Gilbert White and his Contexts
Archive of Abstracts
This international conference took place across three days in early June 2025 in Gilbert White's own house in Selborne. This page archives the abstracts of the papers being delivered at the conference. The abstracts are listed in alphabetical order of the person giving the paper.
Nigel ASTON (University of York)
Gilbert White the Oxford Don
White's educational formation as a young man is often downplayed in relation to his mature status as a naturalist; this paper aims to correct that perception by emphasising the importance of the rich intellectual currents to which the young White was exposed at Oxford University during the 1740s, a decade of exceptional political instability. As an undergraduate and a fellow at Oriel College (a college with a distinctly Tory flavour) White came under the lasting influence of two exceptional theologians: Walter Hodges, the Provost, a Tory and a Hutchinsonian (and thereby an anti-Newtonian), and Edward Bentham, his tutor, and a moderate Whig, committed to improving the education of ordinands, and a moral philosopher in his own rights. He also took advantage of the lectures in natural philosophy then on offer and the Oxford Physic Garden was primary to his emerging passion for plants. White enjoyed every aspect of Oxford life serving as a Proctor in 1752-3 and was a disappointed candidate for the Provostship in 1757. Oxford as much as Selborne could so easily have been the locus of White's career as a naturalist and, for the best part of two decades, it was. It also gave him many of the enduring friends and connections indispensable to his wellbeing.
Stan BOOTH (University of Winchester)
The Bioethics of the Vista: Gilbert White's Contribution
This paper proposes a critical examination of the bioethical implications of Gilbert White's work in the context of environmental ethics. White, an ecologist and conservationist, is best known for his book The Natural History of Selborne (1789), which explored the natural world through observations on the local flora and fauna. However, this paper will argue that White's work goes beyond mere scientific inquiry, as it also raises important bioethical questions about our relationship with the natural world. Specifically, this paper will explore how White's work reflects and reinforces dominant bioethical narratives of his time, particularly in regard to anthropocentrism, speciesism, and the commodification of nature
Bill BROOKS
Gilbert White: A Photographic Exploration
This short paper describes a photographic exploration of the places and species described by Gilbert White in his letters and journals. For a forthcoming book (A Zigzag Path) I have paired extracts of White's writing with contemporary photographs. Like the zigzag path constructed by Gilbert White and his brother John, my photographs meanders backwards and forwards, to and fro, between place and time. Whilst the photographs are all taken within the last three years, some are deliberately 'modern' whilst others have a more ambiguous relationship with time. Some explicitly depict the areas that White knew, others reflect more tangentially on his words. Photographs of the species he describes are shown in circular frames, presenting them as museum specimens, questioning their status in today's world. Using this approach, I hope to present White not in a purely historic context, but as someone who calls us to action, ensuring that future generations can inherit at least some part of world that he so vividly described.
Kevin Richard BUTT (University of Central Lancashire)
Observations of the earthworms from Gilbert White's estate
Gilbert White's letter to Daines Barrington (May 20, 1777) included the lines: 'Earth-worms, though in appearance a small and despicable link in the chain of nature, yet, if lost, would make a lamentable chasm... worms seem to be the great promoters of vegetation, which would proceed but lamely without them and, most of all, by throwing up such infinite numbers and lumps of earth, called worm-casts, which being their excrement, is a fine manure for grain and grass.' These perceptive observations are regarded as relevant by today's soil ecologists, and particularly by those that specialise in earthworm ecology. In full, the letter clearly describes a collection of ecosystem services (burrow formation, dead organic matter incorporation, cast production and nutrient release) on which we rely for healthy soils. This work encompasses the written observations of Gilbert White and recent investigations in the grounds of his house. Sampling sought to confirm the presence of one type of earthworm alluded to in his writing and to record earthworm species in different habitats across the estate. Earthworms were collected using standard techniques, but instead of behavioural observations by candlelight, as performed by White, twenty first century technology was employed to discover aspects of earthworm activity at the soil surface. White's observations are considered as some of the earliest and most revolutionary in earthworm ecology. They dispelled myths of earthworms as pests in the soil and inspired Charles Darwin to investigate earthworms over his lifetime and ultimately to write a book about them just before his death. Although Darwin has been quoted as saying that he 'stood on the shoulders' of White, and went on 'a pilgrimage to Selborne' as a young man in June 1857, it is a pity that Darwin failed to give Gilbert White full credit for his earlier ecological writing on earthworms.
