The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 — Reading Companion

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Authors: White, Gilbert, 1720-1793, Morley, Henry, 1822-1894 [Editor] Digital Source: Project Gutenberg Gutenberg Release Year: 2007 First Publication Year: Not confirmed

Key Word: Natural history -- England -- Selborne -- Early works to 1800; Selborne (England) -- Description and travel -- Early works to 1800; Selborne (England) -- Antiquities -- Early works to 1800 Target Reader: Readers of public-domain and historical texts

Book Edition: Project Gutenberg digital edition Book Language: en

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Words 44,449

Reading time 194 min

Text sections 5

The catalog record for The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 — Reading Companion provides practical reading context through 44,449 words, 3 hr 14 min estimated reading time, and 5 detected text sections.

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Project Gutenberg metadata also associates the work with “Natural history -- England -- Selborne -- Early works to 1800,” connecting these edition facts with the source record’s subject description.

Source: Project Gutenberg record #20933

Gilbert White's letters from Selborne blend precise natural observation with a quiet, unhurried prose style. This volume traces seasonal rhythms, bird behavior, and local landscape through a structure that moves between anecdote, measurement, and reflection.

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CASSELL'S NATIONAL LIBRARY.

THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE

BY THE REV. GILBERT WHITE A.M.

CASSELL & COMPANY, Limited: _LONDON_, _PARIS_, _NEW YORK & MELBOURNE_. 1887

Gilbert White was born in the village of Selborne on the 18th of July, in the year 1720. His father was a gentleman of good means, with a house at Selborne and some acres of land. Gilbert had his school training at Basingstoke, from Thomas Warton, the father of the poet of that name, who was born at Basingstoke in 1728, six years younger than his brother Joseph, who had been born at Dunsford, in Surrey. Thomas Warton, their father, was the youngest of three sons of a rector of Breamore, in the New Forest, and the only son of the three who was not deaf and dumb. This Thomas, the elder, was an able man, who obtained a fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford, became vicar of Basingstoke, in Hampshire, and was there headmaster of the school to which young Gilbert White was sent. He was referred to in Amhurst's "Terrae Filius" as "a reverend poetical gentleman;" he knew Pope, and had credit enough for his verse to hold the office of Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1718 to 1728. His genius for writing middling verse passed on to his more famous sons, Joseph and Thomas, and they both became in due time Oxford Professors of Poetry.

Gilbert White passed on from school to Oxford, where he entered Oriel College in 1739. He became a Fellow of Oriel, graduated M.A. in 1746, at the age of six-and-twenty, and six years afterwards he served as one of the Senior Proctors of the University. His love of nature grew with him from boyhood, and was associated with his earliest years of home. His heart abided with his native village. When he had taken holy orders he could have obtained college livings, but he cared only to go back to his native village, and the house in which he was born, paying a yearly visit to Oxford, and in that house, after a happy life that extended a few years over the threescore and ten, he died on the 26th of June, 1793.

Gilbert White never married, but lived in peaceful performance of light clerical duties and enjoyment of those observations of nature which his book records. His brothers, who shared his love of nature, aided instead of thwarting him in his studies of the natural history of Selborne, and as their lives were less secluded and they did not remain unmarried, they provided him with a family of young people to care about, for he lived to register the births of sixty-three nephews and nieces.

It was one of his brothers, who was a member of the Royal Society, by whom Gilbert White was persuaded, towards the close of his life, to gather his notes into a book. It was first published in a quarto volume in the year of the outbreak of the French Revolution with the fall of the Bastile. He was more concerned with the course of events in a martin's nest than with the crash of empires, and no man ever made more evident the latent power of enjoyment that is left dead by those who live uneventful lives surrounded by a world of life and change and growth which they want eyes to see. Gilbert White was in his seventieth year when his book appeared, four years before his death. It was compiled from letters addressed to Thomas Pennant and the Hon. Daines Barrington.

Thomas Pennant was a naturalist six years younger than Gilbert White. He was born at Downing, in Flintshire, in 1726, and died in 1798, like White, in the house in which he had been born. His love of Natural History made him a traveller at home and abroad. He counted Buffon among his friends. He had written many books before the date of the publication of White's "Selborne." Pennant's "British Zoology," his "History of Quadrupeds" and "Arctic Zoology," had a high reputation. He wrote also a Tour in Wales and a History of London.

