Chapter Six

A Man of Letters

 

In July 1767, Mulso wrote to Gilbert with the news that the Rector of Cromhall in Gloucestershire had died, and that this Oriel living was now vacant. He hoped, earnestly, that Gilbert would apply. For a start it might encourage him to visit Witney (‘I lye in ye very Road’), and in any case it might be Gilbert’s last chance:

I am afraid that this is not the best Living of ye College: but nevertheless I think I collected by our last Confabulation, that You was inclined to secure to yourself the first Thing that fell, & get rid of your fellowship before your Fellowship got rid of you.¹

And with memories of Gilbert’s non-appearance in Yorkshire still fresh in his mind, he recommended that Gilbert should install a curate at the first possible opportunity. Being ‘tied by the Leg as you are by your serving a Curacy yourself was ‘a Circumstance very hatefull to a Man whose Inquisitive Genius makes him love to change ye Scene often & search for Curiosities in various Regions’.² Mulso understood very well that Gilbert was bound to Selborne by complex ties of affection, circumstance and habit, not always voluntary and by no means always for his own good. ‘I shall have you routed out of that Recess,’ he wrote, ‘where your Affections are too much engross’d for Yourself, & your friends at a Distance.’³

As might be expected, Gilbert made no real effort to secure the Cromhall position. When it became vacant again a few years later he described it as ‘so dismally circumstanced that I think there can be no doubt which way I had best act… no barn; I believe no stable; a wretched house; and all the parish offices for years past in the hands of an attorney’.⁴ But on this occasion something had already happened to make the prospect of life in Selborne seem less lonely and aimless. On 18 April 1767 Gilbert had travelled to London for a long stay, no doubt visiting both his brothers, Benjamin and Thomas. Some time during the following two months he made the acquaintance of Thomas Pennant, the eminent traveller, writer and Fellow of the Royal Society, who was to become one of the correspondents of the Natural History.

It is not at all clear exactly how the friendship started. It isn’t even certain if the two men met, and more than once in the correspondence that ensued between them Gilbert remarks how pleasant it would be ‘to have a little conversation face to face after we have corresponded so freely for several years’. But Pennant had got word of Gilbert’s skill and reliability as a natural historian and had passed on to him the suggestion that they share and discuss their findings. The intermediary was almost certainly Benjamin White. As well as owning a bookshop ‘at Horace’s Head’ in Fleet Street that was a popular meeting-place for writers and scientists, Benjamin had just become Pennant’s publisher. He had probably mentioned his brother’s studies in Selborne, and even if he did not personally introduce them at his shop, he did enough groundwork for it to be easy for them to correspond.

And Gilbert, for one, was plainly delighted and excited by the opportunity. Within a couple of months of his return to Selborne he had composed a long and rambling letter to Pennant that would eventually become Letter X in the Natural History. It has, in its original, unamended state, all the energy of a long bottled-up enthusiasm. It chatters on about the possibility of hibernation by swallows, about the songs of warblers and how many species of water rat there were, and about the identity of the falcon found nailed to the end of a barn, which he was sending to Pennant forthwith. But it begins with an almost obsequious note of gratitude:

Sir – Nothing but the obliging notice you were so kind as to take of my trifling observations in the natural way, when I was in town in the spring, and your repeated mention of me in some late letters to my brother, could have emboldened me to have entered into a correspondence with you: in which though my vanity cannot suggest to me that I shall send you any information worthy of your attention, yet the communication of my thoughts to a gentleman so distinguished for these kind of studies will unavoidably be attended with satisfaction and improvement on my side.⁵

Who was this man who could arouse such a show of awe in Gilbert, and galvanize a now rather lax correspondent into a fit of garrulousness? Gentleman he certainly was, born of a wealthy landowning family at Downing in Flintshire. And though Gilbert’s compliments seem a trifle disproportionate now, there is no doubt that Pennant was beginning to acquire something of a name in the natural sciences. He had been elected to the Royal Society in February 1767, at the age of 41, and had completed the first edition of his encyclopaedia of mammals and birds, British Zoology, the previous year. It had not been particularly successful, and it was Benjamin’s offer to republish the work that had brought them together in the first place. Pennant was also a doughty and open-minded traveller, and his various Tours were bestsellers in their time. Samuel Johnson thought him ‘the best traveller I ever read’. But he had no great instinct or aptitude for field-work and nothing approaching White’s critical intelligence. He was essentially an intellectual entrepreneur, a popularizer and compiler of other people’s observations and ideas, and was able to produce a large number of very readable guides as a result. ‘I am astonished at the multiplicity of my publications,’ he exclaimed in his brief autobiography, The Literary Life of Thomas Pennant⁶ (‘by Himself’). Pennant’s pushy and bombastic manner, and a reliance on second-hand information that at times-came close to plagiarism, have left him with a rather tarnished reputation.⁷ He was certainly not the most modest of men, and overestimated his prowess as a naturalist. But he was always an innovator as far as ideas for books were concerned, and he deserves credit for that. In the appendix to his Tour of Scotland, for instance (which gives an insight into his typical modus operandi), there is already a suggestion for the kind of book Gilbert was one day to write. It takes the form of a questionnaire about geology, rivers, birds, cattle, air, weather, echoes, and the like, addressed

to Gentlemen and Clergy in North Britain, respecting the Antiquities and Natural History of their respective Parishes… with a view of exciting them to favour the World with a fuller and more satisfactory Account of their Country than it is in the power of a stranger and transient visitant to give… It is to be hoped some parochial Geniuses will arise and favour the public with what is much wanted, LOCAL HISTORIES.⁸

This use of original reports from a wide network of field observers (including some famous ones, like Sir Joseph Banks and other Fellows of the Royal Society) blended with digests of already published works, was quite novel, though Robert Plot had tried a similar scheme on a much smaller scale.⁹ Pennant was scrupulous with his references and acknowledgements, and his method would today be regarded as a thoroughly proper way of gathering material for a book. The results may have lacked the personal touch and insight of White’s writing but they were highly accessible, and certainly in tune with the current fashion for natural history journalism, which by the 1760s was supporting at least half a dozen popular periodicals.¹⁰

With a new edition of British Zoology to prepare Pennant needed as many helpers and informants as he could muster, and he was no doubt pleased to discover an observer as original as White, especially one, as he confided later, who lived in ‘the most southerly county’. It would be unfair to see all this as deceitful or cynical exploitation on Pennant’s part; but equally so to imagine that it was simply friendship or the disinterested camaraderie of scientific enquiry that he was looking for.

Gilbert for his part can’t have been under any illusion about what Pennant wanted from him. The deferential tone of his opening remarks was simply a polite acceptance of the terms of the relationship, and, once the correspondence was securely established, he was to become much more waspish. More to the point in that first letter was how he went on the explain the need he hoped Pennant’s friendship would fill:

It has been my misfortune never to have had any neighbours whose studies have led them towards the pursuit of natural knowledge; so that, for want of a companion to quicken my industry and sharpen my attention, I have made but slender progress in a kind of information to which I have been attached from my childhood.¹¹

Gilbert, in short, welcomed the arrangement wholeheartedly and thought it likely to provide a spur to his own observations and thinking. In this respect he was taking a fairly common view of the value of scholarly correspondence, for his comparatively isolated situation was not that unusual. All long-distance travel was slow and arduous. There were few learned societies, and correspondence provided something of the same framework for the intellectual community that conferences and journals do today. This may partly explain why, right from the outset, he regarded these letters as a special case, and began to make and keep copies of them.