Lisa CARDY (Natural History Museum, London)
Digitally unlocking Thomas Pennant's Extra Illustrated Tours of Wales and Scotland
Pennant's Extra Illustrated Tours of Scotland and Wales include unique drawings and paintings by Moses Griffith, John Ingleby and other artists. The tours influenced many contemporary writers and travellers, and offer a major, and still largely untapped, resource for modern scholarship. This paper presents the implementation and outputs so far from a collaborative crowdsourcing project between the Natural History Museum and the National Library of Wales to collect data on unique images of places and buildings (many now vanished) in the National Library of Wales bespoke extra-illustrated Tours of Wales and Scotland. The crowdsourced data will be used to generate links, for the first time, from digital editions of the Tours to the associated images hosted at the National Library of Wales website. In addition this project has used AI to generate controlled vocabulary to more accurately tag the unique illustrations. The research outputs will create new conjunctions and possibilities for researchers of Pennant who corresponded with Gilbert White.
Brycchan CAREY (Northumbria University)
Gilbert White in the Network of Eighteenth-Century Clerical Naturalists
White is often held up as the type specimen of the 'parson naturalist', a species, according to some, peculiarly English, largely Anglican, and somewhat scarce, confined mainly to rural parsonages. My research, by contrast, has identified at least 1200 clerical naturalists in the English-speaking world alone, distributed from the sixth to the twenty-first century, from a wide range of denominations, and in both urban and rural settings. Many of these individuals knew one another, often corresponding, meeting, and collaborating. They were aware of the clerical naturalists who preceded them, and they frequently inspired those who came later. In this paper, I explore this rich heritage and locate White within this network, discussing some of the clerical naturalists who inspired him and those with whom he corresponded or maintained personal and professional relationships.
June CHATFIELD
Forty years of recording in White's Selborne from 1978 to the present
Dr June Chatfield was Curator of the Gilbert White Museum from 1978-1988. She has lived in the area since 1978 and has recorded plants and animals including groups like mosses and molluscs not covered by White. In this talk, she will compare her finds with those of White.
Helen CLARKE and Sharon WITT
How does the wisdom of Gilbert White—as a geographer with a deep sense of place—inspire educators today?
Our experiences, and our pedagogical thinking and practices as educators are inspired by Gilbert White's deep respect for place. The village of Selborne is repeatedly a companion in our walking, and a muse in our responses and research. As teachers and teacher educators, with backgrounds in science, geography and environmental humanities, we celebrate White's legacy not only as a naturalist, but as a geographer; with an intense curiosity about the world, whimsical perspectives and a sense of place rooted in his locality that offers much to inform local site-specific fieldwork.
White's observations give insights about the natural world, which remain as relevant as ever today, and pose geographical questions of phenology (close observations of weather and climate, species migration, hibernation and germination patterns in an English village), geology and landscape (intimate knowledge of complex biomes such as fields, woods, ponds and holloways), human settlement (notes on gardening, agriculture, textiles, pastimes and attitudes), and interconnectedness (new respect for the more-than-human world). And so, White's life and work offer inspirations for deep and authentic development of contemporary geographical knowledge, skills, enquiries, communication, care and hope. In this presentation, we share responses gathered during fieldwork with undergraduate and Master's level students and in-service teachers; with whom we have visited the Field Study Centre, walked with Selborne, engaged in playful approaches, explored nature connection and raised new voices. We draw on our publications; where we attend to place differently, seek alternative perspectives, focus on the here and now, value the extraordinary in the ordinary and deep map in expansive, literal and lyrical ways. We propose 'pedagogies of attention', and illustrate how deep relationships with place are essential in current times of climate and environmental uncertainty.
Mary-Ann CONSTANTINE (University of Wales) and Nigel LEASK (University of Glasgow)
Curious Travellers: new journeys for old tours
Curious Travellers is a long-running academic project focused through the influential Tours of Wales and Scotland published by the naturalist and antiquarian Thomas Pennant (1726-1798). It could be described as a 'crucible' project—a space in which different media, different perspectives, and different research skills combine and collide. Currently funded by the AHRC, it is a digital humanities project, creating data-linked online editions of Pennant's tours and correspondence. Our research team seeks to unpick the multiple voices and collaborations behind Pennant's texts, and to explore their legacy in the journeys and texts of others. Gilbert White (and his brother Benjamin) were important 'nodes' in Pennant's natural history and publishing networks, and the project is delighted to be housing Stephanie Holt's new online edition of Gilbert's original letters to Pennant.
