Richard Jefferies
Encyclopedia
John Richard Jefferies (6 November 1848 – 14 August 1887) was an English nature writer, noted for his depiction of English rural life in essays, books of natural history, and novels. His childhood on a small Wiltshire
farm had a great influence on him and provides the background to all his major works of fiction. For all that, these show a remarkable diversity, including Bevis (1882), a classic children's book, and After London (1885), an early work of science fiction. For much of his adult life, he suffered from tuberculosis
, and his struggles with the illness and with poverty also play a role in his writing. Jefferies valued and cultivated an intensity of feeling in his experience of the world around him, a cultivation that he describes in detail in The Story of My Heart (1883). This work, an introspective depiction of his thoughts and feelings on the world, gained him the reputation of a nature mystic at the time. But it is his success in conveying his awareness of nature and people within it, both in his fiction and in essay collections such as The Amateur Poacher (1879) and Round About a Great Estate (1880), that has drawn most admirers. Walter Besant
wrote of his reaction on first reading Jefferies: "Why, we must have been blind all our lives; here were the most wonderful things possible going on under our very noses, but we saw them not."
, in the parish of Chiseldon
, near Swindon
, Wiltshire, the son of a farmer, James Luckett Jefferies (1816–1896). His birthplace and home is now a museum open to the public. James Jefferies had the farm from his father, John Jefferies, who had been a London printer before returning to Swindon to run the family mill and bakery. Richard's mother, Elizabeth (1817–1895), always called Betsy, was the daughter of John Jefferies' binder and manager. These relationships are mirrored in the characters of Jefferies' late novel Amaryllis at the Fair (1887); and the portraits of the family in the novel tally with external accounts of the Jefferies. James Jefferies, like Iden in Amaryllis, was devoted to his garden, while struggling to make a financial success of the farm. The garden, lovingly recalled in Wood Magic and Amaryllis, also makes a strong impression on the memories of those who knew the Jefferies at the time. Betsy, like Iden's wife, seems to have been dissatisfied with life on the farm: "a town-bred woman with a beautiful face and a pleasure-loving soul, kind and generous to a fault, but unsuited to a country life." The farm was very small, with 39 acres (157,827.5 m²) of pasture; and a mortgage of £1500 would later begin a slide into debt for James Jefferies, who lost the farm in 1877 and became a jobbing gardener. But these difficulties were less evident in Richard's childhood. The situation was much as in After London (1885), where the farming and gardening Baron is again based on James Jefferies: "The whole place was thus falling to decay, while at the same time it seemed to be flowing with milk and honey". One part of the Jefferies family is strikingly missing from the books. In Wood Magic, Bevis and Amaryllis, the hero (or heroine) has no siblings; only After London gives the main character brothers and depicts the imperfect sympathy between them. James and Elizabeth's first child, Ellen, had died young; but Richard had two younger brothers and a younger sister.
Jefferies spent several of his earlier years, between the ages of four and nine, with his aunt and uncle, the Harrilds, in Sydenham
, where he attended a private school, returning to Coate in the holidays. He kept a close friendship with Mrs. Harrild and his letters to her are an important source for biographers. At Coate, he spent most of his time in the countryside; and much of what he narrates of Bevis is true of himself. His father had taken him shooting when he was eight; and already at nine he had shot a rabbit. He was soon spending much of his time hunting (both with a gun and with snares) and fishing. He also, like Bevis, added home-made rigging to a boat to sail on the reservoir; and he is said to have built his own canoe, like the hero of After London. At the same time, he became a keen reader: favourite books included Homer's Odyssey
, Percy's Reliques
, Don Quixote and James Fenimore Cooper
's The Pathfinder
, which served as a model for mock battles fought on a field between the farm and the reservoir.
In November 1864, at the age of sixteen, he and a cousin, James Cox, ran off to France, intending to walk to Russia. (Cox, slightly older than Jefferies, worked for the Great Western Railway
and had a little money saved.) After crossing the channel, they soon found that their schoolboy French was insufficient and returned to England. Before they reached Swindon, they noticed an advertisement for cheap crossings from Liverpool
to America and set off in this new direction. The tickets however, did not include the cost of food; and the boys were forced to return to Swindon after an attempt to pawn their watches had drawn the attention of the police.
Jefferies left school at fifteen and at first continued his habits of solitary wanderings about the local countryside. He dressed carelessly and allowed his hair to grow down to his collar. This, with his "bent form and long, rapid stride made him an object of wonder in the town of Swindon. But he was perfectly unconscious of this, or indifferent to it." He helped little on the farm (his only enthusiasm was for chopping and splitting wood) and was regarded as something of an idler. The gun that he always carried drew the suspicion of local landowners – one said, "That young Jefferies is not the sort of fellow you want hanging about in your covers". Finally, early in 1866, he started work as a newspaper reporter for the North Wiltshire Herald
. For several years he worked as a reporter, contributing not only to the North Wiltshire Herald, but also to the Wilts and Gloucestershire Standard and to the Swindon Advertiser
. The editor of the Swindon Advertiser, William Morris, an antiquarian and local historian, lent Jefferies books and encouraged his early writing attempts. Jefferies himself developed an antiquarian interest in the countryside: he published articles on local history in the North Wiltshire Herald and was the first to notice a stone circle near Coate Farm. He was also spending much time on the downs, particularly at the iron age hill fort, Liddington Castle
, where he would lie on the grass, ecstatically feeling and seeking a connection with the natural world. In September 1867 and July 1868 he was very ill. In retrospect the illnesses were clearly the first symptoms of the tuberculosis that would kill him. He emerged from them weakened and very thin – "My legs are as thin as a grasshopper's", he wrote to his aunt. Illness also prompted some reconsideration of his own character: he was going to be "not swell but stylish" in future, since people set so much store by appearance.
