 Hello and welcome to this event from the British Library. I'm Brett Walsh of the Cultural Events Department and I can't think of a better way to celebrate the summer solstice than with one of Britain's foremost nature writers, Richard Mayby, who's also the award-winning biographer of Gilbert White. Now tonight's discussion is going to be chaired by the historian Rebecca Radial, but before I introduce Rebecca there's a few points of housekeeping. So if you'd like to purchase a copy of Richard's book on Gilbert White you can do so using the button just above the video. In that same menu you'll also find a link to give us your feedback. Your feedback is really important to us so please do take the time to fill that out and you can also donate to the British Library. Now towards the end of the event we'll be doing a public Q&A so if you've got a question just pop it in the form below the video. We're also going to be seeing some items from the Library's collection relating to Gilbert White so we're going to have some presentations from our curator Alex Olt throughout the event. Now our chair tonight is Rebecca Radial. She is a historian of Early Modern England and the director of the History Festival, His Fest. She is the author of 1666 Plague, War and Hellfire and she also hosts the History Podcast Killing Time. She is a former television researcher and producer. She developed the award-winning David Attenborough's First Life and the BAFTA-winning Flying Monsters with David Attenborough. She's lectured and tutored at University College London, BAFTA University and Oxford University. So without further ado I will hand you over to Rebecca. Thank you. Hello and welcome everyone to this evening's event and in true British style and I think in keeping with the rest of the 18 months that we've had our summer solstice is actually a very dull and gloomy day but hopefully we can bring you a bit of sunshine and joy this evening to make up for that. So tonight we're going to explore the life and work of Gilbert White known to history as England's first ecologist. He authored perhaps one of the most famous books to come out of the 18th century, The Natural History of Selborn. Now last year marked 300 years since he was born and unfortunately because of what happened last year it got somewhat overshadowed but hopefully we can make up for that tonight. To tell his story and unravel his life I'm joined by the award-winning nature writer, journalist and the biographer of the Whitbread award-winning Gilbert White biography of the author of The Natural History of Selborn, Richard Mayby. And we're also joined today by Alexandra Alts who has created some lovely short videos that will take you into the British Library's collection and show you some of White's original documents. And my first question Richard, hi how are you? I've been having a lot of fun going through your 1986 book here and one of the things that you mentioned and I think we can all kind of empathize with this when we come to a new topic is that we're often aware of things or that there's something that we know of, we don't necessarily give them a lot of attention and one of the things that you say in your introduction to your book is that while Gilbert White was someone that you were aware of and you'd read you weren't particularly enamoured or intrigued by him to start with can you tell me how that changed in the process and behind putting together your your book? Yes, when I first attempted to read The Natural History of Selborn I suppose I was in my 20s and I found it really hard going. The form of the book, a series of letters, the language which at first reading felt to me a little stilted. I kind of saw it as a book of the old school in very many senses. What changed was that I was asked to write an introduction to The Natural History for the Penguin Classics Library which meant I actually to read it seriously and the more I looked into it the more astounded I was by what an extraordinary literary construction it was, what amazing powers of observation White had and how he was able to translate those into words and also I became fascinated by the man himself. There is a kind of caricature of White that floats about as a kind of robust rather simple innocent country parson. I mean one of his first nicknames was parson White and the more I looked into his life the more of a parody disappeared to be of what he was really like. So I think I got to talking about my interest in quite a lot and a good friend of mine who was a director at penguins at the time said have a go at a biography so I did and it was a fascinating two years work. And boy did you have a go I mean this was so acclaimed when it came out and it's being reissued later on this year as well so do get yourself a copy and I want to come back to the process of writing a little bit later on in this talk but before we get there I wonder if you could maybe paint a picture of White's early life his family background and the world that he was born into. Well he came like very many writing folk of the 18th century from a long clerical background and his family were in Hampshire most of the time and he was brought up in cell born he was born in the house he eventually lived in and what we know very little about his childhood what one can speculate that he had a lot of time to spend in the in the local landscape which has been very invigorating for a child as it is as it was to me when I started discovering it and I'm fascinated by what that landscape may have imprinted on his character because I think one of the big turning points when I was writing the biography was to actually go down to cell born spend a lot of time there follow White's footsteps if you like and the landscape is extraordinary I mean it's a patch of what the great Oliver Rackham once