THE VILLAGER

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 917, 8 March 1957, Page 13

THE VILLAGER

GILBERT WHITE IN HIS VILLAGE, by Cecil S. Emden; Oxford University Press, English price 15/-. ‘THE purpose of this elegant little book, so neatly bound, so perfectly printed, is to reveal the man Gilbert White behind the naturalist. It has clearly been a labour of love, a worshipper’s act of devotion, a task for which there can have been no demand in advance, but for which, now that it is done, there will certainly be a public. Gilbert White, as everybody knows, spent most of his 73 years in or about Selborne in Hampshire. There under a modest headstone he still lies, and with pilgrims coming and going for 164 years it might have been supposed that the world knows everything about him that it wants to know. But Mr. Emden wants it to know more, as much, in fact, as White’s neighbours and contemporaries knew, and in these 140 pages we probably have as accurate a picture of White the villager as it is now possible to present. Of Gilbert White the curate there is only a _ perfunctory resurrection, but White the good neighbour, White the countryman and farmer, White the easy mixer, White the listener and questioner, is here in his own setting, his comfortable house, his formal garden, his zig-zag, his hermitage, his hanger, and ha-ha, with London only 30 miles away, but almost as remote from Gilbert White the parson, John Burbey the grocer, Richard Butler the butcher, John Hale the farmer, George Tanner the shoemaker, Thomas Hoar, White’s gardener, and Sarah Dewey his maid, as if their village had been on an island in the Outer Hebrides. If Mr. Emden has not brought them all to life, he has done far more than compile a guide book to the village whose history, for .generations yet, will be the story of

one man,

O.

D.