Richard Jefferies and the Ecological Vision

By Brian Morris

Richard Jefferies and the Ecological Vision provides an illuminating account of one of Britain's best-loved nature writers, the incomparable Richard Jefferies. Lucid and comprehensive the book critically explores the diversity of Jefferies' literary talents, for this Wiltshire naturalist was without doubt a many sided and comprehensive genius. As a prose poet of nature Jefferies, like Thoreau, attempted to combine a vivid empirical naturalism with an extraordinary poetic imagination. He was indeed, as Brian Morris demonstrates, a pioneer ecologist.

Although blessed with some insightful early biographers, Jefferies has been very much a neglected figure, and this study attempts to re-affirm his importance and relevence as a literary naturalist.

Given the diversity of the Jefferies talents the structure of the book largely follows, and critically explores, the many different genres that Jefferies expressed in his writing. An initial chapter outlines Jefferies biography the history of a short life, for Jeffries, like Keats, died of tuberculosis and at the early age of thirty-eight.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Feb 20, 2007
• ISBN: 9781425193928

Brian Morris

Brian Morris is the author of several books on anthropology and natural history including Anthropological Studies of Religion (Cambridge University Press, 1987) and Western Conceptions of the Individual (Berg 1991). He teaches anthropology at Goldsmiths College, University of London.

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Copyright 2006 Brian Morris.

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CONTENTS

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

ABBREVIATIONS

1. THE LIFE OF RICHARD JEFFERIES

2. THE ETHNOGRAPHER OF GAMEKEEPING AND HUNTING

3. THE POLITICAL JOURNALIST OF THE RURAL ECONOMY

4. THE PROSE-POET OF NATURE

5. THE NOVELIST OF THE RURAL LANDSCAPE

6. THE VISIONARY NATURALIST

7. THE COMPREHENSIVE GENIUS

8. JEFFERIES AND THE NATURE TRADITION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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For Trevor, Jean And Alan --

PREFACE

Having failed my eleven-plus, my secondary school years were largely devoted to acquiring technical skills – in woodwork, engineering drawing, forge, workshop practice, and metalwork. I never learned French and never had a lesson in biology, but I knew a lot about Archimedes. In my first year at secondary school I came bottom of my class – 33rd. I was thus, around the age of thirteen, barely literate. Born in the Black Country, a working class boy, all my male relatives had been foundry workers, going back to the nineteenth century, either puddlers, or like my own Dad, iron moulders. I thus left school at the age of fifteen to work in Akrill’s foundry, Great Bridge. At that time my only interest in life was football – I was an avid supporter of West Bromwich Albion – and natural history, and I spent many hours with my younger brothers and my cousin Terry Taylor, exploring the Tame Valley canal and the Friar Park woods, watching birds (without the aid of field glasses) and studying other forms of wildlife.

In my last year at school I was, however, very fortunate to have as an English teacher Mr L W Bennett, who I always thought was of Scottish origin, only to discover some forty years later that he was in fact born in Darlaston. Strict, but friendly and warm-hearted, and never using the cane, this excellent teacher encouraged me to read and write, and recognizing my passionate interest in wildlife, he prompted me to read books about birds and general natural history. This encouragement completely transformed my life, and the fact that I later became a university teacher in anthropology, I largely owe to his interest in my welfare. The first article I ever wrote in fact was on ‘Bird Migration; which was published in the school magazine The Cronehillian. In my last year at school I thus began to read books by such nature writers as Frances Pitt, W Percival Westell, Ernest Thompson Seton, W H Hudson, H Mortimer Batten, Seton Gordon (all now, sadly forgotten) – and the subject of this present study, Richard Jefferies. I have therefore been an avid reader of the nature essays of Jefferies since my youth, and this long term interest has motivated me to write this critical introduction to his life-work.

The book aims to be both readable and scholarly, but I have not followed the usual academic fashion of appropriating and re-writing other people’s work, and then giving an aura of originality to one’s own work by relegating sources to obscure footnotes at the end of the book. I have thus highlighted other scholars’ work on Jefferies in the text, and have freely quoted from their work to give the flavour of their own writings. As this book is about Richard Jefferies I have also quoted liberally from his own work – often long extracts, even at the risk of giving my own study a rather potted feeling. It will, I trust, encourage others to read the writings of this unique Wiltshire naturalist.

I should very much like to acknowledge the warm support I received from members of the Richard Jefferies Society, and would especially like to thank the following for their help and encouragement: Mark Daniel, Margaret Evans, W J Keith, Susan King, John Price, Andrew Rossabi, Ray Morse, Angela Travis and Phyllis Treitel. I should also like to thank the staff at the Devizes Museum, and the Swindon Reference Library for their support. Finally, I offer my thanks to Emma Svanberg and Sheila Robinson who helped me to type up the manuscript.