In its most recent phase, working with the Pennant collections at the Natural History Museum, Curious Travellers has become increasingly engaged in exploring the role of material objects (specimens, souvenirs) and of visual culture in relation to travel and broader global contexts of colonialism and environmental history. In this presentation, Nigel Leask and Mary-Ann Constantine will offer a brief introduction to the project, sketch out potential new directions, and discuss the constraints, as well as the possibilities, of being multi-stranded, cross-disciplinary—and intermittently funded.
Nigel COOPER (Anglia Ruskin University and the Diocese of Ely)
A comparative Critical Discourse Analysis of White's Natural History and the Dasgupta Report on the Economics of Biodiversity
Critical Discourse Analysis is a particular methodology for uncovering perspectives and assumptions of authors and the way they have used language to persuade readers to adopt their point of view. It is particularly useful in disclosing techniques that are somewhat underhand, techniques that may be deliberate or be just unconsciously perpetuating surfaces of power. I have used CDA to show that Dasgupta, while acknowledging that Nature is beyond economics, uses these techniques to persuade readers that incorporating Nature into economics is just 'common sense'. In this paper I hope to analyse The Natural History of Selborne using CDA in anticipation that it will show White did not use deceptive techniques to the same degree.
I intend to analyse one or more sentences in detail. I shall compare their handling of the word 'Nature', its personification and implied gender and its metaphorical use. I shall look for ruses around transitivity and nominalisation to displace attention from human responsibility, while also looking for how White grants agency to non-human actors. And I intend to compare the assumed reader in each work and the power of their role in society and what this may reveal about the intended effects of the two texts. The analysis may throw up unexpected insights—or fail even to provide expected ones.
Caroline DAVISON
'The amiable Mr Stillingfleet' and the 'ingenious friend Mr. Marsham': how a friendship influenced the writing of The Natural History of Selborne
The series of twenty letters exchanged between Gilbert White and Robert Marsham 1790-1793 were first made widely available in E. T. Bennett's edition of The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1876) and Henry Bell's edition of 1877. In reference to these letters, the most recent White biographies describe Marsham as a kindred spirit of White (Dadswell 2002), a 'great lover of the natural scene' (Foster 1988) and a 'lover of trees' (Mabey 1986). None of the biographies mention Marsham's Royal Society paper on 'Indications of Spring', published in 1787; nor is the fact that Benjamin Stillingfleet collected the data for his Calendar of Flora at Marsham's estate in 1755 explored, although both these subjects are mentioned in the letters. The importance of the Flora to White is recognised in the biographies, and in Secord's introduction to the OUP's 2013 edition of The Natural History of Selborne, but Marsham's link to Stillingfleet remains unexamined. The importance of Marsham's spring indicator data is acknowledged in the current field of UK climate science - he has been dubbed the 'father of phenology'. With this context, the paper addresses Marsham's overlooked but essential role in creating the circumstances for Stillingfleet's collection of data for the Calendar of Flora, a publication which inspired White and was to influence the design of Daines Barrington's Naturalist's Journal. Using material from the letters, historical articles, Royal Society papers and publications, the paper reinvestigates Marsham's relationships with Stillingfleet and White and traces a narrative in which Marsham as naturalist, friend and mentor is instrumental in advancing Stillingfleet's production of the Flora and therefore played a noteworthy part in White's journey towards his Natural History of Selborne.
Alex DEANS (University of Glasgow)
'A part of Great Britain that perhaps was never so well examined before': Gilbert White, Thomas Pennant, and the natural history of Scotland
The correspondence with Welsh naturalist Thomas Pennant (1726-98) that forms the first part of The Natural History of Selborne, evinces Gilbert White's interest in—and encouragement of—Pennant's pioneering Tour in Scotland 1769 (1771). This paper will argue that Pennant's relationship with White played a decisive role in shaping the natural history concerns central to Pennant's Scottish travels. Comparing the White-Pennant correspondence with Pennant's simultaneous efforts to establish a circle of natural history informants in Scotland, reveals the geography of collaboration that underpins the printed texts. The contrasting methods of White and Pennant, employing local observation and travel respectively, exemplify the double perspective that natural history brought to bear on questions such as climate and the migration of birds. But the synthesis of perspectives and voices in Pennant's printed works (in contrast to the 'monographic' approach of White's Selborne) is not necessarily straightforward, suggesting the practical and formal affordances at play in the organisation of natural knowledge in print.