called ancient countryside still unchanged very much very up and down ancient beachwoods hanging beachwoods boggy forests extraordinary ancient meadows with with hedgerows White once described the countryside as very abrupt meaning there were there were sudden changes from a river valley to a steep hill covered by trees and I felt that in that one word one had an insight into what was to develop in his character and writing which was an ability to shift the focus of what he was seeing from a backcloth to an extraordinary foreground I think that's really interesting as you say that word abrupt because often when you live in urban areas I mean I'm from Chester I'm based in Chester at the moment which isn't a particularly busy city but you do often associate the countryside with peace and calm but this this this idea of it being abrupt and busy is something that's that he shows so well and you do as well in your book so he was born into this life in cell born he was surrounded by this countryside in this village and and then he went he went to school and could you tell me about his his how his life led up to him going to to university and what he what he studied when he was there what he studied theology chiefly at university as as a as a clerical family son would do it's not clear if he if he went to any zoology or botany glasses they were available just about at Oxford but it's not at all clear that he did I mean the the atmosphere even in the theology classes at this moment I mean he was born in 1720 he went to Oxford in what 1739 and many of the books he would have read then would have been in the prevailing mode of what was called physical theology which was almost like an intelligent version of you know creationism which postulated that the world was as it was because the creator had fitted so many beautiful details together so that by understanding those details you could begin to understand the mind of the creator and white white read a lot of the the the authors of this sort of William Durham and there was no doubt that that in some way his intellectual output in the intellectual outlook would have been shaped by physical theology the the idea of that close attention to the minute particulars of the world white began to see it in in rather different terms than being just an act of devotion but there's no doubt that that kindled it thing I'd like to say about his time at Oxford was that he was a he was a typical student he spent a lot of money on booze on fancy clothes he went to the concert he frequented coffee shops he hung out with poets it was for a guy who'd come from a country village he was living a high bohemian existence in Oxford I love that some things never change do they and just to just to talk about his one of the the collection of books that he had with him at Oxford and I'd like to introduce the first video from alexandra if that's okay I'm so excited to show you some of the incredible collections we've got relating to gilbert white from the british library manuscript collections and among the treasures that we're going to be looking at this evening are some original manuscripts for the naturist journal and original letters from gilbert white to thomas pennant as well as alexandra popes iliad which he gave as a gift to white now the gilbert white museum in cellborn has the original manuscripts for others of white's work but we're so happy to have many of his manuscripts here which really complement their collections so I've got in front of me a really exciting object which is alexandra popes iliad which was published between 1715 and 1720 in six volumes and it's not just exciting because it's the first edition of popes iliad which I'll show you here it was given by pope to gilbert white in 1743 when white was at oxford on receiving his ba and what I love about these volumes is that when you look inside gilbert white's written given to me by mr alexandra pope on my taking the degree of ba 30th of june 1743 gilbert white aural college oxford six volumes but these volumes also reveal more secrets and even in 17 well 1743 gilbert white as a student was quite happy to write in his books and you can see he's recorded a chess score and he's got the name of the players who's won who's lost and stating the date of the game of march the 26th 1746 and even more excitingly gilbert white was notoriously shy and refused to sit for portraits well allegedly refused to sit for portraits and has been not published on whether there are any likenesses of him and these volumes show little pen and ink drawings portraits of white when he was a student at oxford they were made by his friend and you can see there's a larger pen and ink sketch here and towards the end of the volumes a much smaller portrait of white again from around the 1740s now one of the other things i love about these volumes is they were given to white by pope in 1743 when white was essentially starting his career now pope died the year later in 1744 and pope was born in the 17th century and when we talk about degrees of separation these tiny objects actually connect us here and now in the british library boardroom with alexander pope in the 17th century and you think about their provenance going from pope to white all the way through 18th and 19th century collectors and with us now and it doesn't take much to take us back to pope and the 17th century and the british library actually also owns popes original manuscripts for the eliad as well and we've got some of the sketches that you actually see published within these small volumes and it's fascinating after after what you've said um richard about his life at university and how he was you know living up this bohemian life you can see it being played out on the notes in in those books can't you yeah the the um the presentation by pope himself