Brian Morris

June 20th, 2006

INTRODUCTION

This book offers a critical introduction to the life and work of Richard Jefferies, a man who has been described as a minor English eccentric and something of a curiosity among English nature writers (Coveney 1957: 232). Invariably denoted as a country writer within the rural tradition of English literature, Jefferies has thus always been linked with such writers as Gilbert White, William Cobbett, George Borrow, Thomas Hardy, W H Hudson and H J Massingham. An early generation of literary critics declared that Jefferies was little more than a mere cataloguer of the sights and sounds of the English landscape, and that his importance for prosperity would undoubtedly dwindle – that Jefferies would be remembered as little more than a minor Victorian nature-essayist (Saintsbury 1896: 417).

Yet every generation seems to rediscover and reaffirm the importance of Richard Jefferies, and his books and new anthologies of his essays continue to be regularly reissued. There is still a flourishing Richard Jefferies Society dedicated to his memory, and to promoting an appreciation and study of the life and writings of this Wiltshire naturalist.

What has to be recognized, however, is that Jefferies is ill-understood if considered simply as a nature essayist – in the tradition of White and Hudson – for his talents as a writer were diverse and multi-faceted. Indeed it is quite remarkable how much Jefferies produced in his short life – for like Thoreau and Keats he died of tuberculosis, and at the early age of thirty-eight. The well-known literary critic, Q D Leavis rightly described Jefferies as a many-sided and comprehensive genius (1938: 437), for by turns, Jefferies wrote as a social historian and political journalist, writing trenchant essays on agricultural topics and on the rural economy; as an ethnographer of gamekeeping, poaching and hunting – for as McKelvie writes there is more than a touch of the amateur anthropologist about Jefferies (BL 12); as a poet-naturalist and pioneer ecologist who wrote evocative and insightful essays on the English countryside and its wildlife; as an aspiring novelist of the rural landscape, whose novels Bevis – the Story of a Boy and Amaryllis at the Fair have an enduring value, Jefferies often being compared with Mark Twain and Thomas Hardy; and, finally, as a nature mystic whose moving autobiography The Story of my Heart inspired and enraptured such scholars and writers as Edward Thomas, Henry Williamson, Leslie Paul, Ethel Mannin and Henry Miller.

There is indeed something unique and inspiring about this shy and reticent prose poet of England’s fields and woodlands (as his epitaph reads) which comparisons tend to diminish. This is so whether Jefferies is compared with Mark Twain, Thomas Hardy or D H Lawrence as a novelist, with Wordsworth and Whitman as a nature mystic, with Cobbett as a political journalist, or with White, Thoreau or Hudson as a literary naturalist. While Jefferies often comes off second-best in such comparisons, it says much for the richness and diversity of Jefferies’ talents that he can be compared with such contrasting and illustrious literary figures.

Yet although Jefferies’ work does fall within certain and easily identifiable literary genres, it has to be recognized, as Brian Taylor (1982) suggests, that a strong case can also be made for the presence of an underlying unity in both the life and work of Richard Jefferies. He was indeed unique, and in essence, he pioneered and expressed an ecological vision that encompassed all these genres.

Often placed within the romantic tradition, for Jefferies communicated an ecological sensibility and was critical of Cartesian mechanistic philosophy, seeking to overcome the alienation of humanity from nature, Jefferies in an important sense embraced both the Enlightenment and Romantic philosophical traditions. He thus, as we shall explore in this study, combined rationalism and mysticism, empirical science and poetry, humanism with an emerging ecological consciousness. Jefferies can therefore best be described as a visionary naturalist, or, as his early biographers described him, as a poet-naturalist.

Much neglected as a writer, and treated very much as a marginal literary figure, there is still no authoritative biography of Richard Jefferies. Fortunately, he was blessed by having some interesting and insightful early biographers. All four are worthy of some discussion.

The first of these was Walter Besant (1836-1901). A popular and best selling author of his day, and deeply involved in the welfare of London’s urban poor, Besant wrote The Eulogy of Richard Jefferies (1888), within a year of Jefferies’ demise. As its title suggests, it is not a critical biography; it is rather a memoir, full of warmth and understanding, for Besant’s admiration of Jefferies was, as he put it, pure and unalloyed. Jefferies had taught his Victorian contemporaries, Besant suggests, to see the natural world with new eyes and he considered Jefferies, as a literary naturalist, to be superior to both Gilbert White and Henry Thoreau (1888: 47).