He was now actively pursuing a career as a writer, writing a history of the Goddards, a local family, and Reporting, Editing, and Authorship: Practical Hints for Beginners in Literature (1873), in which he shared the fruits of his brief experience as a local reporter. Meanwhile the novels he was writing could not find a publisher. What national attention he attracted was instead from a series of letters to The Times
on the Wiltshire agricultural labourer, published in November 1872. The letters, like his other writings from this period, reflect the Conservative outlook of his upbringing.
In 1874, the year of his first published novel, The Scarlet Shawl, he married Jessie Baden (1853–1926), the daughter of a nearby farmer. After living for a few months at Coate Farm, the couple moved to a house in Swindon in 1875 (its current address is 93 Victoria Road); and their first child, Richard Harold Jefferies, was born there on 3 May.
, near Surbiton
. (There is a wooden plaque commemorating this by the entrance to Surbiton Library.) The area was then at the limits of London's growth. Jefferies spent much time wandering through the nearby countryside; and these walks would later provide the material for Nature Near London (1883).
The Surbiton years were momentous. The couple's next child, a daughter called Jessie after her mother (but known by her second name, Phyllis), was born (on 6 December 1880), and Jefferies began to make his name at last. His new surroundings defined him, both to himself and others, as a country writer. Articles drawing on Jefferies' Wiltshire experiences found a ready market in the Pall Mall Gazette
. First came a series of essays based on his friendship with the keeper of the Burderop estate, near Coate, The Gamekeeper at Home, collected as a book in 1878. The book was well received and Jefferies was compared with the great English nature writer, Gilbert White
. Three more collections followed the same pattern of publication in the Pall Mall Gazette and then in book form: Wild Life in a Southern County and The Amateur Poacher (both 1879), and Round About a Great Estate (1880). Another collection, Hodge and his Masters (1880), brought together articles first published in the Standard. In the few years that Jefferies took to write these essays, his literary skill developed rapidly: The Amateur Poacher in particular is regarded as a major advance on the earlier works, the first in which he approaches the autobiographical subject matter that is behind his best works. A minor novel, Greene Ferne Farm (1880), was the first to gain recognition, both from contemporaries and in later scholarship.
to convalesce. About this time he wrote his extraordinary autobiography, The Story of My Heart
(1883). He had been planning this work for seventeen years and, in his words, it was 'absolutely and unflinchingly true'. It was not an autobiography of the events of his life, but an outpouring of his deepest thoughts and feelings.
Articles about the Surbiton area were reprinted in the popular Nature Near London (1883), although the last chapters of the book refer to Beachy Head
, Ditchling Beacon
and other Sussex
landmarks.
In Brighton, his third child, Richard Oliver Launcelot Jefferies, was born on 18 July 1883. But his life was to be a short one. Jefferies moved to Eltham
, then in Kent
, now a part of Greenwich
, in June 1884, and here, early in 1885, the child died suddenly of meningitis
. Jefferies was so affected that he could not attend the funeral.
": after some sudden and unspecified catastrophe has depopulated England, the countryside reverts to nature, and the few survivors to a quasi-medieval way of life.
The book has two parts. The first, "The Relapse into Barbarism", is the account by some later historian of the fall of civilisation and its consequences, with a loving description of nature reclaiming England: fields becoming overrun by forest, domesticated animals running wild, roads and towns becoming overgrown, the hated London reverting to lake and poisonous swampland. The second part, "Wild England", is largely a straightforward adventure set many years later in the wild landscape and society (here too Jefferies was setting an example for the genre); but the opening section, despite some improbabilities, has been much admired for its rigour and compelling narrative.
Critics dissatisfied with the second part often make an exception of chapters 22-4, which go beyond recreation of a medieval world to give a disturbing and surreal description of the site of the fallen city.
Jefferies' interest in catastrophes predates After London: two short unpublished pieces from the 1870s describe social collapse after London is paralysed by freak winter conditions. In the better achieved of these, the narrator is a future historian piecing the story together from surviving accounts. The fantasy of the second part also has a predecessor in a short work, The Rise of Maximin, Emperor of the Occident, serialised in The New Monthly Magazine
in 1876, in this case an adventure set in a remote and imaginary past.
Although the society that Jefferies depicts after the fall of London is an unpleasant one, with oppressive petty tyrants at war with each other, and insecurity and injustice for the poor, it still served as an inspiration for William Morris
's utopian News from Nowhere
(1890). In a letter of 1885, he writes of his reaction to After London: "absurd hopes curled around my heart as I read it."
, then in a house on Crowborough
Hill. In Crowborough Jefferies completed his most ambitious and most unusual novel, Amaryllis at the Fair (1887). Closely based on his own family at Coate, it describes a farm and family imperceptibly approaching disaster. There is little narrative development; instead significant or typical moments are presented in short scenes or even tableaux
.
