Gilbert White(1720–1793)

Gilbert White was born at The Wakes, the family house in the small Hampshire village of Selborne, on the eighteenth of July 1720, eldest of the eleven children of John White, a non-practising barrister of Selborne, and Anne Holt of Streatham. He was raised at The Wakes in the small village under the great chalk hanger of Selborne Common, was schooled at Basingstoke Grammar from 1734, and entered Oriel College, Oxford, in 1740 on the strength of his uncle the Reverend Charles White's College Fellowship endowment. He took his BA in 1743, his MA in 1746, was elected Fellow of Oriel in March 1744 in his twenty-fourth year, and held the Fellowship until his death (the College Fellowship of Oriel was at this period an unmarried freehold sinecure compatible with parish work).

He was ordained deacon in 1746 and priest in 1749, served the curacy of Swarraton (Hampshire) 1751 to 1755, the curacy of Durley (1753), and from 1757 the curacy of his own parish of Selborne (held under the absentee vicar his college friend, since Selborne was a chapelry of Basingstoke). He held the Selborne curacy for the next thirty-six years to his death, lived throughout at The Wakes, and never travelled out of southern England in his life. He never married. The Selborne parish life of botanical recording, ornithological observation, kitchen-garden experiment and field-walking became the central work of his life.

He had taken from his Oriel undergraduate years a sustained interest in the natural history of the south-of-England chalk-and-greensand country, and from 1751 began the systematic Garden Kalendar and Naturalist's Journal in which he recorded every observable detail of the Selborne parish: the dates of the migrating birds' arrival and departure (he was the first English naturalist to demonstrate by careful field observation that the swallow, the house-martin and the swift were three distinct species and not the same bird at different ages, the standard misidentification of the early eighteenth century), the spring flowering dates of every wild plant in the parish, the rainfall in inches and the wind direction, the harvest dates, the daily field-walk observations. The Journal ran for forty years to his death and constitutes the longest single sustained natural-history-observation log of the eighteenth-century English-speaking world.

From 1767 he began the long correspondence with the Welsh naturalist Thomas Pennant, and from 1769 with the London barrister and natural-history correspondent Daines Barrington, in which he wrote up the Selborne observations in the long sequence of letters that ran across the next twenty years. The Pennant correspondence (forty-four letters 1767 to 1780) and the Barrington correspondence (sixty-six letters 1769 to 1787), with the additional ten introductory letters and the closing Antiquities of Selborne, were collected and published in 1789 in his sixty-ninth year as The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne. The volume sold modestly on first publication, became known across the natural-history reading public through the second edition of 1813, was one of the central reading-influences on Charles Darwin's adolescent natural-history reading at Shrewsbury, was on Henry David Thoreau's reading list at Walden Pond, and through the nineteenth century became the central single English-language work of place-based natural history.

The book has been continuously in print since 1789, has been issued in over three hundred separate editions in English alone (including the 1900 illustrated edition by Edmund New, the 1932 World's Classics edition with the H. J. Massingham introduction, and the 1986 Penguin Classics edition), and is by general accounting the fourth-most-published book in the English language after the King James Bible, the Book of Common Prayer and the works of Shakespeare. Gilbert White died at The Wakes on the twenty-sixth of June 1793 in his seventy-third year and was buried in the parish churchyard at Selborne. The Wakes is preserved as the Gilbert White Museum and is open to the public; the small parish church and the great chalk hanger that he climbed daily for forty years stand on the ground he wrote them on. The White name in modern English natural history carries the weight of the Selborne curacy of 1757 to 1793 and the volume of 1789.