The letters sent that year cover a vast range of topics. ‘I forgot to mention … ’ one paragraph begins, and this exactly captures their gossipy, anecdotal tone. White talks about the fish to be found in the local stream, about the failure of the wild fruit crop, about a tame bat whose company he’d enjoyed the previous autumn, and which would take flies out of his hand. Almost by the way, he gives the first account in print of the harvest mouse – though this was achieved at the expense of whole families of young mice (the nests were ‘perfectly round, and about the size of a cricket ball’) being taken in the wheat-fields.

Much of the material in these early letters concerns events which happened some years before, and suggests that as well as an obviously retentive memory Gilbert may have kept rough notebooks for field notes and jottings. He would have needed no prompting to recall the feeding habits of his tame owl, or the summer the Wakes’ garden was graced by a pair of hoopoes that ‘used to march about in a stately manner, feeding in the walks’. But remembering precisely the date he once saw a late house-martin flying about the quadrangle of Christ Church in Oxford (it was 20 November) might have been less easy.

To cope with the kind of work he was now engaged in, Gilbert needed a more organized and permanent way of preserving his records. Fortunately, a solution became available at just the right moment. Towards the end of 1767 he was presented with a set of printed forms described as The Naturalist’s Journal. They had been published by Benjamin White and were sent to Gilbert by their ‘inventor’, Daines Barrington, another prominent naturalist and one of Pennant’s network of correspondents. Each page was meant to serve for a week. It was divided horizontally into days, and vertically into ten columns, for the recording of wind, weather, plants first in flower and other details. A final, broader column was included for miscellaneous observations.

Barrington provided suggestions about filling in the tables in the notes that accompanied each set of Journal pages. In the miscellaneous observations column, for instance,

it may also be proper to take notice of the common prognostics of the weather from animals, plants, or hygroscopes, and compare them afterwards with the table of the weather, from which it may be perceived how far such prognostics can be relied upon … Many other particulars will daily offer themselves to the observer, when his attention to such points hath once become habitual, and from many such journals kept in different parts of the kingdom, perhaps the very best and accurate materials for a General Natural History of Great Britain may in time be expected, as well as many profitable improvements and discoveries in agriculture.¹²

Barrington viewed the methodical logging – and, with luck, the deciphering – of nature as part and parcel of the great eighteenth-century drive to discipline the world, and this was echoed even in the sample entries he provided: ‘Lost within the last week twenty sheep by the rot.’ ‘William was cured of the ague by the use of … plants.’ ‘Swallows were found in a torpid state in … cliff on the sea-coast.’

Specialized journals weren’t uncommon in the eighteenth century, though they were rarely laid out as meticulously as this. Gilbert’s brother Harry kept one on the activities around his farm and household. His brother-in-law, Thomas Barker, had been making regular nature notes in Rutland since the 1730s. And Thomas Gray, the poet, began using Barrington’s printed journal sheets in the same year as Gilbert. As Barrington freely admits in his preface, the idea for a naturalist’s journal (though not the convenience of the printed forms) was not original. It had been inspired by the Calendar of Flora in Benjamin Stillingfleet’s Tracts,¹³ itself modelled on the Calendar (1755) of the Swedish naturalist, Alexander Berger. Initially, Gilbert did not seem to regard his new journal as in any way different from these records, or indeed as much more than a workaday notebook. He entered the weather diligently every day (a habit he was to continue to within a week of his death) and, with a great respect for the labelled columns, terse notes on the appearance of migrant birds and the opening of flowers. As for the garden notes that had once filled the Kalendar, these were now compressed into ‘Miscellaneous Observations’. There is no surplus matter at all, certainly none of the explanatory filling-out that one would expect if the journal had been intended for outside reading. Sometimes it is left to the punctuation to provide the comment: ‘Hirundo domestica!!!’ reads the entry for 13 April 1768, and the Latinism cannot hide Gilbert’s sheer delight at the arrival of the first swallow. Sometimes there is one of those lucid, perfectly selected details that were to make the Naturalist’s Journal the quintessence of White’s view of the world:

May 1: Great showers … Wheat begins to look a little wan.

Aug 10: White butter flies gather in flocks on the mud of the puddles.

Sept 15: Rain all day. Black warty water-efts with fin tails & yellow bellies are drawn up in the well-bucket.

It’s possible, from these early entries, to build up a picture of how Gilbert’s field-work fitted into his daily round. Many of the observations were made in the garden of the Wakes, or in the parkland that lay on the other side of the Ha-ha. Some were doubtless the fruits of his regular ride to take services at Farringdon. This is only two miles as the crow flies, but at that time involved a tortuous meander through hollow lanes and overland tracks that could measure up to twice that distance. Yet from some of his records – of marsh harriers nesting in Woolmer Forest, for example – it looks as if he was also making trips specifically for the purpose of field study. He walked in the immediate vicinity of the village, but travelled by horse for preference. He may have carried a notebook, and perhaps a gun, though on most occasions where a bird is ‘procured’ away from the garden, it is for, not by, him. He was out in all weathers and quite frequently in the dark. On 3 June 1769 he ‘Saw the planet Venus enter the disk of the sun. Just as the sun was setting the spot was very visible to the naked eye. Nightingale sings; wood-owl hoots; fern-owl chatters.’ Each day the journal was written up in ink, probably in the study at the Wakes, with its view over the garden to the looming mass of the Hanger.

At first sight it seems a tidy, domestic regime. Yet one of the striking features of the journal is just how unmethodical the records are collectively. By scientific criteria they are haphazard to the point of being whimsical. With the exception of the weather tables and the logging of the hirundines’ movements, there is little rigorous, regular noting of places or species. A sudden fad or fit of curiosity will spring up – for parasitic insects or moulds or noxious fogs – dominate the entries for a week or so, and then peter out. Many questions are raised and reminders posted, but, in the pages of the journal at least, only rarely followed up. Whatever kind of record the Naturalist’s Journal is, it is not the log of a systematic investigator. Nor is it a purely parochial record. During 1769, for example – not an exceptional year – Gilbert spent a total of fourteen weeks away from Selborne, and made entries for most of his usual retreats in Fyfield, Ringmer, London and Oxfordshire. The journal went with him on many of these trips, and is sometimes written in a different nib when he is away (though occasionally it remained in Selborne, and the weather notes were completed by Gilbert’s man, Thomas). Then again, some of the most celebrated anecdotes in the Natural History, even when they occurred within the period spanned by the journal, aren’t mentioned in it at all. His account of a visit to Goodwood on Michaelmas Day 1768, for example, to examine a long-dead and already putrefying moose, went straight into a letter to Pennant written eighteen months later; and the most blackly comic episode in the whole book (‘the length of the legs before and behind consisted a great deal in the tibia, which was strangely long; but in my haste to get out of the stench, I forgot to measure that joint exactly’¹⁴) was either vivid enough to stick in the memory, or was noted somewhere other than in the journal.