Illness and resulting lower productivity had impoverished Jefferies; and the editor Charles Longman suggested an application to the Royal Literary Fund
. At first Jefferies resisted the suggestion, regarding aid from aristocratic patrons not involved in literary work humiliating: "Patrons of literature! was there ever such a disgrace in the nineteenth century? Patrons of literature! The thing is simply abominable!" Longman finally succeeded in convincing Jefferies that the fund was "assisted by everybody who had made any success in literature". An application was accepted and the committee voted a grant of one hundred pounds. Another fund arranged by Longman enabled Jefferies to move nearer to the sea, to the Worthing
suburb of Goring. Here, on 14 August 1887, he died of tuberculosis and exhaustion. He is buried in Broadwater and Worthing Cemetery in Worthing.
After his death, a number of posthumous collections were made of his writings previously published in newspapers and magazines, beginning with Field and Hedgerow (1889), edited by his widow. New collections have appeared over the century following his birth, but even now not all have been reprinted in book form.
:
Jefferies' works inspired Henry Williamson
to take up writing ; Williamson edited a collection of Jefferies' writings with a title that indicates the great regard that he held for Jefferies:
Other writers who admired Jefferies included David Garnett
, Edward Thomas
(who wrote his biography), Leslie Paul
, Ethel Mannin
,
John Fowles
, Henry Miller
and Raymond Williams
.
The Richard Jefferies Bird Sanctuary in Surbiton commemorates him.
Wiltshire
Wiltshire is a ceremonial county in South West England. It is landlocked and borders the counties of Dorset, Somerset, Hampshire, Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire and Berkshire. It contains the unitary authority of Swindon and covers...
farm had a great influence on him and provides the background to all his major works of fiction. For all that, these show a remarkable diversity, including Bevis (1882), a classic children's book, and After London (1885), an early work of science fiction. For much of his adult life, he suffered from tuberculosis
Tuberculosis
Tuberculosis, MTB, or TB is a common, and in many cases lethal, infectious disease caused by various strains of mycobacteria, usually Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Tuberculosis usually attacks the lungs but can also affect other parts of the body...
, and his struggles with the illness and with poverty also play a role in his writing. Jefferies valued and cultivated an intensity of feeling in his experience of the world around him, a cultivation that he describes in detail in The Story of My Heart (1883). This work, an introspective depiction of his thoughts and feelings on the world, gained him the reputation of a nature mystic at the time. But it is his success in conveying his awareness of nature and people within it, both in his fiction and in essay collections such as The Amateur Poacher (1879) and Round About a Great Estate (1880), that has drawn most admirers. Walter Besant
Walter Besant
Sir Walter Besant , was a novelist and historian who lived largely in London.His sister-in-law was Annie Besant.-Biography:...
wrote of his reaction on first reading Jefferies: "Why, we must have been blind all our lives; here were the most wonderful things possible going on under our very noses, but we saw them not."
Life and Works
Early life
John Richard Jefferies (he used the first name only during his childhood) was born at CoateCoate Water Country Park
Coate Water is a country park situated to the southeast of central Swindon, near Junction 15 of the M4. It takes its name from the main feature, a reservoir originally built to provide water for the Wilts and Berks Canal....
, in the parish of Chiseldon
Chiseldon
Chiseldon is a village in the borough of Swindon, Wiltshire, England.The village lies on the edge of the Marlborough Downs, a mile south of junction 15 of the M4 motorway, on the A346 between Swindon and Marlborough...
, near Swindon
Swindon
Swindon is a large town within the borough of Swindon and ceremonial county of Wiltshire, in South West England. It is midway between Bristol, west and Reading, east. London is east...
, Wiltshire, the son of a farmer, James Luckett Jefferies (1816–1896). His birthplace and home is now a museum open to the public. James Jefferies had the farm from his father, John Jefferies, who had been a London printer before returning to Swindon to run the family mill and bakery. Richard's mother, Elizabeth (1817–1895), always called Betsy, was the daughter of John Jefferies' binder and manager. These relationships are mirrored in the characters of Jefferies' late novel Amaryllis at the Fair (1887); and the portraits of the family in the novel tally with external accounts of the Jefferies. James Jefferies, like Iden in Amaryllis, was devoted to his garden, while struggling to make a financial success of the farm. The garden, lovingly recalled in Wood Magic and Amaryllis, also makes a strong impression on the memories of those who knew the Jefferies at the time. Betsy, like Iden's wife, seems to have been dissatisfied with life on the farm: "a town-bred woman with a beautiful face and a pleasure-loving soul, kind and generous to a fault, but unsuited to a country life." The farm was very small, with 39 acres (157,827.5 m²) of pasture; and a mortgage of £1500 would later begin a slide into debt for James Jefferies, who lost the farm in 1877 and became a jobbing gardener. But these difficulties were less evident in Richard's childhood. The situation was much as in After London (1885), where the farming and gardening Baron is again based on James Jefferies: "The whole place was thus falling to decay, while at the same time it seemed to be flowing with milk and honey". One part of the Jefferies family is strikingly missing from the books. In Wood Magic, Bevis and Amaryllis, the hero (or heroine) has no siblings; only After London gives the main character brothers and depicts the imperfect sympathy between them. James and Elizabeth's first child, Ellen, had died young; but Richard had two younger brothers and a younger sister.
Jefferies spent several of his earlier years, between the ages of four and nine, with his aunt and uncle, the Harrilds, in Sydenham
Sydenham
Sydenham is an area and electoral ward in the London Borough of Lewisham; although some streets towards Crystal Palace Park, Forest Hill and Penge are outside the ward and in the London Borough of Bromley, and some streets off Sydenham Hill are in the London Borough of Southwark. Sydenham was in...
