Traveling in Place: Gilbert White's Cosmopolitan Parochialism

"We have great Faith in your Topography, as if in Fact You had been everywhere."

—John Mulso writing to Gilbert White

Gilbert White's The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, in the County of Southampton (London, 1789) dedicates itself to the proposition that a place so minute as the parish of Selborne, a district roughly thirty miles in circumference with "all its curves and indentings" (5) exhibits sufficient topographical particularity, singular phenomena, and curious inhabitants to interest a growing audience of armchair travelers and natural history enthusiasts.¹ White (1720-1793) offers his definition of the dimensions and constitutive elements of place as an innovative contribution to the literature of popular regional histories that commenced with Robert Plot's Natural History of Oxfordshire in 1677. In the Advertisement to Selborne, he submits to the public his "idea of parochial history," which will include detailed observations on a region's natural "productions and occurrences" along with more traditional antiquarianism. White's letters from Selborne have proven enduringly popular, bearing out the audacious prediction John Mulso made for his friend's modest book: "Your work, upon the whole, will immortalize your Place of Abode as well as Yourself."² Seeing more than two hundred editions and reissues, White's local history has garnered praise from Coleridge, Carlyle, Darwin, Ruskin, Woolf, and Auden; and according to Martha Adams Bohrer, it initiated a still flourishing genre, the tale of locale.³ With Selborne, milieu enters the foreground as a significant subject of literary interest, which explains why White is the first British writer whose canonical status is inextricably associated with the place he wrote about, as it would be for Wordsworth, the Brontë sisters, and Hardy in the nineteenth century.

Selborne's reception in the two hundred years since its initial publication offers a vivid instance of the retrospective idealization that transforms history into heritage. This is the process, memorably depicted by Raymond Williams as an escalator conveying us ever further from an antiquity conjured up out of our own nostalgia, whereby literary geographies are refashioned into the stable ground of a static past, which is in turn favorably contrasted with a precarious, ephemeral present.⁴ Selborne has been treated as a rural idyll, a work that assists its dislocated urban and colonial readers in remembering a settled and knowable home in the En-glish countryside. Editors and biographers have complemented this imagined Selborne by characterizing White as an intellectual and emotional localist, a stay-at-home naturalist who deserves moral approbation because of his satisfaction in occupying the limited confines of his parish during an era known for the imperial ambition and global interest of its scientific travelers. Here I argue that this persistent mythology tells us more about the ideological articulations of a modern nostalgia for autonomous localities than it does about the methods with which White came to know and represent his parish.

The cultural geographer David Harvey has been a frequent critic of the place-based nostalgia which has so animated Selborne's reception. Harvey observes that the strategy of appealing to primordial localities as sites of authenticity, harmony with nature, or heterogeneity occurs across the intellectual and political spectrum: from Heidegger's metaphysics of dwelling, the staunch particularism of the late twentieth-century environmental and anti-globalization movements, to the post-structuralist practice of locating emancipatory contingency in places on the margin or the outside.⁵ He also isolates the epistemological flaw in such appeals—and, by extension, in a myth that attributes White's pioneering representation of place to insularity and unmediated contact with the natural world, or, as one recent critic puts it, to sheer "naive attentiveness."⁶ Because places are always already situated within wider ecological, economic, and ideological contexts, Harvey argues, a legitimate knowledge of place requires "abstractions capable of confronting processes not accessible to direct local experience" (33).

White gained access to such "abstractions"—a set of discursive tools for surveying, categorizing, and comparing regions and their inhabitants and a network for collecting and disseminating this information—by virtue of his involvement with his period's cosmopolitan...