But at times Gilbert seemed unnerved by the responsibilities he had taken on. He wasn’t yet confident that he had the skill or the firmness of purpose to carry on this kind of disciplined study, and as 1768 advanced he became increasingly anxious for company and reassurance. On 30 March he invited Pennant to visit Selborne, and to bring Joseph Banks if he could. The original letter ends: ‘if he [Banks] will do me the honour to come and see me he will find how many curious plants I am acquainted with in my own Country. I request also that you will be pleased to pay my compliments and thanks to Mr Barrington for the agreeable present of his Journal, which I am filling up day by day.’¹⁵ Pennant wasn’t able to accept the invitation on this occasion, and on 18 April Gilbert had another try at tempting him down. ‘I shall still live in hopes of seeing you, at this beautiful season,’ he wrote, ‘when every hedge and field abounds with matter of entertainment for the curious.’ A few days later he wrote directly to Banks, who was soon to leave on his round-the-world journey with Captain Cook. Gilbert took the trouble to make a copy of this letter in his own hand, though there was little of substance in it beyond a rather mournful anticipation of months of solitary work ahead:

I was greatly in hopes that both you gentlemen would have honoured me with your company this spring; but now it seems that unless Mr. Skinner of C.C.C. [Corpus Christi College] should happen to come (as he has partly promised), I must plod on by myself, with few books and no soul to communicate my doubts or discoveries to.¹⁶

In May it was Mulso’s turn to be invited, but he too had to refuse. He points out gently to Gilbert that it wasn’t quite like the old days, when they were both relatively free agents:

No man beats you at playing the Master of a large family of friends, yet You do not yet know the Difficulties of managing a family of Servants & Children, & how hard it is to leave them prudently.¹⁷

Gilbert was depressed by this reply which seemed to portend ‘a perpetual Embargo’ on his friend’s visits. Mulso reassured him that the obstacles were only temporary, but returned again to what he felt was the reason for Gilbert’s unease:

How comes it to pass that You, who want to make Selborne your Residence, are afraid of a Living where your Residence would not be required? This is one of those Paradoxes in which you have always delighted.¹⁸

Mulso had raised this touchy issue again because the living at Cholderton – and another at Ufton Nervet, in Berkshire – had again become vacant and again been passed by. Gilbert seems, at this moment, already to have defined the limits of his own territory. He was reluctant to venture beyond its boundaries or to vary the kind of relationship he had already established with each place inside. He was quite happy staying in London, for instance, for weeks on end, and to have no more reminders of life in Selborne than the ‘12 brace of fair cucumbers’ he had sent down from the village on May Day. But when Pennant invited him to Flintshire, 200 miles away, he might just as well have been suggesting an expedition to the South Seas, and Gilbert declined in terms which are very reminiscent of his evasiveness over visiting Mulso in Yorkshire. Pennant repeated the invitation at the beginning of 1769, and this time Gilbert realized that a more elaborate explanation was needed:

You will not, I hope, suspect me of flattery when I assure you that there is no man in the kingdom whom I should visit with more satisfaction … Besides your part of the world would not be without its charms from novelty; as I am not acquainted with the N. W. part of this island any farther than Shrewsbury. Your improvements, your mines, your fossils, your botany, your shores, your birds, would all be a matter of the highest entertainment to me. But then how am I to get all these pleasures and amusements? I have neither time nor bodily abilities adequate to so long a journey. And if I had time I am subject to such horrible coach-sickness, that I should be near dead long before I got to Chester. These difficulties, I know, will be matter of great mirth to you, who have travelled all over Europe; but they are formidable to me. As therefore the man cannot come to the mountain, I hope the mountain (since friendship will effect strange things) will come to the man: I hope you will have it in your power to meet me in London, and that you will gratify me with an opportunity of waiting on you in Selborne.¹⁹

Although Gilbert’s coach-sickness was obviously no laughing matter (despite Mulso’s occasional guffaws) it is hard to take this explanation at face value. Gilbert had gritted his teeth through journeys as extensive as this only fifteen years before, when the attractions at the other end had been far less. Was the worsening of his coach-sickness partly psychosomatic, a device for keeping him in the security of familiar territory? It certainly wouldn’t be unfair to say that he was in a kind of thraldom to Selborne, and that the prospect of moving away – of being sited ‘out of his knowledge’ – filled him with as much unease as a displaced cricket. Yet perhaps he was beginning to accept and understand a degree of confinement as a condition of his work. As Ronald Blythe has written of all great ‘local’ writers: ‘Their feeling for nature and the landscape of man deepens when it remains hedged about by familiar considerations.’²⁰

A view of the Hanger from the Lythes in the north-east. The Zig-zag path is visible amongst the then open scrub towards the left side of the Hill. In the foreground is the tent put up for summer entertainments.

Gilbert’s father, John.

The Short Lythe and Dorton from Hucker’s Lane, one of White’s favourite views and walks. The gnarled tree roots, right, still survive. (Grimm, 1776)

A more decorous view of Dorton and the Lythes, taken a hundred years later.

Selborne’s stream in Silkwood Vale, east of the church, (Grimm, 1776)

The old hollow lane to Alton. (P.H. Delamotte, 1880). Both illustrations show the way the layered sandstone is worn down by water or trafic.

Glibert’s brother, Thomas, born 1724.

His daughter Marry, born 1759, and ‘Molly’, one of Gilbert’s favourite correspondents.

Rebecca Snooke, Gilbert’s aunt, who lived at Ringmer, Susex, and was the original owner of Timothy the tortoise.

A view of the Wakes from the foot of the Hanger in the 1770s, showing haymaking in the ‘Park.’ The lip of the ha-ha is just visible, and the alcove in the right-hand hedge. The tiny figure leaning on a stick just in front of the house is usually assumed to be White himself. (Grimm, 1776)

A closer view of the Wakes, circa 1875.

The old Hermitage on the Hanger, with Henry White (Harry), as the Hermit. (Grimm, 1776)

 

Harry (below, left) (born 1733) in later life, (below, right) Catherine Battie, the girl with whom he – and quite possibly Gilbert, too – became infatuated during the ‘festal summer’ of 1763.

View of Selborne from inside the Hermitage. (Grimm, 1776)

A view from higher up the Hanger. (P.H. Delamotte, 1880)

Selborne church from the churchyard. The famous yew (foreground) was already twenty-three feet in girth when White measured it. (Grimm, 1776)

The Plestor, or play-space, at the church end of the village street. The two boys on the right appear to be playing a form of cricket, which was very popular in the area. (Grimm, 1776)

The extent to which Gilbert’s relationships with places were becoming an important feature of his emotional and intellectual life, with an increasing timidity balanced by heightened sensitivity, is shown by two revealing passages to Pennant. The first, in the letter dated October 1768, was not included in the Natural History:

I met with a paragraph in the newspapers some weeks ago that gave me some odd sensations, a kind of mixture of pleasure and pain at the same time. It was as follows: ‘On the 6th day of August, Joseph Banks Esq., accompanyed by Dr. Solander, Mr. Green … &c., set out for Deal, in order to embark aboard the ‘Endeavour’, Captain Cook, bound for the South Seas.’

