Chapter Seven

‘Watching narrowly’

 

Gilbert had by now discarded his former reticence and modesty, even with Pennant. ‘I have received a most violent complimenting letter from Mr. Pennant,’ he gleefully announced to John that winter. ‘He is going to publish a second edition of “British Zoology”, and is to do wonders with the information extracted from my letters. I shall take the opportunity of laying before him the more glaring faults in the first edition.’¹

But most of his energies were now largely devoted to long and lively exchanges with Barrington. ‘My letters to Mr Barrington swell very fast,’ he wrote, ‘he has engaged me in a monography of the swallow genus.’ Throughout 1773, the Naturalist’s Journal had been carrying notes on these summer visitors to the village, and on 20 November 1773 he despatched a long essay on the house-martin to Barrington. Things then moved along with uncharacteristic despatch. In December Gilbert was able to tell John that, thanks to Barrington’s influence, the essay was to be delivered as a paper before the Royal Society. ‘An Account of the House-Martin, or Martlet’ was read on 10 February 1774, and was well received. Gilbert was not a member of the Society, and didn’t attend on this occasion, but he was able to see the paper in print in the Philosophical Transactions a month later.² Mulso was overjoyed that his faith in Gilbert was being vindicated atlast: ‘MayyourHirundines, asldoubtnot, bringinthe Spring & Summer of your F ame! I am glad You have entrusted yourself to the Public that You reap your due Honour… You are Yourself the richest Man that I know; for You are the only Man of my Acquaintance that does not want Money.’³ On 16 March the following year the Royal Society heard a composite paper comprising Gilbert’s letters on the swallow, sand-martin and swift (which was then still assumed to be a member of the same family).⁴ Together these four essays are the high point of Gilbert’s prose writing. By any standards they are models of lucidity and insight; by those of the eighteenth century they were revolutionary. Few such extended monographs of single species had ever been composed in the English language, and none which were drawn so closely and affectionately from life. Gilbert clearly regarded the subjects of his study as special and had already written a eulogy of them in a letter to Barrington in June 1773. In the edited version of the letters in the Natural History he converts this into a general introduction to the hirundine papers by inserting an explanatory note:

(It will be proper to premise here that the sixteenth, eighteenth, twentieth and twenty first letters have already been published in the Philosophical Transactions: but as nicer observation has furnished several corrections and additions, it is hoped that the republication of them will not give offence…) The hirundines are a most inoffensive, harmless, entertaining, social, and useful tribe of birds: they touch no fruit, in our gardens; delight, all except one species, in attaching themselves to our houses; amuse us with their migrations, songs and marvellous agility.⁵

It would be hard to imagine a more glowing testimonial. There was nothing new in wild birds being given good references because of their practical usefulness; but Gilbert was breaking new ground in applauding them for sheer vivacity and entertainment value, and for their willingness to live on the most intimate territorial terms with human beings. Yet there was a fascinating air of mystery about them, too, especially about the instincts that governed their lives and put them beyond human sight for six months of the year.

The spectacle of these wild creatures, going about their perfectly yet inscrutably organized business inside the context of a human community, fascinated Gilbert, and must have seemed to him a perfect expression of Ray and Derham’s vision of a harmonious Creation. Yet he never openly appropriated the birds’ lives as evidence for any moral or theological theory, any more than he dismissed them as mere automata or human playthings. They are respected for themselves. In fact, if there is a weakness in Gilbert’s account it is that the martins seem a little too bright – and with an intelligence very much in the human mould.

Martins teemed in Selborne during the eighteenth century. Several pairs nested at the Wakes, and Gilbert was able to watch them under the eaves of his brew-house and stable without even leaving his garden. They arrived around 16 April, and once they had begun nest-building a month later Gilbert must have found it difficult to drag himself back to his desk and his parish duties. His journal entries on them show a mixture of excitement and concern that is curiously modern. Many of the intimate details of their lives that most enchanted him (and which he was the first to set down on paper) are the kind that can still touch anyone who has kept the long summer watch over house-martins as they raise their families. He noticed how they use their chins to plaster new mud on the nests; their determination in rebuilding nests when they are washed away by rain; the bewitchingly inquisitive faces of the young birds, ‘peeping out’ of the nest’s hole all day when they are nearly fledged; and, finally, how the young are fed on the wing by the parents, ‘but the feat is done by so quick and almost imperceptible a sleight, that a person must have attended very exactly to their motions before he would percieve it.’ It would be foolish to deny that Gilbert was thoroughly soft-hearted about his ‘martlets’, and sometimes he seems to ascribe human emotions and purposes to them. The adult birds, he noticed ‘are industrious artificers … at their labours in the long days before four in the morning’; and when they carry off their nestlings’ droppings they do so with ‘tender assiduity’. Yet in the context of the whole paper, these reflections seem not so much anthropomorphic as an affirmation that there is a core of experience and challenge which is common to all life. On the one occasion when he does explicitly compare the behaviour of humans and martins it is the birds’ skill which is offered as the model. Gilbert is describing the method used by the birds to construct their mud nests:

The bird not only clings with its claws but partly supports itself by strongly inclining its tail against the wall, making that a fulcrum; and thus steadied it works and plasters the materials into the face of the brick or stone. But then, that this work may not, while is is soft and green, pull itself down by its own weight, the provident architect has prudence and forbearance enough not to advance her work too fast; but by building only in the morning, and by dedicating the rest of the day to food and amusement, gives it sufficient time to dry and harden. About half an inch seems to be a sufficient layer for a day. Thus careful workmen when they build mud-walls (informed at first perhaps by this little bird) raise but a moderate layer at a time, and then desist; lest the work should become top-heavy, and so be ruined by its own weight.⁶

Such close-ups almost compel respect; they imply that even the smallest detail of the bird’s life matters. When Gilbert turned his attention to the swallow itself a short while later, he moved further in this direction, and his essay includes examples of a viewpoint already strikingly realized in the journal. There are episodes which are not only acute insights into the bird’s private lives and their part in the larger society of nature, but which are composed, almost as if they were parables or portraits. He had watched swallows and martins mobbing sparrowhawks as they glided down the Selborne valley:

As soon as an hawk … appears he [a swallow] calls all the swallows and martins about him; who pursue in a body, and buffet and strike their enemy till they have driven him from the village, darting down from above on his back, and rising in a perpendicular line in perfect security.⁷