Jefferies’ second biographer was the redoubtable Henry Salt (1851-1939), whose study Richard Jefferies: His Life and His Ideals was published in 1894. A friend of William Morris and Edward Carpenter, Salt described himself as a rationalist, socialist, pacifist and humanitarian, and though he died in relative obscurity was throughout his long life an active and well-known campaigner against blood sports. He was also an ardent nature conservationist, wrote a classic and seminal study on Animal Rights (1892), and his books advocating a vegetarian diet had a profound impact on Mohandas Gandhi, who was also one of his friends. His own religious faith Salt described as the Creed of Kinship; a form of atheism that essentially entailed a refusal to inflict unnecessary suffering on any sentient being, and to uphold the sanctity of life.

Early in his life – he was a teacher at Eton for many years – Salt discovered the writings of Thoreau and Jefferies, and became a fervent admirer and student of both poet-naturalists – as a he described them. He eventually came to write insightful intellectual biographies of both men. Jefferies’ autobiography The Story of My Heart, Salt considered a wonderful and subversive book (1930: 102) and suggests that as a thinker, Jefferies stood in the romantic tradition of Rousseau, expressing a new spirit of reverential sympathy towards the natural world (1894: 73).

Salt’s study of Jefferies is less a biography than an appreciation of his genius, and an intellectual assessment, not uncritical, of Jefferies’ many talents – as sportsman, poet-naturalist, nature-mystic and novelist. Considering the nature-essays ‘The Pageant of Summer’ and ‘Hours of Spring’ to be literary masterpieces, it is quite clear that Salt felt that Jefferies’ main forte to be that of a poet-naturalist. Salt was certainly a great admirer and advocate of Jefferies’ nature philosophy (for important studies of Salt see Winsten 1951, Hendrick 1977).

Another scholar who was deeply influenced by Jefferies in his youth, and came to write a biography of the naturalist, as well as to establish himself as a major English poet was Edward Thomas (1878-1917). Even though he has been described as the quintessential English poet and was born in London, Thomas always thought of himself as an expatriate Welshman, for both his parents were Welsh. He was an avid reader of books from an early age, as well as being fond of the outdoor life and natural history. As his wife Helen Thomas simply put it: he had a love of nature and literature, and Richard Jefferies was his mentor and favourite author (Gant 1977: 9).

As Thomas had relatives who lived in Swindon, he often visited the town when a boy, and explored the area around Coate Farm (where Jefferies was born), as well as befriending, like Jefferies before him, a local gamekeeper (Watts 2002). While at Oxford, Thomas secretly married Helen Noble, and she was to write in her memoirs that she and Thomas eagerly read Jefferies’ books together, and records

with delight I found the joy in one’s body spoken of there as if it was right and good (1972: 22).

Thomas earned his living, like Jefferies, from his pen, and in the space of fifteen years produced over forty books and anthologies, and according to a biographer wrote over a million words in literary reviews. At the age of thirty-five, encouraged by Robert Frost, Thomas begin writing poetry. Four years later, in June 1917, having volunteered to serve overseas, Thomas was tragically killed in action in Flanders. Like his beloved Jefferies, Thomas had a short but highly productive literary career.

In April 1907 Thomas was commissioned by Hutchinsons to write a critical biography of Jefferies. In August that year he took a three-week holiday in Wiltshire with his wife Helen, and spent time walking the downs, visiting the places associated with Jefferies, consulting the parish registers, and interviewing Jefferies’ family and others who had known him personally. Thomas’ biography Richard Jefferies: His Life and Work was published in 1909, and is significantly dedicated to W H Hudson. The book had mixed reception, some critics felt the book had too many quotations, while Lorna Collard pronounced it dull but full of useful facts and dates (1928: 623). Other scholars, rightly in my view, have acclaimed the biography, for Thomas approached his subject with an unusual critical sympathy…The biography has indeed been described as a labour of love in the best sense (Cooke 1970: 52). The critic Q D Leavis described the book as a classic in critical biography, and a model biography that contains better literary criticism than most critical works (1938: 436). This view has been affirmed by many later scholars. Miller and Matthews thus write that Thomas’

long and close attachment to Jefferies’ books and his countryside, the deep perceptions of a kindred spirit, combined with his own great gifts of expression, have made Thomas pre-eminent among Jefferies interpreters and advocates (1993: 588).

Although Thomas’ biography of Jefferies gives a rich and detailed account of the naturalist’s life and circumstances, it is in fact much more than a biography; for it gives rich topographical descriptions of the Wiltshire countryside – Jefferies’ Land; long extracts from Jefferies’ books and essays which are skilfully blended into the text – it is anything but a pastiche – and is distinguished above all, as Rossabi writes, by the excellence of the literary criticism (1992: 24). Besides emphasizing the diversity of Jefferies’ literary talents, what comes out strongly in Thomas’ biography is the fact that Jefferies is pre-eminently a writer of place – he describes Jefferies as an earth spirit (1909: 84) – and that in combining a sensuous disposition with a mystical approach to nature, Jefferies emerges as a naturalist with an extraordinary poetic vision (for useful studies of Edward Thomas see Thomas 1985, Cooke 1970, Smith 1986, Hooker 1996; 56-95).