When I reflect on the youth and affluence of this enterprizing gentleman I am filled with wonder to see how conspicuously the contempt of dangers, and the love of excelling in his favourite studies stand forth in his character. And yet though I admire his resolution, which scorns to stoop to any difficulties; I cannot divest myself of some degree of solicitude for his person. The circumnavigation of the globe is an undertaking that must shock the constitution of a person inured to a sea-faring life from his childhood; and how much more that of a landman! … If he survives, with what delight shall we peruse his Journals, his Fauna, his Flora! If he falls by the way, I shall revere his fortitude, and contempt of pleasures, and indulgences: but shall always regret him, though my knowledge of his worth was of late date, and my acquaintanceship with him but slender.²¹

Compare this, in both feeling and structure, with the following reflections on some other long-distance travellers, written to Pennant in February of 1769, but referring back to the autumn when Banks set sail:

When I used to rise in a morning last autumn, and see the swallows and martins clustering on the chimnies and thatch of the neighbouring cottages, I could not help being touched with a secret delight, mixed with some degree of mortification: with delight to observe with how much ardour and punctuality those poor little birds obeyed the strong impulse towards migration, or hiding, imprinted on their minds by their great Creator; and with some degree of mortification, when I reflected that, after all our pains and inquiries, we are yet not quite certain to what regions they do migrate; and are still farther embarrassed to find that some do not actually migrate at all.²²

In 1768, the second edition of Pennant’s British Zoology was published. It contained a certain amount of material supplied by Gilbert, particularly on house-martins and swifts, and he was properly thanked in the text. Gilbert obviously appreciated this, and it gave him the confidence to point out some of Pennant’s errors. He had made ‘several mistakes … with respect to some birds of the Grallae order’. Gilbert’s criticism is polite, exact and uncompromising:

But there is a passage in the article Goatsucker, page 247, which you will pardon me for objecting to, as I always thought it exceptionable: and that is ‘This noise being made only in its flight, we suppose it to be caused by the resistance to the air against the hollow of its vastly extended mouth and throat for it flies with both open to take its prey.’ Now as the first line appears to me to be a false fact; the supposition of course also falls to the ground, if it should prove so.²³

This was White’s very practical scientific touchstone: not the results of abstract argument or controlled experiment, but the evidence of patterns of repeated association in the real world. His attention to the circumstances under which birds sang had already produced some novel findings. He had noticed that snipes always ‘hummed’ as they descended in flight, and inclined towards the idea that the sound was not a song at all, but was made by the vibration of their feathers. He had tracked down the identity of the bird that made ‘a clatter with its bill against a dead bough’ by brusquely but decisively having one shot ‘in the very act’. (It proved to be a nuthatch.) The times at which birds sang had even suggested an important and relatively new ‘maxim in ornithology, that as long as there is any incubation going on there is music.’

As for the nightjar, he had dramatic first-hand evidence that it did not sing only in flight. One evening he and a group of friends were in the Hermitage up on the top of the Hanger, when a nightjar came and settled on the roof. It began to churr, and the company were ‘all struck with wonder to find that the organs of that little animal, when put in motion, gave a sensible vibration to the whole building!’²⁴ He was sure that the note was produced in its windpipe, ‘just as cats pur’.

Gilbert was only able to establish these facts by ‘watching narrowly’, which for him meant both close observation and the intimate study of small areas. Both approaches were novel at the time, and Gilbert believed that one reason Pennant made so many mistakes was that the style of his field-work was almost exactly the opposite. But he is always courteously indirect when it comes to such general criticisms. ‘My little intelligence is confined to the narrow sphere of my own observations at home,’ he wrote on 22 February 1770; and then, in September the same year:

Monographers, come from whence they may, have, I think, fair pretence to challenge some regard and approbation from the lovers of natural history; for, as no man can alone investigate all the works of nature, these partial writers may, each in their department, be more accurate in their discoveries, and freer from errors, than more general writers.²⁵

Gilbert was touched at how generously Pennant accepted his criticisms, and for his part was equally gracious when Pennaint – rather quickly chancing on Gilbert’s intellectual Achilles’ heel – pointed out a slipshod argument about the migration of ring ouzels. ‘You put a very shrewd question,’ Gilbert admits, ‘when you ask me how I know that their autumnal migration is southward? Was not candour and openness the very life of natural history, I should pass over this query just as the sly commentator does over a crabbed passage in a classic; but common ingenuousness obliges me to confess, not without some degree of shame, that I only reasoned in that case from analogy.’²⁶ Knowing with a fair degree of certainty that other autumn migrants came largely from the north, because of our milder winters, he had assumed that ring ouzels did the same. It was, he admitted, a fallacious way of thinking that he had only slipped into due to the virtual impossibility of ever truly witnessing migration.

The convivial tone of these letters reflected a general change for the better in Gilbert’s life. In August, two Oxford friends, Richard Skinner of Corpus Christi and William Sheffield of Worcester College (shortly to become Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum) came to stay at Selborne for a fortnight. Gilbert was tremendously excited by their visit, as they were ‘the only Naturalists that I have ever yet had the pleasure of seeing at my house’. When he wrote to Pennant about their visit, he recalled how exciting it was to walk out with these two scholars who seemed to know the identity of every living thing they encountered. (The living things themselves were not always so fortunate; Gilbert described how Sheffield ‘went into Wolmer Forest & procured me a green sandpiper’.)²⁷

The following month Pennant floated the possibility of launching a new periodical specifically devoted to natural history. Gilbert – rather surprisingly, given his close family connections with publishing – pleaded ignorance of such undertakings and expressed a worry that with the current public appetite for scandal and political controversy another new periodical specializing in natural science might have difficulty attracting a readership. But if Pennant did go ahead, he would be happy to help, though it could only be in a small way.

I shall be ready to advance my mite: but then I shall expect you to be very charitable in your allowance, and to grant that my mite in one respect is equal to larger contributions, as it is all my stock of knowledge.²⁸

The periodical never materialized, but a short while later another publishing idea was put to Gilbert. Some time during the spring of 1769, when Pennant had been off on one of his Scottish tours, Gilbert had met the Honourable Daines Barrington, the man who had presented him with the Naturalist’s Journal the previous year. They began corresponding in June, and by the spring of 1770 Barrington, clearly impressed by what he was reading, suggested to Gilbert that he ought to make a book out of his observations.