, where he attended a private school, returning to Coate in the holidays. He kept a close friendship with Mrs. Harrild and his letters to her are an important source for biographers. At Coate, he spent most of his time in the countryside; and much of what he narrates of Bevis is true of himself. His father had taken him shooting when he was eight; and already at nine he had shot a rabbit. He was soon spending much of his time hunting (both with a gun and with snares) and fishing. He also, like Bevis, added home-made rigging to a boat to sail on the reservoir; and he is said to have built his own canoe, like the hero of After London. At the same time, he became a keen reader: favourite books included Homer's Odyssey
Odyssey
The Odyssey is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. It is, in part, a sequel to the Iliad, the other work ascribed to Homer. The poem is fundamental to the modern Western canon, and is the second—the Iliad being the first—extant work of Western literature...
, Percy's Reliques
Reliques of Ancient English Poetry
The Reliques of Ancient English Poetry is a collection of ballads and popular songs collected by Thomas Percy and published in 1765.-Sources:...
, Don Quixote and James Fenimore Cooper
James Fenimore Cooper
James Fenimore Cooper was a prolific and popular American writer of the early 19th century. He is best remembered as a novelist who wrote numerous sea-stories and the historical novels known as the Leatherstocking Tales, featuring frontiersman Natty Bumppo...
's The Pathfinder
The Pathfinder, or The Inland Sea
The Pathfinder, or The Inland Sea is an historical novel by James Fenimore Cooper first published in 1840. It is the fourth novel Cooper wrote featuring Natty Bumppo, his fictitious frontier hero, and is considered as forming the third chronological episode of the Leatherstocking Tales...
, which served as a model for mock battles fought on a field between the farm and the reservoir.
In November 1864, at the age of sixteen, he and a cousin, James Cox, ran off to France, intending to walk to Russia. (Cox, slightly older than Jefferies, worked for the Great Western Railway
Great Western Railway
The Great Western Railway was a British railway company that linked London with the south-west and west of England and most of Wales. It was founded in 1833, received its enabling Act of Parliament in 1835 and ran its first trains in 1838...
and had a little money saved.) After crossing the channel, they soon found that their schoolboy French was insufficient and returned to England. Before they reached Swindon, they noticed an advertisement for cheap crossings from Liverpool
Liverpool
Liverpool is a city and metropolitan borough of Merseyside, England, along the eastern side of the Mersey Estuary. It was founded as a borough in 1207 and was granted city status in 1880...
to America and set off in this new direction. The tickets however, did not include the cost of food; and the boys were forced to return to Swindon after an attempt to pawn their watches had drawn the attention of the police.
Gazette and Herald
The Gazette and Herald is a local weekly paid-for newspaper, established in 1816. Published every Thursday. It serves the areas and communities of Devizes, Calne, Chippenham, Wootton Bassett, Swindon, Marlborough, Malmesbury, Corsham, Box and other areas in North Wiltshire.Originally the Devizes...
. For several years he worked as a reporter, contributing not only to the North Wiltshire Herald, but also to the Wilts and Gloucestershire Standard and to the Swindon Advertiser
Swindon Advertiser
The Swindon Advertiser is a daily tabloid newspaper, published in Swindon. The newspaper was founded in 1854, and had a circulation in 2006 of 22,321....
. The editor of the Swindon Advertiser, William Morris, an antiquarian and local historian, lent Jefferies books and encouraged his early writing attempts. Jefferies himself developed an antiquarian interest in the countryside: he published articles on local history in the North Wiltshire Herald and was the first to notice a stone circle near Coate Farm. He was also spending much time on the downs, particularly at the iron age hill fort, Liddington Castle
Liddington Castle
Liddington Castle, locally called Liddington Camp, is a late Bronze Age and early Iron Age hill fort in the English county of Wiltshire....
, where he would lie on the grass, ecstatically feeling and seeking a connection with the natural world. In September 1867 and July 1868 he was very ill. In retrospect the illnesses were clearly the first symptoms of the tuberculosis that would kill him. He emerged from them weakened and very thin – "My legs are as thin as a grasshopper's", he wrote to his aunt. Illness also prompted some reconsideration of his own character: he was going to be "not swell but stylish" in future, since people set so much store by appearance.
He was now actively pursuing a career as a writer, writing a history of the Goddards, a local family, and Reporting, Editing, and Authorship: Practical Hints for Beginners in Literature (1873), in which he shared the fruits of his brief experience as a local reporter. Meanwhile the novels he was writing could not find a publisher. What national attention he attracted was instead from a series of letters to The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
on the Wiltshire agricultural labourer, published in November 1872. The letters, like his other writings from this period, reflect the Conservative outlook of his upbringing.
In 1874, the year of his first published novel, The Scarlet Shawl, he married Jessie Baden (1853–1926), the daughter of a nearby farmer. After living for a few months at Coate Farm, the couple moved to a house in Swindon in 1875 (its current address is 93 Victoria Road); and their first child, Richard Harold Jefferies, was born there on 3 May.
