English country clergyman and pioneering field naturalist whose book "The Natural History of Selborne" (1789) helped start a quiet revolution in natural history. The work united the gifts of an acute empirical observer and a consummate stylist in its meticulous yet enchanting account of the flora and fauna of a village in Hampshire.
White cleared a path towards modern ecology and anticipated ethology, the systematic study of animal behaviour. He made discoveries including the large noctule bat, the tiny harvest mouse and the fact that swifts mate on the wing. His book was admired by Charles Darwin, William Wordsworth and Virginia Woolf, and treasured by soldiers in the first world war as a vision of the country they had left behind. It has proved a perennial bestseller and still inspires the blossoming genre of nature writing.
A bachelor who never travelled far or rose high, White was no fussy misanthrope. He had a huge, affectionate extended family—living nieces and nephews alone numbered 39 by 1782, and 62 on his death in 1793. He treated nature as a conversation, not a battlefield. Recording a horse that befriended a hen, he noted "a wonderful spirit of sociality in the brute creation."
Though not a scientist in modern terms, White looked hard and tested received ideas. His findings hint at evidence of adaptation and change in nature, putting him on the brink of 19th-century breakthroughs in biology and geology. Jenny Uglow's "A Year with Gilbert White" recreates a single year (1781) from his daily journal entries. Richard Mabey, one of White's finest successors in nature writing, wrote the best full-dress biography.
Two wrongs are only the beginning.