It may seem curious that such a suggestion had not already been made to Gilbert by Pennant, given the latter’s involvement with natural history publishing. But Pennant, of course, relied quite heavily on Gilbert’s help and advice, and would not have relished having him as a rival. Barrington had no such inhibiting ambitions. He was an effusive man, an avid snapper-up of ideas and fashions, and in many ways a typical example of the wealthy dilettantes who straddled the worlds of art and science in the eighteenth century. Seven years White’s junior, he was the fourth son of Viscount Barrington, a lawyer and a member of the Inner Temple, and like Pennant, a Fellow of the Royal Society, which, at this period, included many cultivated amateurs among its members. Beyond that there are not many similarities with Gilbert’s first correspondent or, for that matter, with Gilbert himself. Barrington was neither field observer nor popularizer. His chief interest was in the theories of natural history and his way of thinking about these occupied an idiosyncratic niche somewhere between that of a medieval philosopher and a new rationalist. Like the earlier generation he was less interested in the routine, day-to-day workings of the natural world than in its great riddles and anomalies. Like his contemporaries he was eager to replace old superstitions with new truths. The paradox was that he seemed to think this could be achieved by the application of reason alone, much of it based on the assumption that the rest of creation ran their lives according to human notions of common sense. He acknowledged the need for carefully gathered factual evidence, but was curiously gullible when it came to assessing this. He read exceptionally widely, but seemed to have little interest in making his own critical observations – in ‘watching narrowly’ – in the world beyond his library. A glimpse of how his notional concern for rigour could collapse into a kind of offhanded woolliness when it came to considering evidence in practice is given in some of his remarks about migration. He thought, for instance, that the reason the Greeks and Romans handed down so little information about this subject was ‘because their dress prevented them being so much in the field as we are’. Or if they did hear of an unusual arrival they had no guns to shoot it, ‘the only method of attaining real knowledge in natural history depends almost entirely upon having frequent opportunities of thus killing animals, and examining them when dead.’²⁹ As for less tangible forms of evidence, their value rather depended on who was the supplier. Barrington accepted the testimony of most of his fellow naturalists without question, just so long as it coincided with his own beliefs. Where evidence was perverse or lacking he blamed the inattention or ignorance of the observer. He had no real understanding that evidence could be of different kinds and different degrees of accessibility. Migration certainly couldn’t be happening ‘beyond human sight’. He had met people

who conceive they have lost sight of birds by their perpendicular flight; I must own, however, that I have always supposed them to be short-sighted, as I never lost the sight of a bird myself, but from its horizontal distance, and I doubt much whether any bird was ever seen to rise to a greater height than perhaps twice that of St Paul’s cross.³⁰

On vexed questions like this Barrington argues with the ingenuity and tortuousness typical of a bright man with a fixed idea. He was not really a dogmatist, more a rather blinkered intellectual sniper who would pot at any disruptive ideas, and his idiosyncratic stance led him from the best of questions to the most eccentric of answers. Finding the notion of a universal deluge hard to accept, he reasoned that fossils were accidental imitations of living things produced by burrowing insects. Appalled by the travesty of decent instincts that the cuckoo’s behaviour represented, he tried to retrieve a shred of decency for its reputation by arguing that it probably did incubate and feed its own young, albeit in the foster-parent’s nest.

But it would be unfair to judge Barrington’s beliefs too harshly. At least he was alert to what the key issues in natural science were. If his disputations on these seem defensive and conservative, perhaps that is understandable at a time when science was constantly threatening to shake the most deeply-held religious and philosophical beliefs. Maybe the worst that can be said is that a whiff of self-righteousness seems to hang about him – as if he was constantly disappointed by nature’s failure to live according to the tidy, moral scheme he thought appropriate for it – and that his care, his passion, was for the theory not the creatures. When Charles Lamb came to write a vignette on Barrington he caught this hint of imperiousness perfectly:

— another oddity; he walked burly and square – in imitation, 1 think, of Coventry – howbeit he attained not to the dignity of his prototype. Nevertheless, he did pretty well, upon the strength of being a tolerable antiquarian, and having a brother a bishop. When the accounts of his year’s treasurership [of the Inner Temple] came to be audited, the following singular charge was unanimously disallowed by the bench: ‘Item, disbursed Mr Allen, the gardener, twenty shillings for stuff to poison the sparrows, by my orders.’³¹

But Barrington admired Gilbert, and mentions him with gratitude many times in his book, Miscellanies. And if his theories seem a little perverse today, they were important to Gilbert simply by giving him something to pit his wits against. As early as the fourth exhange of letters between them, Barrington surprised Gilbert with a new notion about the cuckoo. He had speculated that cuckoos did not lay their eggs indiscriminately in the first nest that came their way, but actually sought out foster-parents with habits ‘in some degree congenerous’ to their own. The observation, Gilbert replied, ‘is perfectly new to me; and struck me so forcibly, that I naturally fell into a train of thought that led me to consider whether the fact was so, and what reason there was for it’.³² And his way of considering the idea was not simply to meditate upon it, but to ‘recollect and inquire’ about local observations of cuckoo fostering. His neighbours were an observant bunch by now, and they reported seeing young cuckoos only in the nests of wagtails, hedge sparrows, pipits, whitethroats and robins – all of them, Gilbert realized, soft-billed birds like the cuckoo.

On this occasion Barrington and White’s approaches proved to be complementary. But ‘congenerous’ was hardly a description which could be applied to their habits, and it is no wonder that when the idea of the book was raised, Gilbert’s response was polite but circumspect. He was, as usual, coy and self-deprecating, and he repeats the slightly doleful complaint about his isolation. Yet given the significance of Barrington’s proposal, Gilbert’s reply has a composure that suggests the idea may have already occurred to him and been properly weighed up, and that for the moment he was keeping the verdict on it to himself:

When we meet, I shall be glad to have some conversation with you concerning the proposal you make of my drawing up an account of the animals in this neighbourhood. Your partiality towards my small abilities persuades you, I fear, that I am able to do more than is in my power: for it is no small undertaking for a man unsupported and alone to begin a natural history from his own autopsia!³³

Whatever his private feelings about producing a book of his own, Gilbert’s life after 1770 became increasingly involved with the labours of other writers. Pennant continued to be foremost among these, and during 1770–1, Gilbert began to comment on his illustrations and proofs as well as sending him new information. He had – in his letters at least – matured from a slavish novice to an accomplished (pedantic, some might say!) consultant. ‘Your proof-sheet meets with my approbation,’ he wrote at the beginning of 1771. ‘I always was of the opinion that the stile should be in some measure adapted to the length of the composition, or the subject in all cases; and therefore long flowing sentences can’t be suitable to short descriptions in a work that professes to be a synopsis.’³⁴

Another sign of Gilbert’s conscious movement towards a more literary way of life is the expansion in the range of correspondence he kept or copied. There are, for example, a sheaf of letters to his brother John, who since his ignominious departure in 1756 had been chaplain to the military garrison at Gibraltar. During the early 1760s communication between Gilbert and John had been sparse, but in November 1768, when Gilbert had begun to think seriously about migration, he told Pennant that he had ‘written also to my South country correspondent at Gibraltar, & urged him to take up the study of Nature a little; & to habituate his mind to attend to the migrations of birds and fishes’.³⁵ This note comes, pointedly, after a paragraph extolling to Pennant the moral virtues of natural history:

Happy the man! who knows, like you, how to keep himself innocently and usefully employed; especially where his studies tend to the advancement of knowledge, and the benefit of Society. And happy would it be for many more men of fortune if they knew what to do with their time; if they knew how to shun ‘The pains and penalties of Idleness’, how much dissipation, riot and excess would they escape; not without the complacency of finding themselves growing still better neighbours and better commonwealths-men.³⁶

It looks very much as if Gilbert hoped his scheme for John would do them both some good.

