Gilbert disapproved of the ‘improper custom of burying within the body of the church’ and in his will specified in wonderful, alliterative prose that he should be interred ‘in the church yard belonging to the parish Church of Selborne aforesaid in as plain and private a way as possible without any pall bearers or parade and that six honest day labouring men respect being had to such as have bred up large families may bear me to my grave.’1 The covers had already begun to be drawn over his life.
Most of his close relatives soon joined him. Benjamin died the following year, Thomas in 1797. Gibraltar Jack, after losing his first wife, married Henry White’s daughter Elizabeth, but died without children in 1821. Molly survived the longest, not dying until 1833 at the age of 74.
As for the Natural History, it did not at first fulfil its early promise. A curious, bowdlerized German edition appeared 1792, and a selection of entries from Gilbert’s journals was Jublished as A Naturalist’s Calendar by Dr John Aikin in 1795. But a full English second edition (also edited by Aikin) did not appear until 1802. The third (edited by Mitford) had to wait until 1813. In fact it was not until the 1830s, after the publication of the celebrated article on Selborne in the New Monthly Magazine (see page 7) that the aook became first fashionable, then an established classic, with new editions coming out virtually every year.2
Its rise in popularity occurred as part of the growing public taste for escapist, and nostalgic ‘country writing’. This in turn coincided with a period of great unrest and distress in the countryside, typified by the uprisings and machine-breaking of ‘Captain Swing’ in 1830. Swing reached Selborne itself in the middle of November that year, the first serious social disturbance the village had seen for four centuries.3 A large gathering of farmworkers sacked the workhouse and besieged the vicarage, demanding a reduction of tithes from their unpopular, cantankerous vicar, Mr Cobbold. Many of the rioters were subsequently arrested and transported. A few were hanged. The man who sounded the trumpet for them, John Newland, escaped and hid for some months on the Hanger. When he eventually gave himself up he was pardoned, but died in poverty years later, and was buried under the yew tree in front of the church.
In 1847 a new road was built from the village to Alton, and the hollow lanes gradually fell out of use. Selborne had now joined, in every way, the fast-moving world of nineteenth-century England. The narrow window of time and place through which Gilbert White had been able to see his unique vision of the natural world – supported by an independent community, in an atmosphere that was inquisitive about nature without as yet being touched by a sense of loss – was finally closed.