The late summer of 1781 was dry and hot in the south of England, and the ponds were shrinking and the landscape browning around the village of Selborne in Hampshire. But early in September, the weather at last turned: “rain, rain, rain, dark and blowing”, and now the gleaners were at work, the swallows and martins were gathering excitedly in preparation for the autumn migration, and there were lines of winter turnips greening the fields.
We know such detail – and a vast deal more – about this rural corner of Georgian England because of the painstaking work of the clergyman and writer Gilbert White, whose Natural History of Selborne stands as an early and exalted form of ecological writing: the book has been continuously in print since its appearance in 1789. In the autumn of 1781, White was 61 years old, and more than ever alert to the lives and growth and alterations breathing around him, recording the continually changing moods of his immediate environs as the seasons slipped by.
In her new biography of White, then, Jenny Uglow has chosen to engage with a life the specific rhythms of which have already been set down and memorialised to an unusual degree: White himself, after all, detailed elements of his own life as he recorded the world around him, leaving us with the impression of a warm-hearted and expansive man, at peace with his life and community. But Uglow’s method – to take the year 1781, day by patient day, and to remind us of the context of the wider world beyond Selborne – breathes new vitality, colours, shades into White’s story, and in the process shapes a fresh, distinctive and moving narrative.
She also glances at her own situation: she is writing her book day by day in northern England, with its quite different landscapes and weathers; but she shares White’s alertness to and fascination with nature, and understands his sense of awe and poignancy as she watches it at work – while adding a modern sense of sorrow and foreboding in the face of climate change and pollution. The result is a loving contemplation of White’s world, a portrait of what we have lost or nearly lost since then – and a timely reminder of a trailblazer’s enduring legacy.
