In time, White’s tone shifts from passing elegies for lost species to more concentrated expressions of awe and fear at the unpredictable weather of the 1780s. A primer for the narrative tone at the end of the chronicle comes when a landslide caused by a sudden massive thaw hurls a “huge fragment” of earth hundreds of yards down a steep slope. Houses, woods, and farm fields are “strangely torn and disordered” by the mysterious event. All witnesses agree “that no tremor of the ground, indicating an earthquake, was ever felt” (222–23). In this and other apocalyptic passages, White offers little speculation as to the cause and makes no reference to biblical Armageddon. He seems to enjoy lingering on the perversity of the incident, providing only an objective account that allows sensation to work its own effect in the individual reader. The narrative gains momentum when White considers the effects of these climatic anomalies on established ecological relationships. He explicitly brings meteorology, the study of the unpredictable or “meteoric,” into Selborne’s history: “Since the weather of a district is undoubtedly part of its natural history, I shall make no further apology for the four following letters, which will contain many particulars concerning some of the great frosts and a few respecting some very hot summers, that have distinguished themselves from the rest during the course of my observations” (253). This letter, the sixty-first of sixty-six, opens an extended ex-position on sublime phenomena noted objectively as temperature and barometrical readings, but also on the psychological effects of unprecedented events in natural history. He never returns to his initial phenological perspective, which assumes cyclical, consistent patterns of deistic design open to the naturalist’s observation.
White’s language comes to rely on exceptional terms quite foreign to a natural theology based on the balanced economy of nature. The words paradox, severity, loathsome, amazing, tremendous, extraordinary, portentous, superstitious, strange, prodigious, violent, deluging, convulsed, and fierce enliven the final series of letters (253–68). The four letters that detail sudden and unseasonable extremes of warmth and cold prepare the reader for the last two entries, which detail the atmospheric effects of 1783’s Laki volcano eruption in Iceland and the severe thunderstorms that accompanied this catastrophe. White uses these extreme observations rhetorically as well as epistemologically. The ethos established by his early talent for close and patient description is a counterbalance for this new narrative of wild weather. It provides a sense of authorial reliability lacking in the work of more histrionic writers. White feels confident as a respectable member of the scientific establishment, as well as an independent-minded scholar who knows the subject of his monograph better than anyone else.
As a microcosm, Selborne’s dynamics make intelligible the movements of a larger natural world. White is eager to learn the lessons of the model, however surprised he may be by its recalcitrance. Sudden, unseasonable changes in temperature determine the biological character of entire years; they are not merely passing inconveniences for human beings. The exceptional winter seasons of 1768 and 1776 impress him with “wild and grotesque” scenes of extreme cold and heavy snowfall (258). These “accidental severities,” which occur “once perhaps in ten years,” provide knowledge of which plants can withstand extreme cold and which succumb when temperatures go off-kilter (256). Conversely, the summer extremes are notable for their effects on animal populations: “The summers of 1781 and 1783 were unusually hot and dry. [. . .] The great pests of the garden are wasps, which destroy all the finer fruits just as they are coming into perfection. In 1781 we had none; in 1783 there were myriads” (263). This passage provides some of the earliest speculation on the future science of population ecology. White’s notes reveal that the demographics of some species, like wasps, are subject to wild vacillation each year, without any obvious reversion to a long-term norm and certainly no annual constancy.
Although White did not have the quantitative tools to unravel the mysteries of population fluctuation, his work effectively acknowledges a problem that the science of ecology would model more than two hundred years later. When today’s population ecology takes account of a variable environment over many years, the system often shows nonlinear and emergent properties consistent with chaotic dynamics. One important variable that mathematical modelers are currently attempting to capture is the effect of ecological variation on population and community dynamics (Chesson 253). White has no desire to elide or simplify these chaotic patterns that become apparent when closely observed and recorded in the long term. Though he can provide no answers for why two equally hot, dry summers would result in such different wasp infestations, his posing the question started public inquiry.
The wasp population explosion that summer was upstaged by a literal explosion. On 8 June, the Laki volcano in Iceland erupted. White’s description of the impact in Selborne speaks for itself:
The summer of the year 1783 was an amazing and portentous one, and full of horrible phenomena; for, besides the alarming meteors and tremendous thunder-storms that affrighted and distressed the different counties of this kingdom, the peculiar haze, or smokey fog, that prevailed for many weeks in this island, and in every part of Europe, and even beyond its limits, was a most extraordinary appearance, unlike anything known within the memory of man. By my journal I find that I had noticed this strange occurrence from June 23 to July 20 inclusive, during which period the wind varied to every quarter without making any alteration in the air. The sun, at noon, looked as blank as a clouded moon, and shed a rust-coloured ferruginous light on the ground, and floors of rooms; but was particularly lurid and blood-coloured at rising and setting. All the time the heat was so intense that butchers’ meat could hardly be eaten on the day after it was killed; and the flies swarmed so in the lanes and hedges that they rendered the horses half frantic, and riding irksome. The country people began to look with superstitious awe, at the red, louring aspect of the sun; and indeed there was reason for the most enlightened person to be apprehensive; for, all the while, Calabria and part of the isle of Sicily, were torn and convulsed with earthquakes; and about that juncture a volcano sprung out of the sea on the coast of Norway. (265)
Up to this point White has maintained his educated distance from the superstitions of country people and has advanced solid objective reports. He appeals here to Romantic discourse that appreciates the wonder of natural forces and delights in their irreducible mystery. Inspired by the same event, William Cowper noted in his journal, “We never see the sun but shorn of his beams, the trees are scarce discernible at a mile’s distance, he sets with the face of a red hot salamander and rises with the same complexion” (quoted in Grattan and Brayshay 128). Alternatively, 1783 was known as the “sand summer” in England because of the lingering atmospheric ash, as described in White’s account of the blanched midday sun. The Laki eruption infused a massive volume of sulfurous ash into the stratosphere, which had the effect of reflecting some sunlight back into space and cooling the atmosphere; but the ash also dispersed admitted light and created a milky-white luminosity like a frosted incandescent light bulb. As Laki continued to pump ash and gases into the atmosphere for eight months, widespread famine, stifling air pollution across Europe, and a particularly severe winter into 1784 condemned most of Iceland’s livestock to death, and one-quarter of its human population followed. Local parish records across England from 1783–84 suggest that the accumulated effects of the Laki eruption killed twenty-three thousand British men and women, which makes it one of the largest natural disasters to beset modern England. An estimated 120 million tons of sulfur dioxide were emitted, or three times the total industrial pollution of Europe in 2006 (Walker).
The Laki eruption had the kind of apocalyptic qualities that led the religious to believe that they were experiencing a form of divine retribution, and made secular-minded Enlightenment thinkers question the perfectibility of human society through reason and science. Religious, folk, and scientific perspectives preserved in eighteenth-century periodicals demonstrate the high levels of anxiety and troubling portents swirling in various social circles (Grattan and Brayshay 129–32). The virulent heat in July