed.
White was delighted. At first. His initial letter to Pennant bubbled with thanks that a "gentleman so distinguished" in natural history would entertain White's "trifling observations." Soon, however, White saw Pennant's flaws. Within three years, he told Pennant that the Zoology needed work: "continue to revise," White urged. He also decided that a naturalist who focussed on one region was "much more likely to advance natural knowledge than those that grasp at more than they can possibly be acquainted with."
Just how White himself might advance this knowledge, however, he could not decide. The obvious suggestion came from a new correspondent, Daines Barrington, inventor of the Naturalist's Journal. By the early 1770s, Barrington began to take Pennant's place as principal recipient of White's letters. Unlike Pennant, Barrington almost immediately urged White to become an author.
White responded shyly, pleading "small abilities." But plans for a book, which White may have been incubating for years, were finally hatched. The question remained: what form should his book take?
White might have imitated his week-by-week Journal, creating a sort of natural history calendar. He considered chronicling a single year in two disparate regions, to be written jointly with his brother John, who was serving as chaplain to the British military garrison on Gibraltar and could add the glamor of a report from the verge of Africa. But John had grand plans for his own Gibraltar book.
Or White might have written formal essays. He did produce a small series of papers, which the Royal Society published in its prestigious journal, Philosophical Transactions. But the Society's printers riddled his essays with errors, and White gagged at the words put in his mouth: "Swallows," his published essay proclaimed, "eat grass."
Or White might continue to write letters. A book of letters. He would not be the first. Samuel Richardson, the correspondent of his friend Hecky Chapone, had recently created a new literary form, the novel, with his book Pamela. And it was epistolary--it looked like letters. Hecky herself, for that matter, had just written a best seller, begun for her niece, called Letters on the Improvement of the Mind.
White too might write an epistolary book. It had advantages. For one thing, it was half written. All along, White had saved copies of his letters to Pennant and Barrington. To fill gaps, he simply added new sections, disguised as letters.
For another, letters suggested modesty. White need not boast, as Robert Plot had in his pretentious Natural History of Oxfordshire, that his town was a favorite of kings. Instead, White presented Selborne as the village of the average man, a "single straggling street" through a sheltered vale.
Most important, White, in his book of letters, sounded human. Gone was the stuffiness of earlier naturalists. Plot, for example, began his chapter on the animals of Oxford with embroidered fustian:
Having done with the Vegetative, I proceed to the Animal Kingdom, wherein I shall consider first, that part of it that indeed has Apprehension of external Objects, of Pleasures and Pains, and Locomotion to make address to the one, and fly the other, but is void of Reason . . .
Plot meant that his chapter would cover mostly birds and beasts. His next chapter would cover those animals not "void of Reason," by which he meant men.
White's readers, then, must have read with astonishment Selborne's first encounter with bird or beast--a story. For years, ravens had nested high in the jutting bulge of an ancient Selborne oak, the "Raven-tree." Generations of village youths had tried to reach the ravens' aerie, but none could clamber round the lower skirt of the bulge. "So the ravens built on," wrote White, "nest upon nest, in perfect security." Then came the day when the oak was sold, for twenty pounds, to build a bridge near London.
The saw was applied to the butt, the wedges were inserted to the opening, the woods echoed to the heavy blows of the beetle or mallet, the tree nodded to its fall; but still the [raven] dam sat on. At last, when it gave way, the bird was flung from her nest; and, though her parental affection deserved a better fate, was whipped down by the twigs, which brought her dead to the ground.
Here was the dawn of something new: natural history that watched closely and spoke with a human voice. Readers who walked through Selborne with the Reverend White felt the hidden forces that drive the world, saw the impact of man on the natural realm, and heard over and over the importance of precisely observed fact--White's "narrow watching."
White's attention to natural forces like the raven's maternal instincts made Selborne no book for the pre-Victorian prude. The walker in the Reverend White's parish learned to look at the cool light of the glow-worm not as decoration but as the "amorous fire" of her mating call. He learned that coupled tortoises might, perhaps, linger through "a whole month in performing one feat of copulation." And he learned that swifts not only mated on the fly but did so "with a loud piercing shriek"--made while, in free fall, they tumbled through the air "down together for many fathoms." Led by this clergyman, the reader learned not to look away from the sexual drama of nature. And the reader heard from Gilbert White, perhaps for the first time, what later study would amplify: "the two great motives which regulate the proceedings of the brute creation are love and hunger."