On the chalk downs he had seen horsemen followed by little flocks of swallows ‘for miles together, which plays before and behind them, sweeping around, and collecting all the skulking insects that are roused by the trampling of the horses’ feet’. There were the sounds, too. When a swallow hovered over one of the wide chimneys which were then their favourite nest-sites, ‘the vibration of her wings acting on the confined air occasion a rumbling like thunder’; when one catches a fly, ‘a smart snap from her bill is heard resembling the noise at the shutting of a watch-case.’ And all this was noted in the face of bouts of increasing deafness, which at times, he confesses, made May ‘as silent and mute with respect to the notes of birds, etc, as August’, and for which he was soon to need an ear-trumpet.*

Only one of the anecdotes in the Royal Society papers seems slightly out of keeping and was perhaps inserted chiefly for effect, though it is an interesting enough story. It concerns an exhibit in Ashton Lever’s famous museum in Alkrington, Lancashire (later transferred to London) – a swallow’s nest, with eggs, built on the outstretched wings of a dead owl which had been hanging from a rafter. Lever was so struck with this curiosity that he gave the donor a large shell to put where the owl had previously been. This was done, and the following year swallows obligingly nested in the shell – which, needless to say, was whisked off to the museum just as soon as it had a full clutch of eggs. Gilbert certainly had not seen these exhibits himself when he completed the swallow paper early in January 1774. He had heard about them from John, who lived near the museum, and on 12 January 1774 he asked John to repeat the anecdote: ‘Pray tell me over again the story of the swallow building on the dead owl’s wings and on the conch &c. I think I could make good use of it’⁸ A fortnight later it was installed at the end of the essay.

The paper on the swift, as well as containing magnificent descriptions of their evening races round the steeples and churches, records some wholly original observations. Gilbert had noticed that sitting birds and nestlings replied to the packs when they screamed past the nest entrances. He spotted, too, that they mated on the wing:

If any person would watch these birds of a fine morning in May, as they are sailing round at a great height from the ground, he would see, every now and then, one drop on the back of another, and both of them sink down together for many fathoms with a loud piercing shriek. This I take to be the juncture when the business of generation is carrying on.⁹

But their departure from the village in early August was ‘mysterious and wonderful, since that time is often the sweetest season in the year.’ And it posed problems about how the young could be made ready for long flights in such a short period. In the summer of 1775 he had the opportunity to observe a swift’s nest at close quarters to see if this riddle could be solved. His brother Henry had been busy building a large new wing on his house at Fyfield, to accommodate his growing family and the small private school he was running. The extension ran between the kitchen and the brew-house, where a number of swifts nested, and Gilbert decided to take advantage of the general dismantling to take a look at one:

I got Harry’s bricklayer one evening to open the tiles of his brewhouse, under which were several nests containing only two squab young apiece; and moreover his workmen all told me that, when boys, they had invariably found only two eggs or two birds.¹⁰

He looked again ten days later, noted in his journal for 9 July that ‘young swifts helpless squabs still’, and the following year repeated the whole exercise, this time almost certainly in Selborne:

On the fifth of July, 1775, I again untiled part of a roof over the nest of a swift. The dam sat in the nest; but so strongly was she affected by natural στoρφη [affection] for her brood, which she supposed to be in danger, that, regardless of her own safety, she would not stir, but lay sullenly by them, permitting herself to be taken in hand. The squab young we brought down and placed on the grass-plot, where they tumbled about, and were as helpless as a new-born child. While we contemplated their naked bodies, their unwieldy disproportioned abdomina, and their heads, too heavy for their necks to support, we could not but wonder when we reflected that these shiftless beings in a little more than a fortnight would be able to dash through the air almost with the inconceivable swiftness of a meteor; and perhaps, in their emigration must traverse vast continents and oceans as distant as the equator.¹¹

Gilbert knew swifts to be resourceful feeders and flyers, and regarded them as being the most likely migrators among the ‘swallow tribe’. But to the extent that he thought some of this tribe might stay behind to hibernate in the village (and to the extent that his views on migration. were influenced by rational arguments), it was this image of small, inexperienced birds only a few weeks old crossing whole oceans that he found most distressing and incredible. And this was the argument he frequently put to Barrington, who believed, in a much less qualified way, in full-scale hibernation. To use the human analogies that were clearly always at the back of their minds, Gilbert, with his first-hand knowledge, saw the birds as good, industrious citizens, with complicated needs, considerable powers of adaptation, and an instinctive concern for their young. Barrington, who was largely ignorant of their domestic lives, regarded them much as he probably did the poor, as simple creatures lacking in flexibility and intelligence, and unlikely ever to make any effort that wasn’t absolutely necessary. Migration over the sea was exceptionally unlikely, he believed, because birds would be unable to find food, and could not perform such complex navigation purely by instinct. In any case:

Such a bird immediately upon its arrival on the Southern coast of Spain would find the climate and food which it desired to attain, and all proper conveniences for its nest: what then is to be its inducement for quitting all these accommodations which it meets in such profusion, and pushing on immediately over so many degrees of European continent?¹²

*

Gilbert frequently used information and anecdotes from friends and relatives to fill out his letters. In June 1774 he wrote to Samson Newbery, a Fellow of Exeter College who lived in south Devon, requesting any information he might have about the birds of the West Country. Newbery’s reply is full of useful notes, many of which were quickly passed on to Pennant. But the correspondence with Pennant had by now almost run its natural course. The only two communications from Gilbert between November 1773 and September 1774 are a torrent of terse notes and anecdotes on birdsong, odd migrants, winter habits and the like, designed to give Pennant the maximum amount of factual information for the revised edition of British Zoology with the minimum of distraction from his now more absorbing correspondence with Barrington. ‘I observe that my long letter carries with it a quaint and magisterial air,’ he apologizes on 2 September 1774, ‘but, when I recollect that you requested stricture and anecdote, I hope you will pardon the didactic manner for the sake of the information it may happen to contain.’¹³

His growing file of correspondence was beginning to strike Gilbert as a rather better (or at least more convenient) starting-point for his book than an ‘annus historico-naturalis’. ‘As to my letters,’ he wrote to John at the end of March, ‘they lie in my cupboard very snug. If you will correct them, and assist in the arrangement of my Journal, I will publish.’¹⁴ One month later he is even more explicit about his plans:

Out of all my journals I think I might collect matter enough, and such a series of incidents as might pretty well comprehend the Natural History of this district, especially as to the ornithological part; and I have moreover half a century of letters on the same subject, most of them very long; all which together (were they thought worthy to be seen) might make up a moderate volume. To these might be added some circumstances of the country, its most curious plants, its few antiquities; all which together might soon be moulded into a work, had I resolution and spirits enough to set about it.¹⁵

Gilbert’s doubts about his resolution were to prove depressingly accurate. Although the description that he sent to John that May is virtually a prospectus of the Natural History as it was eventually published, the editing and arrangement were to take him another fourteen years. John did what he could to help, as requested, but it is doubtful if he was able to contribute anything substantial enough to speed up Gilbert’s progress. Once he reprimands Gilbert for putting those traditionally most feminine of birds, swallows, into the neuter. ‘I thank you for your strictures on my printed monography,’ Gilbert replies, ‘I had used the pronoun personal feminine to my swallows; but somebody objected, so I put it in its place; but I think you are right, and shall replace she and her.’¹⁶ Dealing with editors was even then, plainly, a fractious and finicky business.