Elizabeth EDWARDS (University of Wales)
Teaching taxonomies: Thomas Pennant and natural history in the classroom
This paper presents a recent case study in public engagement and knowledge exchange, focusing on the use of eighteenth-century natural history in a primary school environment. In 2024, the 'Curious Travellers' research project commissioned a visual artist and animator, Sean Harris, to work on themes of natural history with a class of 9–11-year-olds in north-east Wales. Over spring/summer 2024, Harris's residency focused on the relationship between drawing and natural history, using illustrations of birds from Thomas Pennant's British Zoology (1766). Pennant's work was used as a visual prompt for pencil drawings, but it was also the starting point for a wide range of ecological conversations comparing the eighteenth century with our own time. Themes arising from Harris's conversations with the class included the meanings of terms like taxonomy, diversity, symbiosis and migration. Using pages from British Zoology the children compared the status of species in the eighteenth century and now, learned how to read a long S in eighteenth-century print, and discussed why we name things, with what effects, in English and in Welsh. Given that eighteenth-century works of natural history are not commonly used in the classroom, this paper explores what uses could be made of such texts in twenty-first-century educational settings, and what benefits, for teachers and learners, might result from them.
R. Paul EVANS
'The vain and self-seeking author of the British Zoology': How justified was Professor T. Bell in his negative assessment of Thomas Pennant's lack of formal acknowledgement of the support he had received from Gilbert White in the writing of his various zoological works?
In 1877 Professor Thomas Bell edited an edition of The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (London, MDCCCLXXVII) in which he heavily criticised Thomas Pennant for the complete lack of respect he had shown towards the help and support he had received from Gilbert White in the writing of his various zoological publications. Bell stated that in the preface to the British Zoology (1768) Pennant made 'no acknowledge of his [White's] help, no recognition of the debt' [Vol.I, p.xli]. Bell's negative criticism of Pennant's conduct was picked up in unquestioned fashion by several subsequent editors of Selborne. Bell had impeccable credentials to edit such a work, holding the chair of Professor of Zoology at King's College, and being the President of the Linnean Society and the first President of the Ray Society. As expected, Bell's writing carried academic weight but, despite this, the question still needs to be asked about how justified and accurate he was in this criticism of Pennant? White's biographer, Rasleigh Holt-White, writing in 1901, reached a more sympathetic assessment, claiming that Bell was 'in error' when stating that there was no acknowledgement. In 1904 Professor Louis Miall in his edition of Selborne concluded that Pennant did indeed 'announce his debt'. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the evidence through an examination of the correspondence between White and Pennant, the instances where information supplied by White is evidenced in Pennant's zoological publications, and the observations of other editors of Selborne and biographers of White, in order to reach a judgement as to the validity of Bell's condemnation.
William GIBSON (Oxford Brookes University and Faculty of Theology, University of Oxford)
Gilbert White the parson
Despite the assumption that White was principally a gardener, botanist or ecologist, he was first and foremost a clergyman. The aim of this paper is to outline some of his clerical ideas and interests, and especially his theological focus. By using his manuscript sermons preserved in the Hampshire Record Office and the Houghton Library at Harvard, this paper will argue that White is best understood through an examination of his religious attitudes. White preached on some issues that were rarely discussed in the eighteenth century. His sermon on the character of Mary Magdalen is especially unusual but draws on deep roots of eighteenth-century Latitudinarianism. His sermons also demonstrate the degree to which White's thinking was influenced by ideas of a benevolent God; the depravity of humanity remained but it was weakened by ideas of the innocent of pleasure. White also saw Anglicanism as a means of establishing a peaceable society, another theme of his sermons. His treatise on man's obligations to society suggest that he was strongly influenced by older Whig ideas, perhaps derived from his father, also a parson. Nonetheless, White was an orthodox Anglican committed to the principles of the Revolution of 1688 and the settlement in Church and State.
