Writers who believe they have to travel the world, have great romances or wild adventures in order to publish a book should contemplate Gilbert White, who never went abroad, seldom ventured further than Alston, his nearest town, and had no adventures at all. Just quiet days in his garden listening to birdsong, counting his cucumbers and keeping an eye on Timothy the tortoise was material enough.
In the introduction to her book, Uglow points to White as typical of the clergy of the Georgian Church of England:
classically educated, generous to the poor but complacently sure of his place and proud of his country (p.6).
While there is a hint of criticism in this description offered, I found it to be a pleasing and positive description of Georgian clergy - and, I might add, a rather more preferable clerical mindset to the default progressive views of those 21st century Anglican clergy who, as Bishop Philip North has memorably said, "squirm nervously during Remembrance Sunday".
While, as Uglow notes, White "rarely engages with political events in his personal letters or his journal" (p.74), it is clear that he was an example of Trollope's rule - "No man was so surely a Tory as a country rector", or, in White's case, a country curate. He had a proud Tory heritage: his grandfather, also Gilbert and rector of Selborne, was the son of Sir Sampson White, "knighted by Charles II in 1660 for loyalty to the Crown" (p.30). Our Gilbert White exemplified a quiet, gentle, cultural Toryism, having nothing of the destabilising zeal that a true Tory knew to be mere Enthusiasm. In the face of the sectarian violence of the 1780 anti-Catholic Gordon Riots, White's niece Molly summarised her uncle's wise Toryism:
he himself, as Molly suggested, loved a quiet life and was fearful of any mob. It was Protestant violence, not Catholic faith, that appalled him (p.199).
A similar response to sectarian mob violence is seen in the diary of another country clerical Tory, Parson Woodforde. While the good parson was a Loyalist and horrified by the developments of the French Revolution, he was no less appalled by the 'Church and King' mobs involved in the Priestly Riots of July 1791:
Shocking accounts on the Papers of dreadful Riots at Birmingham, Nottingham &c. ... The Presbyterian and Independent Meeting Houses pulled down to the Ground and the inside furniture burnt, many of the Dissenters Houses destroyed, among the rest Dr Priestlys (entry for 21st July 1791)
The quiet Toryism of White and Woodforde knew that sectarian mobs threatened the heart of their Tory vision of a settled, peaceable community - what it was to be "quietly and godly governed".
White's quiet cultural Toryism knew that a shrug of the shoulders was a much wiser response to political bad news than zealotry or Enthusiasm. His clerical friend John Mulso wrote to him in 1781, amidst reports of defeats during the American War:
I will imitate You ... in your Prudence in saying nothing of public affairs. Methinks, however, I see You shrug up your Shoulders. In all times, be they good or bad, I am, My dear Gil, Your affecte. friend a& Faithful Servt. (p.73).
More important, indeed, than such reports of defeats was their friendship, in good times and bad.
This, I think, goes to the heart of the wisdom and pattern of life embodied in White. The joy with which he viewed his beloved Selborne speaks of his recognition of the importance of the particular and the local:
It was the idea of 'the district' that enthralled him. By concentrating on a small patch - his 'abrupt, uneven country, full of hills and woods, and therefore full of birds' - he knew he was doing something valuable, something new (p.13).
We see this too in the routines of his ministry in the parish:
his handwriting first appeared in the parish register among the baptism in 1760. He took the services, gave the sermons and wrote down details of weddings, baptisms and burials in his firm, clear hand. It was a peaceful routine ... (p.28).
It might be regarded as odd to share my thoughts on Uglow's book, with its subtitle 'The First Great Nature Writer', and to have not yet referred to the reason for White's fame, the activities and observations which led to his The Natural History of Selborne (1789). This has partly reflected my own historical and political interests but is also, I might cautiously indicate, suggestive of how White's delight in the natural world of his locality was an expression of his - to use the term of the late Sir Roger Scruton - oikophilia. As Uglow writes:
Gilbert White kept a series of journals for forty years, until his death in 1793. The first, kept from 1751 to 1768, was his Garden Kalendar, which was stuffed with accounts of building hotbeds, planting fruit trees, bulbs and annuals, harvesting cucumbers, cabbages and carrots. The Kalendar's notes are appropriately down to earth, punctuated by delight at a fat melon or rage at slugs. But they are also sociable, embracing the farmers who supply his manure and the friends who share his melon feast (p.14).