Indeed the problems involved in moulding a series of existing letters into a finished book raise the question of why Gilbert chose this particular way of preparing his text, rather than rewriting their contents as continuous prose. Was it nothing more than a realistic admission of his lack of determination and literary stamina? It is hard to see this prolific correspondent, who had kept a daily journal for nearly a quarter of a century and completed his elegant hirundine essays in a matter of weeks, as suffering from some kind of writer’s block; yet the evidence of those fourteen years of prevarication is impossible to overlook. Perhaps – and the character of the journal entries might support this – he actually found immediate, first-time writing easier than revision. Max Nicholson has also pointed out that, since the idea for the book had arisen out of the correspondence with Barrington and Pennant, there was a kind of logic in ‘following this line of least resistance’ and simply editing the existing correspondence.¹⁷ It would avoid the charge of pretentiousness, and enable Gilbert to use in its original state a good deal of material which had already been published by Pennant, and which could hardly have been reissued in any other form without a suspicion of plagiarism. Nicholson’s suggestion that Gilbert also felt the need ‘to shelter himself behind the then powerful names of Barrington and Pennant’ is less convincing, given his growing confidence with both men.

Yet beyond these possible tactical considerations there is the plain fact that a collection of letters, datelined Selborne, was a well-nigh perfect medium for conveying the spirit of the seasonal ebb and flow of natural life in a parish, and Gilbert must have realized this sooner or later. The recording of one dramatic event earlier in 1774 shows the extent to which the letters were, in one sense, an extended form of village gossip. The saga of the Hawkley landslip is not a typical Natural History entry (especially as Gilbert was not even there to describe it first-hand) but it does demonstrate how the letters became a device for turning conversation into literature.

The year had begun portentously, with unprecedentedly heavy rains. On Sunday 9 January the flooding was so severe that Gilbert was for the first time in his curacy unable to get to Farringdon to take the services. ‘Thomas and I were over the calves of our legs before we got to Peter Wells’s’ he wrote to John three days later, and ‘were told that if we proceeded any further our horses would swim’. The exceptional weather brought a spate of unusual water-birds to the parish, including a number of bitterns. Three were shot in the parish (one in a coppice near the foot of the Hanger) and were brought to Gilbert’s house, as was now becoming the custom with any natural curiosities which appeared locally. As the birds were already dead, he took a severely practical view of them. After weighing, dissecting and generally appraising them (‘the serrated claw on the middle toe is very curious!’) he cooked up the remains for his supper. ‘I….found the flavour to be like that of wild duck, or teal, but not so delicate.’¹⁸

The cold wet weather continued unabated during February and the underground springs (‘lavants’) began to break out of the chalk hills ominously early. Much of the early wheat on the low-lying clays was rotting in the ground. Lambing time was a disaster, with large numbers of animals, already weakened by a diet of sodden turnips, dying from exposure and drowning. Nor had Gilbert escaped with nothing more than a case of wet feet. He had been working hard on the swallow papers through the debilitating rounds of frost and flood, and had gone down with a complicated illness – probably influenza – of which he sent Mulso a ‘terrible Description’. Mulso warned him to take the greatest care of himself, since the symptoms were liable to reappear; but not so much care as to become hypochondriacal. ‘Do not fall into ye Extream of Fear on the other Side, like your Father; but consider, that by the Account of all the Faculty here, & indeed as seems a natural Consequence of the Peculiarity of our Seasons this winter, Extraordinary appearances of Illness, & new Modes of Suffering have happen’d.’¹⁹ Fortunately Jack was still at the Wakes with his uncle, helping with his journal and correspondence and no doubt in keeping his spirits up, too. ‘He is now of real service to me,’ Gilbert wrote to John on 5 February, ‘and a companion in my solitude.’

The deluge reached a climax on 8 March. Two days of unrelenting rain culminated in a snowstorm, and the resulting floods in the south of England were ‘beyond any thing ever remembered before’. In the parish of Hawkley, a couple of miles south of Selborne, the mass of water accumulating below the chalk was reaching an unprecedented volume. Some time in the early hours of 9 March it finally found a weak spot and broke through. A huge section of Hawkley Hanger (ironically, land once owned by Gilbert’s grandfather) fell away, toppling trees and cottages, and crashing with the force of a small earthquake on to the fields below. Gilbert’s illness meant that he was in no state to visit the disaster, but Jack travelled down during the next few days and was able to report back to his uncle. His description was so vivid and perceptive for a boy of 15 – and not without a touch of his uncle’s eye for detail – that Gilbert encouraged him to write it down in the form of a letter to his cousin, Sam Barker. This note remains the only first-hand account of the immediate after-effects of the landslip. Jack reckoned that eighty to a hundred acres had been affected:

a large fragment of the Hanger… slipped away for near two hundred yards in length, and fell down the steep to the depth of 40 ft, carrying with it the coppice-wood, hedge, and gate between the two fields, &c. The sinking of this gate is very strange, as it stands at present as upright as it used to do and is as easy to be opened and shut… A lane which went down one side of this hill is sunk eight or ten feet, and very much pushed forward so as to be rendered impassable … There is in one field that was wheat last year pretty well an acre so much sunk, that it is impossible to be ploughed. All the corn land which was affected by this event is full of large chasms and cracks, some two feet wide: the meadow land has very few of these cracks in it, but seems to be pushed forward; and is filled with large swellings of the turf very much resembling waves: in some places where the ground met with any thing that resisted it rose up many feet above its former surface.²⁰

The landslip became a famous tourist attraction that spring, and one Sunday a couple of weeks after the incident, a crowd estimated at close on a thousand people gathered at the site. But Gilbert’s continuing poor health kept him away from Hawkley till at least the middle of April. A trip to London later in March, while he was still suffering with the after-effects of his influenza, brought on first a rash and then a cough. By the end of the month he was ‘feverish and faint’, and not even up to making his usual April trip to Oxford.