is is very fascinating because it's not at all clear how pope knew white um their families had various points of connection but it's almost as if his family used those connections to kind of say to pope come on come on let's give the boy a treat um certainly there were high jinks around his his graduation he he notes in his account book that he spent eight shillings on on dinner um the the the night he graduated which is actually something like 80 pounds in today's money so he had a night on the town um and later in his life pope comes in in another way because um in his garden um he experimented with lots of the kind of things that pope wrote about in terms of of landscape design he he he created all kinds of follies the funniest of which is is six six bar gates seen in perspective going up a hill um so in some ways you know i think he was taking the mickey out of the picturesque movement but um that's another link with pope i think that's i think that's really interesting this interaction um and there's almost a conversation because you you mentioned well you touched upon at the beginning about how he's often seen as this um stereotypical country parson and you i will quote your own words at you and living a somewhat tranquil simple wholesome and unworldly life and how does that reputation tally with the reality from your point of view um it it's scarcely tallies at all except in the in the superficial details that um white found it very hard to settle when he'd left when he left oxford he drifted about um taking various curacies um and then went back to become proctor at oxford and he wanted his burning wish at that time when he was in his late 30s was to um become a permanent fellow at oxford he wanted to become an academic but because of some rather murky or rather imaginary murky history in his family the belief amongst people in orial college that his family had a great deal of money and and white was going to come into this he was denied his fellowship a decision that was exacerbated by the fact that he he kept refusing uh remote livings in pokey little northamptonshire flatlands um and uh so he drifted and um there was a period in his life when uh contrary again to another myth that he was actually not just wedded but welded to cellborn when he went touring britain um he went up to the yorkshire dales he foraged for sea kale down in devon um he spent six months in in ealy in east anglia um i think which was a very uncomfortable time for a man used to the hills um and uh so so he's his reputation as uh a really solitary cleric um isn't psychologically true but it becomes literally true later in his life when he abandoned all hopes of getting a proper living for himself in a parish that would suit him and settled for the curacy at cellborn um and dug in um but compensated for that kind of isolation by by this uh increasing outgoing grasping for intellectual contact with people with a similar train of mind to him um and so began the letters to the zoologist thomas pennant that began the natural history well we'll come on to pennant um in in a moment i want to ask you um before we move on to the next the next short video just about the um this this growing sense that must have been within him of of the natural world and what he could possibly do about it and get and how he could engage with it are there any early indications of this within his within his writings or his his life story yeah um before he begins any writings that we can get our hands on before he begins his various journals he was obviously writing quite vivid naturally inclined travel journals of his trips around Britain that I just mentioned briefly and we know this because the most important person in Gilbert's life was his best friend uh mulso john mulso another cleric um white letters to mulso don't survive it would be the greatest discovery um in in this kind of area if they were ever found but I'm sure they've been destroyed but mulso's replies which are wonderful witty um barbed fencing foils with white himself do survive and by a kind of reflection you can imagine what white was writing to him um which are obviously vivid witty accounts of his journey through the countryside of Britain and he's growing interest in the uh organic ornamentation of that country and I think now might be a good point to um we will go into detail about them but maybe a good point to frame his achievements just for people watching so we can just get a sense of what it why this this man is important would you be able to just outline you know kind of tick off the things that he that he did gosh um well uh if if you start with uh the the profile of public interest in him I mean it's reputed that the natural history of cell born is the fourth most published book in the English language um that may be apocryphal I'd try to work it out and I'm not not at all sure it's it's necessarily true but that means the number of editions that have been published that virtually every year since publication somebody has reinterpreted or re-edited the natural history of cell born and it's a it's a fascinating um insight into the the history of ideas about ecology um to read the introductions to the different editions of Gilbert White introductions by people like uh like Richard Jeffries and Coleridge and um anyway so that's how he's seen publicly from from my point of view I I think he marks a crucial turning point in writing about the natural world firstly because um he gives it a kind of attention that endows it with agency um these are organisms creatures even plants white was a great botanist quite late in life um that had lives of their own they weren't simply subservient to our life they weren't just objects in our life they were subjects in their own life that was a radically new perspective on the natural world um