The Natural History of Selborne

by Gilbert White

Overview

The distillation of a lifetime of observation, and ranges beyond White's immediate neighborhood. His aim was to get readers to pay more attention to the wonders around them.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783375018320
Publisher:	Bod Third Party Titles
Publication date:	06/04/2022
Pages:	434
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x 0.97(d)

About the Author

Gilbert White

Gilbert White was born in 1720 in Selborne in Hampshire and went to Oriel College, Oxford, where he became a Fellow in 1743. He took ordination and held a number of curacies in the vicinity of Selborne before finally becoming permanent curate of his birthplace in 1784, a position he held until his death in 1793. In 1751 he started keeping his 'Garden Kalendar', and later the 'Naturalist's Journal' he kept for 25 years. The Natural History of Selborne is based on his correspondence with two distinguished naturalists, Thomas Pennant and Daines Barrington.


Anne Secord is an Affiliated Research Scholar in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge. The focus of her research and writing is on popular natural history in nineteenth-century Britain, and on horticulture, medicine, and consumption in the eighteenth century. She is completing a book that explores social class, observation, and skill in nineteenth-century natural history for the University of Chicago Press.

Table of Contents

Letters to Thomas Pennant, Esq
Letters to the Honourable Daines Barrington

Editorial Reviews

"I can wholeheartedly recommend this edition ... Beautifully produced ... Secord's introduction - surely one of the chief reasons to purchase this new edition of a book never out of print - provides a nuanced and stimulating account of the origins, character, and legacies of Selborne." — Diarmid A. Finnegan, Journal of Historical Geography

"This Oxford edition offers new insights into a work that has been hugely popular." — Land and Business

"This book set the standard for much of the nature writing that has followed in its wake. White is a great example of an amateur naturalist - the grandfather of citizen science and public data capture. The work is a powerful reminder of the richness of the natural world in White's time and a marker of how much we've lost since then." - Arts & Humanities Research Council

From the Publisher

Peter Wickham slips easily into the voice of the eighteenth-century English parson and naturalist Gilbert White as he delivers White's pioneering study of the seasonal patterns of plants and animals. Vigorous and precise, Wickham's performance captures not only the antique grace of White's prose, but also his understanding of the importance of the details he was recording. Written in the form of letters to other naturalists, these brief chapters evoke a time when nature shaped the cycles of everyday life. They are ideal companions for gardening and chores, and, equally, for times of unease and stress. Written at the same time as the American Constitution, they are as remote from politics, strife, and pollution as this century is from that untroubled country garden in England. D.A.W. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine

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