Sayre GREENFIELD (The University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg)
'Such observations as may occur': Poetry, Science, Gilbert White, and the Disordering of Birds
A long tradition of poets, from Chaucer through Thomson, invokes various species of birds singing in coordinated harmony. Likewise, early taxonomists of birds, looking 'through Nature up to Nature's God,' also employ the metaphoric axis of thought: in the Linnaean model, God creates clusters of similar species—variations on basic morphological designs. Thus, birds are juxtaposed by similarity, again creating a comprehensible harmony in nature. Readers of The Natural History of Selborne have long appreciated both its literary and its scientific qualities. Yet, at times, Gilbert White escapes the metaphorical arrangements that constrain eighteenth-century poetry and science, and links pieces of nature metonymically by the happenstance of observation. The mobility of birds makes them particularly favorable to create unexpected conjunctions, and this propensity is enhanced by the epistolary form of the book, as species occur side by side between and within letters. The result is an apparent randomness that detaches reporting from overall design and focuses White's comments on species individually, leading to closer observation and possible reconsideration of the validity of metaphoric structures of understanding. White sometimes uses Linnaean systems to create his clusters of topics, but he also disrupts that order of adjacency as he bounces unexpectedly from one species to another quite unconnected (except by location or season). The apparent randomness in reporting 'Such observations as may occur' (Letter 39) allows focus on gathering data about the features of birds without pushing a defense of a conceptualized system. This aspect of White's writing makes him seem more modern and allows his prose to survive the transition from a metaphorically powered view of the natural world to our modern metonymically conceptualized one.
Stephanie HOLT (Oxford University/Natural History Museum, London)
Corresponding Naturalists: Thomas Pennant and Gilbert White
Thomas Pennant (1726-1798) was a Welsh naturalist, travel writer, and antiquarian. As the author of numerous works of natural history and travel writing he had an international network of correspondents. As anyone who has even a passing knowledge of The Natural History of Selborne will know, one of these correspondents was Gilbert White. Recently I have been studying the collection of 32 original letters White sent to Pennant, which are held in the British Library as MSS ADD 35138. Transcriptions of these letters have now been published on the Curious Travellers Project website, making them available for the first time beyond access within the collections of the British Library. This talk will delve into these letters, considering the contents of the letters and how they influenced both Pennant's British Zoology and his Outlines of the Globe manuscript. It will also discuss what was changed from the original letters to the manuscript of The Natural History of Selborne; what was considered suitable for publication and what was left out, and how the letters were transformed into the publication we know so well.
Ben JACKSON (University of Manchester)
'The warmth of our old friendship': Friendly bodies in John Mulso's to Gilbert White 1744-1790
In December 1770, John Mulso, then the rector of Witney in Oxfordshire, had broken his leg. He wrote to White to thank him for the 'very kind Letters on this Occasion, which express the warmth of our old friendship'. Mulso and White met at Oxford in the 1740s and became lifelong friends and correspondents. It was typical for clergymen to maintain 'old friendships' through warm correspondence as the eighteenth-century clergy was a mobile and geographically diffused profession. These men formed close friendships at the universities yet, after ordination, were dispersed throughout the nation's and empire's parishes. Moreover, many ministers moved between parishes when seeking preferment, by holding livings in plurality, and performing ecclesiastical offices. While White spent his time between Oxford and Selbourne, Mulso moved between Surrey, Yorkshire, Oxfordshire, and finally Hampshire. Mulso's and White's epistolarity was important to maintaining their life-long clerical friendship that was deeply intimate yet physically distant and provides a unique archival resource for understanding clerical friendship in the period, how it was constructed and maintained, and its dynamics. This paper explores the multiple forms of desire at work in clergymen's correspondence. The paper considers the embodied intimacy both within clergymen's letters and in the act of writing them. In early modern England, the physical intimacy, or 'gift of a friend's body' ( Alan Bray, 2003), enjoined social and political alliances. By the eighteenth century, Bray argues, this bodily touch and intimacy became increasingly sexualised and thus no longer an effective mechanism of same-sex friendship. This paper argues that Mulso's and White's desire to maintain a friendship through the gift of the body was transposed in the eighteenth century into other forms of bodily and embodied intimacy.