and white more than that had had had sympathy with them um on the the very first published natural history note that he makes um is about the life of the field crickets that uh inhabited one of the fields below his uh his church um and it's a very touching vivid account of these creatures the noise they make their lovely golden stripes on their bodies but the most exceptional thing about the account is the way white extracts them from their holes on a piece of grass because he did not want to damage them and this is this is exceptional at this time in in the 18th century I'm not excusing white on other occasions I mean he he he did plenty of shooting of birds that plundered his orchard and he was constantly receiving carcasses and various hapless mammals and birds from people in the village it's great community exercise in taking it down to the reverent white to see what he made of it but right through that there is wherever is possible an attempt to respect the lives of even humble creatures like crickets and the third thing why is important is is the radical way in which he translated this new attentive vision um into words um the extraordinary structure of the natural history of cellborn which is uh a series of letters some of which are completely fictional I mean about a third of them were never sent to the recipient he was using a structural device um which is similar to come of the the epistolary novels that were being written at the time and the as for the journals will come on to those they have a particular magic in their literary construction of their own well we'll we'll move we'll move on to the next video now which looks at the um the naturalists journal um if we could go to video two please in front of me I've got one of a number of volumes of the naturalists journal which was actually produced for white by his friend the honorable Danes Barrington and actually you can see in the inscription in the very first of these volumes it says Gilbert White 1768 the gift of the honorable Mr Barrington the inventor and these volume or the set of volumes are really sort of they encapsulate white and his career these volumes contain set out squares and dates which allowed white to record all of the things that he saw around him in cellborn and for each date and year you have a day and you're able to record the weather the temperature trees plants birds insects and miscellaneous observations and when you start looking through these journals you actually get a sense that this could be a journal for us today and we could look out of the window and look into our gardens or from our balconies and make similar observations and I think that's one of the most amazing things about white is the language he uses and the observations that he makes really bring us to the here and now as well for example in 1769 on the 25th of March frogs croak spawn abounds um young cucumber swells the great bed heats well sewed some melons as well goose sits while legander with vast acidity keeps guard so I've got here the page open for 1769 for June and today which is June the 21st we see vast rain cold and wind and he says quite a winter's day for June I think we all know what that's like and what's lovely as well is that on the next page he's talking about young hedgehogs and he says young hedgehogs are frequently found four or five in a litter at five or six days old their spikes which are then white grow stiff enough to wound anybody's wound anybody's hands they I see are born blind like puppies and what's really lovely about white is his language he's observing these animals these creatures and they're alive and they're living near him and he's looking at them every day and it feels in direct contrast to many of the other collections the scientific collections we've got at the British Library which show drawings of specimens of animals that are no longer alive and were dissected and so actually reading 18th century observations of creatures that are still alive and flourishing in their natural habitat is incredible and you'll see sort of the marrying of this throughout the Naturalist Journal for example on the 25th of June he says cuckoo sings and it's raining but it's also fine and on the next day next the 26th the next day he says kidney beans and young cucumbers hardly survive no cucumbers for some weeks and again this sort of drawing together of animals a fruit of vegetables and whether when you get a sense of an entire world around white and not just sort of singular objects singular animals or singular events and I wonder if we if we keep in mind that the description from Alexandra from from the books then how radical was this way of writing about animals at the time and was he aware that he was being radical in his writing it was radical it gets more radical I'll come on to some later entries I think in a minute but the when Barrington started this idea of a nature journal he sent the forms to give what white to fill in he made it clear that it had a very practical purpose in his eyes you know that it was to build up a picture of the nation so that the processes of agricultural improvement could become more effective it was a very utilitarian idea to start with and I think white took this idea and ran with it into into quite different regions and I the what Alex showed there I mean there were some wonderful entries which show his meticulousness of observation and those records of of even the records of the temperature and wind speed and such like are incredibly valuable now because they provide a yardstick by which we can estimate the degree to which the climate is changing now because we have something nearly 30 years a continuous observation of the weather but when it really gets interesting is when white becomes less interested in those early columns and becomes more