But he was well enough recovered by the summer to visit the landslip and make his own investigations of the upheaval it had caused. He talked to cottagers who lived in the vicinity, and made meticulous measurements – to the nearest yard, in places – of the exact extent of the disturbance

Unusually, none of this evidence found its way into his correspondence. Perhaps it was too remote for Barrington and too much like old news for his relatives. But some time later he wrote up the story as one of the concluding ‘false letters’ in the Natural History. It takes the form of a letter to Barrington, but was never actually sent to him, and consequently bears no date.²¹ With no need to hurry the telling, or to dwell on the sometimes rather dull necessities of real correspondence, Gilbert was free to fashion his account like a suspense story, and quite deliberately uses dramatic close-ups and cliff-hangers to bring an edge of Gothick horror to it.

Just as interesting, given how free Gilbert is in most of his writing with the niceties of sequence and order, is the extent to which the piece is structured. The details are accurate and telling, often touchingly so, and undeniably White; yet they are put together in a more controlled and recognizably eighteenth-century way than almost anything else he wrote. In places the essay’s shape is as formal as a neoclassical landscape painting. There in the foreground are the hapless victims quaking in their cottages as seventy feet of wooded hillside collapses around them; in the middle ground, a world of familiar objects bent out of all order and sense; and beyond them, the shock-waves of the disturbance rippling away into the distance; and all seen, as it were, through the eyes of the main characters, the cottagers:

When daylight came they were at leisure to contemplate the devastations of the night: they then found that a deep rift, or chasm, had opened under their houses, and torn them, as it were, in two; and that one end of the barn had suffered in a similar manner; that a pond near the cottage had undergone a strange reverse, becoming deep at the shallow end, and so vice versa; that many large oaks were removed out of their perpendicular, some thrown down, and some fallen into the heads of neighbouring trees; and that a gate was thrust forward, with its hedge, full six feet, so as to require a new track to be made to it. From the foot of the cliff the general course of the ground, which is pasture, inclines in a moderate descent for half a mile, and is interspersed with some hillocks, which were rifted, in every direction, as well towards the great woody hanger, as from it. In the first pasture the deep clefts began: and running across the lane, and under the buildings, made such vast shelves that the road was impassable for some time; and so over to an arable field on the other side, which was strangely torn and disordered. The second pasture field, being more soft and springy, was protruded forward without many fissures in the turf, which was raised in long ridges resembling graves, lying at right angles to the motion. At the bottom of this enclosure the soil and turf rose many feet against the bodies of some oaks that obstructed their farther course and terminated this awful commotion.

*

For the remainder of 1774 life in Selborne proceeded on a more even keel. Despite the ravages of the winter, it proved to be a bountiful year. House-martins arrived, eventually, in even greater numbers than usual. A redstart took to singing from the top of the village maypole. In the Wakes garden, the peaches and nectarines set a bumper crop, and even the bees, still lethargic from the late spring, were persuaded into pollinating the melon and cucumber flowers by means of a little honey smeared on the petals. ‘Sweet summer’s day,’ Gilbert wrote on 13 May, when he would plainly not have wished to be anywhere else in the world. ‘Field cricket begins to shrill. Horses began to lie abroad.’ And, inspired partly by Harry’s ambitious projects at Fyfield, he began to think of extending and improving the Wakes by building a new parlour. Mulso approved of the plan, and understood the feelings that lay behind it:

Pray, when you build, let it be a ‘drawing Room up Stairs, that you may look on the Hanger; Let it be higher than the present, & let it be sashed – Monstrous! why this will be great Expence! True, therefore take two Years instead of One to do it in. As You want to decoy your family after You to make Selbourne a Place of Residence, as well as to enjoy it during your own Life, e’en do it in a tempting way.²²

The Wakes had already become a holiday retreat for the White clan, and that April a new name joins the list of regular visitors. Molly, Thomas White’s 15-year-old daughter, had come to spend the summer and be tutored by the vicar’s wife, Mrs Etty. She adored Selborne, growing ‘tall, fair and handsome’, and no doubt enjoyed the company of her energetic cousin, Jack, who was still installed at the Wakes. Jack’s stay had been extended, chiefly because it was proving difficult to find a suitable position for him now his schooling was over. Gilbert and Thomas had offered to help with the search while John was still in the north, but they were not finding much that lived up to their expectations for a favourite nephew. Chemistry was ‘unwholesome’. Printers might earn a good deal of money, but their apprenticeships were ‘low and servile’. Lawyers were overpaid and had never been popular with the family. Even where quite humdrum jobs were involved, employers were asking outrageous deposits for taking on young trainees. Gilbert reckoned, not entirely flippantly, that Jack would be most usefully employed assisting his father in the preparation of his Fauna Calpensis, which was beginning to falter for lack of help with the transcription: ‘A writing master would take this trouble off your hands for a small sum, but with this disadvantage, that no man can transcribe his own works without seeing plans that he can alter for the better; a benefit which is entirely lost where a stranger is amanuensis. I wish Jack would earn your book; I mentioned the conditions, at which he smiled.’²³

In fact John’s book was beginning to run into an increasing number of technical problems. When he wrote to Gilbert about its progress in August 1774, there is an air of dejection in his letter, and the surprising admission – given the vast amount of work that seemed to have been devoted to it over the past four years – that he had advanced only a small way into the final text:

am drawing towards the conclusion of my insects; and shall then proceed to the quadrupeds, birds, and fishes. After all there must be a general correction and transcript of the whole, which will be no small undertaking.

