The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne

There are 44 letters to White's friend Thomas Pennant (1726–1798), of which the first nine were never posted and are thus undated. Of those that were posted, the first, Letter 10 giving an overview of Selborne, is dated 4 August 1767; the last, Letter 44 on wood pigeons, is dated 30 November 1780. It is not known how the men became friends, or even if they ever met; White writes repeatedly that he would like to meet "to have a little conversation face to face after we have corresponded so freely for several years"[8] so it is certain they did not meet for long periods, and possible they never met at all. The letters are edited from the form in which they were actually posted; for example, Letter 10 as posted had a cringing introductory paragraph of thanks to Pennant which White edited out of the published version.[8]

Correspondent: the English lawyer and naturalist Daines Barrington

There are 66 letters to the lawyer Daines Barrington (1727–1800), occupying half the book. Letter 1, on summer birds of passage, is dated 30 June 1769; Letter 66, on thunderstorms, is dated 25 June 1787. The Barrington letters therefore largely overlap the time frame of those to Pennant, but began and ended somewhat later. It was Barrington who suggested to White that he should write a book from his observations; although Pennant had been corresponding with White for a while, he was relying on White for natural history information for his own books, and, suggests White's biographer Richard Mabey, must have wanted White as a continuing source of information, not as a rival author.[9] Barrington, on the other hand, liked to theorize about the natural world, but had little interest in making observations himself, and tended to accept claimed facts uncritically.[9]

A character in some of the letters is a tortoise:

The old tortoise, that I have mentioned in a former letter, still continues in this garden, and retired underground about the 20th of November, and came out again for one day on the 30th : it lies now buried in a wet swampy border under a wall facing to the south, and is enveloped at present in mud and mire ![10]

Letter 65 describes the summer of 1783 as:[11]

an amazing and portentous one, and full of horrible phenomena; for, besides the alarming meteors and tremendous thunderstorms that affrighted and distressed the different counties of this kingdom, the peculiar haze, or smoky fog, that prevailed for many weeks in this island, and in every part of Europe, and even beyond its limits, was a most extraordinary appearance, unlike anything known within the memory of man ... The sun, at noon, looked as blank as a clouded moon, and shed a rust-coloured ferruginous light on the ground, and floors of rooms; but was particularly lurid and blood-coloured at rising and setting. All this time the heat was so intense that butcher's meat could hardly be eaten on the day after it was killed ...

This was caused by the eruption of the Laki volcano in Iceland between 8 June 1783 and February 1784, killing up to a quarter of the people of Iceland and spreading a haze as far as Egypt.[12]

This section, often omitted from later editions, consists like the Natural History of 26 "Letters", none of them posted, and without even the fiction of being addressed to Pennant or Barrington.

Letter 1 begins "It is reasonable to suppose that in remote ages this woody and mountainous district was inhabited only by bears and wolves."[13] Letter 2 discusses Selborne in Saxon times; Selborne was according to White a royal manor, belonging to Editha, queen to Edward the Confessor.[14] Letter 3 describes the village's church, which "has no pretensions to antiquity, and is, as I suppose, of no earlier date than the beginning of the reign of Henry VII."[15] Letter 5 describes the ancient Yew tree in the churchyard. Letter 7 describes the (ruined) priory. Letter 11 discusses the properties of the Knights Templar in and near the village.

Letter 14 describes the visit of bishop William of Wykeham in 1373, to correct the scandalous "particular abuses"[16] in the religious houses in the parish. He orders the canons of Selborne priory (Item 5th) "to take care that the doors of their church and priory be so attended to that no suspected and disorderly females, suspectae at aliae inhonestae, pass through their choir and cloiser in the dark";[16] (Item 10th) to cease "living dissolutely after the flesh, and not after the spirit"[16] as it has been proven that some of the canons "sleep naked in their beds without their breeches and shirts";[16] (Item 11th) to stop "keeping hounds, and publicly attending hunting-matches" and "noisy tumultuous huntings";[16] (Item 17th) to properly maintain their houses and the convent itself, since they have allowed "through neglect, notorious dilapidations to take place";[16] (Item 29th) to stop wearing "foppish ornaments, and the affectation of appearing like beaux with garments edged with costly furs, with fringed gloves, and silken girdles trimmed with gold and silver."[16] Richard Mabey describes White's reaction to the "Priory saga" as "grave disapproval of the monks' sensuality and ... general delinquency".[17]