Richard KERRIDGE (Bath Spa University)
Gilbert White and present-day nature writing
Gilbert White is frequently identified as a founding influence on the nature writing genre in Britain and North America. His work pioneered - one could almost say invented - a specific sub-genre, the nature journal or almanac. Although The Natural History of Selborne consists of letters, the way it records seasonal phenomena and changes, and reaches out from that cycle to larger perspectives before returning, constitutes a kind of journal and establishes the characteristic methods and tropes of the sub-genre. In this paper, I will look briefly at the history of the nature writing almanac-journal from White to the present, identify some important features with their ancestors in White's book, and comment critically on some recent examples, with reference to the particular value of this sub-genre in the context of climate change. That value, I will argue, resides in the capacity of the almanac-journal to move between immediate and far-reaching perspectives, between minutiae and large ecological processes, and between the personal and the scientific; I will connect this ability with Timothy Clarks concept of 'scale-derangements', and look at the possibility of expanding the structure across much longer time-frames. Among the writers I will discuss alongside White are Aldo Leopold, Annie Dillard, Mark Cocker, Leslie Marmon Silko, David Haskell and Melissa Harrison.
Francesca MACKENNEY (Manchester Metropolitan University) and Ralph PITE (University of Bristol)
Gilbert White and 'Natural History'
A new GCSE in 'Natural History' has been in development for a number of years, and its rollout has recently been confirmed by Government. Its introduction coincides with the increased prominence and promotion of 'climate change education' within the secondary curriculum. This paper discusses whether and in what ways Gilbert White's practice of 'natural history' can or should inform twenty-first century teaching and pedagogy.
We look at White's holistic and multifaceted approach to observing the natural world, arguing that this provides a template for making present-day Natural History an interdisciplinary subject-area, where the arts and humanities complement scientific fieldwork, turning observation into attentiveness. White's observation-led inquiry into the nature he found locally at Selborne provides a model, moreover, for the development of curiosity and open-minded receptiveness. His practice encourages awareness of nature on the doorstep—of the localism, that is, that policy-makers currently prioritise with the aim of generating action by schools to cherish, protect, and enhance the flora and fauna of their grounds and communities. His epistolary writing, reaching out to others elsewhere also studying the natural world nearby, models we suggest the glocal consciousness so urgently needed now.
Chris MOUNSEY (University of Winchester)
Walking in White's Footsteps: The Enduring Legacy of Local Natural History Observation
Since I was a child, I have often walked on Selbourne Hanger, fascinated by the precariously clinging trees and marvelling at the power of these great beings. Other days I would walk on the Long Lythe gathering wildflowers and learning how to use a taxonomy to name them, before I pressed them to preserve their beauty for all time. On both walks I was in the shadow of Gilbert White, whose name and reputation I knew as a ghostly presence, who could explain things like the dew on the spiderwebs in the morning, and who build the zigzag pathway up to the top of the Hanger. This paper examines the enduring impact of Gilbert White's groundbreaking work in introducing natural history to young walkers like myself, specifically focusing on his emphasis on meticulous local observation. White, renowned for his classic "The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne," championed the value of close, sustained engagement with and reverence for the natural world within one's immediate surroundings. This paper will argue that White's meticulous approach to observing and recording the flora and fauna of his Hampshire parish has had a profound and lasting influence on the development of local natural history societies, citizen science initiatives, and the contemporary practice of "slow walking" as a means of environmental engagement, and healthful engagement with the outside world. By analysing White's methodology, examining the historical development of local natural history societies inspired by his work, exploring contemporary examples of citizen science projects and slow walking initiatives, and the literary representations of plants and trees, this paper will demonstrate how White's emphasis on localized observation continues to resonate today. I will argue that his work provides a valuable framework for understanding the interconnectedness of humans and the environment, both scientific and literary, fostering a deeper appreciation for the natural world, and encouraging active participation in environmental stewardship.
