Walter White (1811–1893) was an English travel writer, diarist, and librarian of the Royal Society. Born on 23 April 1811 at Reading, Berkshire, the son of an upholsterer and cabinet-maker, he was educated at local private schools and apprenticed to his father's trade. Largely self-taught and a voracious reader, he learned German, French, and Latin. In 1834 he sailed for America with his family, working as a cabinet-maker in New York and Poughkeepsie, and returned in 1839 no better off than he had left. In April 1844 he was appointed an attendant at the Royal Society at Somerset House, at eighty pounds a year, and went on to catalogue much of its library. When Weld retired in 1861 White was elected assistant secretary and librarian, a post he held until he resigned with a full pension in December 1884. Forty years in the Society's rooms brought him into contact with many of its fellows and visitors, among them Thomas Carlyle, Charles Darwin, and Tennyson. He was best known in his lifetime for a series of walking narratives, among them To Mont Blanc and Back Again (1854), A Londoner's Walk to the Land's End (1855), On Foot through Tyrol (1856), A July Holiday in Saxony, Bohemia, and Silesia (1857), and A Month in Yorkshire (1858), alongside his contributions to the magazines. In 1862 he edited A Sailor-Boy's Log-Book from Portsmouth to the Peiho; the sailor boy was his third son, Henry, whose account of training at Portsmouth and service aboard HMS Highflyer during the Second Opium War the book preserves. His own journals, covering his early years and his Royal Society career down to his retirement, were published posthumously by his brother in 1898. He died on 18 July 1893 at Brixton.
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