If it was oikophilia which imbued White's writing on the natural world of his locality, what of his theology? This subject is my one criticism of Uglow's book. Put simply, she gets White theologically wrong - entirely wrong. She mistakes White's conventionally austere, reserved Georgian Anglican piety for something quite different, describing it as "closer to ... Deism":
The word 'God' appears only a handful of times in The Natural History, and 'Creator' only once. When baffled, he appeals to 'Providence' (p.197).
Parson White - a good son of the Church of England - was certainly no Deist: indeed, he would have been shocked at the very suggestion. Like very many commentators on Georgian Anglicanism, Uglow mistakes the austere register of its piety for a lack of faith. (Lauren F. Winner points out that the same error is made when expecting the piety of elite colonial Virginian Anglican households to sound like that of Puritan New England.) Nor, as I have pointed out in another context, was the use of 'Providence' by 18th century Anglicans an indication of supposed Deism. Rather, such modesty and reserve was the quite conventional public discourse of 18th century civic Anglicanism.
(Related to this, I thoroughly recommend Louis Coulson's 2011 study To Edify and Delight: Introducing the Sermons of Gilbert White of Selborne. Couslon offers insightful commentary on the theological seriousness of White's sermons, alongside their homely and rustic nature, with the text of the sermons themselves both demonstrating White's skill in the pulpit and drawing the reader to an even more joyful, deeper appreciation of White.)
My advice, therefore, is to set to the side Uglow's occasional theological comments and not let them spoil the joy of this book. The drawings, maps, and paintings throughout the book only add to its joy, whether they are from works which may have been known to White or which have illustrated various editions of The Natural History of Selborne. The structure of the book is also joyful, following White's observations - and his life - through the months of the year, allowing us to dip into it as the seasons change and again read the observations of Parson White.
Let me conclude, however, with two aspects of the book that have particularly stayed with me since my first reading earlier this year. The first is the account of what happened "when the snow fell":
In such winters, Gilbert and his great friend Richard Yalden, vicar of Newton Valence, shovelled the snow off the path between their houses and compared their thermometers. Put side by side, they read the same, but they found when Richard's thermometer was used at Newton Valence, a couple of hundred feet higher up the hill, it was always two or three degrees lower than Gilbert's at The Wakes (p.35).
It is a quietly moving and insightful account of the nature of male friendship. I am tempted to suggest that those exploring men's mental health in contemporary society would learn much more from this short account than from endless reports, seminars, and conferences. Likewise, the online TheoBros promoting weird and deeply insecure expressions of masculinity would better spend their time learning from the friendship of parsons Gilbert White and Richard Yalden.
The second indicates how White exemplified a rustic earthiness which leads some of us (yes, we New Georgians) to prefer Georgian parsons to prim, prude Victorians. White, Uglow tells us, was a busy home brewer, making "about fifty gallons of strong beer a year ... it was as potent as the name suggests". As he proudly declared:
I only know that my strong beer is much admired by those that love pale beer (p.305).
The same rustic earthiness is seen in a 1789 letter he sent to a nephew, complaining about bad weather leading to a lack of hay:
Hay is become very scarce and dear indeed! My rick is now almost as slender as a the waste of a virgin; and it would have been much for the reputation of the last two brides that I have married, had their wastes been as slender ... (p.145).
One knows only too well how Obadiah Slope and his ilk would respond to both sets of circumstances. How much more cheerful and joyful is the company of Parson White.
On 26th June 1793, in a room looking across his garden, Gilbert White died. His will instructed that he was to be buried in Selborne churchyard, "in as plain and private a way as possible" (p.413). It is how the end of an earthly life should be marked, with the plain Prayer Book office, with no show or dramatics, laid to rest in a quiet churchyard.
The author and Church of England cleric Fergus Butler-Gallie has pointed to what the contemporary church can learn from another figure from Georgian Anglicanism, Parson Woodforde:
Woodforde has much to teach us about rootedness and pastoral care. But, above all, he has much to teach us about hospitality. To him, it wasn’t just something that he did, but a part of his vocation. Woodforde’s hospitality is theological.
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