Legacies and Legends

The British have for a long time regarded their relationship with the countryside as something quite distinctive, a badge of cultural identity. Despite having become a largely urban people, we continue to admire the rural village as the idea form of community, and have an affection for the native that is probably without parallel in the industrialized world. It is a passion which has sometimes deteriorated into sentimentality, and which doesn’t always have a very clear view of history, but it has left an indelible mark on our way of life. And standing as its principal text, as the first book to link the worlds of nature and the village, is Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selborne. This deceptively simple and unpretentious account of natural comings and goings in an eighteenth-century Hampshire parish has come to be regarded as one of the most perfectly realized celebrations of nature in the English language. The American writer J.R. Lowell once described it as ‘the journal of Adam in Paradise’.¹ This was extravagant even by the generous standards of the tributes heaped upon this book, yet Lowel had succeeded in catching something essential about both the man and his writing. Selborne, the real English village that is the setting for the book, may fall a mite short as a model for paradise; but the dramas of courtship, birth, survival and migration that are played out in its woods and fields, have, as recounted by White, something almost sacramental about them, Although he lived at a time when the rule of reason and the supremacy of man were accepted almost as gospel, White contrived to portray the daily business of lesser creatures as a source not just of interest, but of delight and inspiration. To that extent the book is a glimpse of a place of sanctuary.

What is extraordinary, given the book’s originality and importance, is how little is known about its author. To cast him as Adam, as Lowell did, is an example of the way his life and character have been repeatedly idealized, as if knowing too much about him might break the spell. This is a common enough process with national heroes, and is arguably a perfectly sufficient reason for a biography. Yet it is as well to make clear that I had an additional motive in beginning this study. Not long after discovering White, I began to be struck by what a modern figure he was; by the way that many of his attitudes and problems – for instance, how to reconcile a love for nature with an enjoyment of the stimulation of urban life – had recognizable parallels today; and most strongly, by how the facts of his protracted, compromised but ultimately triumphant resolution of these difficulties shone through the sentimental mists with which we shroud so much of our rural past, as a heartening and exemplary story.

But 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. Occasional, brilliant images floated up – scenes at night, when ‘goatsuckers glance in the dusk over the tops of trees’, and you could watch ‘the proceedings and manoevres of rooks’ – but not enough to dispel a certain coolness about the book as a whole.

It was seeing Selborne itself, the source of White’s inspiration, that changed my view decisively, and helped me to understand what the book was truly about. I suspect this realization would have come eventually, but the village proved to be a powerful catalyst. It is not that it trumpets its associations with White. There are no elaborate monuments or commemorative street names. Even Gilbert’s grave is hard to find and, stretched between two weatherbeaten stones, seems more like the resting-place of a small farmer, fallen on hard times, than a world-famous author.

But fortunately the landscape of the parish has changed very little since the eighteenth century. There is no need to view it through the glass of nostalgia or pastoral whimsy, because you can touch the actual stuff of White’s writings. There might be little chance these days of seeing forty ravens playing over the Hanger, as there were one morning in the autumn of 1778; yet the beechwoods that cloak this steep hill behind the village are just as extensive as they were in the eighteenth century. So is the vast thousand-year-old yew tree, under which now lies the grave of a man who took part in the local farm labourers’ uprising against the iniquities of the tithe system, thirty-five years after White’s death. And the intricate network of sunken lanes still give a palpable sense of the kind of enclosed, intimate world that White lived in and immortalized. The fact that it is a living landscape prevents Selborne becoming some kind of sentimental museum piece; and it was precisely its sense of vitality and change inside an ancient framework that, for me, began to dissolve the veils of myth and remoteness from White, and show him as a real person in a real place.

