The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne

The main part of the book, the Natural History, is presented as a compilation of 44 letters nominally to Thomas Pennant, a leading British zoologist of the day, and 66 letters to Daines Barrington, an English barrister and Fellow of the Royal Society. In these letters, White details the natural history of the area around his family home at the vicarage of Selborne in Hampshire. Many of the 'letters' were never posted, and were written especially for the book. Patrick Armstrong, in his book The English Parson-Naturalist, notes that in particular, "an obvious example is the first, nominally to Thomas Pennant, but which is clearly contrived, as it introduces the parish, briefly summarizing its position, geography and principal physical features." White's biographer, Richard Mabey, estimates that up to 46 out of 66 'letters to Daines Barrington' "were probably never sent through the post"; Mabey explains that it is hard to be more precise, because of White's extensive editing. Some letters are dated although never sent. Some dates have been altered. Some letters have been cut down, split into shorter 'letters', merged, or distributed in small parts into other letters. A section about insect-eating birds in a letter sent to Barrington in 1770 appears in the book as letter 41 to Pennant. Personal remarks have been removed throughout. Thus, while the book is genuinely based on letters to Pennant and Barrington, the structure of the book is a literary device. "No novelist could have opened better", wrote Virginia Woolf; "Selborne is set solidly in the foreground." ==Illustrations==

. The "hermit" was Henry White, dressed to look picturesque. The first edition was illustrated with paintings by the Swiss artist Samuel Hieronymus Grimm, engraved by W. Angus and aquatinted. Grimm had lived in England since 1768, and was quite a famous artist, costing 2½ guineas per week. In the event, he stayed in Selborne for 28 days, and White recorded that he worked very hard on 24 of them. White also described Grimm's method, which was to sketch the landscape in lead pencil, then to put in the shading, and finally to add a light wash of watercolour. The illustrations were engraved (signed at lower right) by a variety of engravers including William Angus and Peter Mazell. ==Structure==

The Natural History of Selborne Letters to Thomas Pennant There are 44 letters to White's friend Thomas Pennant (1726–1798), of which the first nine were never posted and are thus undated. Of those that were posted, the first, Letter 10 giving an overview of Selborne, is dated 4 August 1767; the last, Letter 44 on wood pigeons, is dated 30 November 1780. It is not known how the men became friends, or even if they ever met; White writes repeatedly that he would like to meet "to have a little conversation face to face after we have corresponded so freely for several years" so it is certain they did not meet for long periods, and possible they never met at all. The letters are edited from the form in which they were actually posted; for example, Letter 10 as posted had a cringing introductory paragraph of thanks to Pennant which White edited out of the published version. Barrington, on the other hand, liked to theorize about the natural world, but had little interest in making observations himself, and tended to accept claimed facts uncritically. This was caused by the eruption of the Laki volcano in Iceland between 8 June 1783 and February 1784, killing up to a quarter of the people of Iceland and spreading a haze as far as Egypt. The Antiquities of Selborne This section, often omitted from later editions, consists like the Natural History of 26 "Letters", none of them posted, and without even the fiction of being addressed to Pennant or Barrington. Letter 1 begins "It is reasonable to suppose that in remote ages this woody and mountainous district was inhabited only by bears and wolves." Letter 2 discusses Selborne in Saxon times; Selborne was according to White a royal manor, belonging to Editha, queen to Edward the Confessor. Letter 3 describes the village's church, which "has no pretensions to antiquity, and is, as I suppose, of no earlier date than the beginning of the reign of Henry VII." Letter 5 describes the ancient Yew tree in the churchyard. Letter 7 describes the (ruined) priory. Letter 11 discusses the properties of the Knights Templar in and near the village. Letter 14 describes the visit of bishop William of Wykeham in 1373, to correct the scandalous "particular abuses" in the religious houses in the parish. He orders the canons of Selborne priory (Item 5th) "to take care that the doors of their church and priory be so attended to that no suspected and disorderly females, suspectae at aliae inhonestae, pass through their choir and cloiser in the dark"; A sequence of Letters then relate the history of the priors of Selborne, until Letter 24 which relates the takeover of the priory by Magdalen College, Oxford under bishop William Waynflete in 1459. White describes this as a disastrous fall: "Thus fell the considerable and well-endowed priory of Selborne after it had subsisted about two hundred and fifty-four years; about seventy-four years after the suppression of priories alien by Henry V., and about fifty years before the general dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII." The final letter records that "No sooner did the priory .. become an appendage to the college, but it must at once have tended to swift decay." White notes that since then, even "the very foundations have been torn up for the repair of the highways" White's biographer Richard Mabey casts doubt on the "frequent assumption" that White's "deepest regret was that he could never be vicar of Selborne", but it was true that he was ineligible, as only fellows of Magdalen could be granted the living. A Naturalist's Calendar From the year 1768 to the year 1793 This section, compiled posthumously, contains a list of some 500 phenological observations in Selborne from White's manuscripts, organised by William Markwick (1739–1812), and supplemented by Markwick's own observations from Catsfield, near Battle, Sussex. The observations depend on the latitude of these places and on the (global) climate, forming a baseline for comparison with modern observations. For example, "Cuckoo (Cuculus canorus) heard" is recorded by White for 7—26 April, and by Markwick for 15 April and 3 May (presumably only once at the earlier date) and "last heard" by Markwick on 28 June. The table begins as follows: Observations in Various Branches of Natural History ; Observations on Birds :This is the longest section of the observations, with comments in each instance by Markwick. ; Observations on Quadrupeds :These are a few entries on sheep, rabbits, cats and squirrels, horse and hounds. ; Observations on Insects and Vermes :The 'Vermes' cover glow-worms, earthworms, snails and slugs, and a "snake's slough", a cast skin. ; Observations on Vegetables :The observations relate to trees, seeds, "beans sown by birds", "cucumbers set by bees", and a few fungi (truffles, Tremella nostoc, and fairy rings). ; Meteorological Observations :These are a few curiosities such as frozen sleet and the "black spring" of 1771. He also recorded the effects on the weather of the 1783 volcanic eruption of the Icelandic crater Laki. ==Reception==