Essays
While in Swindon, Jefferies had found it difficult to seek publication or employment with London publishers; and early in 1877, with Jessie and their baby son Harold, he moved to a house at what is now 296 Ewell Road, TolworthTolworth
Tolworth is a mostly residential area of outer South London in the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames, located south west of Charing Cross. Neighbouring places include: New Malden, Kingston, Surbiton, Berrylands, Chessington, Ewell and Worcester Park....
, near Surbiton
Surbiton
Surbiton, a suburban area of London in the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames, is situated next to the River Thames, with a mixture of Art-Deco courts, more recent residential blocks and grand, spacious 19th century townhouses blending into a sea of semi-detached 20th century housing estates...
. (There is a wooden plaque commemorating this by the entrance to Surbiton Library.) The area was then at the limits of London's growth. Jefferies spent much time wandering through the nearby countryside; and these walks would later provide the material for Nature Near London (1883).
Pall Mall Gazette
The Pall Mall Gazette was an evening newspaper founded in London on 7 February 1865 by George Murray Smith; its first editor was Frederick Greenwood...
. First came a series of essays based on his friendship with the keeper of the Burderop estate, near Coate, The Gamekeeper at Home, collected as a book in 1878. The book was well received and Jefferies was compared with the great English nature writer, Gilbert White
Gilbert White
Gilbert White FRS was a pioneering English naturalist and ornithologist.-Life:White was born in his grandfather's vicarage at Selborne in Hampshire. He was educated at the Holy Ghost School and by a private tutor in Basingstoke before going to Oriel College, Oxford...
. Three more collections followed the same pattern of publication in the Pall Mall Gazette and then in book form: Wild Life in a Southern County and The Amateur Poacher (both 1879), and Round About a Great Estate (1880). Another collection, Hodge and his Masters (1880), brought together articles first published in the Standard. In the few years that Jefferies took to write these essays, his literary skill developed rapidly: The Amateur Poacher in particular is regarded as a major advance on the earlier works, the first in which he approaches the autobiographical subject matter that is behind his best works. A minor novel, Greene Ferne Farm (1880), was the first to gain recognition, both from contemporaries and in later scholarship.
The Bevis books
Two books of these years form a sequence. Wood Magic: A Fable (1881) introduces his child-hero, Bevis, a small child on a farm near a small lake, called the "Longpond", clearly Coate Farm and Coate Reservoir. Bevis's exploration of the garden and neighbouring fields brings him into contact with the country's birds and animals, who can speak to him, as can even inanimate parts of nature, such as the stream and the wind. Part of the book is a depiction of a small child's interaction with the natural world, but much is a cynical animal fable of a revolt against the magpie Capchack, the local tyrant. In Bevis (1882), the boy is older, and the fantasy element, by which animals can talk, is quite absent. Rather, we have realistically related adventures of Bevis and his friend Mark, fighting a mock battle with other local children, rigging a boat and sailing to an island on the lake (which they call "The New Sea"), fishing and even shooting with a homemade gun.Onset
In December 1881, Jefferies began to suffer from his until then undiagnosed tuberculosis, with an anal fistula. After a series of painful operations, he moved to West BrightonBrighton
Brighton is the major part of the city of Brighton and Hove in East Sussex, England on the south coast of Great Britain...
to convalesce. About this time he wrote his extraordinary autobiography, The Story of My Heart
The Story of My Heart
The Story of My Heart is an autobiography, first published in 1883, by English nature writer, essayist and journalist Richard Jefferies. It is no true autobiography, but the story of a soul's awakening...
(1883). He had been planning this work for seventeen years and, in his words, it was 'absolutely and unflinchingly true'. It was not an autobiography of the events of his life, but an outpouring of his deepest thoughts and feelings.
Articles about the Surbiton area were reprinted in the popular Nature Near London (1883), although the last chapters of the book refer to Beachy Head
Beachy Head
Beachy Head is a chalk headland on the south coast of England, close to the town of Eastbourne in the county of East Sussex, immediately east of the Seven Sisters. The cliff there is the highest chalk sea cliff in Britain, rising to 162 m above sea level. The peak allows views of the south...
, Ditchling Beacon
Ditchling Beacon
Ditchling Beacon is the third-highest point on the South Downs in south-east England, behind Butser Hill and Crown Tegleaze . It consists of a large chalk hill with a particularly steep northern face, covered with open grassland and sheep-grazing areas...
and other Sussex
Sussex
Sussex , from the Old English Sūþsēaxe , is an historic county in South East England corresponding roughly in area to the ancient Kingdom of Sussex. It is bounded on the north by Surrey, east by Kent, south by the English Channel, and west by Hampshire, and is divided for local government into West...
landmarks.
In Brighton, his third child, Richard Oliver Launcelot Jefferies, was born on 18 July 1883. But his life was to be a short one. Jefferies moved to Eltham
Eltham, London
-Parks and open spaces:There is a large variety of open green space in Eltham, in the form of parkland, fields and woodland.*Avery Hill Park is large, open parkland, situated to the east of Eltham. It is most notable for its Winter Garden, a hothouse containing tropical trees and plants from around...
, then in Kent
Kent
Kent is a county in southeast England, and is one of the home counties. It borders East Sussex, Surrey and Greater London and has a defined boundary with Essex in the middle of the Thames Estuary. The ceremonial county boundaries of Kent include the shire county of Kent and the unitary borough of...
, now a part of Greenwich
London Borough of Greenwich
The London Borough of Greenwich is an Inner London borough in south-east London, England. Taking its name from the historic town of Greenwich, the present borough was formed in 1965 by the amalgamation of the former area of the Metropolitan Borough of Greenwich with part of the Metropolitan...