Jefferies seems to be one of those writers who have always attracted a number of fervent devotees, but no admirer of Jefferies was more dedicated, enthusiastic and painstaking than Samuel J Looker (1888-1965). At the end of his long life Looker co-authored (with Crichton Porteous) a fourth biography of Jefferies. It was titled Richard Jefferies: Man of the Fields (1965). Compared with Thomas’ critical work, it is a rather disappointing text, and seems to have been mainly written by Porteous. It is subtitled ‘A Biography and Letters’, and thus contains long extracts from Jefferies’ letters, as well as from his notebooks. The book certainly has its value, even though one scholar, somewhat presumptuously, dismissed Looker’s biography as absolutely worthless (DeLattre 1992: 32).

At the age of thirteen, while browsing in Stoke Newington Public Library, Looker came across a copy of The Story of My Heart. Its refreshing candour and impassioned prose cast a magical spell over Looker, and he was entranced by the work. He was to spend the next sixty-three years devoted to Jefferies, whose writings he loved and admired with an unusual intensity (LP xiv). In his tribute to Looker, Andrew Rossabi suggests that Looker gave his life, so to speak, to Jefferies. Looker sought out and unearthed everything on or by Jefferies, particularly from long-forgotten periodicals such as the Live Stock Journal; he gathered together manuscripts, letters, and Jefferies’ own field notebooks, often at some expense (these are now housed in the manuscript section of the British Library); he painstakingly transcribed the notebooks and published them in book form (thus earning the gratitude of all Jefferies’ scholars); and between 1937 and 1957 published ten anthologies of Jefferies’ writings. Many of these books contain unpublished essays and letters. All the books Looker edited have lucid, sympathetic and useful introductions, and are invaluable contributions to Jefferies’ scholarship (Rossabi, AF ix-xi).

The problem with Looker is that he tended to portray Jefferies less as a many-sided genius – which is how Salt, Thomas and Leavis had all described Jefferies, but rather as primarily a philosophical recluse and a prose-poet of nature. In his most well-known anthology, Jefferies’ England (1937), in which Jefferies specifically aims to show the real Jefferies, Looker includes only Jefferies’ more philosophical nature essays, and includes no excerpts from his early country books, his autobiography or his novels. Even the essays chosen are edited, so as to exclude anything that darkens or disturbs the rural idyll (Miller and Matthews 1993: 688).

For Looker, Jefferies was essentially a nature-mystic, a naturalist in whom knowledge had given place to wisdom. Towards the natural world, Looker writes, Jefferies had a profound sense of sympathy and wonder. His contemplation of nature thus took a religious form. In his later, more imaginative essays – which had an especial appeal to Looker – Jefferies went beyond simply being a nature-essayist and invoked, Looker suggests

hitherto unsuspected vistas of thought and feeling in his portrayal of life on earth. Thus Looker concluded that Jefferies was among the greatest nature writers of the Victorian era – passionate, pure and sensuous (JE xvii, JC xxiii).

Looker always tended to view himself as defending the integrity and reputation of Jefferies as a nature-writer, as against such literary critics as John Moore, Malcolm Elwin and Geoffrey Grigson. The latter writer, for example, had dismissed Jefferies as simply an ordinary observer, whose writings appealed only to children, the immature and the second-rate (Warren 1948: 15). Such critics, Looker felt, harboured an attitude of intellectual arrogance towards a writer – Jefferies – who was far greater than themselves, and they had in fact climbed to success on his shoulders. In responding to these critiques, Looker came to feel that Jefferies had never received due recognition from literary critics and other nature-writers. This, of course, as Henry Williamson (1965) pointed out, was quite untrue. Scholars and naturalists, for more than a generation, had paid tribute to Jefferies as a unique and outstanding literary naturalist, and these include such diverse figures as Edward Thomas, John Lubbock, Henry Salt, W H Hudson, Q D Leavis, Edward Garnett, Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald, R M Lockley, as well as Henry Williamson. None of these were second rate scholars or naturalists, as Grigson carelessly implied.

There is, however, a sense in which opinions about Jefferies seem to go to extremes, and are either completely dismissive or derogatory – as expressed by Grigson, Elwin and such naturalists as L G Payne (1946) who found Jefferies’ writings vague, monotonous, unscientific and lacking in depth – or are full of uncritical adulation. Ever since Besant, writings about Jefferies have been expressed, as Taylor puts it, in an often myopic haze of flattery (1982: 15). It is therefore important to steer between these two extremes if we are to appreciate Jefferies’ enduring significance as a poet-naturalist and as an important harbinger of an ecological vision.

