The Selborne pioneer
by Richard Barnett
[ bookreviews ]
"Hirundo domestica!!!" - Gilbert White, April 13 1768.
Gilbert White's journal entry for April 13th 1768, celebrating the return of the swallows and with them the spring, captures the contradictory allure of this unassuming Enlightenment curate. White was both scholar and ingénue, formidably learned and yet candid in his love of what we would now call the natural world. His writing - published in 1788 as The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne - is at once completely immersed in the genteel culture of Georgian England, and free to speak across the centuries to generations of common readers. As Ted Dadswell observes in the opening pages of The Selborne Pioneer, the central challenge scholars face in writing about this endlessly fascinating figure is one that White, as a naturalist, met constantly. How to describe (in White's phrase) the "manners and modes" of your subject in its natural habitat, without murdering to dissect and, in doing so, destroying the intimate immediacy which makes White such congenial company?
Make a list of 18th-century writers who have sufficiently captured the popular imagination to merit a Penguin Classics edition: Boswell, Gibbon, Defoe, Sterne, Fielding, Richardson and so on. It is a testament to White's enduring appeal that he does not seem entirely out of place in such exalted company. In the 219 years since its publication, The Natural History of Selborne has never been out of print. An almost Biblical number of editions and translations - White is especially big in Japan - have turned the village of Selborne in Hampshire into something of a shrine, filled throughout the year with pilgrims walking White's "stations of the cross": the wooded hanger, the village green, the vicarage, and finally the single grave in the churchyard.
But we have run ahead of ourselves. White has the strange power to make natural historians of his readers, whether gardeners, historians or biologists, and we must anatomise this numinous, charismatic figure. White was born in Selborne, in the mild summer of 1720. After a vigorous, outdoorsy childhood - in which he proved himself particularly adept with a fowling piece - he went up to Oriel. After several terms of profligacy, exciting waistcoats and languid, rather desultory reading, he pulled himself together and left with a college fellowship. Paul Foster, the author of White's entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, points out that the Orielensis Alexander Pope was guest of honour at White's graduation, and presented him with an inscribed copy of his translation of the Iliad.
Family properties and investments allowed White to follow whatever career he chose, and in short order he chose the Church. Various curacies took him around the country, and eventually back to Selborne. From 1751 he began to keep what he called a 'Garden-Kalendar' - a daily diary of his observations, and a scrapbook of folklore concerning animals, plants and the weather. He began to question the morality of shooting for sport, but kept his fowling piece as a source of specimens for dissection and a deterrent to the pigeons that threatened his raspberry canes. In 1758 White's father died, and the family home passed to him. He remained in Selborne for the rest of his life, maintaining his Garden-Kalendar and gossiping about parishioners until his death in 1793. In this sense, White is straight out of Jane Austen. If it were not for his fame as a naturalist and writer, nothing in his life would distinguish him from hundreds of country parsons in the 18th and 19th centuries. The Natural History of Selborne is an oddly unassuming masterpiece, its haphazard construction revealing the process by which White came to write it.
Though he rarely left Selborne after 1758, White was an incorrigible scribbler, and maintained a select group of correspondents in the Royal Society, the citadel of British natural philosophy. He was also fortunate in his relations: one brother - Thomas - was a fellow of the Royal Society, and another - Benjamin - ran London's most renowned natural history bookshop. But the roots of The Natural History of Selborne lay in White's friendship with two other Royal Society luminaries, Thomas Pennant and Daines Barrington. The book is set out as a series of letters to Pennant and Barrington - some genuine, others written up in this style - describing White's observations of his parish. The epistolary style was not only a popular format for eighteenth-century novelists such as Richardson and Fielding; in the Enlightenment 'republic of letters' it was also the accepted format for communication between learned gentlemen. Correspondence carried the authority of authenticity, of trustworthy first-hand experience, and by using this style White sought to make his observations respectable.
But the epistolary style had another dimension. Explorers (such as White's acquaintance Joseph Banks, who accompanied Captain James Cook on his 1768-72 circumnavigation) used it as a way of capturing the shock of the new and exotic. By presenting his work in this way, as an 'exploration' of a rural English parish, White took the utterly commonplace and made it foreign, fascinating, uncanny. As the full title of his work suggests, White's view of natural history included not only the animal and plant life (wild and domestic) of the parish, but also its situation, topography, weather and climate, relationship to other places, history, antiquities and inhabitants. Selborne was for him a microcosm of the 'great chain of being', complete with 'mountains' (the South Downs) and 'forests' (the beech woods of Hampshire), from which the world could be travelled in a single summer afternoon.