The walker in Selborne saw man not just as observer but as potential destroyer of his natural realm, for White was among the first writers to lament the extinction of species from their habitats. He told of the last grouse hunted out of Selborne, and the last red deer. White's stories of deer-poaching came in terms his townsfolk could understand. Certainly, he made clear, he did not despise hunting. He had been a shooter once, and he knew most men were "sportsmen by constitution." But this killing was not sport.
Only recently, he recalled, he had met some of the last poachers, the "old dear stealers," men grown pathetic in their anecdotage. Over their ale, he had heard them recount exploits of their youth. They boasted of "following the pregnant hind to her lair, and, when the calf [fawn] was dropped, paring its feet with a penknife to the quick." They left it, lying on its side, helpless to stand or run, fattening on its mother's milk. Later they would return, as they pleased, to slaughter the fatted fawn.
The man who could not boast such butchery, who could not call himself hunter, White sneered, could make no claim to "manhood or gallantry."
Selborne urged not just attention to the ways of nature and to man's relation to them, but to precisely how man paid attention. The world-roaming rationalists and system-builders, White suggested, had gone partly wrong. The watcher and not the terrain determines what will be seen: "all nature is so full, that that district produces the greatest variety which is the most examined." Because they sought to categorize all the world, they often mistook what they saw--and built on sand. They could not be relied on. By contrast, methodical students of single regions, the narrow watchers and "partial writers" who saw more accurately than the world-measurers, might in fact pave the way towards understanding the big mysteries of creation.
Of all the world's mysteries, none perplexed White more than the migration of birds. He was not alone. It had become one of the troubling questions of the age, challenging human pre-eminence atop the chain of being. At a time when man still struggled with problems of navigation, no one could explain how birds could navigate distant seas where men sailed, as it were, on a wing and a prayer.
The migration--or non-migration--of swallows caused particularly complex debate. English naturalists proposed that swallows hid for the winter on land, hibernating in the crevices of cliffs or old buildings. Scandinavian naturalists supposed that swallows slept beneath water. White would believe neither--until he had evidence. Little came. He mocked one credulous Swedish naturalist, for example, a student of Linnaeus who talked "as familiarly of the swallows going under water in the beginning of September, as he would of his poultry going to roost a little before sunset."
White devoted years in the effort to settle this mystery "past all doubt." All the swallow tribe--as he called swifts, swallows, martins, and sand-martins--could be found within Selborne. He watched them fondly, particularly the swallow. It enjoyed the human hearth, near which it often nested, and enjoyed also the company of horsemen, whom it would follow for miles to grab insects roused by horses' hoofs. It worked precisely, taking each fly with a "smart snap" of its bill, like "the noise at the shutting of a watch case." A swallow could spend the "whole day in skimming close to the ground"--not unlike White himself.
At times White seemed to hope the local birds never left. And he had circumstantial evidence. In one hot spell in March, for example, swallows reappeared all across southern England for two warm days, only to disappear again until true spring arrived. Such evidence almost settled it. At least some must hibernate, he suggested, for no one could suppose "that house-swallows should leave the districts of Africa to enjoy, in March, the transient summer of a couple of days."
But without direct evidence, White could not settle his doubts. As late as the autumn before he died, he went probing the ragged thatch of a decayed village house, looking for proof that his birds did not forsake Selborne. Not until a century later did proof appear that English swallows had spent January in southern Africa; no birds have yet been found in hibernation.
White's narrow watching did not always end inconclusively. Although his scientific discoveries were few--identifying one new species, extending another's range--some had lasting value. In his Journal of 1774, for example, he had wondered about the value of earthworms. Around him, he heard farmers curse them as destroyers of crops. But he kept watching. Within a few years, in time for Selborne, he was sure. In the chain of nature, he wrote, worms might seem a "despicable link," but their destruction would leave a "lamentable chasm." Their boring opened soil. Their manure enriched it. Worm-hating farmers would find "that the earth without worms would soon become cold, hard bound," and, White told them, "sterile." White suggested, earnestly, that some naturalist should do more study and produce a smart "monography of worms."
It would come. But White, like any author whose work lives on, would never hear what finally came of Selborne.
* * *
In late 1788, at age 68, White held the first edition of his one book (carrying the date 1789, perhaps to give it an entire year as new). Reviewers praised it. The precision of a philosopher, said one, combined with the mark of a poet. A year later White heard happily that his Selborne was "still asked for in Fleet Street." The book brought him new correspondents and new visitors, and it did nothing to diminish his outpourings in the daily Journal. His last entry for 1793 retains his strong hand: "The ground is as hard as iron: we can sow nothing, nor plant out." That ended the week of June 9. Just then, he could probe the earth no more. Two weeks later he died.
