Drawn to Nature by Simon Martin

Drawn to Nature: Gilbert White and the Artists
By Simon Martin
Yale University Press, 2022

Ever since its original publication in 1789, Gilbert White’s Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne has been one of the best-selling and most beloved English classics in the canon, a curious and utterly endearing oddity, a series of observations made by an eighteenth-century cleric about the natural world around his village of Selbourne in Hampshire. 

White wasn’t wealthy, and he wasn’t worldly, but there’s a chance he was wise, and certainly he had a wonderful ability to see what he was looking at – not at all a given, even among professional thing-watchers. And one inevitable result of this is that his pages have spoken directly to generations of readers with a quiet sincerity they found in virtually no other text. 

Those readers have flocked to this odd little book for centuries. It’s never been out of print, editions have abounded, and a great many of those editions have been illustrated – an informal tradition that receives a glorious celebration in Simon Martin’s new book Drawn to Nature: Gilbert White and the Artists, a pleasingly heavy, extensively illustrated volume produced by Yale University Press in collaboration with Pallant House Gallery, where Martin is curator. The book features the work of dozens of the artists who’ve illustrated this book over the years, from the engravings of Thomas Bewick and Eric Ravilious to the drawings of Frederick Marns in the 1970s to the gorgeous wood engravings Christopher Wormell did for the Folio Society in 1994. It’s a stunning procession.

And for good measure, Martin decided to include Virginia Woolf’s 1939 essay “White’s Selbourne”:

Compared with Gilbert White the most realistic of novelists is a rash romantic. The crop of the cuckoo is examined; the viper is dissected; the grasshopper is sought with a pliant grass blade in its hole; the mouse is measured and found to weigh one copper halfpenny. Nothing can exceed the minuteness of these observations, or the scrupulous care with which they are conducted. 

That scrupulous care has so often been mirrored in the artwork from various Selbourne editions, infused with the love this book has inspired for so long. Long-time fans of White’s Natural History will be hugely grateful for this beautiful volume; it’ll doubtless send some of them off to antiquarian bookshops, spending cash in hand.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. He’s a books columnist for the Bedford Times Press and the Books editor of Big Canoe News in Georgia, and his website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.