We have had a sad, gloomy, wet, chilly season. We are now sitting over a fire. I have brushed up my house as spruce as if it were for sale; but it is to give you as agreeable an idea of Lancashire as I can.²⁴

There are close enough echoes here of some of Gilbert’s complaints to suggest that John may have been slyly getting one back at his brother. Gilbert did not respond to this muted plea for encouragement and company. Perhaps he felt that too great a show of consideration would have obliged him to make the dread journey north. But he still seemed willing to advise John about the best way of presenting his work. The suggestions are as shrewd and effusive as ever. He should include as many plates as possible, since picture-books were now highly fashionable. So were accounts of tours, and John’s volume would be the poorer without a ‘pretty chapter’ on his explorations. (Gilbert had just read Samuel Johnson’s A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland, and though he found it sentimental, it was ‘full of good sense, and new and peculiar reflections’.) Gilbert, now the thoroughgoing literary professional, explained that Benjamin’s hesitation in agreeing terms for the book might in part be due to a growing reluctance among publishers to take on new editions, in consequence of a confirmation that year of a drastic foreshortening of the legal term of copyright.²⁵ So, playing the role of the mediating elder brother, he suggests a way of appeasing Benjamin:

Suppose you write to him, and ask him how much he will give you downright clear of the plates and printing for your copy; and then you will know your certain gain, and will run no risk. Anything in the naturalist way now sells well. Or if he chuses to go shares in profit or loss, enquire of him what proportion he should think would pay him for conducting the sale and publication.²⁶

Hecky Chapone, he added, having sold her first two volumes for 50 the pair,²⁷ had now managed to squeeze her publisher for 250 for a third collection, Miscellanies in Prose and Verse, ‘so that it is expected the man will lose considerably by the purchase.’ (‘We all abuse her this Time for cheating the Public,’ commented Mulso, who had been the source of this particular snippet.) Gilbert revelled in the familiarity of this literary chit-chat, which must in several ways have shortened the distance between Selborne and the city. Hecky herself, having become a celebrated hostess, was rarely out of the gossip, and Gilbert had already risen spiritedly to her defence in a letter to his sister in the autumn of 1774. ‘The insinuation that Mrs. Chapone is a papist is a foolish slander thrown out by somebody that envies her literary reputation: I have been assured since that she is an Italian stage-dancer.’o;²⁸

*

The winter of 1774/5 began early, with snow falling in Selborne on 11 November. By the middle of the month repeated severe frosts had set in, and the papers were full of ominous reports of the weather conditions over the near Continent. Gilbert no longer relished the snow as he had done when he was younger, and confessed as much in letters to his sister Anne and to Mulso, who was sad to hear of this sign of the toll of advancing years:

It was odd enough, that on the very Morning that I reed Your’s, in which You complain of the Snow, that I had been revising a Lr from You, in which You tell me that You had rode out every Day to contemplate that beautifull Meteor, which shows itself to Advantage in your uneven Country. I am sorry You change your Note: No one bears Time better outwardly; and yet I know by Myself that Time has made some advances upon You, for Yesterday I was fifty three: I have one Pleasure however in this Increase of Years, It is the longer Date of our Friendship.²⁹

In fact Gilbert was bearing the passage of time less well than Mulso knew. He had pains in his chest whenever he wrote for too long and, for a time, a ‘heat and Stiffness’ in his eyes from prolonged reading. His hands were beginning to show signs of gout. All these complaints made work on his letters and manuscript irksome and slow. And since Jack had finally left to join his father in November, Gilbert had no help at all with transcription. Technical aids to copying did exist, in the form of special inks and moistened, semi-transparent paper, but they were exceptionally expensive, and none of Gilbert’s surviving correspondence appears to have been copied by any means other than laborious longhand.

Gilbert was no doubt relieved that he was able to spend the coldest part of December in London. But despite the fierce frosts of early winter, January and February of 1775 proved to be mild and exceptionally wet. It snowed on only two days, and on one of these the snow fell as sleet. From Hackwood Park near Selborne, Gilbert received a report that a large number of rooks had been brought to the ground during this fall, which had frozen their wings together. Rooks were one of a vast range of subjects – including wasps, frost-hollows, hops, the formation of dew-ponds and a great fall of gossamer cobwebs that he had witnessed in the village in 1741 – to which Gilbert gave special attention during 1775. He watched rooks eating grubs in the fields, squabbling over their nest-sites, courting, scrumping walnuts from his orchard, and finally how ‘the twigs which [they] drop in building supply the poorwith brush-wood to light their fires.’³⁰

Many of his observations this year concern these kinds of interaction between animals, both with their own kind and with other species. He was fascinated by the sheer range and number of insects that were about during mild weather in the winter (‘lepismae in cupboards, and among sugarphalenae in hedges’) and how these were vital to the survival of our resident birds. He was also curious – perhaps for more practical reasons – about the lives of slugs and snails. He was puzzled as to why the seemingly better protected snail hibernated during the winter, whilst the ‘shell-less snails, called slugs’ were about all winter in mild weather, making havoc with garden plants and young wheat. Later in the year there was not much to choose between them in terms of the damage they caused, and Gilbert was pleased to find just how many were consumed by thrushes (‘the walks are covered with their shells’) – pleased for the thrushes, too, that there was such a provident food-source for them when the earthworms burrowed deep in hot, dry weather.

The exquisitely balanced economies of nature were one of the subjects that Gilbert discussed at length with John Mulso when his old friend came to stay in late June. It was a visit that seemed to have been arranged at short notice and without any fuss, and Mulso thought it was probably the most agreeable time he had ever spent in Selborne. The two men had strolled about the village and the surrounding country (or at least the flatter parts of it; Mulso was no rambler) discussing physico-theology and the plans for the book, and Gilbert had shown Mulso his journals and some of the edited letters. Mulso seems to have been overawed by these. He does not quite know what to say, and his letter of thanks in July is untypically sober and formal:

You have a double Felicity in your Manner of Entertainment; You can gratify your Visitors both wth beautiful Originals, & high Descriptions; Representations studiously copied from Nature & finished with a Masterly Hand. As You intend your Works for ye Public, I would not say so much in a Strain of Flattery; for tho’ I would not tell an Author how much I disliked his Productions, yet I might slubber them over with a hasty careless Compliment, or lose them in Silence … You have happily grounded Ethics on a stable & beautifull Basis, ye Works of God; & your Figures formed from naked & genuine Beauty, beat every finical Composition that would fascinate ye Judgement by adventitious Ornament. This is my real Opinion of your Work. But Mem: I do not mean by ye close of ye last Sentence a Slur on your Intention of employing the Art of Mr Grim, or any other more accomplished Designer: I wish he may add to ye Pleasure of ye World, as much as he will gratify my Partiality.³¹

This is the first mention of the possibility of using the up-and-coming Swiss artist Hieronymus Grimm, who had been working in England since 1768. Mulso sounds not wholly convinced about the need for such embellishments in a work already so finely drawn. But he would have been much more seriously perturbed if he had known what other additions Gilbert was planning, and which began to become apparent that autumn in a run of journal entries on the likely origins of Selborne place-names.