interested in that last column of miscellaneous observations and gradually that begins to swell as the years go on and completely overwhelm the more mundane details of which bird had arrived which if I might I might like to read you one from about three three years later and it shows to me the particular technique which white had in his journal entries and this is for September the 22nd in three years after the ones we just heard tops of the beaches are tinged with yellow heavy clouds on the horizon this morning the swallows rendezvoused in a neighbor's walnut tree at the dawn of the day they were all together in infinite numbers occasionally such a rushing with the strokes of their wings it might be heard at a considerable distance I love the use of that word rendezvoused but it was that that contrast between this extraordinary precise indication of autumn the yellowing of the leaves the heavy clouds and then the swallows are there exploding against that background so that you could actually hear the clap of their wings and it's this technique it's almost haiku like in white journals that uses time and time again time and time again of taking a snapshot of the surroundings to very precise details and then against that something profoundly active happens and I think that was that was extremely original and certainly in the writing about the natural world it was and I think this moves on nicely to a question that I was going to ask a little later but I'll ask it now and let's let's be rebellious and about this the literary way that that he writes and its legacy I mean even in the books that you write nature writing is a beautiful form of writing it's an art form and it's a genre in itself could you tell me a little bit about that link and how that relates to to white yes I think that nature I think is to do it well is fantastically different difficult and I'm not sure very many of us do it particularly well because what you have to do if just let me go back a bit nature writing as such is different from natural history writing in that the observer is in there with with their particular feelings and inflections on what they're seeing in that sense white is poise between being a naturalist writer and a nature writer but the poise is absolutely crucial he is always in there you can sense his personality in almost anything of any length that he writes but he never obtures into it he never puts himself willfully into the picture he is there as a passionate engaged observer not as a subject of his own writing and the more you understand about his his own life about his perpetual indecision about getting married which his great friend Malse was always ribbing him about about his difficulty in finding a job that that kind of insecurity finds its way into the way he writes about other creatures he never anthropomorphizes but it is there you can tell by the kind of things he pays attention to that this is a man to whom singularity and family have particular meanings particular emotional means the most the most wonderful pieces in the natural history of Selborn are his essays on the the swallow and how smart in tribe where he describes that their whole family life the places they nest in the village the industry of their work and most of all how wonderful it is to see the Swiss on a better June day than today screaming through the streets of Selborn and how awful it is when they go the most the one point where real emotion of truths into to whites writing about these creatures is the terrible depression he gets when they've all gone and I think it's one of the reasons that he half believed that they hibernated in Selborn that they they flew up into the he knew he knew migration happened he knew report reports from his brother in Gibraltar that they'd seen swifts flying flying over so he knew it happened but somewhere in his heart he liked to believe that a few of them stayed behind in his beloved village his summer guests would also be nestling down there for the winter so I think I think a man who for whom that that sense of of being embedded in a community finds its way it trickles into the way he writes about everything else it's it's a real the way you describe it there it's just it sounds like such a special bond that he had with with the natural world and I'm very aware that we are running short on time now so I'm going to move to the next the next video video three which is some of his letters to Thomas Pennant please so I've got a volume here of 30 letters from Gilbert White to Thomas Pennant and what's amazing about these letters is that they formed the basis for Gilbert White's natural history of Selborn and they start in 1767 and go up to 1773 and what's just so lovely about these objects or letters is that although they form probably one of the most famous books to come out of the 18th century in Britain at the time and indeed in centuries afterwards you actually get a sense of their origins the book's origins here and as letters they were folded and you can still see the lines where the letters were folded and you can see the seal on them and you can see the address to Pennant to Squire at Downing in Flintshire North Wales a single sheet and you can see as well that Gilbert White is also saying 10th of August 1767 at Selborn near Alton Hans so again you're placing these people in physical locations and these letters are going between the two of them so one of the things about these letters as well as you can see that they are written in iron gall ink and iron gall ink you didn't just buy ink you had it mixed up or somebody would mix it up for you we'd mix it up yourself and you can see as you go through the volume that the ink looks different and that's because obviously White had access to different types of ink and some of it is more acidic than others and so