About the Book
After London, or Wild England 1885
A fantasy novel. England after a conflagration destroys towns and cities reverts to the wild.
The Surbiton years were momentous. The couple39;s next child a daughter called Jessie after her mother but known by her second name, Phyllis, was born on December 6, 1880,4 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 Jefferies39; 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.4 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.29 A minor novel, Greene Ferne Farm 1880, was the first to gain recognition, both from contemporaries and in later scholarship.30
Two books of these years form a sequence. Wood Magic: A Fable 1881 introduces his childhero, Bevis, a small child on a farm near a small lake, called the quot;Longpondquot;, clearly Coate Farm and Coate Reservoir. Bevis39;s exploration of the garden and neighbouring fields brings him into contact with the country39;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 child39;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 quot;The New Seaquot;, fishing and even shooting with a homemade gun.
About the Author
Richard Jefferies, 18481887
Naturalist and novelist, son of a farmer, was born at Swindon, Wilts. He began his literary career on the staff of a local newspaper, and first attracted attention by a letter in the Times on the Wiltshire labourer. Thereafter he wrote for the Pall Mall Gazette, in which appeared his Gamekeeper at Home, and Wild Life in a Southern County 1879, both afterwards republished. Both these works are full of minute observation and vivid description of country life. They were followed by The Amateur Poacher 1880, Wood Magic 1881, Round about a Great Estate 1881, The Open Air 1885, and others on similar subjects. Among his novels are Bevis, in which he draws on his own childish memories and After London, or Wild England 1885, a romance of the future, when London has ceased to exist. The Story of My Heart 1883 is an idealised picture of his inner life. J. died after a painful illness, which lasted for six years. In his own line, that of depicting with an intense sense for nature all the elements of country and wild life, vegetable and animal, surviving in the face of modern civilisation, he has had few equals.