(for other useful biographical studies of Jefferies see Arkell 1933, Bugada 1958, Taylor 1982: 1-28).

All of Jefferies’ early biographers seem to have been profoundly influenced by their early encounter with Jefferies’ writings. The same may be said with regard to several other twentieth century naturalists and writers.

The novelist Henry Williamson, for example, read Jefferies’ autobiography as a youth, having discovered a copy of The Story of My Heart in a secondhand bookshop in Folkestone. The book came to Williamson as a revelation and completely changed his whole outlook on life. He had, Williamson wrote, found his true purpose in life to extend Jefferies’ truth of redemption through nature to my fellow men (1994: 37). Williamson was later (1937) to edit an anthology of Jefferies’ writings.

The founder of the Woodcraft Folk, and later an important Christian philosopher, Leslie Paul, experienced a similar revelation in his youthful years.

The Shropshire novelist Mary Webb is author of the well-known country book Gone to Earth; she too discovered Jefferies’ The Story of My Heart as a teenager, and his gospel of the earth, she records, made a great impact upon her. She took Jefferies as her model, rejected Orthodox Christianity and became a pantheist (Moult 1932: 60-61).

The popular novelist and anarchist Ethel Mannin also discovered Jefferies in her youth, and considered The Story of My Heart to have been a significant influence on her thought, along with Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Edward Carpenter’s Towards Democracy. Extracts from Jefferies’ book she carefully copied into her own journal when she was seventeen years old (Warren 1948: 16).

A contemporary writer of several best-selling books on the British countryside and its flora, Richard Mabey, also admits falling under the spell of Jefferies during his adolescent years. He writes that during his school days he shamelessly plagiarized Jefferies – both his style and passages from his nature essays. He thus came to win a school prize for essay writing! He chose Jefferies’ The Story of My Heart as his prize, but the book had to be vetted by the staff, as they thought it might be a piece of cheap romantic fiction! (1983: 133).

Many naturalists and writers, it seems, on reading Jefferies, especially The Story of My Heart, found in Jefferies a kindred spirit, whose feelings and thoughts about the natural world they found enthralling and absorbing – echoing their own thoughts and aspirations (cf Humphreys 1976: 782). When I first read the autobiography in my early twenties, along with Ernest Thompson Seton’s animal stories, it certainly made a vital and enduring impact on my own thoughts.

Over the past half century Jefferies has been the subject of a wealth of critical studies, mainly by literary critics, who have sought to assess Jefferies’ unique contribution to English literature. During the course of the present study I shall engage with many of these studies, but mention may be made here of one truly pioneering work, that of W J Keith (1965), who produced a landmark study of Jefferies’ life work (for other important critical studies of Jefferies see Mitchard 1982, Taylor 1982, Manning 1984, Hooker 1996, and the various illuminating essays by Andrew Rossabi).

Given the diversity of Jefferies’ talents, the structure of the present text largely follows and explores the many different genres that Jefferies expressed in his writings. After an initial chapter outlining Jefferies’ biography – a history of his short life – Chapter Two discusses Jefferies’ role as an ethnographer of gamekeeping, hunting and poaching, as expressed in his classic early country books – The Gamekeeper at Home, The Amateur Poacher and Red Deer. It thus focuses on Jefferies as a sportsman-naturalist, and examines not only Jefferies’ ambivalence towards hunting that he sometimes expressed, but also his strident defence of sport – hunting, shooting and fishing.

Jefferies first came to the notice of a wider public with letters he wrote to The Times in 1872 on the conditions of the Wiltshire labourer, and Chapter Three is devoted to Jefferies’ writings as a political journalist, and as a social historian of the English rural economy. It examines in particular Jefferies’ classic work Hodge and His Masters (which includes enlightening essays on the English landed gentry and their tenant farmers); his many essays on the agricultural labourer – the toilers of the field; and his various informative articles on farming. Of especial interest is the extent to which Jefferies progressed from being a staunch defender of the position of the tenant farmer, with an almost sycophantic attitude towards the land-owning aristocracy, to that of a radical socialist – a proto-Marxist defending the rights of the agricultural worker.

Chapter Four explores the genre for which Jefferies is best known – his writings as a nature essayist and as the prose-poet of nature. I thus discuss his two key topographical books on the Wiltshire landscape – Wild Life in a Southern County and Round About a Great Estate – and his natural history essays on the wider English landscape, especially in relation to the River Thames, and the Surrey and Sussex countryside which Jefferies also knew well. These essays were published in such works as The Open Air, Nature Near London, Life in the Fields and Field and Hedgerow. In the chapter I highlight Jefferies’ aesthetic or poetic approach to the natural world, his interest in folk culture, and his emerging ecological sensibility.