Rosamund PAICE (Northumbria University)
Three Trees and a Bridge Repair: the politics of White's second letter to Pennant
This paper challenges the construction of White as apolitical, typified by the New Monthly Magazine review of 1830 and repeated in across the centuries since: for Leonard Jenyns, White was secluded from 'the bustle and turmoils of the world' (introduction to Selborne, 1843); 'No breath from the outside world enters in', wrote James Fisher; 'no politics; no ambition; no care or cost' (introduction to Selborne, 1983). Even Richard Mabey, while challenging the simplifying 'myth of Parson White', retains the image of an apolitical White in his emphasis on his 'honest muddle of instinct and affection' (Gilbert White, 1986). In this paper, I show that White's second letter to Pennant is not just an 'environmental parable' (Carey, 'The Literary Gilbert White', 2020) but a politically charged one. In doing so, I will make the case for more politically alert engagements with White's writings. Often referred to as the one with the Raven-tree, this letter in fact singles out three trees: the wych elm at Norton house farm, the oak on the Plestor in Selborne village, and the Raven-tree, a distinctive oak in a grove of oaks on the Blackmoor estate. White moves us from tree to tree through parallel linguistic constructions and repeated points of reference, that have all the hallmarks of a narrative sequence. The resulting fable, though, does not simply uncover the unintended environmental consequences of plantation forestry. White's reference to a bridge by Hampton Court, for the repair of which twenty trees (including the Raven-tree) were cut down, draws us into a place that was once the seat of monarchy but in the late eighteenth century was notorious for its architectural and social excess and degeneration. Geographically distant, the ravens of Selborne, as White tells it, are sacrificed to human irresponsibility.
Daniel REED (Westminster College Oxford Trust)
What was a 'typical' clerical career in the eighteenth century?
One route into tracing these trajectories is through the Clergy of the Church of England Database (CCEd), which was established with the ambitious aim of creating a relational database of all clergymen in England and Wales between 1540 and 1835. Drawing chiefly from diocesan collections, the database charts their lives and careers through appointment records and other key events. By 2008, the CCEd featured over 105,000 individual clerics, comprising nearly 1.5 million evidence records. Despite this achievement, the 'funded phase' of the CCEd is now over and the database remains incomplete; future updates are reliant on the part-time work of the dedicated few and voluntary contributions from external researchers. As such, the CCEd is an expansive but problematic resource for historical research. Gilbert White is one of several notable clergymen of the period including Laurence Sterne, and Charles and John Wesley, whose entries in the database are either flawed, highly incomplete—or in the case of the latter, entirely absent. The methodological approach taken by the CCEd often renders curacies (especially assistant curacies) invisible—meaning that several of White's roles, including at Selborne, are not recorded. With particular reference to the CCEd, this paper explores Gilbert White's typically atypical clerical career and interrogates lingering assumptions about the functioning of ecclesiastical patronage and the 'supply/demand' for church places in the long eighteenth century.
Edwin ROSE (University of Cambridge/Natural History Museum, London)
Gilbert White in a Global Context: Thomas Pennant, Daines Barrington and the Beginnings of Biogeography
With the onset of the American Revolutionary War in 1776 Thomas Pennant renamed his project on 'American Zoology' to the 'Arctic Zoology'. Analysing Pennant's approaches to gathering information for Arctic Zoology, this talk examines a collecting programme that extended across broad geographic scales in the northern hemisphere ranging from Kamchatka to Britain, Scandinavia, Iceland, Hudson's Bay and Alaska, developing a network of dedicated correspondents who sent letters, books and specimens. Through examining Arctic Zoology, this talk shows how information on the natural world was gathered on a global scale from a diverse range of individuals ranging from Indigenous peoples through to traders, travellers and those who participated in official state voyages of discovery. This allowed Pennant to partition the earth, drawing lines across its surface to chart the distribution of different animals and plants, ideas that came to form the field known as biogeography by the nineteenth century. For Pennant, collecting information was a never-ending process, resulting in the production of two editions of Arctic Zoology, numerous supplements and part of 'Outlines of the Globe.' Finally, analysis of the relationship between Thomas Pennant and Daines Barrington, letters to who formed The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, and their means for communicating across the world provides an essential piece in the jigsaw when placing Gilbert White in a global context.
John C. RUMM
Awakening to Birds at 'The Wakes': Gilbert White's Journey from Novice to 'Full-Fledged Watcher'
'The birding life is a journey of exploration,' Ted Floyd commented in How to Know the Birds (2019). Yet for Gilbert White, 'the man who started us all birdwatching,' that journey was much different from how today's novices learn about birds. Informed by my close reading of The Natural History of Selborne and his journals, and my own evolution as a birdwatcher, I will trace how White came 'to know the birds.'