Contemporary White's lifelong friend John Mulso wrote to him in 1776, correctly predicting that "Your work, upon the whole, will immortalize your Place of Abode as well as Yourself." Thomas White wrote "a long, appreciative, but.. properly restrained review" of his brother's book in ''The Gentleman's Magazine'' of January 1789, commenting that "Sagacity of observation runs through the work". An anonymous reviewer in The Topographer of April 1789 wrote that "A more delightful, or more original work than Mr. White's History of Selborne has seldom been published ... Natural History has evidently been the author's principal study, and, of that, ornithology is evidently the favourite. The book is not a compilation from former publications, but the result of many years' attentive observations to nature itself, which are told not only with the precision of a philosopher, but with that happy selection of circumstances, which mark the poet." The book was widely admired by contemporary writers. Samuel Taylor Coleridge called it a "sweet, delightful book"; John Clare imitated its style of natural history letters. Thomas Carlyle wrote that "It is one of our most excellent books; White, a quiet country Parson, has preached a better sermon here than all the loud Bishops that then were". Charles Darwin is said to have been delighted by it. Circa 1862, the retired surgeon and zoologist Thomas Bell moved to The Wakes. He devoted his time to studying White's work, and editing new edition of the book. Edwardian era The 1907–1921 Cambridge History of English and American Literature begins its essay on White's Selborne with the words: Modern White is sometimes treated as a pioneer of ecology. The British ornithologist James Fisher gives a more balanced view, writing in 1941: The medical historian Richard Barnett writes that Barnett notes, too, that: Tobias Menely of Indiana University notes that the book "has garnered praise from Coleridge, Carlyle, Darwin, Ruskin, Woolf, and Auden" and that The naturalist Richard Mabey writes in his biography of White that Virginia Woolf liked the book enough to devote an essay in her The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays, "White's Selborne" to it, stating that the start of the book is like a novel. ==Manuscript==

The manuscript for the book stayed in the White family until 1895, when it was auctioned at Sotheby's. The purchaser was Stuart M. Samuel, who mounted the letters and bound the book in green Morocco leather. His library was sold in 1907. The manuscript was bought by the dealer A.S.W. Rosenbach in 1923, and passed into the collection of Arthur A. Houghton. The Houghton collection was auctioned by Christie's in 1980, where the manuscript was purchased by and for "Gilbert White's House and Gardens" at The Wakes, Selborne, where it is displayed. Since 2018 the complete manuscript is digitized and online available at the website of Gilbert White's House. ==Legacy==

Thomas Bewick, in the first volume (Land Birds) of his A History of British Birds (1797), presents a phenological list of 19 birds which are "chiefly selected from Mr. White's Natural History of Selborne, and are arranged nearly in the order of their appearing". The list begins with the wryneck ("Middle of March"), places the cuckoo in the middle of April, and ends with the flycatcher in the middle of May. Charles Darwin read the Natural History as a young man, inspiring him to take "much pleasure in watching the habits of birds" and to wonder "why every gentleman did not become an ornithologist". Sara Losh, too, read the Natural History as part of her "wonderful, varied and advanced [home] education for a young girl". White's Natural History has been continuously in print since its first publication. It was long held ("apocryphally", according to White's biographer, Richard Mabey) to be the fourth-most published book in the English language after the Bible, the works of Shakespeare, and John Bunyan's ''The Pilgrim's Progress''. White's frequent accounts in The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne of his tortoise Timothy, inherited from his aunt, form the basis for a variety of literary mentions. Verlyn Klinkenborg's book, Timothy; or, Notes of an Abject Reptile (2006) is based wholly on that reptile, as is Sylvia Townsend Warner's The Portrait of a Tortoise (1946). The tortoise also finds its way into science, as its species, Testudo whitei (Bennett 1836), long thought to be a synonym of Testudo graeca, has been rediscovered in Algeria. Various writers have commented on the book. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge called it "This sweet delightful book". The novelist Virginia Woolf observed that "By some apparently unconscious device .. a door [is] left open, through which we hear distant sounds." The writer and zookeeper Gerald Durrell commented in The Amateur Naturalist that White "simply observed nature with a sharp eye and wrote about it lovingly." ==Notes==