, in June 1884, and here, early in 1885, the child died suddenly of meningitis
Meningitis
Meningitis is inflammation of the protective membranes covering the brain and spinal cord, known collectively as the meninges. The inflammation may be caused by infection with viruses, bacteria, or other microorganisms, and less commonly by certain drugs...
. Jefferies was so affected that he could not attend the funeral.
After London
Jefferies' next novel, After London (1885), can be seen as an early example of "post-apocalyptic fictionApocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction
Apocalyptic fiction is a sub-genre of science fiction that is concerned with the end of civilization due to a potentially existential catastrophe such as nuclear warfare, pandemic, extraterrestrial attack, impact event, cybernetic revolt, technological singularity, dysgenics, supernatural...
": after some sudden and unspecified catastrophe has depopulated England, the countryside reverts to nature, and the few survivors to a quasi-medieval way of life.
The book has two parts. The first, "The Relapse into Barbarism", is the account by some later historian of the fall of civilisation and its consequences, with a loving description of nature reclaiming England: fields becoming overrun by forest, domesticated animals running wild, roads and towns becoming overgrown, the hated London reverting to lake and poisonous swampland. The second part, "Wild England", is largely a straightforward adventure set many years later in the wild landscape and society (here too Jefferies was setting an example for the genre); but the opening section, despite some improbabilities, has been much admired for its rigour and compelling narrative.
Critics dissatisfied with the second part often make an exception of chapters 22-4, which go beyond recreation of a medieval world to give a disturbing and surreal description of the site of the fallen city.
Jefferies' interest in catastrophes predates After London: two short unpublished pieces from the 1870s describe social collapse after London is paralysed by freak winter conditions. In the better achieved of these, the narrator is a future historian piecing the story together from surviving accounts. The fantasy of the second part also has a predecessor in a short work, The Rise of Maximin, Emperor of the Occident, serialised in The New Monthly Magazine
The New Monthly Magazine
The New Monthly Magazine was a British monthly magazine published by Henry Colburn between 1814 and 1884.-History:Colburn and Frederic Shoberl established The New Monthly Magazine and Universal Register as a "virulently Tory" competitor to Sir Richard Phillips' Monthly Magazine in 1814...
in 1876, in this case an adventure set in a remote and imaginary past.
Although the society that Jefferies depicts after the fall of London is an unpleasant one, with oppressive petty tyrants at war with each other, and insecurity and injustice for the poor, it still served as an inspiration for William Morris
William Morris
William Morris 24 March 18343 October 1896 was an English textile designer, artist, writer, and socialist associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the English Arts and Crafts Movement...
's utopian News from Nowhere
News from Nowhere
News from Nowhere is a classic work combining utopian socialism and soft science fiction written by the artist, designer and socialist pioneer William Morris...
(1890). In a letter of 1885, he writes of his reaction to After London: "absurd hopes curled around my heart as I read it."
Final Years
After Eltham, Jefferies lived briefly in various parts of Sussex, first at RotherfieldRotherfield
Rotherfield is a village and civil parish in the Wealden District of East Sussex, England. It is one of the largest parishes in East Sussex. There are three villages in the parish: Rotherfield, Mark Cross, and Eridge.-Etymology:...
, then in a house on Crowborough
Crowborough
The highest point in the town is 242 metres above sea level. This summit is the highest point of the High Weald and second highest point in East Sussex . Its relative height is 159 m, meaning Crowborough qualifies as one of England's Marilyns...
Hill. In Crowborough Jefferies completed his most ambitious and most unusual novel, Amaryllis at the Fair (1887). Closely based on his own family at Coate, it describes a farm and family imperceptibly approaching disaster. There is little narrative development; instead significant or typical moments are presented in short scenes or even tableaux
Tableau vivant
Tableau vivant is French for "living picture." The term describes a striking group of suitably costumed actors or artist's models, carefully posed and often theatrically lit. Throughout the duration of the display, the people shown do not speak or move...
.
Illness and resulting lower productivity had impoverished Jefferies; and the editor Charles Longman suggested an application to the Royal Literary Fund
Royal Literary Fund
The Royal Literary Fund is a benevolent fund set up to help published British writers in financial difficulties. It was founded by Reverend David Williams in 1790 and has received bequests and donations, including royal patronage, ever since...
. At first Jefferies resisted the suggestion, regarding aid from aristocratic patrons not involved in literary work humiliating: "Patrons of literature! was there ever such a disgrace in the nineteenth century? Patrons of literature! The thing is simply abominable!" Longman finally succeeded in convincing Jefferies that the fund was "assisted by everybody who had made any success in literature". An application was accepted and the committee voted a grant of one hundred pounds. Another fund arranged by Longman enabled Jefferies to move nearer to the sea, to the Worthing
Worthing
Worthing is a large seaside town with borough status in West Sussex, within the historic County of Sussex, forming part of the Brighton/Worthing/Littlehampton conurbation. It is situated at the foot of the South Downs, west of Brighton, and east of the county town of Chichester...
suburb of Goring. Here, on 14 August 1887, he died of tuberculosis and exhaustion. He is buried in Broadwater and Worthing Cemetery in Worthing.
After his death, a number of posthumous collections were made of his writings previously published in newspapers and magazines, beginning with Field and Hedgerow (1889), edited by his widow. New collections have appeared over the century following his birth, but even now not all have been reprinted in book form.
