Footnotes

'CHIF-CHAF BEGAN TO EXERT HIMSELF ON MARCH 30TH; & TO MAKE THE HANGERS ECHO': Gilbert White to "the Lady Flora of Selborne". White was the first to distinguish the chiffchaff as a distinct species from the willow and wood warblers, observing in The Natural History of Selborne that: 'it utters two sharp piercing notes, so loud in hollow woods as to occasion an echo; and is usually first heard about the 20th of March'. His famous pet tortoise Timothy in his hybernaculum, which also features in the second of these letters, has been seen as emblematic of the sequestered life White himself led, a theme explored in the BBC Radio 3 play The Hybernaculum (broadcast 20 June 2010).

Molly White, recipient of these delightful letters, was the only daughter of Gilbert's brother Thomas, himself a distinguished naturalist. Gilbert's other brother, Benjamin, ran a stationers and bookshop in Fleet Street specializing in natural history; and it was he who, on 1 November 1788, published The Natural History of Selborne. Not only did Molly often stay with her uncle Gilbert but she was, in Verlyn Klinkenborg's opinion, his favourite correspondent (see The Rural Life blog for the New York Times, 19 March 2006). But her involvement with The Natural History of Selborne was even closer than that: 'Molly White, who had been such a sterling source of help and advice for the past ten years, now began to have an even more active involvement in the book. In 1785, at the age of 26, she had married her cousin, Benjamin White's eldest son (also Ben), who had taken over the management of his father's publishing house in Fleet Street. Molly saw herself as part of the family business, and she soon took on the role of Gilbert's sub-editor. From the middle of 1787 Gilbert was sending his concluding essays (probably beginning with Letter LVI to Barrington) direct to her for checking out and marking-up. Gilbert, understandably, fussed and fretted about his offspring – "Pray let this letter stand the last, before the letters to Mr Barrington describing the weather at Selborne, in number, I think, four" – but he had no real cause for worry. Back from Molly came clean sheets of proofs "so well corrected, that I have not met with one error!"' (Richard Mabey, Gilbert White: A Biography of the Author of The Natural History of Selborne, 1986, p. 204).