Throughout his short life Jefferies aspired to be a novelist – with little success – and Chapter Five examines Jefferies rather unique role as a novelist of the rural landscape. The chapter thus outlines, as well as reviewing the work of many literary critics with regard to Jefferies’ five major novels – the adventure story Bevis-the Story of a Boy, the bucolic novels Greene Ferne Farm, The Dewy Morn and Amaryllis at the Fair – all to some degree autobiographical and based on his own early experiences at Coate – and the strange futuristic novel After London. Although it is generally accepted that Jefferies, compared with Thomas Hardy, D H Lawrence and Mark Twain, lacked the narrative skills necessary to become a major novelist, his novels, nevertheless, have their own intrinsic merit and interest which, in the chapter, I attempt to highlight.

One of the books for which Jefferies is best known, if not renowned, is his compelling autobiography The Story of My Heart – a confession which describes his own mystical experiences with regard to the natural world. Chapter Six is thus focussed on Jefferies’ visionary naturalism, and outlines Jefferies’ nature-mysticism, as expressed in many of his more philosophical nature-essays, such as ‘The Pageant of Summer’ and ‘Hours of Spring’, as well as in his autobiography, which Franco Bugada described as a sacred book for all those who care for the welfare of humanity (1958: 74). In the second part of the chapter I critically explore the many interpretations of Jefferies’ nature-mysticism, as advanced by various scholars.

Chapter Seven offers a critical review of the many aspects of what Leavis described as Jefferies’ many-sided and comprehensive genius, and deals, respectively, with the following topics: Jefferies’ sensuous approach to the natural world and his eidetic vision; the aesthetics of his poetic naturalism and Jefferies’ standing as a pioneer ecologist – and I examine his writings on all the major forms of wildlife; the realism and nature-mysticism inherent in Jefferies’ novels; and, finally, Jefferies’ important writings as an agricultural journalist, particularly his writings on the agricultural depression of the 1870’s and his repudiation of any past rural idyll.

The final chapter reiterates Jefferies’ importance as a prose-poet of nature and as a pioneer ecologist, and attempts to situate Jefferies in the back to nature movements of the late nineteenth century, as well as his place in the rural tradition of English literature.

One writer has described Jefferies as something of a relic within the rural tradition of English literature, even though he insists that Jefferies is an excellent writer whose works should be permanently available (Coombes 1980: 65). In the present study I aim to provide a critical introduction to the life-work of this relic – Richard Jefferies – in all its diversity, emphasizing that Jefferies was unique in many ways in combining rationalism and mysticism, social realism with an ecological sensibility, and a vivid empirical naturalism with an extraordinary poetic imagination. Most important, as a poet naturalist and pioneer ecologist Jefferies certainly needs to be placed alongside Henry Thoreau, John Muir and Aldo Leopold, as one of the true precursors of the environmental movement.

ABBREVIATIONS

To avoid excessive footnoting, I have used abbreviations in the text wherever referring to Jefferies’ own writings or to key texts.

CHAPTER ONE

THE LIFE OF RICHARD JEFFERIES

1.Family Background

Richard Jefferies was born at Coate Farm in the parish of Chiseldon, near Swindon, on the 6th November 1848. Taking the names of his grandfather and great grandfather, he was christened John Richard, when baptized in the Holy Rood Church, Swindon. He was, however, always known simply Richard Jefferies. An early biographer suggests that he belonged to an Old English Yeoman stock and was a veritable son of the soil (Besant 1888: 5-6); in fact, his ancestry was rather more complex and diverse. His great grandfather Richard Jefferies (1738-1825) was a rather prosperous businessman who purchased Coate Farm in 1800, together with a mill and bakery in Swindon. He had two sons and the younger son John Jefferies (1784-1868) – the grandfather of Richard Jefferies – seems to have been an important influence in Jefferies’ early life. As a young man John Jefferies worked for a printer and publisher in Fleet Street, London, returning to Swindon in 1816 to take over his father’s bakery business. A lover of books, and said to be a prodigy of learning, he built two new houses in Swindon, and extended the house at Coate. He was by all accounts the controlling influence in family affairs. John Jefferies had eight children. One of these was Jefferies own father, James Luckett Jefferies (1816-1896), who was born in London and who, in his youth, had spent some years in Canada. He is described as a dark haired, intensely bright blue-eyed man of about five feet ten inches in height, with fine hands and feet (Thomas 1909: 25). In September 1844, when aged twenty seven, he married Elizabeth (‘Betsy’) Gyde, who was the daughter of Charles Gyde of Islington, a printer and bookseller and an early associate of Jefferies’ grandfather. The marriage took place at the Holy Trinity Church, Islington, and after a honeymoon in Brighton, the couple settled at Coate Farm, then an agricultural smallholding owned by James Lucketts’ father, John Jefferies. Elizabeth Gyde, Jefferies mother, is described as short, with hazel eyes and brown hair, a ‘town-fared woman with a beautiful face and a pleasure-loving soul, kind and generous to a fault, but unsuited to a country life" (Thomas 1909: 26).