Part of White's appeal lies in this ability to summon a powerful, particular vision of pre-industrial England. He offers his readers the key to a walled garden of mellow Queen Anne brick, lying beside Thomas Gray's country churchyard and an ancient water meadow. Constablesque clouds pile up on the horizon: a stormy night is in the offing, which will be all the more pleasurable when heard through the open window of a bedchamber. For the moment, though, the air is still and clear, carrying birdsong and unsullied by mechanical noise. Orwell, unlikeliest of revolutionaries, felt the pull and the power of this English (not British) patriotism sans peur et sans reproche. In a poem published in the Adelphi magazine in 1936 he lamented that:
A happy vicar I might have been
Two hundred years ago
To preach upon eternal doom
And watch my walnuts grow...
But girls bellies and apricots,
Roach in a shaded stream,
Horses, ducks in flight at dawn,
All these are a dream.
This sense of something lost, something simple which our ancestors possessed but which is denied to their fallen children, sounds exactly the right note of English melancholy. Richard Mabey put it beautifully in his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of The Natural History of Selborne: "Selborne, in short, is the landscape of the pastoral dream made flesh: cosseted, balanced, endurable" (pxi). Dadswell goes further: White's feelings for Selborne were, he argues, "an emotional allegiance" (p1). What has survived of White is love.
Perhaps because of the intensely personal loyalty his work inspires, White scholarship has tended to be partisan, focusing on one aspect of his life or work to the exclusion of others. In the introduction to this revised edition of The Selborne Pioneer Dadswell - a former teacher and freelance historian - identifies three major interpretations of White. First, the 'mythological White', as understood by, say, panellists on Gardeners' Question Time: a child of nature, filled with naïve but undisciplined wonder. Second, the "literary White". Dadswell acknowledges White as a "gifted and unspoilt stylist" (px), the Gerald Durrell of his day. But he follows ornithologist James Fisher in arguing that the mythological and literary Whites have distracted from proper assessment of his work as a naturalist: "quite enough [has] been heard over the years of the 'charm' of Gilbert White" (pxvi).
For this reason, The Selborne Pioneer focuses on White as "naturalist and scientist". Dadswell's major claim is that White was "an early and quite extraordinary exponent of modern behavioural biology" (pxvi) and, as such, is an innovator comparable in stature and significance to Gregor Mendel or Charles Babbage. He identifies White's 'self-contradictory' character (p8) as the key to understanding his work. We might think of The Selborne Pioneer as a modern "field guide" to the many faces of White as a naturalist: the antiquarian, the gardener, the sky-watcher, the theorist. As Dadswell point out, White both worked within and transcended the Enlightenment natural historical project of classification and taxonomy. He studied animals as 'types' - expressions of a timeless and divinely ordained plan - but he took an equal interest in their individual idiosyncrasies of behaviour and appearance, their "life and conversation". White's "outdoor method" was central to this endeavour. In addition to dissecting and describing specimens in his study, he made a point of observing their behaviour alive and in nature.
Swallows were the most frequent objects of White's attention, and the "hirundine puzzle" (p38) provides Dadswell with his most engaging theme. Did members of the hirundine family - swallows and martins - migrate to foreign parts for the winter, or did they remain in England and hibernate in buildings, ponds and riverbanks? Answering this question became a lifelong passion for White. The Natural History of Selborne records his ecstatic pleasure at their return each spring ("Hirundo domestica !!!") and his speculations on where they had been. The migrating swallows, like White's letters, linked Selborne with the rest of the world, the familiar with the tantalisingly new. And this Ecclesiastes-like delight in the rhythm of the seasons was not confined to wild nature. The White family possessed an ancient tortoise, whose name, sadly, has gone unrecorded, and whose yearly hibernation and reappearance was recorded with equal care.
By shifting attention away from the 'mythological' and 'literary' Whites, Dadswell is able to explore the often-overshadowed social and financial aspects of White's life. He highlights the importance of market-gardening in supplementing White's clerical stipend and Oriel fellowship, allowing him to "fulfil his responsibilities as a senior family member" (p14). White, he argues, saw the 'natural economy' reflected in the agricultural economy of his parish and the financial concerns of his family. He could not bear the prospect of living and working away from his family home, but as an Orielensis he was unable to become vicar of Selborne - a living available only to fellows of Magdalen. So he remained curate of the parish he loved, scribbling, growing onions, and developing that "genius for intimacy" which, like Charles Kingsley and Francis Kilvert a few generations later, made him a peerless observer and an incorrigible gossip.
