A book that influenced Charles Darwin and is reputedly the fourth most published work in the English language is to be made available online.
The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne by the Reverend Gilbert White, first published in 1789, has inspired generations of naturalists with the vivid descriptions of the flora and fauna – as well as the weather and crops – the author encountered in the countryside around his Hampshire home.
The book has since been published in more than 300 editions and has never been out of print. It is believed to be the most published book in the English language after the Bible, the works of Shakespeare and John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress.
The original manuscript is a star of the collection at White’s home, now a heritage attraction, which has recently undergone a £2.8m makeover.
Putting the manuscript online as a digital flipbook, all 339 pages, was a way of celebrating its reopening, said museum director Steve Green.
“We’ve got the original manuscript and it is obviously a very precious thing,” he said. “But it is in a big cupboard and you can only see two pages at a time when you come to visit.
“It will be much more interesting than reading one of the subsequent editions because it has got White’s crossings out and alterations, so it helps reveal something of his thought processes.”
White is considered the first ecologist and the book was groundbreaking because it is a study of living birds and animals in their natural habitats and was at odds with naturalists at the time who mostly examined them dead in laboratory-type conditions.
He was the first person to identify the chiffchaff, willow warbler and woodwarbler as three distinct species based on their songs. He was also the first to describe the harvest mouse and noctule bat.
White celebrated the earthworm as “a small and despicable link in the chain of nature”, which, if lost “would make a lamentable chasm”.
The book has influenced and inspired generations of naturalists. Charles Darwin read it as a young man and made a pilgrimage to Selborne. Similarly Chris Packham, the naturalist and TV presenter, read a tatty copy given to him by his biology teacher and cycled from Southampton to Selborne to see it for himself.
“I was 12 years old and I took the book home and I was immediately enchanted,” Packham recalls in a video he has made for the museum. “I’d started to keep a diary myself in 1971 of all the natural history that I encountered – the first page is the lengths of different grass snakes that I’d caught and I still have that diary, it’s very much a personal treasure.
“But I loved reading White’s description and his descriptions were so vivid that I was able to rebuild this landscape so far away in time.”
The book goes online on Saturday, coinciding with the reopening of a house which also contains the collections of two other natural world explorers: the Antarctic adventurer Captain Lawrence Oates, of “I am just going outside and may be some time” fame; and his uncle Frank Oates, a Victorian explorer of the Americas and Africa.