John responded more enthusiastically than Gilbert had expected, and by the following year had conceived ‘a design of drawing-up somewhat of a natural history of those Southern parts of Europe’.³⁷ Gilbert was glad to offer what help he could, and from the autumn of 1769 a voluminous technical correspondence about the peculiarities of Gibraltar’s fauna and flora began. Only Gilbert’s letters survive but they are full of bold and often quite uncompromising advice, and show not a hint of the naïvety he was apt to parade when discussing his own work.³⁸ John should ‘Examine the Scarab-balls at different periods; perhaps at some seasons they contain maggots. Where are these balls found?’ ‘Where are your smelts caught? How are the montageo, or Spanish hams cured; in ye snow? are the hogs from whence they are taken fed with vipers?’ He should remember that ‘Wet insects keep incomparably better than dry’ and that the Rock’s plants needed to be included: ‘A soldier sent out with an hand-basket in flowering time will collect many curious plants in a day.’ Above all else he should watch out for reports on, and if at all possible collect ‘yr winter Martin’ (i.e. the crag-martin, which Gilbert initially thought might be overwintering house- or sand-martins).

There was editorial advice, too, terse, shrewd and confident, as if Gilbert was already an experienced hand in publishing. ‘You are to remember,’ he writes, ‘that you will want an abundance of matter to fill up 200 or 300 pages: and no publication will make a reasonable appearance unless you can swell it to somewhat of such a bulk.’ … Beware of stating too dogmatically that a species is new … Describe the vulture minutely … ‘get some account of the prickly heat, or fever, and the exact height of your mount’. Write to Scopoli; ‘he is very clever: but ask him as gravely as you can how he is sure that the woodcock, when pursued, carries off her young in her bill’. Above all, deliver as many anecdotes and dissertations as possible ‘to entertain the unsystematic reader’.

Of course this advice was far from disinterested. John’s responses were invaluable for Gilbert’s own work, and in November 1770, only six months after Barrington had raised the idea of a book, Gilbert suggested that they should, in some unspecified way, put together comparative diaries for a single year:

Pitch on some one year for yr Journal suppose 1769: & then throw all the current observations you have made, & regular incidents into that year: by which means there will be some times 4 or 5 pages of observations to one of Journal. In that manner I shall manage my Journal for the same year: & thus we may compare the two climates.³⁹

As well as letters, macabre bundles of dead specimens began to pour across from Gibraltar for identification or comment. Gilbert seemed to enjoy the discipline of examining these exotic objects, and when he had finished with them, they were labelled (‘1, 2, 3, etc so you will be able to speak of them with precision’) and sent off by waggon to Thomas White in London, to be collected by or forwarded to Pennant. The technical problems involved in the transport of these ‘cargoes of curiosities’ must have been formidable. Preservation techniques were still primitive, and though they may have been effective enough with insects, it is hard to imagine the state in which even salted-down fish must have arrived after a journey that could take as much as two months. Birds were scarcely better, and when only a wing or leg was sent over, it was usually because they were the only parts of the creatures that hadn’t already decayed. But with one particular vulture it was all there ever was. ‘The bird was found dead and floating in the sea; an accident it seems not very uncommon: some fishermen picked it up, and flayed it, eat the carcase, and threw away the skin, and gave him the head and feet.’⁴⁰ No wonder that one parcel became entangled with the quarantine restrictions at Stangate Creek, and that Gilbert, in the preface to his journal for 1770, writes out a recipe for ‘A proper antiseptic substance for the preservation of birds &c’.

The objects that were subjected to this process of being stuffed, squashed, desiccated, crammed into boxes until they all resembled stoats, and then trundled over the stony roadways of rural England, were, needless to say, travesties of the original creatures, and Gilbert’s interest in them seems a long way removed from his delight in the vitality of living things. But it proved to be a comparatively short-lived fad, a useful intellectual discipline, and perhaps the best way of taking advantage of John White’s rather special resources. Very little of the content or style of these exchanges was to find an echo in either the Natural History or the Journal, and during 1770–1 the latter proceeds with its usual preoccupations.

Two themes were beginning to dominate the entries: the weather, and the arrivals and disappearances of birds, and all this suggested about the mysterious imperatives of instinct.

Early 1771 saw a long, severe freeze-up across much of Britain. In Skye, where snow covered the ground for eight weeks, it became known as the Black Spring. On 6 February it was cold enough in Selborne for a decanter of water to freeze solid inside Gilbert’s bedroom. During the whole of March the thermometer barely crept above the low thirties (degrees Fahrenheit) and on 15 April dropped to fourteen degrees in the night. But the day before, the first, lone swallow had flitted over the snowbound village, barely delayed at all. The appalling weather continued, with harsh winds, fogs and dark freezing days. ‘Cold & coughs universal’ Gilbert recorded on 18 April, but he was still out and about, watching the spring fight back. On 20 April there was ‘just enough rain to discolour the pavement’ and he was able to watch multitudes of young frogs beginning their spring migration, miraculously unharmed by the severe frost. Swifts had returned by the 29th of the month and on 25 May the number dashing round the church had reached the usual eight pairs: ‘they do not all come together, but in a straggling manner, a few at a time: perhaps a pair many days before the rest.’ A fortnight later he noticed – and it had probably never been realized before – that the sitting hen swift leaves the nest to feed for a short while at dusk. By September ring ouzels were appearing on the chalk downs at Noar Hill, and families of martins and swallows were swarming in vast numbers below the Hanger. The 22nd proved a day to remember:

Tops of the beeches are tinged with yellow. Heavy clouds on the horizon. This morning the swallows rendezvoused in a neighbour’s wallnut tree. At the dawn of the day they arose altogether in infinite numbers, occasioning such a rushing with the strokes of their wings as might be heard to a considerable distance.⁴¹

That was the last occasion that month on which they were seen in large numbers. Only a few late broods and stragglers remained around the village. But then, out of the blue, many more appeared in the midst of stormy weather in the first week of October. They were gone by the middle of the month, migrated at last, or gone to ground in the village, he presumed. But while he was on a visit to Ringmer on a sunny day in early November, he ‘saw three house swallows flying briskly at Newhaven at the mouth of the Lewes river!!’ Their winter habits remained a tantalizing mystery.

Much of the material in the journals was soon reworked into his correspondence, even the rather cold-blooded dissection of two noctule bats which the journal records simply as ‘procured’. The arrival of the swallow amidst the snow is announced to Pennant in the letter dated 12 May, and repeated almost word for word to Barrington nine days later. The idea of some kind of book based on his observations was beginning to take hold, though he was not letting on about this except to his closest confidants. His brother John was one of these. In January 1771, just after receiving a bizarre assortment of shirts, sweetmeats and dead birds from Gibraltar, Gilbert refined the suggestion he had made a couple of months before. ‘As matter flows in upon me I begin to think of composing a nat: Hist: of Selborne in the form of a journal for 1769.’⁴² But writing six months later to Pennant (who seemed to have echoed Barrington’s suggestion) he was more cautious:

As to any publication in this way of my own, I look upon it with great diffidence, finding that I ought to have begun it twenty years ago. But if I was to attempt anything it should be somewhat of a Nat history of my native parish, an annus historico-naturalis comprizing a journal for one whole year, and illustrated with large notes and observations. Such a beginning might induce more able naturalists to write the history of various districts, and might in time occasion the production of a work so much to be wished for, a full and compleat nat history of these kingdoms.⁴³