in this first letter which is August the 10th 1767 you can actually see how the ink is starting to eat through the paper now that's because of the acidity in the iron gall ink and it makes it harder for us to read the letter but you can see the beginnings sir nothing but the obliging notice you were so kind as to take of my trifling observations in the natural way when I was in town in the spring and your repeated mention of me in some late letters to my brother could have emboldened me to have entered into a correspondence with you and it's the beginning of this these words it's beginning of this correspondence that you start seeing White evolve and talk about his natural surroundings and even in this first letter as to swallows being found in a torpid state during the winter in the Isle of Wight or any part of this country I never heard of any account worth attending to now he's talking about birds he's talking about migration and as we know it's these words again that actually really helped later scientists will actually understand about the movement of birds and their migrations and just just before I ask you some questions Richard just a reminder to those watching to please submit your questions to Richard about Gilbert White there will be some time to to answer some audience questions towards the end and Richard I'm living right now about 20 minutes from where Penance would have been living at the time I think his house was destroyed in the mid 20th century and we're communicating via the marvel of the internet and from very different places within England and you know we have that we have that connection but that connection was there as well in the 18th century this was a world of letters and writing and keeping contacts for for long periods of time could you tell me about that relationship between White and Penance and how the process of letter writing enabled White to put together the natural history of Selborn? Yeah well White got into a relationship with Penance because Penance wanted to use some of White's observations for the for the book of zoology he was he was writing and White was very gratified by this because not only did he feel the need to have his interest and intellect ratified but it gave him a lifeline after Selborn it's very important to imagine how isolated Selborn was there were only about two roads into the into the village and the the main one was the hollow lanes that Gilbert White described very graphically in some of the letters in the book which were 18 foot deep tunnels which were flooded in winter filled up with snow whenever it did and made access to the village very difficult so in some sense White was trapped in Selborn when he was actually in his later years and having the opportunity to write letters was a huge way with the best way obviously of keeping in contact with the outside world people came to visit him occasionally his best friends but what I find fascinating is that this idea of a book based on date light on letters dateline Selborn they are journalism in the very best sense of the word and that they immediately by being that by being having the address of Selborn become a collection of letters about a community a community in which people lived alongside many other different creatures and organisms and a community which which had an address and addresses the sense of things being in their right place is crucial to what what the development of White as an ecologist he understood habitat he understood where things belonged doesn't just to go on to the creation of the books I know we haven't got very much time it's really fascinating that when he began to I think quite much earlier than he let on to have the idea that he might do a book he must have started keeping copies of some of the letters before he sent them and so at the end of the process he had to start getting some of the letters back from the people he'd sent them to but the idea of an epistolary account of his life or the life of the community was taken to really quite extremes and he wrote a lot of false letters which were never sent to their recipients to cover various other subjects which are otherwise be missing from the overall picture given in the natural history of Selborn so it's really quite a quite a radical kind of literary device there that I mean there's another one of the avant-garde things that can be credited to him I think I that is really interesting but you can see how it would work from a writer's point of view he's obviously somebody that's got I don't know what the phrase would be but he's got lots of interest so he's has a kind of he likes to look and be involved in lots of things so having this letter device you can see how it would be useful for somebody with that I would say one thing I mean it may quite possibly have germinated like that simply out of laziness he wanted to write a book and what was the the best reservoir of material for it stuff he'd already written I think that that may have been that may have happened at one stage in the germination of the book because white was undoubtedly a procrastinator again mulso is repeatedly ribbing him for not finishing the book before it took him about 20 years to write let's face it one one not desperately long book so one has to possibly put into the equation that there is a mixture of uh pragmatism and inspiration in casting the book in this form I think that's I think that's a very fair point but it's it's it's readable things are readable when they're putting you know kind of episodic way and so the book was published um could you before we move on to the the questions from the audience could you touch a little bit on the legacy of the book and its importance um I mean it's a big question to be honest but it was um it it didn't take off terribly quickly um it was well