A sequence of Letters then relate the history of the priors of Selborne, until Letter 24 which relates the takeover of the priory by Magdalen College, Oxford under bishop William Waynflete in 1459. White describes this as a disastrous fall: "Thus fell the considerable and well-endowed priory of Selborne after it had subsisted about two hundred and fifty-four years; about seventy-four years after the suppression of priories alien by Henry V., and about fifty years before the general dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII."[18] The final letter records that "No sooner did the priory .. become an appendage to the college, but it must at once have tended to swift decay."[19] White notes that since then, even "the very foundations have been torn up for the repair of the highways"[19] so that nothing is left but a rough pasture "full of hillocks and pits, choaked with nettles, and dwarf-elder, and trampled by the feet of the ox and the heifer".[19] White had reason to be bitter about the takeover by Magdalen College, as it had made them Lords of the Manor of Selborne, which in turn gave them the right to appoint the parish priest.[20] White's biographer Richard Mabey casts doubt on the "frequent assumption" that White's "deepest regret was that he could never be vicar of Selborne",[21] but it was true that he was ineligible, as only fellows of Magdalen could be granted the living.[22]

This section, compiled posthumously, contains a list of some 500 phenological observations in Selborne from White's manuscripts, organised by William Markwick (1739–1812), and supplemented by Markwick's own observations from Catsfield, near Battle, Sussex. The observations depend on the latitude of these places and on the (global) climate, forming a baseline for comparison with modern observations. For example, "Cuckoo (Cuculus canorus) heard" is recorded by White for 7—26 April, and by Markwick for 15 April and 3 May (presumably only once at the earlier date) and "last heard" by Markwick on 28 June.

The table begins as follows:

Observations on Birds

This is the longest section of the observations, with comments in each instance by Markwick.

Observations on Quadrupeds

These are a few entries on sheep, rabbits, cats and squirrels, horse and hounds.

Observations on Insects and Vermes

The 'Vermes' cover glow-worms, earthworms, snails and slugs, and a "snake's slough", a cast skin.

Observations on Vegetables

The observations relate to trees, seeds, "beans sown by birds", "cucumbers set by bees", and a few fungi (truffles, Tremella nostoc, and fairy rings).

Meteorological Observations

These are a few curiosities such as frozen sleet and the "black spring" of 1771. He also recorded the effects on the weather of the 1783 volcanic eruption of the Icelandic crater Laki.

White's lifelong friend John Mulso wrote to him in 1776, correctly predicting that "Your work, upon the whole, will immortalize your Place of Abode as well as Yourself."[23]

Thomas White wrote "a long, appreciative, but.. properly restrained review"[24] of his brother's book in The Gentleman's Magazine of January 1789, commenting that "Sagacity of observation runs through the work".[25]

An anonymous reviewer in The Topographer of April 1789 wrote that "A more delightful, or more original work than Mr. White's History of Selborne has seldom been published ... Natural History has evidently been the author's principal study, and, of that, ornithology is evidently the favourite. The book is not a compilation from former publications, but the result of many years' attentive observations to nature itself, which are told not only with the precision of a philosopher, but with that happy selection of circumstances, which mark the poet."[24][25]

In 1830, an anonymous critic, in what critic Tobias Menely called a description of Selborne "as a place that lingers beyond the spatio-temporal horizon of modern life",[26] wrote having visited the village that:[27]

[T]he sequestered retreat of the naturalist still remains ... inaccessible to all the improved knowledge and refinement which belong to these enlightened and virtuous times. It has been excluded from the blessings of increasing commerce and population, from factories and filiations, manufactures and Methodism, genius and gin, prosperity and pauperism.