So much about Selborne, White never heard.
Within a few years after it appeared, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge scribbled in the margins of his copy. This was the Coleridge who, with William Wordsworth and their Lyrical Ballads of 1798, opened the age of Romantic poetry and its search for the sublime in nature. Wordsworth's preface to the Ballads defined the voice of the poet in words that could have applied to White--the poet should write without affectation, "as a man speaking to men."
By the 1820s, the author of Selborne had begun an ascent toward the ether of mythology. The landscape painter John Constable praised White not merely for a "clear and intimate view of nature" but also for a "serene and blameless life." Later writers lifted White to apotheosis. An American critic, James Russell Lowell, called Selborne "the journal of Adam in Paradise."
In 1825, at age 16, Charles Darwin read Selborne. He began to watch birds and take notes. He imagined himself becoming a gentlemanly ornithologist, perhaps a parson writing his own parochial natural history. Instead Darwin accepted passage on the Beagle, saw the Galapagos, and wrote the least parochial natural history of all time, the Origin of Species. Just before the Origin appeared, and 30 years after he first read White's book, Darwin travelled as a pilgrim to the village of Selborne. Later, as his last major work, Darwin wrote The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms--the "monography of worms" that White had asked for.
Of all that White could not imagine--and that Americans tend not to know--no comment on Selborne seems more remarkable than a letter of 1845, written in the town of Concord, Massachusetts. That summer an American publisher wrote Nathaniel Hawthorne of Concord, the novelist. He sought two favors: Could Hawthorne contribute to a new series promoting American writers? Could Hawthorne recommend a new author?
To the second request, Hawthorne's reply offered a neighbor--the most "tedious, tiresome, and intolerable" fellow alive, Henry Thoreau. There was "one chance in a thousand," said Hawthorne, that his cantankerous neighbor might write "a most excellent and readable book." But "the only way," Hawthorne warned, would be if Thoreau wrote "in the vein of White's History of Selborne." That same summer, Thoreau began living at Walden Pond. Later, as Thoreau wrote Walden, he kept Selborne on his shelves and let it be known that, among "books of science," he revered Selborne above virtually all others.
By that time, entering the late 19th century, Selborne stood alone. By its 100th anniversary, in 1889, it had gone through 59 editions. It had become the most widely published volume of natural history--and, by some claims, the fourth most published book--in the English language.
Selborne even succeeded, helped by the abundance of hollow lanes and the absence of highways, in saving Selborne. Late in the 20th century, the village remains primarily a winding street through a sheltered vale. Martins build nests near White's old study windows, now part of a museum. His parlor holds formal portraits of various members of the White family (but not of Gilbert himself, who apparently never posed). Swallows hawk for flies above his gardens, still blooming with flowers like those he planted--Provence roses, gold-laced polyanths, marvels of Peru. His trails still criss-cross the looming mass of the Hanger. Rare green hellebores still flower where he found them in the rocky hollow lanes.
Out of the ruts and the ways of its village, Selborne fashioned a new natural history. It spoke simply, with a human voice. But it looked profoundly. It pioneered a way for students of nature who wished, as White did, not to roam the high Arctic or far Pacific but to fathom their own terrain. It offered a wide world to anyone willing to dig deep. Selborne said: watch narrowly, skim close to the ground. It whispered, hushed, what Thoreau would later broadcast: "We are acquainted with a mere pellicle of the globe on which we live. Most have not delved six feet beneath the surface, nor leaped as many above it. We know not where we are." In those words, as in all Walden, Thoreau may have had in mind the village of Selborne and the Reverend Gilbert White--the town reached only by ruts running well beneath the surface, the man whose book had leapt the ruts to round the globe.
###
Sketch, believed to be only portrait made of Gilbert White
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Yes, it was the late 18th century. But ruts and ruts alone led to the village of Selborne, 50 miles southwest of London, home to the Reverend Gilbert White. The ruts, ancient roads fretting ever deeper since Saxon days, ran sixteen and eighteen feet beneath the surface of the earth. Overhead hung leaves, branches, trunks, boles, taproots, whole trees of oak and beech. Roots twisted down from above towards shoulder height, perforating ragstone and sandstone, reaching past strange ferns and rare hellebores. Even in dry summer, timid horsemen shuddered to enter these narrow gorges, paved with slick stone. In winter, the ruts hung with ice or ran with torrents, turning their cartways into ice-slides or watercourses. The ruts cut Selborne off from the civilized world.