White's letters reveal, for example, how, as a boy, he gained familiarity with game birds while hunting and learned vernacular knowledge about birds from farmers and villagers. As a teenager, White began documenting the arrivals of migratory birds, compiling data that, by the 1760s, enabled him to predict accurately their dates of first appearance. His observations of songs and mannerisms led him to write life-histories of several species. By the 1760s, White had accumulated a life-list of 120 species—nearly three-fourths of Britain's then-known avifauna. Yet his learning never ceased. As he wrote in 1778, 'it is now more than forty years that I have paid some attention to the ornithology of this district, without being able to exhaust the subject: new occurrences still arise as long as any inquiries are kept alive.'
White's example offers insights into how we can become 'good ornithologists, able to distinguish birds by their air as well as by their colours and shape; on the ground as well as on the wing; and in the bush as well as in the hand.'
Toby STINSON (University of Oxford)
'Nor be the parsonage by the Muse forgot': The Poetic Legacy of Gilbert White
Since its publication, The Natural History of Selborne has inspired countless responses across numerous different styles and genres. Simon Martin has showcased the inspiration Selborne had on artists, cataloguing the wide range of illustrations that have been produced in response to Gilbert White's text. Sarah Bruxvoort Lipscomb has shown how a new generation of Victorian naturalists saw White's approach to natural history as a model methodology to adopt, while Linda Peterson, developing upon Lipscomb's study, highlighted the inspiration White also provided to the nascent genre of nature writing at the turn of the twentieth century. One genre of response that has had less attention paid to it, yet can tell us much about the way readers connected to White's text, is poetry. Selborne inspired a range of poetic responses in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many of which eulogise White, his text, or his native landscape. This paper will look at some of the first poetic responses to Selborne, analysing what they can tell us about the highly personal connections readers had with Selborne, and how the text resonated emotionally and imaginatively with them. I will examine what qualities these poems draw attention to; how they replicate or respond to White's distinctive use of imagery and language; and what these responses indicate about the specific themes that resonated most deeply with nineteenth-century audiences. Such analysis helps reveal how White's text came to emblematize particular ideas and ideals in the imagination of Victorian readers and writers. It also offers an insight into the literary qualities of White's writing that audiences connected with most at the time when Selborne first began to shift from being viewed as a scientific text to a literary classic.
Graham USHER (Church of England)
Watching narrowly; the gift of attention to heal our world
Gilbert White spoke about 'watching narrowly', preferring to pay attention to wildlife in situ in all of their dimensions, rather than dead specimens on a table. His patient watching and waiting allowed him to see deeply (in an age before binoculars), make connections between different species, as well as with their habitats, and delight in a sense of place. White developed skills of attention that would become standard use in the field studies of future ecologists. This paper explores how White's attentive watching had an empathetic note, and almost a devotional character, which would be in keeping with someone steeped in the Book of Common Prayer's cadences and the words of the Benedicite. If it is true that what we attend to we love, treasure and want to protect, re-kindling the skill of 'watching narrowly' could help foster a greater care for our hurting natural world.
David M. Wilkinson (Universities of Lincoln and Nottingham)
Gilbert White, swift populations, and the Silwood Circle
This talk discusses the use of Gilbert White's writing on the Selborne swift population by two important late 20th century academic ecologists—John Lawton and Robert May. Both were key figures in a highly influential group of ecologists associated with the Imperial College campus at Silwood Park—a research group called 'The Silwood Circle' by the science historian Hannah Gay. In 1983 Lawton and May published an essay entitled 'The birds of Selborne' in the leading science journal Nature, and both returned to the example of Selborne swifts in later writings targeted at more specialist academic ecology audiences. This high-profile attention also caused the example of Selborne swifts to feature in one of the leading university level ecology text books. Lawton and May were in part drawn to this example because of John Lawton's interest in bird watching (much of his technical research was on insects). Two aspects of Whites writing on swifts particularly attracted their attention—that the observations were quantitative (White wrote that: 'the number that I constantly find are eight pairs'), and the questions White asked about this stable population size seemed to them to be surprisingly modern. Using both their publications and an interview with John Lawton, I describe how the Nature essay came to be written and the subsequent influence of this example on how they presented ideas of population ecology to an academic audience. I have myself been influence by the Lawton and May Nature essay to use Gilbert White's swifts as an accessible introduction to the ideas of population ecology for a less academic audience in my 2021 book 'Ecology and natural history' in Collins New Naturalist series.
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