Selborne, the village, also reveals White as a man whose active originality went some way beyond the writing of one considerable book. He helped dig the paths up the Hanger that are still the first port of call for modern pilgrims. He was an impassioned and progressive gardener, not just of conventional flowers and vegetables, but huge melon beds, home-made follies, and wild-flower patches. All this activity was recorded in a series of journals that developed, in Gilbert’s middle years, into a continuous record of the natural year in Selborne that in its immediacy and sense of the continuity of life has no parallel in the eighteenth century. Two hundred years ago he wrote, on 4 June:

The journals lead one inevitably back to the Natural History, the single reason why Gilbert White has been remembered. There is nothing whatever unusual in his earning a place in literary history on the strength of a single book. Exactly the same happened to two authors with whom he is often grouped, John Bunyan and Izaak Walton. What is remarkable is that he was able to produce something so wholly original and appealing out of such unpromising ingredients. For a writer, White’s credentials hardly give one any expectation of what he was capable of: a country curate, never even a vicar, who spent the bulk of his life in the house where he was born. The book, at first sight, seems no more promising. On the surface the Natural History is nothing more than a casually edited collection of letters. Its tone is conversational and unprepossessing. By the somewhat self-satisfied intellectual standards of the time, it pays a quite disproportionate attention to trifling topics, like the singing of crickets, the subtleties of echoes and the way a pair of flycatchers kept their young cool in summer by fanning their wings above the nest.

Yet it was precisely this unorthodox focus that was the most radically original aspect of the book. The Natural History is a tribute to the detail and variety of life, a celebration of nature’s ‘minute particulars’. This is what makes it a unique breath of fresh air from a century that was still largely preoccupied with idealized notions of the power of reason, which had not yet realized that its expansive gestures and grand theories rested on the small, real facts of the world. Samuel Johnson, meditating among the echoing Celtic landscapes of the Inner Hebrides, caught the dilemma of the Age of Enlightenment perfectly:

It was against this climate that White insisted that the senses, far from suppressing local emotion, were the most powerful agents for summoning it up. Choosing as his arena the smallest and most intimate unit of human social life, a country village where he lived himself, he showed how watching the natural world at close quarters could generate not just understanding but respect, and an insight into the kindredness of living things. It was this blending of the scientific and emotional responses to nature that was White’s greatest legacy, and its influence has been far-reaching. It helped foster the growth of ecology, and the realization that humans were also part of the natural scheme of things. It helped pioneer, too, that affectionate writing about place that has become part of the mainstream of English literature.

Yet the Natural History is not just a classic text in the development of our view of nature. For better or for worse, it has also become an institution, and a major consideration for any biographer is the fact that The Natural History of Selborne has become part of that curious concoction of ideas and artefacts which are seen as somehow defining ‘the English way of life’. It is, apocryphally, the fourth most frequently published book in the language. When English settlers emigrated to the colonies in the last century, Selborne was packed alongside the family Bibles and sprigs of heather. It is hard to think of another book that could have brought together so many disparate voices to pay their respects. Coleridge jotted notes in the margin of his copy, and thought it ‘a sweet delightful book’. Darwin praised it as one of the chief reasons for his interest in biology. W.H. Auden wrote an affectionate ‘Posthumous Letter to Gilbert White’. And Virginia Woolf described the Natural History as ‘one of those ambiguous books that seem to tell a plain story … and yet by some apparently unconscious device of the author’s has a door left open, through which we hear distant sounds’.⁴

The sheer depth of this affection becomes at once both an incentive for learning more about the man at its centre, and a major obstacle to succeeding. For it has helped to generate a formidable alternative life-story: the myth of Parson White. This figure is one of the long line of robust, guileless, instinctive and entirely fictitious countrymen with which we have peopled our rural past. His function is to safeguard the Selborne legend, and, though he appears in a number of guises, one assumption run through them all. This is that White was himself a figure from a pastoral, a kind of ruminant tranquil, simple, wholesome and unworldly. He wrote from his heart – his own nature – not from his head. And it was only because he had such qualities that he was able to write the book he did.

The myth has reached high places over the years. It is there in Lowell’s ‘Adam in Paradise’ and Woolf’s ‘unconscious device’ just as much as in the more blatant version of the modern editor who suggested that ‘White rejoiced in his world, as a spaniel may rejoice to find new smells in the hedgerow.’⁵ And few of those who have succumbed are as honest about their motives as Edward Thomas: ‘In this present year, 1915, at least, it is hard to find a flaw in the life he led, which we may be excused for looking back upon dotingly as upon some inaccessible and imperturbable tract of our life.’⁶