A bit over two centuries ago, late in the 1760s, some letters from the Reverend White began leaving Selborne, travelling up the ruts or, as White called them, the "rocky hollow lanes." They headed for London and beyond. Exactly two centuries ago, in December of 1788, the letters appeared for the first time in public. Smartly published by members of the White family, they carried the unwieldy title, The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne in the County of Southampton. But their journey out from the ruts of Selborne did not end with the familial printing of a few hundred copies. In the century that followed, Selborne became the most frequently printed book in English on man and the natural world. It went on to alter the way people wrote, thought, looked--and perhaps even the way they lived--upon the world beneath their feet.
* * *
In Selborne, the year 1768 began cold. Thrushes froze. Horses died. Near the mid-point of the village street, the confluence of all the unnavigable ruts, sat the family home of Gilbert White. In his study, White took notes.
Jan. 3. It freezes under people's beds.
Jan. 4. Meat frozen so hard it can't be spitted.
Jan. 8. Moles work. Cocks crow. Crows crie.
The notes of 1768 marked year forty-seven for Gilbert White's reflections on the village of his birth, year eighteen for his steady note-keeping there, but year one for the checkerboard-like pages in which he now wrote. His new notebook, entitled The Naturalist's Journal, had just been invented--at least, that was the opinion of the Honourable Daines Barrington, the self-assured theorizer who had given the notebook to White and who styled himself its "inventor."
The Journal's pages, like their rationalist inventor, knew what natural history amounted to--observing the world and putting its contents into a checkerboard of boxes. Each checkered page charted seven days. Each day's boxes made precise demands: Note wind. Mark weather. Check thermometer and barometer. Record inches of rain or size of hail. Each day's boxes called also for notes on flora and fauna: What mosses had just vegetated? What flowers bloomed? What trees had leaved or unleaved? What birds had come or gone?
The Journal knew where its notes should lead. Like the 18th-century system-builders, it sought a big picture: nothing less than the filling in, by hundreds of scribes like the Reverend White, of thousands of checkerboards holding millions of boxes. Eventually the boxes would interlock to form, as Barrington explained in his inventor's preface, "the very best and accurate materials for a General Natural History of Great Britain." And that great general volume, in the 18th-century view, would presumably constitute but one crucial box in the checkerboard of a still greater work: the vast, finally categorized and systematized, natural history of the earth. These were heady, world-measuring days.
Sitting in his study with the Journal before him in 1768, Gilbert White seemed to have the ideal view for a scribe--narrow and short.
Jan. 8. Birds pull the moss from the trees.
Jan. 9. Lambs begin to fall.
Jan. 12-16. A cock-pheasant appeared on the dunghill at the end of my stable; tamed by hunger.
Looking across his property, perhaps peering out his study window, White could see stables, orchards, and gardens. Beyond lay hay fields, a great oak, and then, rising suddenly to 300 feet above him, a vast escarpment of chalk. Hung with beech trees and called simply "the Hanger," it cut short his view.
Long before, Gilbert White had chosen this short view, chosen to live within the narrow scope of the village of his birth. But there had been other possibilities, openings to a wider world.
There had, assuredly, been Oxford. As an undergraduate at Oxford's Oriel College, he had known the bon-vivance typified by his witty friend John Mulso and their comrade, the pre-Romantic poet William Collins. There White apparently read the first of the great regional histories of Britain, Robert Plot's Natural History of Oxfordshire, a work he would keep in his sights as he wrote Selborne. There, too, he read Alexander Pope, who had urged writers to "follow Nature" and who, at White's degree ceremony in 1743, presented White with a six-volume edition of his Iliad (for reasons now unknown). Even after White had completed his degrees and been ordained an Anglican priest, Oxford kept its hold, for Oriel elected him a fellow of the college, entitling him to a considerable income and welcoming him often to rejoin collegial camaraderie. Once, he ran for provost of the college, a post that might have tied him to Oxford forever. But he lost the election and did not try again to make his home within Oriel's walls.
Or there had been roaming. Often on horseback, White had explored the southern counties. He travelled north to the fens above Cambridge, east to the coastal marshes of the Essex shore, and west to Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain. He spent so much time on horse that, to his friend Mulso, White seemed less man than centaur--a man's mind, perhaps, but propelling the body of a horse over marsh and moor.
There had, too, been literary London. To London Collins went to seek poetic glory, and from there Mulso, staying with his family, wrote letters rich with bookish chat. There one of White's brothers settled as a publisher in Fleet Street, there another worked as a merchant before inheriting a fortune and becoming an essayist for the Gentleman's Magazine, and there White would visit all his life.