Mulso seems to have been given a hint of the new scheme much earlier, though for the moment he was too preoccupied with his own troubles to pay much attention. He was under siege by a florid array of new complaints – piles, ‘rheumatism in the head’, giddiness and a five-week confinement to bed after dislocating his ankle. ‘A Winter is now become a serious Thing to me,’ he wrote, ‘who find that I cannot get thro’ it, without Sufferings of one kind or Another.’ Summers were not much easier, what with the heat and the exhausting social round. When the Mulsos visited Selborne in the middle of summer in 1770, transporting their cumbersome and ailing family had meant hiring a separate waggon for their ‘great Boxes & Trunks’, and a guide to take them through the hollow lanes from Alton. Some years later Mulso chided Gilbert for doing so little to improve access to the village, and urged him to lobby the local Member of Parliament, Sir Simeon Stuart. ‘Think only of my knowing no Time of ye Year,’ he wrote, ‘for getting at You without a Guide; & seldom, with one … If you lose this opportunity, I shall think that you love your Rosamond’s Bower, because the Access is inscrutable.’⁴⁴

That summer of 1770, tucked away in his bower, Gilbert felt secure enough to confide in his friend: Barrington’s suggestion was looking more and more feasible, and he had begun thinking seriously about how to tackle it. By December Mulso was able to make a cryptic reference to some unspecified project on which Gilbert had been engaged since the summer:

Dear Gil:

There is not upon Earth a Man so hide bound in point of Letters as your honour. I wrote to you on ye Ninth of this Month, & I thought you would have been so glad to see my Hand-writing again, that you would have mechanically caught up a Pen to thank me for it. But You preserve your old Sang froid. Have you been penning a new Sermon against Christmas Day? As to Charles ye 5th, I finish’d him in three Weeks, & You have had three Months, a solitary House, & a Fire to yourself: so that unless You purposely interrupt yourself in Order to prolong your Pleasure, It must be finish’d in all this Time. But you have an inexhaustible Fund in your Systema! true: but as That will never be over as long as you live, I will not admit it as an Excuse for not writing to me.⁴⁵

*

Meanwhile, Gilbert continued to record life in Selborne with an increasingly sympathetic eye for exact, unexpected details. In July 1772 he watched a carder beetle working the garden campions. ‘It is very pleasant to see with what address it strips off the pubes, running from the top to the bottom of a branch, and shaving it bare with all the dexterity of a hoop-shaver. When it has got a vast bundle, almost as large as itself, it flies away, holding it secure between it’s chin, & it’s fore legs.’⁴⁶ On 15 August, while he was riding back from a visit to Mulso’s new house at Meonstoke, there was a slight earthquake at Noar Hill. White picked up the gossip about it later that day. A man in a field had heard a curious rumbling. A mother and her son had both noticed their house tremble at the same moment, while one was upstairs and the other down. And, White notes, ‘each called to the other to know what was the matter.’ It was a detail which captured exactly the sense of suddenness and surprise and yet was ordinary enough to put the authenticity of the report beyond question. This was the gift White was developing in his journal, of linking the strange and the unfamiliar with everyday experience. On 22 August, a day of heavy showers, he notes that vast swarms of black dolphin beetles were devouring the village’s vegetables, even the tough outer leaves of cabbages. ‘When disturbed on the cabbage leaves they leap in such multitudes as to make a pattering noise on the leaves like a shower of rain.’⁴⁷

Sometimes more weighty matters find their way into the journal. Throughout the first fortnight of November 1771, Gilbert was observing his aunt’s tortoise down at Ringmer, to see if its imminent hibernation could give any clues as to similar behaviour by birds:

Nov 2. Mrs. Snooke’s tortoise begins to dig in order to hide himself for the winter.

Nov 15. Tortoise at Ringmer had not finish’d his hybernaculum, being interrupted by the sunny weather, which tempted him out.⁴⁸

Even his family’s travels were sometimes logged in the journal, as if they too were scarce migrants. For some time John White had been considering a return to England, and when a living in Lancashire became a possibility early in 1772, he set off home with his wife Barbara. As they made their laborious way across Spain, Gilbert tracked their movements alongside those of the mayflies. ‘June 17. Ephemerae & phryganaea abound on the stream. Bror: John set-out on horse-back for Cadiz.’ They arrived in England on 27 July with John in a sorry state, as he was to describe to Gilbert the following week:

After being rolled in a tub across the Atlantic for 37 days, & suffering a severe fit of the gravel, together with an ugly fever, I landed at Gravesend last Monday evening extremely weak & emaciated. Providentially my wife was a stout sailor, and was able to nurse & assist me in my distress, else I had probably perished.⁴⁹

His first task, once recovered, was to visit Lambeth Palace, where the Bishop presented him formally to the living of Blackburn, Lancashire. But as he could not take up residence until early the following year, he and his family spent the winter in Selborne, giving Mulso the line for one of his knowing quips. Writing in January 1773 he says ‘I suppose your Brother John & his Lady are put up in Cotton with some of the Andalusian Rarities, for how they can stand agst this severe Weather after their broiling on the Rock so long, I cannot imagine.’⁵⁰ With them at the Wakes was their son John, born on the Rock in 1759 and universally known as Gibraltar Jack. He had been sent to England in August 1769, to attend a school at Holybourne, near Alton. Some of Benjamin White’s sons were at this establishment, and both he and Gilbert kept an avuncular eye on Jack’s progress. He was a bright 14-year-old, and soon began to help Gilbert with the transcription and copying of his letters. Gilbert got on well with young people, treating them with respect and intelligence, and never showing the slightest sign of condescension. (He had already begun a studious exchange of letters with his nephew Sam Barker, aged 15 that year.) During 1773, while John and his wife were in Lancashire preparing the new vicarage, Gilbert took full responsibility for their son’s upbringing and education. He proved to be a fast learner. By the autumn he had consumed several volumes of the Spectator and learned to read tolerably well from Virgil. He had even, with great precocity, been ‘much delighted’ with that basic text of the Christian ecologists, Derham’s Physico-theology (though it would be as well to make allowances for the fact that this was one of Gilbert’s favourite books, too). He was well-behaved, obliging, and ‘in his readiness to assist, and put an helping hand,’ Gilbert confided to his brother, ‘often puts me in mind of a gentlewoman that is very nearly related to him.’ In August Gilbert treated him to a pair of lamb-skin breeches.

But his spell as a foster-parent was not without its share of anxieties. In June Jack had gone down with the measles, and Thomas Hoar had moved into a little bed alongside him to give him balm tea in the night. He ‘behaved like a philosopher all through,’ Gilbert reported, ‘submitting to his confinement without reluctance or murmuring’. The attack seemed to leave him with an obstinate hoarseness which worried Gilbert at first, but he came to the conclusion that it was ‘owing to a cause incident to young men about his time of life’. He was right to be concerned, none the less. Measles and whooping cough were rampant in the southern counties that year, and claimed the lives of five small children in Selborne alone.⁵¹ (The Mulsos, even more fearful for their health than usual because of the epidemics, entered a pact with their neighbours to chance the novel – and still risky – practice of inoculation against smallpox.)