Gilbert had not yet settled the precise form and extent of the book, and in August, while he was staying at his aunt’s house in Sussex, he took the opportunity to set down his thoughts about their respective projects in a long letter to his brother, John. Ringmer, that high summer, had the kind of youthful, familial atmosphere that invariably filled Gilbert with fresh energies. His sister Anne Barker was there, with her children Sally, 23 years of age, Mary, 15, and Sam, now 18 and already proving himself a valuable member of Gilbert’s network of informants and advisers. ‘The young people are clever and intelligent,’ Gilbert wrote contentedly to his brother. ‘Mrs Snooke is very well and a marvellous woman at 81.’ Her tortoise Timothy had amused them all by consenting to be weighed for the first time, and multitudes of young swallows were gathering on the pine trees round the house. The only sadness in all this ‘sweet harvest weather’ was that Jack was not with them, but Gilbert was delighted to hear that he was now settled with a surgeon quite close to his father’s house in Lancashire, though ‘As to Jack’s “venturing to draw blood from his majesties subjects,” I do not so much wonder: I rather admire at the courage of the patients who permit him: however every young man must have a beginning.’³²

But Gilbert points out that losing his amanuensis was having a decided effect on the progress of his work and he was resentful of John’s insinuation that the Natural History was in a state of ‘much more forwardness’. The truth, Gilbert insisted, was that while John’s book was now completely finished, many of his own letters were still waiting to be transcribed, his journal ‘is but just begun’, and – here the new ingredient is spelt out for the first time – ‘the antiquities of Selborne are not entered upon at all.’ But he had made a start: ‘Friends in Oxon., I hope, are searching for me amongst Dodsworth’s collection of papers in the Bodleian library, 60 vol. folio; but the papers that I want to see most are immured in the Archives of Magd. Coll.’³³

The scheme for using Grimm was also making progress. The artist himself was held up by work in the Midlands counties, but in the meantime he was being thoroughly checked out. The reports were promising. He had exhibited four pieces in the Royal Academy exhibition of 1769, only a year after his arrival in Britain, and had worked for some eminent patrons.³⁴ A deputation consisting of Thomas and Benjamin White, Thomas Mulso and Michael Lort (a friend of the influential critic Horace Walpole) who had ‘been to his lodgings to see his performances’, were all agreed that he was ‘a man of genius’. He was especially good with prospects and buildings, though the two Toms felt that he took too many liberties with natural appearances, and that his trees were ‘grotesque and strange’. Gilbert’s chief worry was that he had a reputation for excessive delicacy in his manner of sketching and the use of light water-colour washes; whereas Gilbert wanted a style that would reflect the intensity of detail he was trying to capture in the writing: ‘strong lights and shades and good trees and foliage’. White anticipates Gilpin here. The latter, in his Northern Tour (1786) writes:

It is the aim of picturesque description to bring the images of nature forcibly and as closely to the eye as it can, by high colouring. High colouring is not a string of rapturous epithets, but an attempt to analyse the views of nature: to mark their tints and varied lights and to express all this detail in terms as appropriate and vivid as possible.

There is no doubt that Gilbert’s continuing involvement with all aspects of publishing was a considerable influence on the character of the still embryonic Natural History. The shrewd editorial advice that he gave to other writers, for instance, always seems in part to be directed to himself. There are touches in it of both intellectual swagger and reflection. Yet he never openly stints or distorts the advice for his own ends. When his brother Thomas, who at long last had come into his inheritance from the Holts (see page 45), unexpectedly announced that he was thinking of writing on the natural history and antiquities of Hampshire, Gilbert responded with his usual mixture of encouragement and expert practical counsel. But privately the prospect must have made his heart sink. Thomas was unquestionably the most successful of his brothers and quite probably the brightest. He had already made a considerable amount of money as a partner in a wholesale merchant’s business in London, and had shown some evidence, in his day-book and correspondence, of a confident and economical prose style.³⁵ Later in his life he was to contribute articles upon a huge variety of topics to the Gentleman’s Magazine. He had a particular interest in Anglo-Saxon and medieval history, and it may have been partly at his suggestion that Gilbert decided to add a section on the antiquities of Selborne to his natural history. When Thomas made his somewhat cavalier announcement, Gilbert must have felt anxious over the possible competition and overlap between the two projects, but he is positive and hopeful about Thomas’s idea. ‘You are now at a time of life when judgement is mature,’ he flatters him in January, 1776, ‘and when you have not lost that activity of the body necessary for such pursuits.’ He recommends employing an artist to visit ‘the remarkable places’ in the county, and outlines the subjects of which Thomas should make the most thorough study. But he has a warning about paying too much heed to the kind of approach typified by Robert Plot’s work: ‘he is too credulous, some times trifling, some times superstitious; and at all times ready to make a needless display, and ostentation of erudition.’ Dr Plot had been the author of two of the earliest county-based natural histories – of Oxfordshire, published in 1677, and Staffordshire in 1686, the former interestingly subtitled ‘being an Essay towards the Natural History of England’. In the absence of anything better they had become the model for local studies. But a new attitude towards the natural world – more alert, more self-critical – had been developing in the hundred years since, and Gilbert’s strictures were certainly not an uncharacteristic show of sour grapes. Although Plot and his colleagues in the Royal Society had begun to stress the importance of direct observation, they had not yet begun to discriminate between different kinds of evidence. As a consequence, there is more than a trace of the medieval bestiary about his books. Observed fact, ancient fable and simple hearsay rub shoulders, and bizarre discoveries of the kind that crop up in many old natural history books – eggs within eggs and fossils shaped like human organs were two favourites – receive rather more attention than the common and typically local.

It had been a useful exercise for Gilbert to consider his opinion of Plot, but as far as Thomas was concerned it was so much wasted time. The Hampshire book proved to be a momentary whim, and Thomas, finding the management of his new estates a thoroughly fulfilling occupation, abandoned the idea as abruptly as he had raised it.