And there had been, it seems, romance. There was young Jenny Croke in his Oxford days--Jenny the haberdasher's daughter, Jenny whom his friends thought might snare him. There was "Hecky" Mulso, little sister to his good friend John and later famous herself as the writer Hester Chapone--Hecky who had called him her favorite bachelor and teased him with his Oxford name of "Busser" (Kisser) White, Hecky who applauded but rebuffed his poetic "Invitation to Selborne," letting him know she planned instead an excursion to visit the novelist Samuel Richardson. And, later, there would be greying flirtations: letters to a "maiden" niece and poems to the young heiresses--"dear nymphs," he called them--who one summer played like sylphs through his home and grounds.
Perhaps most plausibly, there had been the possibility of "livings," available from wealthy institutions and patrons to ordained clergymen--providing a church to preach in, a vicarage to reside in, and a healthy income to live on. His friend Mulso took one near London, and livings were available to White. But they had a clear drawback: none would make him vicar of Selborne. That living, which his grandfather had held and which had brought the White family originally to Selborne, belonged to a different Oxford College, Magdalen. When White finally did accept an Oriel living, for little Moreton Pinkney in Northamptonshire, he took it on the condition that he need not live there. Instead, following common but controversial practice, he appointed a curate to minister in his place.
But finally, Gilbert White did not yield to any of the charms--not collegial Oxford or literary London, not hectic romances or easy livings--that could have settled him far from home. Winding past all temptations were the high roads and cart ways that led, ultimately, back to familiar ruts and Selborne.
(Above: the church at Selborne)
There he would improve the family home and grounds, known as "The Wakes." There also he would serve as occasional curate for Selborne and, more steadily, as curate for the neighboring parish, Faringdon. White would act, in spirit if not title, as rural vicar.
And so he remained at home, as the 1760s became the 1770s and as his 40s became his 50s--preaching sermons, planting melons, performing weddings, brewing beer, filling the boxes of a checkerboard.
March 31 [1768]. Black weather. Cucumber fruit swells. Rooks sit.
He rode the hollow lanes to his church at Faringdon. He climbed the Hanger to his thatched retreat, the "Hermitage," with its vast prospect of home and village.
At first, his Journal notes stayed short. The boxes forced pith.
April 17 [1768]. Rooks have young. Young ravens fledged.
Such notes seemed mere sketches. Cruel winters. New nestlings. Evening stars. But White had a larger goal.
His purpose may have eluded his neighbors. Not one of them cared for the study of nature. But still they pitched in to help the little curate, sharp-eyed and sharp-witted, forever poking with his stick through lanes and hedges. They told him stories. They brought him specimens.
May 21 [1768]. Red-backed butcher-bird, shot near the village. It's gizzard was full of the legs & parts of beetles.
May 29 [1768]. The female viper has a string of eggs with her as large as those of a blackbird: but no rudiments of the young are yet formed within the egg.
As White poked about, his thoughts ranged wide, but also narrow.
June 3 [1769]. Saw the planet Venus enter the disk of the sun . . . . Nightingale sings; wood-owl hoots; fern-owl chatters.
Joseph Banks, whom White had met the year before, pursued this transit of Venus across the Pacific Ocean. As Venus entered the sun, Banks watched from Tahiti. White watched at home. Grounded. Engaged in what he called "watching narrowly." Seeking what the world-roamers and system-builders did not see.
June 11 [1769]. Great species of bat appears; it flies very high.
This was the noctule bat (vespertilio altivolans, White named it), its first sighting in Britain.
But White sought more than first sightings, and certainly more than the name-giving and box-filling that went with them. He disparaged such easy work, "done at home in a man's study." The real naturalist should be not sedentary but active, should inhabit not city but country, should demand not bare description but "investigation of the life and conversation of animals"--the "life and soul of natural history."
Barrington's checkerboard offered no box for "life and soul." In mid-1770, White spread a long footnote across a bottom margin.
July 24 [1770]. I saw a young cuckow, nearly fledged, on the ground in the nest of a titlark: it was become much too big for the nest . . . . was very pugnacious and would pursue a person's hand to some distance from the nest, buffeting, & sparring, & sticking up its feathers like a gamecock. The dupe of a [titlark] dam was attending at a distance in a solicitous manner with food in her mouth.
With marginalia and footnotes and inserted pages, White was breaking out of the checkerboard. And, eyes to the ground, he began to discover what others had missed. Another footnote:
Sept. 22 [1774]. Worms seem to eat earth, or perhaps rotten vegetables turning to earth . . . . Without worms, perhaps vegetation would go on but lamely . . . .