received when it first came out it was published by good wise brother benjamin in in london um and it was sent uh I think they did about 800 copies in the first print run um and it wasn't until sort of about the 1830s that they really took off when the whole idea of the countryside um as a reservoir for english values began to be talked about a lot in in amongst the literati and amongst cultural commentators in general because we were beginning to then to have the uh the agricultural revolution being countered by the uprisings of colonel swing and the countryside was in a in a state of tumult and I think that just as today we sometimes rather idyllically look to fantastical views of the of the countryside as a refuge from the travails of the real world so they did in the 1830s um and white's book was again somewhat caricatured as being a pastoral idyll which I think nobody who read it closely could ever really believe but but that that kick started the book and from from that year onwards from from the 1830s onwards uh we begin to get a stream of editions of the book in which large numbers of of commentators both on this side of the atlantic and several from america begin to add their interpretations of white uh to an introduction and it it became I think pretty much until uh what should we say until post second world war days um it became locked in this caricatured idea that it was a a book of of country wisdom by a person who to whom I I'm trying to remember one dreadful introduction which compared white to a spaniel um sporting through the hedges and as it was sniffing out um scenes as if he was a dog or singing like a bird you know anything other than imagine him to be an intellectual who was working quite hard at getting a new vision of the world and I don't think that that that interpretation of him didn't really begin to come through until the the post war years and people like Jeffrey Griggs and looking at white and and seeing him for what he really was that's so interesting he's almost uneasily kind of packed into this romantic movement of the 19th century and didn't really yeah the the nuance we had to wait for but obviously we can we can read all of the nuance and all of his um about his fantastic life in your brilliant book which just to remind people will be reissued this this October but we'll move on to some questions from the audience now um I have a question here from Patricia and she asks how did he get some things so wrong for example barnacle geese um if you lived in a time when um uh it was thought that all kinds of metamorphosis and transmutation were possible and at a time when very few people had done what whites had done which was to actually go and look firsthand at what was happening in the natural world rather than reinterpreting what some of the classical and medieval authors had done um I think it's very easy to make a mistake like that that you know the uh the idea was that geese um when they weren't here um in the summer um turned into barnacles which then eventually hatched back into into geese um these days it doesn't seem so fantastical I mean the uh what we're learning about ideas of metamorphosis in the real world um in some of the extraordinary transmutations you see amongst insects um a shellfish hashing into a bird is small feed um I have another question here um what was your impression of white as a clergyman um was he a shepherd of his flock inverted commas um or evangelizing an evangelizing christian or was it more of a reluctant formal business for him well I have to say that having having spent quite a few years in his company um it is very hard to find any evidence of white evangelizing the christian religion except um on sundays when he uh he preached some really rather routine sermons which don't read as if they're written by the same man that was completing the naturalist journal so even though I had no doubt he was a an undoubted believer um that that really didn't stray into his uh his picturing of the world at all he's not constantly explaining the the mysteries that he was discovering by saying this is this is god's work you know he he wanted to know why these things happened um not that they they were simply received messages sent from above given bodily form so um he he was uh he was both a typical intelligent curate in that his life was lived way beyond his uh conventional duties I mean most of the important scientific work in the late 18th and 19th centuries was done by clergymen but who are the amateur scientists there's no such thing as a professional scientist in those days and the large number of these people were were clergymen so in that sense he was conventional doing this business but in the other in the sense of being a conventional christian um I find no evidence of it he didn't get his creative juices flowing um so um I have a question from from Monica here and she asks I know Danes Barrington was a judge as well as an antiquarian but how did he encounter Gilbert White? Oh gosh um uh I think White White my memory has failed me on this one um White met Barrington really quite late in in his life didn't I think met him just once or twice um and um it was Barrington's um in in listing of White's help with the naturalist journal that was the main reason for their uh their initial contact um it's very interesting to compare the the two correspondents Pennant and White Pennant was very very much the uh the the the the duologist the scientist um Barrington was much more the travel writer and he had very much uh less exact ideas about the natural world than either Pennant or Gilbert White he had he had some fantastical ideas the idea you know he he he he disputed migration of Barrington um because he said I have never seen a bird flying higher than some Paul's Cathedral therefore migration cannot happen