The book was widely admired by contemporary writers. Samuel Taylor Coleridge called it a "sweet, delightful book"; John Clare imitated its style of natural history letters.[28] Thomas Carlyle wrote that "It is one of our most excellent books; White, a quiet country Parson, has preached a better sermon here than all the loud Bishops that then were".[29] Charles Darwin is said to have been delighted by it.[30]

Circa 1862, the retired surgeon and zoologist Thomas Bell moved to The Wakes. He devoted his time to studying White's work, and editing new edition of the book.[31]

The 1907–1921 Cambridge History of English and American Literature begins its essay on White's Selborne with the words:[32]

Gilbert White's Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789) holds a unique position in English literature as the solitary classic of natural history. It is not easy to give, in a few words, a reason for its remarkable success. It is, in fact, not so much a logically arranged and systematic book as an invaluable record of the life work of a simple and refined man who succeeded in picturing himself as well as what he saw. The reader is carried along by his interest in the results of far-sighted observation; but, more than this, the reader imbibes the spirit of the writer which pervades the whole book and endears it to like-minded naturalists as a valued companion.

White is sometimes treated as a pioneer of ecology.[33] The British ornithologist James Fisher gives a more balanced view, writing in 1941:[34]

His world is round and simple and complete; the British country; the perfect escape.

The medical historian Richard Barnett writes that[22]

White has the strange power to make natural historians of his readers, whether gardeners, historians or biologists", noting that this demands analysis. He observes further that "White is straight out of Jane Austen. If it were not for his fame as a naturalist and writer, nothing in his life would distinguish him from hundreds of country parsons in the 18th and 19th centuries. The Natural History of Selborne is an oddly unassuming masterpiece, its haphazard construction revealing the process by which White came to write it.

Barnett notes, too, that:[22]

Part of White's appeal lies in this ability to summon a powerful, particular vision of pre-industrial England. He offers his readers the key to a walled garden of mellow Queen Anne brick, lying beside Thomas Gray's country churchyard and an ancient water meadow.

Yale nonfiction tutor Fred Strebeigh, writing in Audubon magazine in 1988, compared White with Henry Thoreau's Walden:[35]

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.

Tobias Menely of Indiana University notes that the book "has garnered praise from Coleridge, Carlyle, Darwin, Ruskin, Woolf, and Auden"[26] and that

Selborne's reception in the two hundred years since its initial publication offers a vivid instance of the retrospective idealization that transforms history into heritage.

The naturalist Richard Mabey writes in his biography of White that[36]

I must confess that, like many others, I did not come painlessly to the Natural History. For years I was put off by the aura of sanctity and bluffness which seemed to surround it. It was the kind of book presented on prize-giving days, and I saw it as a work, in all senses, of the old school. Even when I eventually came to read it, I cannot say my opinion changed dramatically. I could not cope at first with its rambling disorder, its sudden plunges into thickets of taxonomic Latin, and, for a while, I failed to notice the feeling behind the often dispassionate prose.

Virginia Woolf liked the book enough to devote an essay in her The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays, "White's Selborne" to it, stating that the start of the book is like a novel.[37]

• Biodiversity Library: First edition published in 1789
• Archive.org: 1841 edition (Harper and brothers, New York)
• Biodiversity Library: 1813 edition
• Biodiversity Library: 1877 edition edited by Thomas Bell
• Archive.org: 1880 edition (complete with Antiquities)
• Project Gutenberg edition
• Kindle edition (free)

• The Natural History of Selborne public domain audiobook at LibriVox

• Review in Nature, 1901 (paywall)
• Review of Dadswell's The Selborne Pioneer by Richard Barnett, 2007
• Gilbert White's Cosmopolitan Parochialism by Tobias Meneley
• Letter-Writers. Bartleby's Cambridge History of Literature, 1907–1921