At Coate Farm James Luckett Jefferies and his wife were to remain for some thirty years engaged in uneconomic farming, without working capital and unable to generate a profit (M T7). Jefferies’ mother had a sister Ellen and a brother, Frederick, both of whom were important figures in Jefferies’ early life. Ellen was married to a London printer, Thomas Harrild, while her brother was an engraver and artist of some talent and note.

It was at Coate Farm that Jefferies spent his early formative years, and his early experiences are graphically described in the last book that was published during his lifetime – "Amaryllis at the Fair". Part fiction, part autobiography, the book was published in March 1887. Five months later, after a long illness, Jefferies died of tuberculosis – on August 14th, 1887 at his home in Goring-on-Sea, Sussex. He was only thirty-eight years of age.

Coate Farm, Jefferies birthplace was a plain, oblong brick house of two storeys, situated about two miles southeast of Swindon on the road to Marlborough. [It now houses the Jefferies Museum]. The land attached to the farmhouse was quite limited, only about forty acres in extent, mainly under grass, feeding about eight cows and not employing more than one labourer, except during the haymaking season. Jefferies’ father, who is essentially portrayed as Farmer Iden in "Amaryllis at the Fair" was a rather eccentric but sensitive man, conservative in his politics, proud and independent, a perceptive observer of the natural world, and with a special fondness for trees. He always had good apple trees growing at Coate, and he planted at the farm copper beech, cherry trees, mulberry, lilac and weeping ash. He seems to have been always planting trees (Thomas 1909: 27).

The portrait that Jefferies draws of his father is of a man full of wisdom and thought; one who meditates aloud; one who roams about his fields watching and remembering; one who brings to the planting of potatoes as much thought and care as if he was writing an immortal poem; yet an unpractical and unsuccessful man, who goes steadily and surely downhill (Besant 1888: 15). For James Luckett Jefferies was not a successful farmer, and when his father died in 1868, the complications of the will left him heavily in debt. He thus ended his days as an odd-job gardener in Bath, having sold Coate Farm in 1878. He died there in 1896. Looker suggests that Jefferies did not derive much from his father, other than certain dispositions – a love of solitude, reserve, and a habit of thinking for himself, and a grounding in general country knowledge (LP 8).

Although Jefferies’ mother was an attractive and generous woman and extremely sociable, she was also described as irritable and queer, for her marriage and life on the farm was full of discord and unhappiness. Accustomed to city-life, she did not take easily to a rather restricted existence as the wife of a tenant farmer, making butter and cheese, particularly as her husband proved to be indifferent to her feelings. Richard Jefferies was her second child – a first child Ellen was tragically killed in an accident when five years old, knocked over by a horse and gig in February, 1851. Jefferies had two younger brothers, Henry James Harry, born in 1852, and Charles Charley born in 1958, and a sister Sarah, born in 1853.

Edna Manning has suggested that discord at home and worry about the affairs at the Coate Farm, was largely responsible for the young Richard Jefferies wandering alone in the surrounding countryside. From these lonely excursions he found a freedom of spirit he could never get at home (1984: 13). And in a real sense the countryside around Coate Farm was Jefferies land. This country and its people – the gamekeepers, the agricultural labourers and tenant farmers, the poachers, the clergy and the local squire – form the background, the inspiration and the subject – matter of most of his written work. He knew this landscape intimately, its people, and every aspect of its wildlife and natural history. In his early years Jefferies roamed the fields, woods and hills in the neighbourhood of Coate Farm in pursuit of sport, of health, of society, of solitude, of joy, of the dearest objects of his soul (Thomas 1909: 1). Communion with nature seems to have been the leitmotif of his short life. Although Jefferies left Coate Farm shortly after his marriage never to return, his heart and soul was always in the Wiltshire countryside. As Besant put it: He lived elsewhere; but he mostly wrote about Coate (1888: 6). His major works are thus centrally focussed around Coate Farm and the surrounding landscape – The Gamekeeper at Home, Wildlife in a Southern County’, Round About a Great Estate, The Amateur Poacher, Amaryllis at the Fair" are all about this locality. Of particular interest to Jefferies was the nearby Coate Water, a large reservoir that was built in the 1820’s to supply water to the Wiltshire and Berkshire canal (it is now a country park), the hamlet of Hodson and the Burderop Woods, the village of Chiseldon, and the downland to the south of Swindon – Barbury Hill, Liddington Hill, and Ashbourne Chase in particular. Part of the Marlborough downs, along which runs the ancient Ridgeway, this range of hills is full of ancient monuments – tumuli, burrows, ancient settlements and stone circles. These all had an especial interest for Jefferies, who had a keen sense of the prehistory embodied in the landscape. As Henry Salt wrote: The country around Coate Farm, consisting of rich grassy lowlands dominated by high downs was one that was full of treasure for naturalist and archaeologist alike" (1894:4). Jefferies imbibed and studied this landscape to an unusual degree [for useful studies of the Ridgeway and the Marlborough Downs. See Ingrams 1988 and Watts 1993].