* * *
He began also to write as others had not written. At about the time he received the Journal and its blank checkerboard, late in 1767, White for the first time entered discussion with another British naturalist. Like much thoughtful exchange of the day, this conversation did not go on face to face. It went on from letter to letter, by post. After years of intellectual solitude, White finally had someone to talk with--Thomas Pennant, encyclopedist and traveller, author of a growing compendium on mammals and birds called British Zoology. Pennant also gained from his new contact. In revising his Zoology, he relied on local scribes--"parochial Geniuses," he called them. White seemed perfect: he came from a region Pennant did not know, could help Pennant correct errors that he had already published, and could add species to the Zoology that Pennant had missed.
White was delighted. At first. His initial letter to Pennant bubbled with thanks that a "gentleman so distinguished" in natural history would entertain White's "trifling observations." Soon, however, White saw Pennant's flaws. Within three years, he told Pennant that the Zoology needed work: "continue to revise," White urged. He also decided that a naturalist who focussed on one region was "much more likely to advance natural knowledge than those that grasp at more than they can possibly be acquainted with."
Just how White himself might advance this knowledge, however, he could not decide. The obvious suggestion came from a new correspondent, Daines Barrington, inventor of the Naturalist's Journal. By the early 1770s, Barrington began to take Pennant's place as principal recipient of White's letters. Unlike Pennant, Barrington almost immediately urged White to become an author.
White responded shyly, pleading "small abilities." But plans for a book, which White may have been incubating for years, were finally hatched. The question remained: what form should his book take?
White might have imitated his week-by-week Journal, creating a sort of natural history calendar. He considered chronicling a single year in two disparate regions, to be written jointly with his brother John, who was serving as chaplain to the British military garrison on Gibraltar and could add the glamor of a report from the verge of Africa. But John had grand plans for his own Gibraltar book.
Or White might have written formal essays. He did produce a small series of papers, which the Royal Society published in its prestigious journal, Philosophical Transactions. But the Society's printers riddled his essays with errors, and White gagged at the words put in his mouth: "Swallows," his published essay proclaimed, "eat grass."
Or White might continue to write letters. A book of letters. He would not be the first. Samuel Richardson, the correspondent of his friend Hecky Chapone, had recently created a new literary form, the novel, with his book Pamela. And it was epistolary--it looked like letters. Hecky herself, for that matter, had just written a best seller, begun for her niece, called Letters on the Improvement of the Mind.
White too might write an epistolary book. It had advantages. For one thing, it was half written. All along, White had saved copies of his letters to Pennant and Barrington. To fill gaps, he simply added new sections, disguised as letters.
For another, letters suggested modesty. White need not boast, as Robert Plot had in his pretentious Natural History of Oxfordshire, that his town was a favorite of kings. Instead, White presented Selborne as the village of the average man, a "single straggling street" through a sheltered vale.
Most important, White, in his book of letters, sounded human. Gone was the stuffiness of earlier naturalists. Plot, for example, began his chapter on the animals of Oxford with embroidered fustian:
Having done with the Vegetative, I proceed to the Animal Kingdom, wherein I shall consider first, that part of it that indeed has Apprehension of external Objects, of Pleasures and Pains, and Locomotion to make address to the one, and fly the other, but is void of Reason . . .
Plot meant that his chapter would cover mostly birds and beasts. His next chapter would cover those animals not "void of Reason," by which he meant men.
White's readers, then, must have read with astonishment Selborne's first encounter with bird or beast--a story. For years, ravens had nested high in the jutting bulge of an ancient Selborne oak, the "Raven-tree." Generations of village youths had tried to reach the ravens' aerie, but none could clamber round the lower skirt of the bulge. "So the ravens built on," wrote White, "nest upon nest, in perfect security." Then came the day when the oak was sold, for twenty pounds, to build a bridge near London.
The saw was applied to the butt, the wedges were inserted to the opening, the woods echoed to the heavy blows of the beetle or mallet, the tree nodded to its fall; but still the [raven] dam sat on. At last, when it gave way, the bird was flung from her nest; and, though her parental affection deserved a better fate, was whipped down by the twigs, which brought her dead to the ground.
Here was the dawn of something new: natural history that watched closely and spoke with a human voice. Readers who walked through Selborne with the Reverend White felt the hidden forces that drive the world, saw the impact of man on the natural realm, and heard over and over the importance of precisely observed fact--White's "narrow watching."
