Gilbert White at Selborne

Some books are written by men who travel the world to find a subject. Others are written by men who refuse to leave a single parish, and who, by the refusal, find that the parish has more in it than the world. The discipline is not in the seeing of much; it is in the seeing of one place every day, in every weather, for the length of a working life, until the place gives up its grammar.

THE CURATE AT THE WAKES

Gilbert White was born at The Wakes, in the High Street of Selborne, on the eighteenth of July 1720, son of the lawyer John White and Anne Holt. He was schooled at Basingstoke under Thomas Warton, took his degree at Oriel College Oxford, and was made Fellow of Oriel in 1744. He took priest's orders in 1749. From 1751 he served as curate of Selborne, a living in his own family's gift, and he held no other settled charge for the remainder of his life. He never married. He kept a garden, a horse, a sister, a housekeeper, and a journal. The journal he kept every day from 1768 onward, in a clean schoolmaster's hand, on ruled sheets bound year by year.

The eighteenth century did its natural history at a great distance from itself. The cabinets at the Royal Society filled with skins from Surinam and shells from the Pacific; the swallows of England were thought to winter in the mud at the bottom of ponds, on the authority of writers who had never watched a swallow. White did not travel. He walked the Hanger; he walked the Lythes; he walked the three miles of chalk and hanger-beech and hollow lane that surrounded the village, and he wrote down what he saw. The letters went out from Selborne to the antiquary Daines Barrington in London, and to the zoologist Thomas Pennant in Flintshire, over twenty-three years, from 1767 to 1788. One hundred and ten letters in all. He copied each one before sending it.

THE BOOK COMES UP FROM LONDON

On a soft afternoon of October 1789 the Alton carrier brought up from London a parcel from the press of his youngest brother, Benjamin White & Son, of Horace's Head, Fleet Street. White carried the parcel upstairs to the writing-room at the back of The Wakes, the room that took the south light off the Hanger through a single casement, and cut the string with his pocket-knife. The book inside was a quarto bound in calf, four hundred and seventy pages, the title-page set in three lines: The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, in the County of Southampton: with Engravings, and an Appendix. The dedication, on the second leaf, was to Daines Barrington.

He was sixty-nine years old. He sat down at the desk and opened the book at the place where, in Letter X to Pennant, he had set out his case for the matter of the swallows. He read the sentences he had written. He read the engraving of the Hanger from the south, by Hieronymus Grimm, which his brother had had cut for the frontispiece. He read the list of subscribers. The room was very quiet. Below in the garden a robin was working the late apples.

A SECOND OF TIME IN A HAMPSHIRE PARISH

In the writing-room at The Wakes, with the finished book open on the desk, White reflected for the space of a long minute on the thing he had done. The whole question of his life was contained in that minute. He had spent twenty-three years writing one hundred and ten letters about one parish of three miles' compass. He had refused, by simple omission, every larger subject the age offered a clergyman of leisure: the American war, the French revolution then five months old, the rage for the picturesque, the cabinets of foreign curiosity. He had set against the great subjects the small one. He had set against the cabinet the casement, against the specimen the living bird, against the authority of books the authority of the eye returned to the same hedge in the same month for twenty-six successive years. He had no certainty that the choice would be honoured. The book might, in the honest probability of October 1789, sell two hundred copies in London and be forgotten in a generation. It did not, in the room, matter. The looking was the thing. The book recorded the looking. The looking, by the calendar he had kept since 1768, would go on, in the parish, whether the book was read or not. I am an out-door naturalist, he had written to Pennant in 1770, one that takes his observations from the subject itself, and not from the writings of others. The sentence was the whole of his case. He closed the book.

THE SWALLOWS, AND THE QUESTION OF THE POND-MUD

The book carried into print what the parish had taught him. He had settled, against the authority of older naturalists, the question of the migration of the hirundines, by the simple discipline of dates: the first swift on the Hanger on the twenty-second of April, the last on the eleventh of August, the swallows a fortnight either side of those marks, the house-martins later, the sand-martins earlier, the figures stable to within a few days across a quarter of a century of looking. He had described the harvest-mouse, Mus messorius, which he was the first English writer to set down as a distinct species, weighing one against a halfpenny in his palm. He had described the noctule bat, the lesser whitethroat, the wood-wren and the chiff-chaff distinguished by song. He had recorded the great frost of January 1776, when the thermometer fell to seven degrees below zero on the north wall of the kitchen-garden and the thrushes died in the hedges. He had recorded the dust-fall of June 1783, the Laki haze, when the sun at noon was the colour of rusted iron and the harvest came in light. He had not known the cause. He had recorded the thing seen.

THE EVENING MEAL

He carried the book downstairs and set it on the shelf in the parlour between his grandfather's Pliny and the Systema Naturae of Linnaeus. His sister Anne was laying the table; the housekeeper, Sukey, was bringing in a dish of mutton. He said grace. They ate. After the meal he went out into the garden in the last of the light and stood at the ha-ha at the bottom of the lawn, looking up at the Hanger, where the beeches were turning. The swifts had been gone since the second week of August. The fieldfares would come in from the north on the first hard wind. He had written down, in twenty-six years of journals, the dates on which they had come, and he would write down, when they came this year, the date on which they came again.

THE PARISH AFTER

The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne sold through its first edition within eighteen months. The second edition came out in 1813, twenty years after the author's death. White died at The Wakes on the twenty-sixth of June 1793, seventy-two years old, of a pleurisy, and was buried in the churchyard of St Mary the Virgin at Selborne, ten yards from the porch, on the south side of the yew. The stone bears the initials G. W. and the date, by his own instruction, and nothing else. By 1900 the book had gone through about a hundred editions in English; by the early twenty-first century, over three hundred, in more than thirty languages. Every later naturalist's parish-record in the language, from Richard Jefferies on the Wiltshire downs to Robert Macfarlane in the holloways of Dorset, is written on the model of the Selborne letters: the discipline of the single ground, returned to daily, written down in plain prose. The Wakes has been since 1955 a museum, the Gilbert White's House and Field Studies Centre. The 1789 manuscript and the twenty-six bound years of the naturalist's journal are on permanent display.

The great subject is sometimes the one that is travelled to; sometimes it is the one that is refused to be travelled away from. The man who looks at one hedge for fifty years is, by the discipline of the looking, doing the same work as the man who circumnavigates the globe, and on certain mornings, in certain lights, doing more of it. In the south transept of the church at Selborne a small brass on the wall carries the name and the dates, and a single line: Pleased as I am with the spot, I am almost ashamed to confess how much. Outside, in the churchyard, on the south side of the yew, the stone is set flat into the grass, ten yards from the porch, and the swifts return every April to the eaves of The Wakes, on the third week, within eleven days of the date he wrote down.