2.Boyhood Days

Given the difficulties at home Jefferies was fostered at an early age by his mother’s sister, his Aunt Ellen having been sent at the age of four to live with his aunt and uncle, Ellen and Thomas Harrild, who resided at Sydenham in Kent. He remained there some five years, returning to Coate Farm during the summer months. He eventually returned home when he was nine years old. The couple were settled, childless, and relatively well-off – his uncle was a printer – and Jefferies developed a very strong affection and attachment to his Aunt Ellen. They encouraged him in his reading and drawing, and he was later to write in a letter to his aunt:

I always feel dull when I leave you. I am happier with you than at home, because you enter into my prospects with interest and are always kind…. I wish I could have got something to do in the neighbourhood of Sydenham, which would have enabled me to live with you (March, 1868, Besant 1888: 66).

She was, however, always more than an aunt; Jefferies looked upon himself as in many ways her son. They became even closer at the death of his uncle Thomas, who died in December 1867, at the early age of forty-five.

Jefferies seems to have been equally close to his mother’s brother Fred Gyde who, as earlier noted, was an artist of some talent – a gifted designer and engraver on wood and a delicate artist with the pencil. Jefferies kept a self-portrait of his uncle Fred in his sitting room, and in Amaryllis at the Fair his portrayal of Alere Flamma is clearly based on that of his uncle. He is thus described as an artist, engraver, book-binder, connoisseur, traveller, printer, Republican, conspirator, sot, smoker, dreamer, poet, kind-hearted, good-natured… man of Fleet Street. He drank stout, and there was a delicacy in his ways, and he was a genius as an engraver, designing magnificent book covers (AF 313-315, LP 15).

Jefferies other uncle, John Jefferies (1824-1856) was also a talented artist, and he is said to have taught Jefferies how to draw. But he too died of tuberculosis, at the early of thirty-two (MT 9).

Jefferies own boyhood years are graphically portrayed, even if obliquely and as fiction, in his two well-known children’s romances Wood Magic and Bevis, the Story of a Boy, in which Jefferies is the young hero Bevis. Indeed, as Keith remarks, an autobiographical element looms large in all Jefferies’ work (1965: 101), and this is certainly true of these two books, which Jefferies wrote in his prime (1880-1881), when his own boy Harold was around five years old, and before the onset of the crippling illness that plagued him during the last six years of his life. Wood Magic (1881) is a curious mixture of fact and fantasy, and combines three essential themes; descriptions of Jefferies’ everyday world and childhood experiences; the depiction of a world of his own fertile imagination in which he – Bevis – communicates with natural phenomena, particularly birds; and finally, it offers accurate and insightful observations of wildlife that Jefferies began to make at a very early age.

Wood Magic has a loose narrative which records some of Jefferies’ thoughts and doings as he wanders around the Home Field at Coate with the dog Pan, a spaniel, conversing with the birds and animals he encounters. This world is humanised, and is largely an allegory of the human life-world, particularly its politics. The central figure is Kapchack, the Magpie, who is wise and clever, and has his nest – palace – in an immense old apple tree in the orchard. He is seen as cruel and greedy, but also the king over everything and everybody, the ruler of the local animal kingdom that Bevis himself inhabits (WM 82). Bevis explores this kingdom, communicating not only with the birds and animals, but also with the brook and the wind. He thus talks to the thrush, the toad, the squirrel, the bat, the hare, the rat and the weasel. Birds have a particular significance for the young Bevis, and have unique personalities and names, derived from their calls – Te-te, the tom tit, Kauc, the crow, Tchink, the chaffinch, Kiki the hawk, Cloctaw the jackdaw, Choo-hoo, the wood pigeon. Choo-hoo is depicted as a great rebel, a born soldier who marshalls his forces against Kapchack in a great battle. All these birds and animals are personified: they engage in human activities, and they communicate