Agricultural History Review, Volume 68 Part 2 (2020), p. 317

Richard Jefferies was a prolific author whose essays on rural life, both human and nonhuman, helped to shape how late Victorians imagined England’s countryside. He was also an innovator of children’s literature through his ‘Bevis’ books and apocalyptic fiction via his novel of civilizational breakdown After London. Further, his memoir The story of my heart constituted a striking example of nature mysticism, chronicling Jefferies’ lifelong search for spiritual transcendence. His marginality in the literary canon today is due partly to his early death at 38, and partly to his tendency to express himself through short essays that give his œuvre a fragmentary character. However, Jefferies strongly influenced later authors, from W. H. Hudson to Edward Thomas, and his sensitivity to the suggestiveness of landscapes is echoed by contemporary nature writers like Robert Macfarlane. The miscellany is thus an apt vehicle for introducing Jefferies to new readers, and it is hard to imagine an editor better placed to compile one than Andrew Rossabi, whose mammoth, three-volume biography of the man (with two volumes still to be published) promises to be a milestone in Jefferies scholarship.

Instead of approaching Jefferies’ work chronologically, Rossabi jumps around the publication timeline, tracing at once Jefferies’ maturation as a writer and key stages in his life. This orientation coheres with Jefferies’ simultaneous concern with the hard facts of life in the countryside and the intense feelings and imaginative visions that filled his inner world or ‘soul-life’ as he termed it. Rossabi admits that ‘Jefferies was not a phrasemaker’ and ‘is not best served by excerpts’, his power being ‘accumulative’ rather than epigrammatic (p. 113). Nonetheless, the passages of up to 16 pages give ample tastes of the immersive worlds that Jefferies’ writing could conjure and will encourage readers to hunt down the full texts, most of which can be found online.

Rossabi’s curation exhibits the rich variety of Jefferies’ work. His early sensation tale, ‘A strange story’, indexes his interest in archaeology and fantasies of nature reclaiming the land from humans. His novels of village life like The dewy morn and Amaryllis at the fair resemble Thomas Hardy’s combination of pastoral idealism with social realism. Conversely, extracts from Jefferies’ children’s books Bevis and Wood magic show him refining his mystical nature religion, which he would express directly in The story of my heart. Jefferies wrote of modern life leaving ‘dust’ upon the heart and enclosing the mind in ‘a husk’ for which nature was the only cure (p. 26). In his reveries triggered by the landscapes’ sensual delights, the binary between humanity and the natural world dissolves, and Jefferies declared himself ‘lost, and absorbed into the being or existence of the universe’ (p. 29).

Yet, despite his reverence for nature, Jefferies also insisted on its indifference to humanity. ‘If the entire human race perished at this hour’, he wrote, ‘what difference would it make to the earth? What would the earth care? As much as for the extinct dodo’ (p. 147). This indifference is further underlined by extracts from After London, which depict England returning to primeval forests. Cultivated lowlands sink back into marshes while the wild descendants of domesticated dogs prey on sheep flocks and vermin hordes devour crops. These visions point to the tension in Jefferies’ thought between Romantic idealizations of nature and more Darwinian views of it as a scene of ruthless struggle (although Jefferies was technically an evolution sceptic).

Among Jefferies’ journalistic writing is a long letter he wrote to The Times on the condition of agricultural labourers, which established him as an authority on rural affairs. The letter reflects Jefferies’ conservatism, arguing that labourers were better off than unionists claimed while their employers’ fortunes were often precarious. The letter also observes the rustic workers with the analytic detachment of an ethnographer. Jefferies describes their diets, changing sartorial tastes and distinctive gaits, shaped by their working motions.

Jefferies’ sharp eye paints rural Victorian life in further vivid details in passages from collections such as The gamekeeper at home. He notes the unconscious ease with which the gamekeeper shoulders and fires his gun, conditioned by years of use to experience the weapon as ‘almost a portion of his body’ (p. 69). Meanwhile, in a corner of the gamekeeper’s shed lies an old man-trap, left to rust since the outlawing of such devices. Jefferies depicts the trap as a ‘relic’ of more brutal times before modern policing and the gradualist diffusion of political power (p. 67).

Jefferies is equally acute in his observations of the religious and social habits of Victorian villagers. The tendency of non-conformists to marry early and remarry quickly when widowed reminds him of the Mormons in North America. This analogy leads him to speculate that the two groups, seemingly so far apart, possess a common ‘cast of mind’ characterized by unsentimental practicality and a strict division of public and domestic spheres (p. 225).

A persistent theme in the collection is how modern labour degrades body and soul, reminiscent of John Ruskin’s social criticism. ‘One of the New Voters’ depicts the health-wrecking living conditions of an agricultural worker. Jefferies’ description of summer landscapes is marred by the irony that those working in them are too malnourished, exhausted and uneducated to appreciate their beauty. Elsewhere, Jefferies praises the pigeons nesting in the roof of the British Museum as wiser than the humans who toil inside, forgetful of the gorgeous sunshine. Such sentiments appear most poignant in the extracts from Jefferies’ last essays, written upon his death-bed, when he could no longer enjoy the great outdoors.

Aside from the historical interest of Jefferies’ writing, this miscellany shows that he anticipated several concerns of recent nature writing. Like Richard Mabey, he problematized the rural/urban binary and constructed natural landscapes as therapeutic objects against depression and ennui. He also exhibited an early (or proto-) conservationist sensibility, lamenting the destruction of wildlife by hunting and industrialization. Moreover, his sense of humans’ dependence on the natural world and his dark visions of ecological catastrophe could not feel timelier.