Richard Jefferies

Life and works

Early life

John Richard Jefferies (he used the first name only during his childhood) was born at Coate 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 printer in London before returning to Swindon to run the family mill and bakery. Richard's mother, Elizabeth Gyde (1817–1895), always called Betsy, was the daughter of John Jefferies's binder and manager.

These relationships are mirrored in the characters of Jefferies's 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 made 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 (160,000 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. His uncle, Thomas Harrild, was a son of the printing innovator Robert Harrild. Jefferies kept a close friendship with Mrs. Ellen Harrild (nee Gyde) 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 shooting, snaring rabbits, 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.

First successes

While in Swindon, Jefferies 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, Tolworth, 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's 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.

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 Kapchack, 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.

Illness and death

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 Brighton 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. The Story of My Heart caused controversy on its publication, due to the book's rejection of Christianity.

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.

Jefferies's next novel, After London (1885), can be seen as an early example of "post-apocalyptic fiction": 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 22–24, which go beyond recreation of a medieval world to give a disturbing and surreal description of the site of the fallen city.

Influence and reputation

Biographies

A Peculiarly English Genius or, A Wiltshire Taoist: A Biography of Richard Jefferies by Andrew Rossabi in four volumes published by Petton Books between 2017-2026.

Early works included three by Henry Stephens Salt:

Richard Jefferies: A Study (1894)

Richard Jefferies: His Life and His Ideas (1905)

The Faith of Richard Jefferies (1906)

Henry Williamson edited a collection:

Richard Jefferies : Selections of his Work with details of his Life and Circumstances, his Death and Immortality (1947)

Inspiration to others

J. S. Fletcher wrote several novels about English rural life modelled on Jefferies' work, beginning with The Wonderful Wapentake (1894). Henry Williamson's novel series The Flax of Dream (1921–1928) was influenced by Jefferies both in style and themes. Other writers who admired Jefferies included David Garnett, Edward Thomas (who wrote his biography), Leslie Paul, Ethel Mannin, John Fowles, Henry Miller, Raymond Williams, Jeff VanderMeer and Ludovic Kennedy.

Jefferies' novel After London was a source of inspiration for the band Bird in the Belly's 2022 concept album After the City. The band adapted extracts from the novel, together with broadside ballads, plague poetry and Lancashire Cotton Famine poetry to create a back story to the events that Jefferies details in his novel.

Jefferies' ideas became an inspiration for the conservationist Rachel Carson.

Commemorations

The Richard Jefferies Bird Sanctuary in Surbiton commemorates him.

The BBC TV series Antiques Road Trip featured the Richard Jefferies Museum in 2022 when antiques expert James Braxton met with the museum's director Mike Pringle to tell the authors story.

The Richard Jefferies Society awards an annual Richard Jefferies Award for nature writing.

Works

The following list is necessarily selective. Much of Jefferies's 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).

Published in Jefferies's lifetime

The Scarlet Shawl (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1874)

Restless Human Hearts (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1875)

World's End (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1877)

The Gamekeeper at Home (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1878) (reissued by Cambridge University Press, 2009; ISBN 978-1-108-00410-7)

Wild Life in a Southern County (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1879)

The Amateur Poacher (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1879) (reissued by Cambridge University Press, 2009; ISBN 978-1-108-00409-1)

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 Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1882)

Nature Near London (London: Chatto & Windus, 1883)

The Story of My Heart: An Autobiography (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1883)

Red Deer (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1884)

The Life of the Fields (London: Chatto & Windus, 1884)

Posthumous publications

Only the first of these books (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 & Co, 1909)

Eye of the Beholder: an illustrated anthology (Southampton: Ashford Press Pub., 1987)

"The Rise of Maximin: Emperor of the Orient", first published in serial form in 'The New Monthly Magazine' (1876–7), (Oxfordshire: Petton Books, 2012). ISBN 978-0-9563751-3-1.

"The Farmer's World: Richard Jefferies' Agricultural Journalism in the late 1870s". A collection of Jefferies's articles published in the Livestock Journal. Published by Petton Books, 2016, ISBN 978-0-9563751-6-2

"Ben Tubbs Adventures" (Norfolk: Petton Books, 2016). Jefferies's earliest work of fiction.