But John’s book, the Fauna Calpensis, was becoming a cause for concern. By the autumn of 1775 Gilbert had managed to catch a glimpse of a fair proportion of the manuscript, and it was obvious that John had been paying little attention to the editorial advice he had been given. The text had a stuffy and bloated feel. It was still short of first-hand anecdotes and ‘diversification’, and was weighed down by Latinisms. It had grown to nearly a thousand pages but still had no index (which ‘perhaps has never entered your head’ chided Gilbert). The botanical sections looked shaky, and needed to be read over by an expert. Worst of all, the slight differences between John and Benjamin over the terms for the book had grown into a serious rift. Since John seemed disinclined to take Ben’s advice on the title and general polish of the book, Benjamin had held‘back from buying it outright, and had apparently suggested that they share the costs. Whereupon John, always touchy and suspicious, announced his intention of publishing the thing himself, and accused his brothers of meddling with his work for their own purposes. Gilbert was alarmed by this souring of relations, and sent John a copy of one of his own best anecdotes (the fall of gossamer he described to Barrington in June that year) in the hope, maybe, of transfusing some new life into John’s phlegmatic offspring. But he was exasperated by his brother’s continued obstinacy and wild accusations, and when he tried to calm matters down in January 1776, he openly sided with Benjamin for the first time:

Dear Brother,

As you have enjoined me to speak my sentiments with respect to your work, you must not think me didactic and forward in the following pages … Your Bookseller [Ben] must be consulted a little in the title page and advertisments; as he knows best how to throw in little savoury and alluring circumstances to quicken the appetite of your buyer. By no means should you print, brother Thomas and I both think, ‘til you have sold your copy: booksellers know how to subscribe off an impression to the trade, and to throw cold water on a work lying on the author’s hand … We wish to see your papers, and to correct here and there, not out of vanity and a meddling temper; but because little errors unavoidably befall and escape every Author.³⁶

John did what he could to patch the book up, but his heart was no longer in it. As well as being hurt by the criticisms, he had began to suffer from a debilitating and progressive rheumatic disorder. Gilbert did not learn of this until later in 1776, but he still did not go up to visit his brother. And his and Benjamin’s constant flutterings over the progress of the book – however well meant – can’t have done much to improve John’s health or confidence. Gilbert did not seem to notice the condescension that occasionally crept into his letters, or the contradictory advice he was beginning to offer. In August he was urging the avoidance of arguments over the book:

By your unusual silence I began to fear what has really been the case, ill health. You have perhaps by your attention to your book and other matters been too free with your constitution lately: you must therefore relax a little, and allow yourself more time for riding and walking. Particularly, I think, you should avoid contention though in ever so good a cause.³⁷

Three months on, with John’s condition not improved, his advice was rather different. ‘You seem a cup too low,’ Gilbert wrote, ‘and do not assume the importance of an author. If Mr Pennant had got such a work ready he would feel little diffidence.’³⁸ But John, of course, was nothing whatever like the self-confident and extrovert Thomas Pennant, and it is no wonder that by the summer of 1777 he had thrown aside the book in ‘disgust and chagrin’.

Its final despatch came that autumn. In August Harry White had delivered a complete copy of John’s manuscript to Selborne. At this stage it seems to have been read by all the brothers except Gilbert. Gilbert confessed that ‘between an hurry of business, company and building’ he had had little time to study it. But he had shown it to Dr Richard Chandler, a young writer and antiquarian, and a Fellow of Magdalen College, who had just been appointed to the livings of nearby Worldham and East Tisted and was helping Gilbert’s research on Selborne’s antiquities. His views and credentials, as relayed by Gilbert, were ambiguous, and John may not have thought much of the opinions of a ‘traveller in Greece, who being no naturalist has no partiality for the Linn[aean] system; but avers that it will prevent your book from becoming popular’.³⁹ Chandler is sure, Gilbert continued ‘that if you could perswade yourself to divest it of its quaint garb (those were his words) that he is certain it would be worth 200 of any body’s money.’ But what he was recommending in detail was nothing less than a complete restructuring of the book.

John must have felt crushed and humiliated by these comments, and a short while later Gilbert, glimpsing at last the damage that had been done, made a more generous attempt to restore his faith and determination:

‘In the whole I much approve of your book. Your preface is neat; your history is what I call true Natural History, because it abounds with anecdote, and circumstance; and I verily think your dissertations on the Hirundines are the best tracts I ever saw of the kind, as they throw much light on the dark but curious business of migration … I therefore pronounce as the Vice-chancellor of Oxon. does on similar occasions – imprimatur.’⁴⁰

High praise indeed, from someone who had himself written so originally on the swallow family.

Yet Gilbert seemed unable to keep his professional doubts to himself and even this supposedly conciliatory letter has a sting in the tail. The book’s sentences are too long, he complains. Sometimes the same verb is used five or six times in the same paragraph, and, in general, the style is ‘rather diffuse’. Gilbert then makes the clearest declaration of his own interest: ‘Being jealous of the honor of your work, I cannot admit of these inaccuracies, and have therefore presumed to amend some of them, but with what success I must leave you to judge. I must therefore desire you, who are so perfectly capable, to bestow a fresh and severe inspection on the language.’⁴¹

But it was too late. John was too ill and depressed even to reply. Little more is heard of the work, and when John died some two years later it succumbed with him, never to be published. All that survives today is a brief introductory section on the Rock of Gibraltar, rather cumbersomely written but too short to give much clue to the quality of the main text.⁴² In its own way the Fauna Calpensis may well have been a valuable study, and in the hands of a more traditional publisher its fate mighthave been different. John’s misfortune was not so much his writing style as his family background. He was the Whites’ one-time black sheep, insecure, volatile and conservative, and his brothers were the most advanced and populist natural history communicators of the day. When they became locked together in the making of a book this was bound to lead to complex collisions of family loyalty and literary ambition. On more than one occasion Gilbert suggested trying another publisher, but never with the insistence with which he pointed out John’s shortcomings. The most telling lesson of this sad episode is the commitment Gilbert and Benjamin had to their own literary aims and standards, to the extent that, in the end, they put them higher than their brother’s peace of mind. There isn’t any hint of a deliberate attempt to suppress John’s book; but simmering fraternal rivalry can’t be ruled out, and it does raise the question of what the effect might have been on Gilbert’s own publishing plans had either Thomas’s or John’s book gone ahead to publication. Might his own motivation have been weakened or the focus of his book changed? Anthony Rye has gone so far as to suggest that if the Fauna Calpensis had appeared there would have been no Natural History of Selborne. ‘Gilbert would have rejoiced at the Fauna’s success; it would have contented him; and since he never seems to have felt himself to be essential to the production of great nature books, and since John the naturalist was in a sense his child, perhaps he would no longer have cared to make the last supreme effort.’⁴³

But Gilbert’s dealings with various published works suggest that he relished the role of critic, and I think it equally likely that the publication of other family writings would have made him hone his own text that much more finely. Certainly the fact that John had at least written his book gave Gilbert an important, nettling, incentive to go on.