So far, so good. The Selborne Pioneer brings a refreshingly critical perspective to bear on White, pruning away much of the sentimentalism that has accreted over two centuries and paying close attention to what White actually wrote - something that many of his eulogists have neglected to do. But Dadswell is disappointingly reluctant to engage with the particular challenges raised by this new perspective. In his own terms, he gives us the "anachronistic White". His principal interest in White is as a precursor to the natural sciences boom of the 19th century - the "first behaviour scientist", the "first ecologist" and so on. He frames The Natural History of Selborne in terms of its relationship to current scientific thinking, correcting White's 'mistakes' and praising his anticipations of modern practices such as the use of 'controls' in experiments:
"[White] was penetrating but not 'reductive'… Today, he would have agreed that a living creature 'is not decomposable into independent bits of genetic coding', and he has little in common with the early 20th century research workers who turned behaving animals into laboratory 'preparations'. (p177)
"If nothing else - and his humanity can surely still reach us - a common currency, a code, links us with Gilbert White. We can work with him, outdoors and in the study, much as we can play music from a score written in his time… White foreshadows whole areas of later research." (p181)
"His fellow observers are catching up with [White] today, but they are unlikely to overtake him." (p184)
Our sympathy for White's worldview is undoubtedly conditioned by the fact that we see him through the lens of later natural science. But by trying to understand his subject in isolation from the wider 'ecology' in which he lived, thought and felt Dadswell is doing in historical terms what he praises White for overthrowing in natural history. Hopes are raised by the first section of the last chapter, entitled 'Natural science as culture', but quickly dashed as Dadswell uses a comparison with Victorian natural scientists to repeat his view of White as "an early and distinctive precursor of our own behavioural zoologists and botanists". (p181). This approach is typified by the tantalising but ultimately fruitless view of White as what Darwin might have become, had he followed his father's wishes and become a clergyman. In chapter 10, for example, Dadswell tries to link White's scattered comments on natural adaptations and his work on stock-breeding – "artificial selection", in Dadswell's tellingly anachronistic phrase - with Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection.
But most frustrating of all is Dadswell's attitude to White's Christianity. Though White was a professional Anglican for most of his life, Dadswell tries to interpret his work as a secular scientific project, divorced from the wider context of 18th-century culture. There are clear problems with applying secular science, a distinctly nineteenth-century ideology, and 'scientist', a word coined by the Cambridge philosopher William Whewell in 1834, to the work of a country clergyman who died in 1793. But Dadswell seems determined to claim White for the secularists, and gives his Christianity scandalously short shrift - something less than a page. We are told, somewhat superfluously, that White was 'entirely sincere in his Christianity' (p111) but that 'superstition was inimical to science' (p112) and that he was 'among those in his day who were challenging the belief that an original Act of Creation [sic] sufficiently explained the living world' (back cover). In a short section on 'the 'controverted Design'' (pp 132-136) Dadswell tries to oppose a theory of 'design' - broadly equivalent to modern Christian fundamentalist creationism - with an undefined secular alternative he attributes, on the basis of a few rather abstract quotes, to White.
But White was no Dawkins: he continued to draw his stipend, to pray, to be loved by his parishioners and admired by his ecclesiastical colleagues. Metaphorical readings of Genesis did not begin in the 18th century: many devoted Christians before White had challenged the literal truth of creation in seven days. By the time of his ordination it was perfectly possible to be an Anglican and to believe that creation took place over thousands, perhaps millions of years. Though the idea of "natural theology" - that one could find evidence of the existence of a loving Christian God by studying his creation - was formally set down by the Cambridge theologian William Paley in his Natural Theology (1802), many British intellectuals of the 18th century thought it an absurdity to talk about nature without invoking God. Natural theology was a central part of Enlightenment rationalist projects, whether Anglican, Catholic, Dissenter or Deist.
Linnaeus, for example, thought his system of classification recreated the original plan of creation. Adam Smith believed that the 'hidden hand' of the free market was an expression of divine grace. Thomas Malthus saw starvation, overpopulation and misery as evidence of original sin, for which the only solution was Christian moral restraint. White, for his part, seems to have had little sense of sin. The stability, rhythm and balance he saw around him brought to mind a pre-lapsarian world in which faith and reason, love and knowledge, were partners rather than opponents. Dadswell's view - that 'science' and 'faith' are irreconcilable enemies - is one that emerged from the same mid-19th century ideological struggles which produced the concept of secular science. Evangelical Anglicans tried to reinforce what they saw as the failing power of the Church, while scientists such as Thomas Henry Huxley sought to forge a new professional role for professional researchers and teachers in the natural sciences. Indeed, Huxley and his colleagues aimed to take science out of the hands of gentlemen-naturalists such as White and to bring it into their new laboratories.
The Selborne Pioneer is alive to the oddities of White, and the sheer pleasure his work brings to readers. But by trying to recast White as an exemplary modern field biologist Dadswell runs the risk of alienating those who have most sympathy with his project. Much is lost when the Selborne curate is fixed and wriggling on a pin. Those who read White for pleasure will find little here to add to their enjoyment. The Selborne Pioneer is too descriptive, lacking focus, often content merely to repeat White's own observations. Historians will baulk at the anachronistic appeals to present scientific practice. And even if modern naturalists - apparently Dadswell's intended audience - find his spirited polemic convincing, it is difficult to see what it will bring to their work. We must return our subject to his own historical habitat, without any irritable reaching after contributions or 'firsts', so that his readers may continue to glimpse White across the centuries, standing in his garden in the morning rain, an Adam in his Eden.