Influence and reputation
Early works included three by Henry Stephens SaltHenry Stephens Salt
Henry Stephens Salt was an English writer and campaigner for social reform in the fields of prisons, schools, economic institutions, and the treatment of animals. He was a noted ethical vegetarian, anti-vivisectionist, socialist, and pacifist, and was well known as a literary critic, biographer,...
:
- Richard Jefferies: A Study (1894)
- Richard Jefferies: His Life and His Ideas (1905)
- The Faith of Richard Jefferies (1906)
Jefferies' works inspired Henry Williamson
Henry Williamson
Henry William Williamson was an English naturalist, farmer and prolific author known for his natural and social history novels. He won the Hawthornden Prize for literature in 1928 with his book Tarka the Otter....
to take up writing ; Williamson edited a collection of Jefferies' writings with a title that indicates the great regard that he held for Jefferies:
- RICHARD JEFFERIES : Selections of his Work with details of his Life and Circumstances, his Death and Immortality (1947)
Other writers who admired Jefferies included David Garnett
David Garnett
David Garnett was a British writer and publisher. As a child, he had a cloak made of rabbit skin and thus received the nickname "Bunny", by which he was known to friends and intimates all his life.-Early life:...
, Edward Thomas
Edward Thomas (poet)
Philip Edward Thomas was an Anglo-Welsh writer of prose and poetry. He is commonly considered a war poet, although few of his poems deal directly with his war experiences. Already an accomplished writer, Thomas turned to poetry only in 1914...
(who wrote his biography), Leslie Paul
Leslie Paul
Leslie Allen Paul was an Anglo-Irish writer and founder of the Woodcraft Folk.-Life:Born in Dublin in April 1905, Leslie Paul grew up in South East London...
, Ethel Mannin
Ethel Mannin
Ethel Edith Mannin was a popular British novelist and travel writer. She was born in London into a family with an Irish background....
,
John Fowles
John Fowles
John Robert Fowles was an English novelist and essayist. In 2008, The Times newspaper named Fowles among their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".-Birth and family:...
, Henry Miller
Henry Miller
Henry Valentine Miller was an American novelist and painter. He was known for breaking with existing literary forms and developing a new sort of 'novel' that is a mixture of novel, autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, surrealist free association, and mysticism, one that is...
and Raymond Williams
Raymond Williams
Raymond Henry Williams was a Welsh academic, novelist and critic. He was an influential figure within the New Left and in wider culture. His writings on politics, culture, the mass media and literature are a significant contribution to the Marxist critique of culture and the arts...
.
The Richard Jefferies Bird Sanctuary in Surbiton commemorates him.
Published books by Jefferies
The following list is necessarily selective. Much of Jefferies' writing was not published in book form in his lifetime. Many works surviving in manuscript or only published in journals have been published piecemeal by various editors since his death. Since his contributions to journals were generally anonymous, identification is often a problem. For a fuller survey, see Miller and Matthews (1993).Books published in Jefferies' lifetime
- The Scarlet Shawl (London: Tinsley BrothersWilliam TinsleyWilliam Tinsley was a British publisher. The son of a gamekeeper, he had little formal education; but together with his brother Edward he founded the firm of Tinsley Brothers, which published many of the leading novelists of the time.-Life:Tinsley was born in the village of South Mimms, north of...
, 1874) - Restless Human Hearts (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1875)
- World's End (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1877)
- The Gamekeeper at Home (London: Smith, Elder & Co.Smith, Elder & Co.Smith, Elder & Co. was a firm of British publishers who were most noted for the works they published in the 19th century.The firm was founded by George Smith and Alexander Elder and successfully continued by George Murray Smith .They are notable for producing the first edition of the Dictionary...
, 1878) (reissued by Cambridge University PressCambridge University PressCambridge University Press is the publishing business of the University of Cambridge. Granted letters patent by Henry VIII in 1534, it is the world's oldest publishing house, and the second largest university press in the world...
, 2009; ISBN 9781108004107) - Wild Life in a Southern County (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1879)
- The Amateur Poacher (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1879) (reissued by Cambridge University PressCambridge University PressCambridge University Press is the publishing business of the University of Cambridge. Granted letters patent by Henry VIII in 1534, it is the world's oldest publishing house, and the second largest university press in the world...
, 2009; ISBN 9781108004091) - Greene Ferne Farm (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1880)
- Hodge and His Masters (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1880)
- Round About a Great Estate (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1880)
- Wood Magic (London: Cassell, Petter, Galpin & Co., 1881)
- Bevis: the Story of a Boy (London: Sampson LowSampson Low-Life:Born in London in November 1797, he was the son of Sampson Low, printer and publisher, of Berwick Street, Soho. He served a short apprenticeship with Lionel Booth, the proprietor of a circulating library, and, after a few years spent in the house of Longman & Co., began business in 1819 at 42...
, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1882) - Nature Near London (London: Chatto & WindusChatto and WindusChatto & Windus has been, since 1987, an imprint of Random House, publishers. It was originally an important publisher of books in London, founded in the Victorian era....
, 1883) - The Story of My HeartThe Story of My HeartThe Story of My Heart is an autobiography, first published in 1883, by English nature writer, essayist and journalist Richard Jefferies. It is no true autobiography, but the story of a soul's awakening...