Daines Barrington, fourth son of the first Viscount Barrington, was a year younger than Pennant, and died in 1800. He became Secretary to Greenwich Hospital, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, and President of the Royal Society. His "Miscellanies," published in 4to in 1781, deal with questions of Natural History, and of Antiquities, including a paper first published in 1775 asserting the possibility of approaching the North Pole. His most valued book was one of "Observations on the more Ancient Statutes."

LETTERS ADDRESSED TO THOMAS PENNANT, ESQ.

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Gilbert White's The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 unfolds as a series of letters that resist chronological order, instead following the turn of seasons and the author's curiosity. White's voice is that of a patient observer who measures a stag's height, notes the delayed arrival of summer birds amid 'meteorous strife,' and records the habits of house-martins with the same care he gives to a dead moose. The structure is episodic, each letter a self-contained inquiry that often begins with a date and place, then moves from a specific incident—a shot sparrow, a widowed partridge—to broader reflections on monogamy among birds or the nature of appetite in cats. This volume, edited by Henry Morley, presents White's original text with an introduction that sketches the author's life, but the letters themselves remain the core: a record of a place observed over decades.

Letters as a Structural Frame

The book's epistolary form is not merely a convention but a structural principle. Each letter is addressed to a correspondent, often Thomas Pennant or Daines Barrington, and the format allows White to shift topics without transition. A letter dated May 12, 1770, begins with a report on cold weather and delayed bird migrations, then moves to observations on monogamous birds, then to a story about a sportsman who shot cock partridges, and finally to a note on cats' fondness for fish. The letter form permits these digressions, and White uses them to build a cumulative portrait of Selborne's natural life. The dates anchor the observations in real time, but the sequence is not strictly chronological; letters from different years sit side by side, creating a layered sense of seasonal recurrence.

Recurring Images: The Dead Moose and the Living Bird

White's prose is punctuated by vivid, often surprising images. In one letter, he describes a dead female moose in a garden, noting its 'vast, tall' stature and the keeper's report that it 'seemed to enjoy itself best in the extreme frost.' The image is precise—the moose's height, the lack of front antlers, the plan to make a skeleton—but also slightly grotesque, as putrefaction 'precluded all farther curiosity.' This attention to the dead animal contrasts with the lively birds that populate other letters: swallows appearing in frost, house-martins deprived of nests by sparrows. White moves between the static and the dynamic, the corpse and the nest, without sentimentality. The moose is measured; the martin's struggle is observed. These recurring images of life and death, of creatures in their habitats, give the book a quiet, unsentimental coherence.

Movement Between Scenes: From Garden to Parish

White's observations shift fluidly between scales. A letter may begin in his own garden—where he notes the behavior of a tame bird or the damage done by owls to a dove-house—then widen to the parish of Selborne, then to broader comparisons with other regions. In one passage, he moves from a specific incident (shooting a sparrow that had taken a martin's nest) to a general reflection on the 'propensity' of cats for fish, then to a note on amphibious quadrupeds like otters. This movement is not systematic but associative, driven by the logic of natural history. The reader is taken from the intimate (a single nest) to the comparative (the habits of different species) without losing the sense of place. White's Selborne is both a specific village and a lens through which to see the natural world.

Voice and the Observer's Stance

White's voice is that of a gentleman-naturalist, curious but restrained. He rarely expresses wonder directly; instead, he lets the facts speak. When he describes a stag reaching 'ten feet and a half,' the exclamation mark is the only hint of astonishment. His tone is often wry, as when he notes that a moose and a stag could not breed because 'their inequality of height must have always been a bar to any commerce of the amorous kind.' This dry humor surfaces in observations of bird behavior—the 'old bachelors' among partridges, the widowed hen that 'still found a fresh paramour.' White's stance is that of a recorder, but his personality emerges through these asides. He is not a detached scientist but a man who lives among his subjects, and his voice gives the book a consistent, companionable quality.

Readers approaching The Natural History of Selborne should expect not a systematic treatise but a collection of moments. White's method is to observe, record, and occasionally reflect, leaving connections for the reader to make. The letters reward slow reading: each one contains a detail—the date of a swallow's arrival, the fate of a sparrow—that gains meaning when placed alongside others. This volume, the first of two, establishes the pattern of attention that defines White's work.

That rainy afternoon, White's patient notes on swallows returning to the same eaves felt like a quiet pact with time. I closed the volume and found myself reaching for another, one that seemed to echo that same unhurried attention to land and weather. The Hills and the Vale — Edition Insights drifted into my hands, its pages holding a similar stillness, a gentle reminder that places keep their own calendars.