Owls hoot in B flat...
.. and other natural phenomena from the 18th century: a review of Gilbert White's The Natural History of Selborne
Hi! I’m Hannah James, journalist, writer and editor, and this is where I review nature books, and think about nature-related topics out loud. Thanks for reading!
What I’m reading
This week I finally read what’s popularly credited as the first ever work of nature writing: Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selborne.
Published in 1788, it’s a series of letters by White, the curate of Selborne in Hampshire, to two fellow naturalists, detailing all his meticulous observations in this novel field of enquiry.
The style of nature writing I’m most familiar with is one that interweaves personal anecdote with tales of wandering in nature: H is for Hawk is the classic example. This is the polar opposite of White’s intent. He writes solely about the natural phenomena he’s so fascinated by, mentioning almost nothing about himself (except for a sad little note that he has started to suffer attacks of deafness that “half disqualify me for a naturalist”).
So it’s more accurate to view The Natural History of Selborne not as the first example of a genre, but as the precursor to one, the first sign of the burgeoning popular interest in nature that enabled the birth of nature writing, centuries down the track.
It can’t be shoehorned into the nature writing genre, I think, mainly because it was written before the Romantic movement transformed the popular view of nature and wilderness from threatening to sublime. White describes holloways, those romantic lanes that over centuries of foot traffic have worn deep into the landscape (and whose appeal Robert Macfarlane has written an entire book about), as possessing “very grotesque and wild appearances”. “These gloomy scenes affright the ladies… and make timid horsemen shudder”. They do, however, “delight the naturalist with their various botany”.
What was so terrifying? Their tangled roots and hanging icicles in winter, apparently. I haven’t read Macfarlane’s Mountains of the Mind for some time, but I suspect he cites White in that book’s thesis, which I summarised above: that over the past 300 years, sparked by the Romantic movement, people’s perceptions of certain landscapes have changed from terrifying to beautiful. (Read MotM if you want to know why - it’s brilliant.)
Wood engraving of a hollow lane by Eric Ravilious for a 1938 edition of The Natural History of Selborne (Royal Academy of Art)
White’s relationship to nature is radically different from most current nature writers: he’s not a writer but a scientist, and moreover is on the cutting edge of science, noting things “never before remarked”. He is a true scientist, meticulous, precise and data-driven: constantly weighing and measuring captured birds, field mice, sizes of ponds, rainfall, temperatures. He even gets out his ruler, holds his nose and ventures into a shed at the Duke of Richmond’s estate where an exotic imported moose, unfortunately deceased, has been hung for the edification of interested people.
“From the fore-feet to the belly behind the shoulder it measured three feet and eight inches: the length of the legs before and behind consisted a great deal in the tibia, which was strangely long; but in my haste to get out of the stench, I forgot to measure that joint exactly.”
Wood engraving of White with the moose by Eric Ravilious for a 1938 edition of The Natural History of Selborne (V&A)
Over a period of decades he notes the arrival and departure dates of migratory birds, a mystery he constantly returns to. It’s hard to believe now that people once thought migratory birds spent the winter hibernating at the bottom of ponds or in the crevices of cliffs, but in the 18th century the thought of such tiny creatures navigating thousands of miles to warmer climates - and to a precise annual timetable, at that - was almost impossible to comprehend.
White is in lively debate with fellow natural historians, swapping interesting bird corpses with his correspondents and not hesitating to criticise the greats: “Linnaeus seems to be in a puzzle about his mus amphibius,” he notes, pointing out that he himself has discovered a new species of water rat. Of Scopoli’s assertion in his new book, Annus Primus Historico-Naturalis, that woodcocks carry their chicks in their beaks when fleeing predators, he says tartly:
“Candour forbids me to say absolutely that any fact is false, because I have never been witness to such a fact. I have only to remark that the long unwieldy bill of the woodcock is perhaps the worst adapted of any among the winged creation for such a feat of natural affection.”
White was a clergyman, and not only does this show in his meditations on how the beauty and economy of the natural world reflect the wisdom and munificence of Providence, but in the occasional ringing Biblical cadences of his language:
“It is, I find, in zoology as it is in botany: all nature is so full, that that district produces the greatest variety which is the most examined.”
He’s humble about his writing style, however, apologising to one correspondent:
“On a retrospect, I observe that my long letter carries with it a quaint and magisterial air, and is very sententious: but, when I recollect that you requested stricture and anecdote, I hope you will pardon the didactic manner for the sake of the information it may happen to contain.”
But when some of the information is 250 years out of date, can the reader pardon its occasional sententiousness?
Well, yes. This isn’t a shaped narrative, more a (long) list of observations, but once you understand that, it’s a richly rewarding read. White is funny: I giggled out loud at the stinky moose story; at his musing on how hedgehogs must be born with soft spines (“or else the poor dam would have had but a bad time of it in the critical moment of parturition” - ouch); at his tale of a musical friend of his listening to owls with the aid of a pitch-pipe, and reporting solemnly: “He finds they all hoot in B flat.” He’s endearing: I developed an affection for the industrious clergyman trotting out of his house in the middle of the night with a candle to search the lawn for earthworms, pulling the tiles off his own roof to closely examine a swift’s nest, and taking his watch to the woods to time the flights of owls. He’s so earnest, so unflagging, so driven by an unquenchable curiosity about the natural world around him. He may be entirely uninterested in personal revelation, but his writing betrays his character nevertheless.
Wood engraving of an owl in the woods by Eric Ravilious for a 1938 edition of The Natural History of Selborne (V&A)
He also provides a vital snapshot of the world before the Industrial Revolution. His weather records are still used today, and his lists of birds and plants are a vivid reminder of how much diversity has been lost. Are there still so many ring-ousels around Lewes in autumn that a young man could kill 16 in one afternoon? Is it still true that “Cornish choughs abound and breed on Beachy-head and on all the cliffs of the Sussex coast”? I don’t know, but I suspect not.
And he shows how enmeshed we once were in the natural world. Not everyone was like him in his scientific enquiry, of course, but we all used to live closer to the land, with all the physical and mental health benefits that lifestyle entails. (I don’t intend to romanticise poverty, however.) In White’s world, schoolboys could identify which nest belonged to which type of bird; everyone knew that round-leaved sun-dew could be found “in the bogs of Bin’s-pond” and green hellebore was hidden “in the deep stony lane on the left hand just before the turning to Norton-farm”.
Wood engraving of Selborne village green by Eric Ravilious for a 1938 edition of The Natural History of Selborne (V&A)
Ultimately though, this book deserves to be read because of its author. This odd, obsessive curate in an obscure Hampshire village, tramping about woods and streams with a ruler and carefully dissecting countless dead birds, was not only substantially advancing the sum of human knowledge at the time of his writing, but also providing a vital historical record.
His letters, White notes, are simply “an humble attempt to promote a more minute inquiry into natural history.” They have never been out of print since their first publication in 1788, so it’s fair to say he succeeded.
The Natural History of Selborne was book number 101 for 2020. I’ve also been reading:
Susanna Clarke, Piranesi
Joanne Harris, The Strawberry Thief
Jasper Fforde, First Among Sequels
Gilbert White, The Natural History of Selborne
Alistair Bonnett, Off the Map
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