A Third Force

Abstract

Gilbert White had been dead for a hundred years. The editor of a further edition of his late-eighteenth-century journals, the Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, found it hard to explain its continued popularity. Gilbert White’s village of Selborne in Hampshire seemed so remote from the ‘stern reality’ of the 1890s. And yet, in another sense, the spread of the factory system, and consequent growth of huge towns, had strengthened, rather than weakened, the love of things rural. Where once the country had been simply ‘home’, Warde Fowler (1893) wrote of how ‘we pine for the pure air, for the sight of growing grass, for the footpath across the meadow’, without first having to pass through ‘grimy suburbs’. There was now ‘a touch of self-consciousness in our passion for it, which finds expression in a multitude of books’.