um that was the kind of uh opinionated um and not terribly well read man Barrington was um and I think Gilbert Gilbert enjoyed writing to him because he could show off um and put Barrington in his place from time to time um and we have a question here about punctuation which is unusual but um it's I think it's a good question when it comes to White the fact that um he um this is from James he mentions that in one of your um in your analysis and I'll forgive me for mispronouncing this White's entry when he says Harindo Domestica and puts three exclamation marks there which gives a sense of his delight at the return of the swallows well I mean is there anything to say about about his use of punctuation I was reading before that apparently he was the first person to use a cross as a kiss in a letter um but I just I just wondered if you had anything to say on that um yeah I liked the um I liked the cross and the kisses which was uh after an extraordinary um episode in in Sobol when when various uh teenage heiresses from London came down and spent the summer there and they played out Greek myths on on the on the hills um yeah using that that triple exclamation mark um I I will willingly be uh be educated here it's the first occasion I've seen it used um in a in a piece of natural history writing um and what is really interesting is the way it was subsequently adopted um by uh writers as an indication that the person writing had seen this themselves um it's it's a conventional uh mark in in in in in county floras and county books of birds that if you've seen the bird yourself at a particular place in a particular time you put an exclamation mark in but um it may occur in earlier books and if I'd love to be pointed towards them if it has oh that I think that's really interesting maybe that's that's a challenge we can set up ourselves audience and attendees and and as well and just a couple of final questions before we draw the evening to a close um Richard what advice would you have for anyone wanting to write about nature two things um and it's to do with uh what I think is possibly possibly our greatest current nature writer Tim D says which is to do with the the outside and the inside um that is that you must pay fastidious attention uh to what you experience and what you see um and that you must pay fastidious attention to the ways those experiences have been rendered by other people so you go out a lot and you stay in a lot reading um and I think that the the second one is as important that um uh I'm not sure anyone can ever write well without reading well and I would apply that to nature writing that may seem contradictory you know that the something which is absolutely in its essence to do with attention to the outside world um that should also require uh a cultivation of the inner voice and that is best done in conversation with other people who've been in that situation um and then my final question to you you may not be able to talk about this if it's a book I don't I you know that's fine but what's next for you have you got have you working on a project at the moment uh um I'm trying to work on a project um I'm not sure I've really got a great deal more left to say I hope I have but um when I have an idea then I suddenly find that I'd already explored it 20 years before but what I would like most to do um and it will need um it needs a structure is I'd like to write a fairly critical philosophical book about um the use of the word nature um which seems to me to have begun to fray at the edges in a really quite alarming way um like everyone saying we need to reconnect with nature during the pandemic when we were already being subject to the greatest connection with nature that our species has had for several centuries um and I'd like to kind of place that in in a kind of meditation on on the word nature what we mean by it but done uh done in a grounded way by perhaps um perambulations in our garden here um which has many manifestations of the wild on the cultivated and the different graduations between it um and I fancy that I might do it as a series of letters because that that conversational tone that you can get in a letter we're really talking to someone not just expressing things to yourself it's very special um white did it and um I might have a go myself oh that would be fantastic and the next question would be and you really do not have to answer this is um who you would write the letters to maybe maybe white um um yeah I might like white write them in a false sense but I have a couple of friends who I might pin in the corner as the recipients I'm not telling you who they are Richard this has been such a treat and a pleasure and thank you for joining us and best of luck with the reissue of the book um it's a honestly it's a fantastic read if you haven't read it already do get yourself a copy because it just it takes you away not in a not in not in a dillic way you do you feel connected to to white's life through it but um thank you and thank you to the audience for watching as well thank you Rebecca and Alex and and everyone who's been involved been great fun a huge thank you to Richard Rebecca and Alex for that fascinating discussion of Gilbert white's life I do hope you've enjoyed tonight's event just a reminder that if you want to buy the biography of white you can do so using the bookshop button just above the video and you can also give us your feedback I'd also like to thank Gilbert's White House who've supported this event and I hope you'll be able to find the time to visit them there um we've also recently reopened the British Library in our St Pancras site in London so if you'd like to come and use the reading rooms or look at our exhibitions please visit our website to book your tickets thank you and good night from the British Library