White's attention to natural forces like the raven's maternal instincts made Selborne no book for the pre-Victorian prude. The walker in the Reverend White's parish learned to look at the cool light of the glow-worm not as decoration but as the "amorous fire" of her mating call. He learned that coupled tortoises might, perhaps, linger through "a whole month in performing one feat of copulation." And he learned that swifts not only mated on the fly but did so "with a loud piercing shriek"--made while, in free fall, they tumbled through the air "down together for many fathoms." Led by this clergyman, the reader learned not to look away from the sexual drama of nature. And the reader heard from Gilbert White, perhaps for the first time, what later study would amplify: "the two great motives which regulate the proceedings of the brute creation are love and hunger."
The walker in Selborne saw man not just as observer but as potential destroyer of his natural realm, for White was among the first writers to lament the extinction of species from their habitats. He told of the last grouse hunted out of Selborne, and the last red deer. White's stories of deer-poaching came in terms his townsfolk could understand. Certainly, he made clear, he did not despise hunting. He had been a shooter once, and he knew most men were "sportsmen by constitution." But this killing was not sport.
Only recently, he recalled, he had met some of the last poachers, the "old dear stealers," men grown pathetic in their anecdotage. Over their ale, he had heard them recount exploits of their youth. They boasted of "following the pregnant hind to her lair, and, when the calf [fawn] was dropped, paring its feet with a penknife to the quick." They left it, lying on its side, helpless to stand or run, fattening on its mother's milk. Later they would return, as they pleased, to slaughter the fatted fawn.
The man who could not boast such butchery, who could not call himself hunter, White sneered, could make no claim to "manhood or gallantry."
Selborne urged not just attention to the ways of nature and to man's relation to them, but to precisely how man paid attention. The world-roaming rationalists and system-builders, White suggested, had gone partly wrong. The watcher and not the terrain determines what will be seen: "all nature is so full, that that district produces the greatest variety which is the most examined." Because they sought to categorize all the world, they often mistook what they saw--and built on sand. They could not be relied on. By contrast, methodical students of single regions, the narrow watchers and "partial writers" who saw more accurately than the world-measurers, might in fact pave the way towards understanding the big mysteries of creation.
Of all the world's mysteries, none perplexed White more than the migration of birds. He was not alone. It had become one of the troubling questions of the age, challenging human pre-eminence atop the chain of being. At a time when man still struggled with problems of navigation, no one could explain how birds could navigate distant seas where men sailed, as it were, on a wing and a prayer.
The migration--or non-migration--of swallows caused particularly complex debate. English naturalists proposed that swallows hid for the winter on land, hibernating in the crevices of cliffs or old buildings. Scandinavian naturalists supposed that swallows slept beneath water. White would believe neither--until he had evidence. Little came. He mocked one credulous Swedish naturalist, for example, a student of Linnaeus who talked "as familiarly of the swallows going under water in the beginning of September, as he would of his poultry going to roost a little before sunset."
White devoted years in the effort to settle this mystery "past all doubt." All the swallow tribe--as he called swifts, swallows, martins, and sand-martins--could be found within Selborne. He watched them fondly, particularly the swallow. It enjoyed the human hearth, near which it often nested, and enjoyed also the company of horsemen, whom it would follow for miles to grab insects roused by horses' hoofs. It worked precisely, taking each fly with a "smart snap" of its bill, like "the noise at the shutting of a watch case." A swallow could spend the "whole day in skimming close to the ground"--not unlike White himself.
At times White seemed to hope the local birds never left. And he had circumstantial evidence. In one hot spell in March, for example, swallows reappeared all across southern England for two warm days, only to disappear again until true spring arrived. Such evidence almost settled it. At least some must hibernate, he suggested, for no one could suppose "that house-swallows should leave the districts of Africa to enjoy, in March, the transient summer of a couple of days."
But without direct evidence, White could not settle his doubts. As late as the autumn before he died, he went probing the ragged thatch of a decayed village house, looking for proof that his birds did not forsake Selborne. Not until a century later did proof appear that English swallows had spent January in southern Africa; no birds have yet been found in hibernation.
White's narrow watching did not always end inconclusively. Although his scientific discoveries were few--identifying one new species, extending another's range--some had lasting value. In his Journal of 1774, for example, he had wondered about the value of earthworms. Around him, he heard farmers curse them as destroyers of crops. But he kept watching. Within a few years, in time for Selborne, he was sure. In the chain of nature, he wrote, worms might seem a "despicable link," but their destruction would leave a "lamentable chasm." Their boring opened soil. Their manure enriched it. Worm-hating farmers would find "that the earth without worms would soon become cold, hard bound," and, White told them, "sterile." White suggested, earnestly, that some naturalist should do more study and produce a smart "monography of worms."