Accounts of all these domestic dramas were dutifully sent to Jack’s father, and Gilbert seemed able to write in a more relaxed and intimate tone to John now the bulk of the groundwork for the Gibraltar natural history was complete. They exchanged descriptions of the progress of their respective house repairs, of brewing beer, of the celebrations accompanying the King’s visit to Portsmouth (the cannon repeatedly shook houses at Selborne, thirty miles distant) and, of course, of the weather. But natural history was not forgotten. Gilbert was delighted that John had heard a sedge-warbler up in Lancashire. The bird was ‘a wonderful fellow’, and if only it could be ‘persuaded not to sing in such a hurry would be an elegant songster’. There was plenty Gilbert could say about its power of mimicry, but he preferred his brother’s one-word epithet: ‘Your appellative of polyglott pleases me so much that I shall adopt it.’ And adopt it he did, at least in the Naturalist’s Journal. It also found its way into the entry on the sedge-warbler in Pennant’s Zoology, in which virtually the whole description of the species is based on Gilbert’s notes. ‘I find you,’ Gilbert wrote contentedly to John, ‘as well as when you resided on the other side of the Pyrenean mountains, my most steady and communicative correspondent; and therefore it will be my own fault if our epistolary intercourse should languish.’⁵²

But Gilbert’s rather stilted phrasing is a sure sign that all was not as secure in the relationship as he was trying to make out; and that autumn a little of the underlying strain came to the surface. The cause – and it was not the first time it had been a source of difficulty – was Gilbert’s reluctance to make long trips away from Selborne. On this occasion, though, he did seem to anticipate the likely outcome, and to make some attempt to forestall it. On 11 September he invited John and his wife to come and spend another winter with him while their new house dried out. The previous winter he considered one of the pleasantest in his life, ‘when I had my friends about me in a family way’. He had all the arrangements worked out. He would put a bed up in the drawing-room, and a grate ‘where you shall have a constant fire, by which you may instruct your son, and fabricate your Fauna’. He would be more than happy for his sister-in-law to manage the house and see to the provisions. All in all, he believed, ‘we shall… pass the dead season of the year in no uncomfortable way: and at the return of spring I will let you depart in peace; and will follow you in the summer into Lancashire.’⁵³ Gilbert assured John, perhaps a little too earnestly, that the proposal was ‘a sincere intention’, and that he and his wife should not be put off by the prospects of the long coach journey (‘which is not so formidable to either of you as some others’). But this careful, diplomatic letter ‘surprised and distressed’ the touchy younger brother. He read it as an attempt by Gilbert to get out of a reciprocal visit to Lancashire. Gilbert immediately denied that he intended any such thing, and asked his brother to try to understand his position. ‘You say I may easily throw up my church, and come down to you; which I ought to do, and fully intend: but then when I once relinquish my employ, I cannot reassume it when I please, even though I find myself ever so much becalmed for want of something to call me forth, and employ my body and mind.’⁵⁴ There was something in Gilbert’s argument. Whether or not he seriously imagined he could make the journey north, having shied away from the prospect so many times before, he was certainly beginning to find the routines of the Farringdon curacy a mixed blessing. His first move was to try to resign the position altogether, but this was countered by Mr Roman, the rector, with a generous offer of a 25 per cent salary increase (to £50 per annum) to help Gilbert pay for an assistant when he wanted to be absent for any length of time. Gilbert promptly began canvassing Mulso, Skinner and other influential clerical friends to see if they could procure a locum for him. There was a good deal of manoeuvring and back-stage diplomacy, but to no avail. Gilbert failed to obtain a stand-in and, no doubt for many reasons, never travelled to see his brother in Blackburn. The slight misunderstanding between the brothers was soon healed, but Gilbert’s lengthy explanations for his absence echoed on for some time, and his feeling of being ‘becalmed’ found little to relieve it that autumn.

In October he had to travel up to Oxford, where he was required to say his piece as a Fellow in a long-standing dispute over the holding of offices and residence. By chance Richard Skinner arrived in the city at the same time, and dragged Gilbert out – not unwelcomely, we can be sure – for a day away from the college wrangles. ‘He made me dine and sup and spend the whole day with him; and is the same chatty, communicative, intelligent, gouty, indolent mortal that he used to be.’⁵⁵ Skinner, as it happened, with no reason to think he was going to meet Gilbert in Oxford, had just written to him with news of the adventures of their far-ranging friends, Joseph Banks, William Sheffield and John Lightfoot. The letter was waiting at Selborne. Given Gilbert’s frame of mind, it was probably just as well that he first heard about their spirited travels over a few drinks.

But he still had his own, more limited territory to explore, and an increasingly agreeable companion in the shape of Gibraltar Jack. In December they visited Ringmer, where Gilbert’s aunt, Rebecca Snooke, was recovering after a serious illness. Of all Gilbert’s retreats away from Selborne, this was probably his favourite. Only half a mile from his aunt’s house the South Downs began, and, going west towards Lewes, or south towards the Iron Age fort of Mount Caburn, it was possible to walk on the open hills, among wild thyme and ancient barrows, for miles on end.

Gilbert and Jack went for long tramps across the Downs, watching kites and buzzards, and keeping a sharp look-out for any late migrating birds flying out towards the Channel. Back in the house after their windswept walks they would listen to the rooks flying off to roost, and imagine Mrs Snooke’s ageing tortoise snoozing under the mud in the herbaceous border. Gilbert plainly enjoyed this fortnight in Sussex as much as any he had ever spent away from Selborne. He wrote to Barrington from Ringmer in the most cheerful and exuberant tones of their whole correspondence, and it is tempting to think that Jack’s eager company was responsible. It is a very local letter, full of sharp and affectionate observations on sheep and shepherds, on the local gentry’s taste for roast wheatears, and above all on the magic of the Sussex chalk-hills themselves, with their soaring and very un-Selbornian vistas. Gilbert was exhilarated by the South Downs. He had walked them for thirty years, yet still found ‘that chain of majestic mountains’ more beautiful each time he visited them. He reminded Barrington that John Ray himself, the father of physico-theology, used to visit a village at the foot of the Downs, and was ‘so ravished with the prospect from Plumpton-plain near Lewes, that he mentions those scapes in his Wisdom of God in the Works of the Creation with the utmost satisfaction, and thinks them equal to anything he had seen in the finest parts of Europe.’⁵⁶ And as if that were not sufficient praise, Gilbert, apologizing rather nervously in advance, launches into a quite untypical flight of fancy about how the Downs might have been formed:

Perhaps I may be singular in my opinion, and not so happy as to convey to you the same idea; but I never contemplate these mountains without thinking I perceive somewhat analogous to growth in their gentle swellings and smooth fungus-like protuberances, their fluted sides, and regular hollows and slopes, that carry at once the air of vegetative dilation and expansion … Or was there ever a time when these immense masses of calcareous matter were thrown into fermentation by some adventitious moisture; were raised and leavened into such shapes by some plastic power; and so made to swell and heave their broad backs into the sky so much above the less animated clay of the wild below.⁵⁷

It was to be another fifty years before James Hutton showed that scenery and rocks were formed in the past by geological processes identical to those that can be seen at work in the present, and Gilbert can be excused his rather extravagant fantasy, though seeing something ‘analogous to growth’ in chalk was not that far off target. What is surprising is that he was prepared to admit it to a colleague towards whom he had previously been so reserved. The trip to the majestic mountains had on this occasion quite gone to his head.