A View of White's House. Edmund Hort New (1871-1931). 1900. Illustration for The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Grant Allen, facing p. 16. Click on image to enlarge it.
Grant Allen's Description of the House
Fully to understand The Natural History of Selborne one ought to visit Selborne itself. There, facing the chief street of the village, you see a quiet and unobtrusive old house, which is the one where White made his immortal observations and penned in -peace his immortal letters. As you look at the front towards the street, indeed, you wonder that such a site could afford the bachelor-parson sufficient opportunities for watching the intimate life of birds and beasts as his correspondence shows him to have watched it. But if you obtain the courteous permission of the present proprietor to enter the house and inspect the garden, you will no longer feel surprised. The front windows, it is true, give upon a very compact street of eighteenth century domestic architecture; the back opens out upon a spacious lawn and garden, sloping up towards the Hanger, and wooded with fine old trees, some of them doubtless of Gilbert White's own planting. Here the easy-minded Fellow of Oriel and curate of Faringdon could sit in his rustic chair all day long, and observe the birds and beasts as they dropped in to visit him. The Letters are the vivid picture of a life so passed — the life of a quiet, well-to-do, comparatively unoccupied gentleman of cultivated manners and scientific tastes, studying nature at his ease in his own domain, untroubled by trains, by telegrams, by duns, by domestic worries; amply satisfied to give up ten years of his life to settling some question of ornithological detail.... [Introduction, xxxii-iii]
Links to Related Material
- Grant Allen (1848-1899)
- Richard Jefferies and other British Nature Writers — Gilbert White, William Cobbett, and W.H. Hudson
- Victorian Ornithologists
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Bibliography
Allen, Grant. Introduction. The Natural History of Selborne by Gilbert White. Illustrated by Edmund H. New. London and New York: John Lane, the Bodley Head, 1900. Internet Archive, from a copy in the University of California Libraries. Web. 8 July 2023.
White, Gilbert. The Natural History of Selborne. Ed. Grant Allen. Illustrated by Edmund H. New. London and New York: John Lane, the Bodley Head, 1900. Internet Archive, from a copy in the University of California Libraries. Web. 8 July 2023.
Created 8 July 2023