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King, Amy M.
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The Divine in the Commonplace.
Article contents
INTRODUCING GILBERT WHITE: AN EXEMPLARY NATURAL HISTORIAN AND HIS EDITORS
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 June 2007
Extract
IN 1887, RICHARD JEFFERIES, a popular nature essayist, added his name to the list of several dozen individuals who had written either introductions or notes to Gilbert White's The Natural History of Selborne (1789). Jefferies, like many who chose to edit and introduce this text throughout the Victorian period, represents White as a model figure – but a model for two quite different things. On the one hand, Jefferies commends White and his Natural History as examples of simple, reflective engagement with a local, natural economy – an approach to nature that any inquisitive and observant person could emulate. White is thus allied to fictional working-class naturalists like Job Legh in Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton and leisured clergyman like Mr. Farebrother in George Eliot's Middlemarch. All that is needed to become a student of natural history, Jefferies suggests, is curiosity and intelligence. He informs his reader that, “In the same manner [as White] any one who has a taste for out-of-door observations may study natural history without any previous scientific learning. There is not the smallest need to know the Latin names of the birds in order to watch them, or of the flowers in order to gather them” (viii). White is thus put forward as an exemplar of what anyone may aspire to be. White, Jefferies tells his readers, Was not full of evolution when he walked out, or variation, or devolution, or degeneration. He did not look for microbes everywhere. His mind was free and his eye open. To many it would do much good to read this work if only with the object of getting rid of some of the spiders’ webs that have been so industriously spun over the eyesight of those who would like to think for themselves. (ix)
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