It would come. But White, like any author whose work lives on, would never hear what finally came of Selborne.
* * *
In late 1788, at age 68, White held the first edition of his one book (carrying the date 1789, perhaps to give it an entire year as new). Reviewers praised it. The precision of a philosopher, said one, combined with the mark of a poet. A year later White heard happily that his Selborne was "still asked for in Fleet Street." The book brought him new correspondents and new visitors, and it did nothing to diminish his outpourings in the daily Journal. His last entry for 1793 retains his strong hand: "The ground is as hard as iron: we can sow nothing, nor plant out." That ended the week of June 9. Just then, he could probe the earth no more. Two weeks later he died.
So much about Selborne, White never heard.
Within a few years after it appeared, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge scribbled in the margins of his copy. This was the Coleridge who, with William Wordsworth and their Lyrical Ballads of 1798, opened the age of Romantic poetry and its search for the sublime in nature. Wordsworth's preface to the Ballads defined the voice of the poet in words that could have applied to White--the poet should write without affectation, "as a man speaking to men."
By the 1820s, the author of Selborne had begun an ascent toward the ether of mythology. The landscape painter John Constable praised White not merely for a "clear and intimate view of nature" but also for a "serene and blameless life." Later writers lifted White to apotheosis. An American critic, James Russell Lowell, called Selborne "the journal of Adam in Paradise."
In 1825, at age 16, Charles Darwin read Selborne. He began to watch birds and take notes. He imagined himself becoming a gentlemanly ornithologist, perhaps a parson writing his own parochial natural history. Instead Darwin accepted passage on the Beagle, saw the Galapagos, and wrote the least parochial natural history of all time, the Origin of Species. Just before the Origin appeared, and 30 years after he first read White's book, Darwin travelled as a pilgrim to the village of Selborne. Later, as his last major work, Darwin wrote The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms--the "monography of worms" that White had asked for.
Of all that White could not imagine--and that Americans tend not to know--no comment on Selborne seems more remarkable than a letter of 1845, written in the town of Concord, Massachusetts. That summer an American publisher wrote Nathaniel Hawthorne of Concord, the novelist. He sought two favors: Could Hawthorne contribute to a new series promoting American writers? Could Hawthorne recommend a new author?
To the second request, Hawthorne's reply offered a neighbor--the most "tedious, tiresome, and intolerable" fellow alive, Henry Thoreau. There was "one chance in a thousand," said Hawthorne, that his cantankerous neighbor might write "a most excellent and readable book." But "the only way," Hawthorne warned, would be if Thoreau wrote "in the vein of White's History of Selborne." That same summer, Thoreau began living at Walden Pond. Later, as Thoreau wrote Walden, he kept Selborne on his shelves and let it be known that, among "books of science," he revered Selborne above virtually all others.
By that time, entering the late 19th century, Selborne stood alone. By its 100th anniversary, in 1889, it had gone through 59 editions. It had become the most widely published volume of natural history--and, by some claims, the fourth most published book--in the English language.
Selborne even succeeded, helped by the abundance of hollow lanes and the absence of highways, in saving Selborne. Late in the 20th century, the village remains primarily a winding street through a sheltered vale. Martins build nests near White's old study windows, now part of a museum. His parlor holds formal portraits of various members of the White family (but not of Gilbert himself, who apparently never posed). Swallows hawk for flies above his gardens, still blooming with flowers like those he planted--Provence roses, gold-laced polyanths, marvels of Peru. His trails still criss-cross the looming mass of the Hanger. Rare green hellebores still flower where he found them in the rocky hollow lanes.
Out of the ruts and the ways of its village, Selborne fashioned a new natural history. It spoke simply, with a human voice. But it looked profoundly. It pioneered a way for students of nature who wished, as White did, not to roam the high Arctic or far Pacific but to fathom their own terrain. It offered a wide world to anyone willing to dig deep. Selborne said: watch narrowly, skim close to the ground. It whispered, hushed, what Thoreau would later broadcast: "We are acquainted with a mere pellicle of the globe on which we live. Most have not delved six feet beneath the surface, nor leaped as many above it. We know not where we are." In those words, as in all Walden, Thoreau may have had in mind the village of Selborne and the Reverend Gilbert White--the town reached only by ruts running well beneath the surface, the man whose book had leapt the ruts to round the globe.
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Sketch, believed to be only portrait made of Gilbert White
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