White’s own copy was bound in the skin of his pet spaniel.

From The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain by Bill Bryson. Page 125.

A mile or so beyond Noar Hill is Selborne, a pretty village with two pubs and a good village store with a post office. In the middle of the high street is the house of Gilbert White, Selborne’s most famous son. Gilbert White is a person that most people seem either to know a good deal about or know nothing at all about, though I suspect that many of those who place themselves in the first category would really be more at home in the second. He was a country parson, who was born in Selborne in 1720 and died there seventy-three years later and didn’t do a great deal in between other than plant vegetables and watch the passing seasons. He lived quietly, never married, and was so unworldly that he thought the Sussex Downs ‘a mighty range of mountains’. Through most of his life he kept notes and wrote letters, which became the basis for his extraordinarily enduring book, The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, which Richard Mabey has called ‘one of the most perfectly realized celebrations of nature in the English language’.

The book was nearly a lifetime in the making. It was published in 1788 when White was sixty-eight and just five years from the end of his earthly run. It takes the form of letters to other naturalists, often of a discursive nature, arranged in no particular order, but it has been amazingly influential. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Constable and Virginia Woolf were among its great admirers. Charles Darwin said it inspired him to become a naturalist. In 220 years, the book has never been out of print. By one calculation, it is the fourth most published book in English.

White’s house, called the Wakes, is now a museum, and a slightly odd one in that it is also devoted to the explorers Frank and Lawrence Oates, who had no connection to Gilbert White, Selborne or even Hampshire. They are there simply because in 1955 a wealthy member of the Oates clan, Robert Washington Oates, gave money to buy the house on the understanding that some of it be used to celebrate his cousin Lawrence and uncle Frank.

It makes an improbable but surprisingly splendid package. Most of the house is given over to Gilbert White. In one of the front rooms downstairs is a life-sized, and very lifelike, model of Gilbert White himself. I was surprised to find that he was just a little guy – barely five feet tall and not more than a hundred pounds, I would guess “– and of an open and amiable disposition if the model is anything to go by.

In a glass case nearby was the original manuscript copy of the Natural History, along with bound copies of almost every edition of the book ever printed (and there have been hundreds). White’s own copy, according to the caption beside it, was bound in the skin of his pet spaniel. I am guessing that the spaniel died at a convenient moment and wasn’t sacrificed specially, but the caption didn’t say.