Gilbert White - The Natural History of Selborne

The Natural Hiory of Selborne

GILBERT WHITE

The Natural Hiory of Selborne

Edited by
ANNE SECORD

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First published 2013

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ISBN 9780199591961

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Unless otherwise indicated, all illustrations are taken from Thomas Pennants British Zoology, 2nd edn., iv (1770), courtesy of the Bodleian Libraries, the University of Oxford (8 P. 16. Linc).

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(Thomas Pennant, Arctic Zoology (17845), i, plate viii. Courtesy of Cambridge University Library)

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The Natural History of Selborne is so established a classic that it is hard to take seriously its authors fears that as tastes changed the book might quickly sink into oblivion. Instead, the work has never lost its ability to attract new readers. Over the past two and a quarter centuries, editors and readers have been responsible not only for keeping the work in print but also for establishing the reputation of its author, the Reverend Gilbert White, as the producer of a new kind of natural history. The significance of Whites book has been recast many times and its originality redefined by later scientific questions, but, paradoxically, the very elements that characterize it as a thoroughly eighteenth-century work have proved to be the essence of its enduring, widespread appeal. The Natural History of Selborne has continued to speak to readers because what it has to say is only a part of its attraction. It is in the manner of its telling that much of the charm of the work lies.

Whites decision to depict the natural history of his own parish in a series of letters addressed to the naturalists Thomas Pennant and Daines Barrington has proved essential to its longevity. Employing the sense of immediacy that letters allow, White not only sparks our interest with those anecdotes of animal behaviour he thought so essential to a work of natural history, but also teaches us one of the subtlest of lessons: how to observe. His accounts of natural phenomena and the processes of nature are inseparable from the observational practices most appropriate for their elucidation. No sooner are we invited to gaze upon the heavy and bloated viper basking in the sun than the reptile has been cut open to reveal the live young in her abdomen ().

Whites two series of letters, with their combination of detached analysis and delight in the ordinary occurrences of nature, were carefully compiled to pique and maintain his readers interest, in the hope that this would encourage them to attend to the less gripping issues ).

It is in the light of Whites grand vision of a universal correct natural history that we can understand his concern that the public would laugh at an old country parsons book. During the years that he corresponded with Pennant and Barrington, and while he prepared these letters for publication, White remained unshaken in his conviction that a correct natural history depended upon showing not only that the application of natural knowledge could benefit society but also that social hierarchies, and the authority assumed by the clergy and the gentry, were part of the natural order of things. Gentlemen were qualified to pursue rational inquiries into nature by virtue of their education and their leisurea role that White, an Oxford-educated clergyman from a family deeply embedded in the Anglican church, played out in Selborne, a parish of 12 square miles with 700 inhabitants, in which he lived almost his entire life. Months after Selborne was published, however, the French Revolution and the social unrest it produced in England were the first serious assaults on the authority assumed by the clergy and the upper orders of society. White feared that this political upheaval would disrupt the natural order of thingsthe belief that divine governance, discernible through the investigation of nature, showed how the correct functioning of the whole depended upon the adaptation of the parts. The destruction of such authority would indeed make a book written

White had no need to be as overt as this in Selborne, which was completed before the French Revolution and, as a lavish and expensive work, was addressed an audience he could assume would share his opinion that they alone were qualified to join together to produce a universal natural history. His patrician views of nature, however, are clear from the text itself. Selborne is shaped by his love of the classical authors, of John Miltons poetry, and of physico-theological works. It was the entanglement of these literary and religious resources with Whites acute observation of nature that enabled him to convey feelings of wonder or awe as well as provide a philosophical description of natural phenomena. Selborne is also an expression of cosmopolitanism, and of Whites participation in a scientific culture with global interests, exhibited not least in the number of travel narratives mentioned in the text and by his references to far-flung places, from China to Peru.

Whites own interest in the natural world is itself a parochial history. His early life revolved around Selborne and Oxford, but when his ambition for an academic life came to nought in 1757 with his failure to be elected Provost of Oriel College, and after he inherited The Wakes (the White family home in Selborne) in 1763, he was reluctant to move away from the small village he had known since he was a child. He had already devoted years to making fashionable improvements to the gardens at The Wakes, recording his activities and their results in the Garden Kalendar, which he started in 1751. But it was his duties as a clergyman, combined with his decision to remain in Selborne, that developed and intensified his interest in natural history.