Hampshire Days by W. H. Hudson

First published: 1903

Type of work: Nature study

Critical Evaluation:

Despite the poverty and ill health from which W. H. Hudson suffered much of his life, the dominant mood of HAMPSHIRE DAYS is the quiet joy found in the creatures, plants, and seasons of nature. This mood may have been furthered by the Civil List pension granted the author in 1901, the year before he finished the work. He tells us that he returned to New Forest in December, 1902, to complete this book, which chronicles his activities and discoveries in Hampshire from 1900 to 1902. His purpose was to write of this “delectable spot in the best bird months of April, May, and June,” but fortunately his vision included more than these months and a far wider variety of subjects, including Hampshire people, towns, and buildings, than this statement indicates.

Because Hudson was an important naturalist, one would expect much of the book to be devoted to the flora and fauna of Hampshire and its centuries-old forests, like Harewood, Wolmer and, especially, the somewhat misleadingly named New Forest. Hudson reveals his love of this particular forest on many pages and on one occasion speaks of it as containing the most beautiful forest landscape in all England. Its name derives from its being placed under forest laws by William the Conqueror in 1079. Of its present-day 130-square-mile area, thirty square miles are privately owned and forty-five of the remaining hundred are Crown woodlands, largely of oak and pine. Hudson lived in a former manor house in the forest while gathering material for his book. He was obviously concerned about the future of the forest, endangered by the abuse of the New Forest. This abuse was the unregulated raiding of the forest of its heath, game animals, rare species of birds, and plants. Hudson believed that only by government ownership of these lands and by careful regulation could New Forest be restored to its former glory.

Hudson’s interest in plant life is further revealed by his discussion of yew trees, particularly the Selborne yew, whose age he believed to exceed greatly the thousand years usually credited to a large churchyard yew, and the Farrington yew, both of which he numbers among his Hampshire favorites. He postulates that the practice of burying people beneath yews (with the consequent removal of a barrowful of roots for each grave) inflicts injury on the yew, and he concludes that the great size of the Selborne yew may result from the fact that only one grave was dug near it. As a naturalist, Hudson properly preferred wild nature to cultivated or garden nature, and he had little use for collectors of plants or animals if they killed in order to collect. He seems to have had little use for cut flowers; a picked rose, he says, lacks luster and means no more to the soul than a flower made from wax or paper. But roses growing wild convince one that there is no more beautiful sight in all the world.

The bulk of the book concerns such small creatures as birds, small mammals, and snakes. Hudson did not intend to present any very startling discoveries, but to reveal what he had learned about these animals of Hampshire: their mating habits, peculiarities of behavior, and some of the tales told of them. He discusses the mating game of several animals, as, for instance, the unusual behavior of the female viridissima (a variety of grasshopper) who, hypnotically drawn to the singing of the males, selects the one she wants and waits “to be taken in marriage.” In the case of the white spider, however, the male is both irresistibly drawn to the somewhat larger, white female and at the same time made fearful by her poisonous fangs. Consequently, first he advances eagerly, only to be made wary, and then retreats.

Hudson had the naturalist’s desire to test the truth of accepted nature tales, as his meticulous account of the cuckoo in the robin’s nest shows. In order to verify the newly hatched cuckoo’s supposed strength, he watched the developments in a nest containing, originally, three robin’s eggs and one cuckoo egg. In time two of the robin eggs were ejected, one definitely by the cuckoo, as Hudson saw, but the cuckoo went even further. As Hudson watched, the preternaturally strong fledgling pushed a baby robin from the nest. In all his discussions of animal behavior he reveals the qualities shown here: the care in observation, the desire to test accepted ideas, and the obvious relish he took in reporting his findings.

Despite Hudson’s obvious concern for plants and animals, his book also deals with man and his works. In fact, he devotes some chapters to these topics and only rarely is man totally absent from his discussions. He is careful to acknowledge his debt both to such earlier naturalists as Gilbert White and Moses Harris and to men of his own day who provided him with facts and stories. Of the chapters devoted to man, one deals with the Selborne atmosphere and discusses the appearance of the people, the scenery, and other aspects of the town. Another, devoted to the Hampshire people divides the inhabitants of this region into four types: the blond, which greatly outnumbers all others; the Saxon, also light-haired with blue eyes, but heavier; those slight and narrow-headed, with brown skins, crow-black hair, and dark eyes; and those of average height, with oval faces and dark eyes and hair.

Hudson’s concern for man and his ways is also seen in his interest in old folks and their stories of the past. In one instance, an old woman was able to explain how the lone grave beneath the great yew at Selborne came there; in another, an old woman told of the dashing career of her father, a horn-blower for the “Selborne mob” that attacked a poorhouse in a time of poverty. Such tales of the past were much to Hudson’s liking; he gives them prominent places in this book.

HAMPSHIRE DAYS is the work of a many-sided man: both Hudson the naturalist and Hudson the student of human nature are clearly visible. The personality that informs the work is that of a keen-minded inquirer, capable of delighting himself in study but also capable of feeling compassion for both men and animals. Even though he seems to dislike the intrusions of man into nature’s haunts, he has kind words for some of the young people he meets during his outings. And even though he delivers a lecture in Chapter One about the undesirability of such interference with nature as saving one of the robins ejected from its nest by the cuckoo, and the necessity of the death of great numbers of young birds each year, Hudson himself is guilty of such “interference.” When a young blackbird shows itself incapable of getting food, Hudson intervenes. His explanation is that although he may dislike playing at providence among nature’s creatures, he cannot free himself of pity.