*

In what was becoming a long run of severe winters, the early months of 1776 were the most gruelling for years. ‘Rugged, Siberian weather,’ Gilbert noted on 14 January. ‘The narrow lanes are full of snow in some places, which is driven into the most romantic, & grotesque shapes … I was obliged to be much abroad on this day, & scarce ever saw it’s fellow.’⁴⁴ Birds were suffering terribly and had begun to come into the house for shelter, only to be caught by the cats. ‘The hares also lay sullenly in their seats, and would not move until compelled by hunger; being conscious, poor animals, that the drifts and heaps treacherously betray their footsteps, and prove fatal to numbers of them.’⁴⁵ They had been entering the Wakes garden and cropping the pinks. On 20 January, the fourteenth day of virtually continuous frost and snow, he wrote this short, sad epitaph in his journal: ‘Lambs fall, and are frozen to the ground.’

Three days later Gilbert travelled to London, and found it transformed into a frosted, silent citadel. The Thames was iced over, and the streets were ‘strangely encumbered with snow, which crumbles and treads dusty, and looks like bay-salt. Carriages run without any noise or clatter.’ On the last day of January, when snow had been lying on the roofs for twenty-five days, Thomas Hoar recorded a temperature of zero degrees Fahrenheit in Selborne. Gilbert subsequently wrote this record twice in the same paragraph in his journal, as if he could scarcely believe it. In London, the same day, the thermometer registered just six degrees F, despite the sun.

Gilbert was obliged to spend more time than usual in London this winter because of the continuing litigation over Thomas Holt’s will. Thomas White had, after a thirty-year wait, come into full possession of his part of the bequest without any argument. But the precise position of the rest of the family was not at all clear from what proved to be a ‘blotted’ and contested bequest, and after two months of fruitless legal wrangling Gilbert returned to Selborne to pick up the threads of his book. The antiquities were now well under way, and he had taken advantage of his stay in London to commision the keeper of the Domesday Book to transcribe all the entries relating to Selborne, at the rate of four pence a line. Now the illustrations needed to be finalized. Grimm would cost him more, 2Vz guineas a week, he reckoned. But he was determined to have him, despite Mulso’s worries that ‘that Ornament, which You seemed to set your Heart upon’ might delay the completion of the book. ‘I feel an impatience, & the more for your Sake,’ he warned, ‘as the Tast of ye Town in reading is capricious, & natural Observations have had a run, & at a high Price.’⁴⁶ But his reserve began to soften in the face of Gilbert’s obvious excitement, especially when he was invited down to watch the great draughtsman in action. He ribbed Gilbert for behaving like ‘an Italian Magnifico, with your Designer at your Elbow’, and, declining the invitation, pointed out that he too was ‘waiting for an Artist in his way, that may be as profitable, but is not half so agreeable to my Taste, I mean a Surveyor’. He had some lingering doubts about Grimm’s ‘Stiffness of Expression’ and ‘religious Formality’ but was, yet again, prepared to give Gilbert the benefit of the doubt: ‘Your work, upon the whole, will immortalise your Place of Abode as well as Yourself; it will correct Men’s Principles; give Health to those who chuse to visit the Scenes of Mr Grimm’s pencil, in their Original.’⁴⁷

Gilbert was taking his preparations for the artists’ visit seriously, and among the several building works planned or in progress at the Wakes (which included ‘fitting up a garret for any young person I may have with me’) there was now a ‘new hermitage’ halfway up the Hanger, destined to figure in one of the views. Grimm arrived in Selborne on 8 July, and stayed twenty-eight days, ‘24 of which he worked very hard, and shewed good specimens of his genius, assiduity, and modest behaviour.’

It isn’t clear whether Gilbert dictated the scenes which Grimm sketched, or whether he allowed the artist some leeway for his own preferences. Certainly the dozen scenes that Grimm eventually completed include most of Gilbert’s favourite spots.⁴⁸ There is a panoramic view of the village and Hanger from the Short Lythe with the Zig-zag and Hermitage clearly picked out; another of the south-east end of the Hanger; ‘a side view of the old hermitage with the Hermit [Harry White] standing at the door’, and ‘a sweet view of the short Lith and Dorton’ from Huckers Lane, the prospect that he was later in life to describe as worthy of ‘the first master in landscape’. The remainder are more orthodox vignettes which might have been drawn anywhere. There are two views of the church and Plestor; two of the meadows behind the Wakes; one of Temple Farm; a view of the village from inside the new Hermitage; Hawkley Hanger, still with its cracked ground and tumbled trees (though this ‘does not prove very engaging’); and ‘a grotesque and romantic’ sketch of the waterfall in Silkwood Vale, which perhaps was meant to give an impression of the hollow lanes as well.

Gilbert was greatly tickled by the notion of being a patron of the arts, and, when Grimm had finished at Selborne, he joined forces with him for a while, as travelling companion and critic. They sauntered over to Lord Clanricarde’s at Warnford (ten miles south-west of Selborne) to sketch a great antiquarian find, a hall supposedly built by King John; and to Richard Yalden’s vicarage at Newton Valence to take ‘a view of his house and outlet from the edge of this chalkpit’. But here the two connoisseurs turned up their noses: ‘The employer wanted and intended a view from the alcove; but the draughtsman as well as myself, objected much to the uniformity of that scene.’ In August Gilbert wrote to John White with a detailed and enthralled account of Grimm’s technique: ‘He first of all sketches his scapes with a leadpencil … then he gives a charming shading … and last he throws a light tinge of water-colours over the whole.’⁴⁹ It was a more conventional method than the excitable Gilbert realized, and the finished drawings, too, are somewhat mannered and formal. When Mulso saw a proof of the Hermitage scene the following year, he hardly recognized it. ‘I declare that had the Picture come thro’ any Hands but a White’s, which might have directed me, I should not have guess’d at the Place. A Print in general does ill with Perspective; but in this, neither the Hill itself, or the neighbouring Country are in Character.’⁵⁰

But judged as historical records, Grimm’s vignettes probably provide a fair picture of the topography of eighteenthcentury Selborne. The most striking feature of the landscape is the sheer quantity of woodland, much of it in precisely the same sites where it can be seen today. But vthere have been both losses and gains. The Lythes, now plantations, were then open grass and scrub; the southeastern end of the Hanger was bushy rather than woody; and what is now pasture, just east of the church, was then a small copse. But there is one tree – the ancient beech whose roots grip like talons round a sandstone cliff in the Huckers Lane scene – whose remains are still recognizable today.

 

* Dafydd Stephens, a consultant audiologist, has kmdly pointed out to me a possible connection between Gilberts fits of deafness and his predisposition to coach-sickness, perhaps in a disorder of the labyrinth (though he showed none of the disabling dizziness characteristic of Ménières disease).