The first versions of the myth began to appear during the period of rural unrest in the 1820s and 1830s, and have perceptible political undertones. The earliest I have been able to trace is from John Constable, writing at a time when he was having trouble in reconciling his love of Suffolk landscapes with his distaste for the cussedness and vulgarity of the labourers who inhabited them. In a letter to Archdeacon John Fisher in 1821 he applauded the example of the Natural History: ‘It only shows what a real love for nature will do – surely the serene and blameless life of Mr White, so different from the folly and quackery of the world, must have fitted him for such a clear and intimate view of nature.’⁷ But the official beginnings of Selborne mythology, the consecration of book and place as ingredients of an idyll, is usually credited to a journalist from the New Monthly Magazine. He visited the village only a couple of years after the ‘Captain Swing’ uprisings swept across the agricultural areas of southern England, Selborne included, in 1830, and this is what he chose to see:

In wartime the Natural History has frequently been seen both as an escape from the realities of the war (see Thomas above) and as part of what was being fought for. Writing during the height of the Blitz in 1941, James Fisher found an explanation for White’s appeal ‘not in what he says so much as in the way he says it. His world is round and simple and complete; the British country; the perfect escape. No breath of the outside world enters in; no politics; no ambition; no care or cost.’⁹

But, from the late Victorian period onwards, White has most frequently been cast as a primitive, whose writing was not so much the product of intelligence and hard work as of a fortunate gift, as singing is to a bird. J.R. Lowell linked White with Izaak Walton as a folk-writer. ‘Nature has endowed these men with the simple skill to make happiness out of the cheap material that is within the means of the poorest of us. The good fairy gave them to weave cloth of gold out of straw.’¹⁰

A short while later another American essayist, John Burroughs, plunged even deeper into organic metaphor:

This process of simplification has extended into White’s private life. He has been presented as a recluse, an ascetic, even a village mystic. His relative and biographer Rashleigh Holt-White went so far as to pronounce: ‘White had but one mistress: Selborne.’ But nothing can quite prepare one for the daring invention of the bibliographer Edward Martin, who by joining together two separate rural stereotypes, succeeded in transforming Parson White into a Gentleman Jim:

It is no surprise to find that he was eventually canonized as ‘St’ Gilbert by one of his eulogizers.¹³

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To be fair, it is not just our obstinate desire to see the countryside and all things connected with it as refuges of peace and simplicity that has nurtured these caricatures of Gilbert White. There is also a great lack of direct evidence about the kind of person he was. Very little is known about his parents, or about the kind of upbringing he had. His correspondence with family and friends (much of it collected into Holt-White’s Life and Letters, 1901) is fulsome about his home life and natural history activities, but reserved and circumspect when it comes to his emotional life. His remarkable journals also survive in manuscript in the British Library, but in forty years of almost continuous daily entries there is scarcely one that refers directly to his feelings. For these we have to turn, ironically, to a series of letters to him, from his close friend, John Mulso. Mulso’s intimate, garrulous record of their long friendship is the best evidence there is about the texture of Gilbert’s private life, and this biography is also, in part, the story of his life, as a very different – if entirely complementary – eighteenth-century character.

Circumstantial evidence about Gilbert’s life is much more plentiful, particularly about conditions in Selborne itself, and about the larger intellectual and literary parish in which he moved. I must pay a debt here to those writers who have penetrated beyond the mythology, not only in suggesting interpretations of White’s work and importance, but contributing new information about the parish and Gilbert’s circle of friends; especially Edmund Blunden, Cecil Emden, H.J. Massingham, Max Nicholson and Anthony Rye.¹⁴ Other valuable sources of parish evidence have been the Hampshire Record Office and the archives of Magdalen College, Oxford, which was the Lord of the Manor in the eighteenth century.

A major aim of this biography is to explore these links between White and the eighteenth-century world of, and beyond, Selborne, and to avoid the usual assumption that the secret of his genius lay in a remoteness from outside influences. For instance, how much did his frequent mixing with literary society in Fleet Street shape his decision to write a book? Was his natural history truly original or merely an extension, or synthesis, of trends that were already in motion?

The study of natural history in the eighteenth century was breaking away from the closed superstitious world of medieval thinking. People were beginning to look about them, to ask what at times seemed like heretical questions, to put ideas to the test. Yet some of the old myths proved extraordinarily persistent, as did a belief that the natural world ought to conform to various moral orders. Gilbert White’s major reference book on birds, Willughby’s Ornithology (first published in 1678) had more on the distillation of swallows to produce a cure for the falling sickness than it did on the bird’s nesting habits, and it devoted several pages to a detailed account of a group of nightingales discussing the European wars. Writers such as Robert Plot had begun to publish county studies but these were severe in style and indiscriminate in the way they mixed fact and fable. Before White, work on the natural history of a single parish would have been regarded as absurdly disproportionate, presupposing far too much in the way of local idiosyncrasy.