: An Autobiography (London: Longmans, Green, & Co.LongmanLongman was a publishing company founded in London, England in 1724. It is now an imprint of Pearson Education.-Beginnings:The Longman company was founded by Thomas Longman , the son of Ezekiel Longman , a gentleman of Bristol. Thomas was apprenticed in 1716 to John Osborn, a London bookseller, and...
, 1883) - Red Deer (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1884)
- The Life of the Fields (London: Chatto & Windus, 1884)
- The Dewy Morn (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1884)
- After London; Or, Wild England (London: Cassell & Company, Ltd., 1885)
- The Open Air (London: Chatto & Windus, 1885)
- Amaryllis at the Fair (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1887)
Posthumous publications
Only the first of these (produced by his widow) was planned by Jefferies.- Field and Hedgerow; Being the Last Essays of Richard Jefferies (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1889)
- The Toilers in the Field (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1892)
- The Early Fiction of Richard Jefferies, ed. G. Toplis (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co Ltd., 1896), somewhat bowdlerised
- Jefferies' Land: A History of Swindon and its Environs, ed. G. Toplis (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co Ltd., 1896)
- The Hills and the Vale, collected and introduced by E. Thomas (London: Duckworth & CoGerald Duckworth and Company Ltd-History:Founded in 1898 by Gerald Duckworth, Duckworth is an independent British publisher. It was important in the development of English literature in the first half of the twentieth century, being the publisher of figures such as Virginia Woolf , W. H. Davies, Anthony Powell, John Galsworthy...
, 1909)
Secondary literature
- Banerjee, Jacqueline Literary Surrey John Owen Smith (2005) ISBN 1873855508 ISBN 978-1873855508 pp55–56, 64–72
- W. Besant, The Eulogy of Richard Jefferies (London: Chatto and Windus, 1888, fourth impression 1905)
- J. Fowles, "Introduction", in R. Jefferies, After London (Oxford: OUP, 1980), vii–xxi. ISBN 0192812661
- W.J. Keith, Richard Jefferies, A Critical Study (London: University of Toronto Press, 1965)
- Q.D. LeavisQ. D. LeavisQueenie Dorothy Leavis , née Roth, was an English literary critic and essayist.Born in Edmonton, England, she wrote about the historical sociology of reading and the development of the English, the European, and the American novel...
, "Lives and works of Richard Jefferies", ScrutinyScrutiny (journal)Scrutiny: A Quarterly Review was a literature periodical founded in 1932 by F. R. Leavis, who remained its principal editor until the final issue in 1953...
6 (1938) 435-46, reprinted in Collected Essays Vol. 3 (Cambridge: CUP, 1989), 254–64. ISBN 052126703X - S.J. Looker and C. Porteous, Richard Jefferies, Man of the Fields (London: John Baker, 1965)
- H. Matthews and P. Treitel, The Forward Life of Richard Jefferies (Oxford: Petton Books, 1994). ISBN 9780952281306
- H. Matthews and P. Treitel, Richard Jefferies: An Index (Longcot:Petton Books, 2008). ISBN 9780952281320
- H. Matthews and R. Welshman, "Richard Jefferies: An Anthology" (Longcot: Petton Books, 2010). ISBN 9780956375124
- G. Miller and H. Matthews, Richard Jefferies, A bibliographical study (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1993). ISBN 0859679187
- B. Morris, Richard Jefferies and the Ecological Vision (Oxford: Trafford Publishing, 2006). ISBN 1412098289
- A. Rossabi, ‘(John) Richard Jefferies (1848–1887)’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: OUP, 2004)
- A. Smith, The Interpreter: a biography of Richard Jefferies (Swindon: Blue Gate Books, 2008). ISBN 9780955587436.
- B. Taylor, Richard Jefferies (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982) ISBN 0805768165
- E. Thomas, Richard Jefferies: His Life and Work (London: Hutchinson, 1909)
- K. Tryon, "Adventures in the Vale of the White Horse: Jefferies Land" (Longcot: Petton Books, 2010). ISBN 9780956375117
- H. Sheehan, Jill Carter[www.jillcarterartworks.com]: "'The Cunning Spider"' (Swindon: BlueGate Books, 2007)
External links
- http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=mediatype%3A(texts)%20-contributor%3Agutenberg%20AND%20(subject%3A%22Jefferies%2C%20John%20Richard%2C%201848-1887%22%20OR%20creator%3A%22Jefferies%2C%20John%20Richard%2C%201848-1887%22%20OR%20creator%3A%22John%20Richard%20Jefferies%22%20OR%20title%3A%22John%20Richard%20Jefferies%22%20OR%20description%3A%22Jefferies%2C%20John%20Richard%22%20OR%20subject%3A%22Jefferies%2C%20Richard%201848-1887%22%20OR%20creator%3A%22Jefferies%2C%20Richard%2C%201848-1887%22%20OR%20creator%3A%22Richard%20Jefferies%22%20OR%20title%3A%22Richard%20Jefferies%22%20OR%20description%3A%22Richard%20Jefferies%22)Works by or about John Richard Jefferies] at Internet ArchiveInternet ArchiveThe Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It offers permanent storage and access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public domain books. The Internet Archive...
(scanned books original editions color illustrated) - Richard Jefferies Society
- The Old House at Coate: Jefferies Museum Development Project
- Richard Jefferies' House and Museum
- Free MP3 audiobook of After London from LibriVox