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Here it is, explained like you are 10:
A quiet priest in a small English village spent his whole life watching nature close to home. He wrote letters about swallows and tortoises, frost and echoes, owls and bats. Nothing in his book is far away or famous. It is one small place, looked at with love for fifty years. People found the letters so good that they have been in print ever since 1789.
White never married, traveled little, and declined preferment to stay in the Hampshire village where he was born, serving as curate and keeping, for decades, a daily journal of the weather and wildlife of his parish. The parish of Selborne, with its chalk hills, beech hangers, and one famous zigzag path he cut himself, is the true subject, and White knows it the way you know a face.
The book is made of letters: forty-four to the zoologist Thomas Pennant and sixty-six to the lawyer-naturalist Daines Barrington, written between 1767 and 1780. In them he untangles the willow wrens into separate species, watches swifts and swallows with an obsession that still reads as suspense (do swallows migrate, or hibernate?), studies earthworms, echoes, frost, and his pet tortoise Timothy.
It is a quiet book that quietly founded a genre: watching one place, carefully, for a lifetime, is now the model of nature writing everywhere. White's Advertisement, his prospectus for what parish history ought to be, opens our edition, and the letters follow as he published them.
Gilbert White was a quiet country parson who spent his life watching the animals, birds, and weather of one small Hampshire parish. His book, one hundred and ten letters written to two fellow naturalists, records swallows, tortoises, echoes, and frosts with a poet's eye and a scientist's notebook. Published in 1789, it founded the modern tradition of nature writing and has never gone out of print.
The first chapter
The Author of the following Letters takes the liberty, with all proper deference, of laying before the public his idea of parochial history, which, he thinks, ought to consist of natural productions and occurrences as well as antiquities. He is also of opinion that if stationary men would pay some attention to the districts on which they reside, and would publish their thoughts respecting the objects that surround them, from such materials might be drawn the most complete county-histories, which are still wanting in several parts of this kingdom, and in particular in the county of Southampton.
And here he seizes the first opportunity, though a late one, of returning his most grateful acknowledgments to the reverend the President and the reverend and worthy the Fellows of Magdalen College in the University of Oxford, for their liberal behaviour in permitting their archives to be searched by a member of their own society, so far as the evidences therein contained might respect the parish and priory of Selborne. To that gentleman also, and his assistant, whose labours and attention could only be equalled by the very kind manner in which they were bestowed, many and great obligations are also due.
Of the authenticity of the documents above-mentioned there can be no doubt, since they consist of the identical deeds and records that were removed to the College from the Priory at the time of its dissolution; and, being carefully copied on the spot, may be depended on as genuine; and, never having been made public before, may gratify the curiosity of the antiquary, as well as establish the credit of the history.
If the writer should at all appear to have induced any of his readers to pay a more ready attention to the wonders of the Creation, too frequently overlooked as common occurrences; or if he should by any means, through his researches, have lent an helping hand towards the enlargement of the boundaries of historical and topographical knowledge; or if he should have thrown some small light upon ancient customs and manners, and especially on those that were monastic, his purpose will be fully answered. But if he should not have been successful in any of these his intentions, yet there remains this consolation behind--that these his pursuits, by keeping the body and mind employed, have, under Providence, contributed to much health and cheerfulness of spirits, even to old age:--and, what still adds to his happiness, have led him to the knowledge of a circle of gentlemen whose intelligent communications, as they have afforded him much pleasing information, so, could he flatter himself with a continuation of them, would they ever be deemed a matter of singular satisfaction and improvement.
GIL. WHITE.
Selborne, January 1st, 1788.
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE
LETTERS to THOMAS PENNANT, ESQ.
Source: Project Gutenberg. Published 1789. Author died 1793. Public domain worldwide. Share this book: WhatsApp
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