What was missing from the mainstream of natural history in the mid-eighteenth century was any sense of intimacy or wonder or respect – in short, of human engagement with nature. In some ways the contemporary belief in the power of reason was as great an obstruction to understanding as it was a means to knowledge. It tended to give humans an over-developed feeling of superiority over nature, to encourage the separation of observed facts from all the rich symbolism and associations that lay behind them.

This was perhaps less true of the school of thought which was the major influence on White’s attitude to nature. ‘Physico-theology’ had been pioneered by John Ray, in The Wisdom of God (1691) and later by William Derham, and was, in Derham’s words, ‘a Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God from his Works of Creation’.¹⁵. It was an exploration of design in nature, and a celebration of the miraculous way that the world fitted together and worked. To sceptical modern minds physico-theology is nothing more than a collection of truisms: creatures which were not properly ‘designed’ for their ways of life would simply cease to be. And combined with the persistent belief in the centrality of man, it threw up some ludicrous inverted arguments, like Ray’s assertion that there was exactly the correct amount of gold and silver in the Earth’s crust to regulate human trade; and Derham’s that human beings were made the height that they were to enable them to ride horses. But it is too easy to poke fun at physico-theology. Its precepts meant a wholly new faith in and commitment to observation of Creation’s real works, that made the earlier adherence to the divining of symbolism and pattern seem almost blasphemous. And in making clear the connections – however obvious – between the way that organisms lived and the character of their surroundings, Ray and Derham were also pioneering the study of ecology.

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This was the kind of intellectual background against which White’s thinking and work must be seen. Yet there is an important sense in which his formal scientific discoveries (which have always been overplayed) were much less significant than the way in which he viewed the world and his place in it. Throughout his life he ignored orthodox demarcation lines, between art and science, fact and feeling. He discovered how a nightjar produced its song while he was picnicking in a Hermitage. He put up an extraordinary fake wooden statue not yards from the wild wood on the Hanger. His exact descriptions of weather sound, at times, like the pronouncements of a medieval soothsayer. In fact, the more he reveals his sensuous enjoyment of the natural world and his sympathy with the joys and sufferings of its inhabitants, the more he begins to resemble an early nineteenth-century romantic just as much as an eighteenth-century rationalist.

These questions of motive and purpose are central. Did Gilbert set out to make an original interpretation of the world? Was his commitment to Selborne carefully planned, part of an equally conscious decision to dedicate his life to writing a single book? White mythology often suggests a kind of earth-destiny to account for the conception of the Natural History: ‘Selborne bore him, drew him, held him. Everything shaped and turned to the end that he should settle there and perfect work which could not be done elsewhere.’¹⁶ The evidence, as it unfolds, tends to suggest an altogether more human mixture of accident, opportunity, natural talent and instinctive attachment.

It is this honest muddle of instinct and affection in White’s superficially ordered life that joins him most closely with the creatures that he loved and studied. Gilbert was fascinated by instinct, and especially by the thought that it could guide small birds on vast journeys across the globe. Migration was one of the most vexed questions in eighteenth-century science and philosophy, and many thinkers found it impossible – or just too humiliating – to believe that blind instinct could achieve feats of navigation that superior human intelligence was only just mastering.¹⁷ No wonder many old superstitions about swallows hibernating, in ponds or caves, were revived as eighteenth-century ‘modern myths’: dumb sleep was so much less unsettling as an instinctual gift.

Yet as Gilbert returns to this question time and time again, it is clear that, for him, it was not just a scientific problem. He was intrigued and delighted by the annual return (or re-awakening) of his favourite parish birds, the swallows, swifts and martins; and increasingly their loyalty to the village seemed to echo his own not entirely rational attachment to Selborne. His book is, above all, an exploration of these links between humans and other creatures, a celebration of the life of a whole community. Gilbert White could perhaps have written the Natural History in some other village; but it would have had to have been his own.