The floridly beautiful world of a Victorian writer and journalist - Richard Jefferies - Sports in the Fields and Wood

To read Richard Jefferies is to step instantly into England’s past. The Victorian nature writer was an acute observer of detail, and his books and articles are full of scenes that have largely vanished, now, from rural life. He describes sitting behind a haywain in the setting sun, waiting for rabbits to surface; a farmstead with only a mud track leading to its candlelit windows; workers scything the crops.

The world that he conjures up was largely unchanged for centuries, but was rapidly disappearing even as he wrote. Like Elizabeth Gaskell or Thomas Hardy, he enshrines a vanishing way of life. His rural vignettes would not be out of place in Thomas Gray’s poems, so full are they of ploughmen wearily plodding homeward. But they also feature scenes that would be familiar to Marvell or even Chaucer: untamed woodlands, messengers on horseback and butterfly-filled meadows abound. It was perhaps his consciousness of living on the edge of a dwindling world that inspired the broad themes of Jefferies’s work, particularly his great novel, After London; or, Wild England.

Born in 1848 to James and Betsy Jefferies, Richard was raised in Wiltshire on his family’s small farm. Coate Farm was his idyll – perhaps the more so because he was sent away to live with an uncle and aunt between the ages of four and nine. Holidays back at Coate involved forays in the local countryside, sometimes shooting rabbits with his father, sometimes building canoes to sail in the reservoir, sometimes trailing around after local gamekeepers as they poached. He was shy; he would later write that, in childhood, “I had a dislike to being seen, feeling that I should be despised if I was noticed”. He was uninterested in helping with farm work, but loved to go for long, solitary walks – and to read. Aged sixteen, he ran away to France, intending to walk to Russia. But his schoolboy French proved insufficient and he returned home somewhat dejected. In 1866 he started writing for his local newspaper, the North Wiltshire Herald, and his career was born. It wasn’t until he moved to Surbiton in 1877, however, that he found a London readership, publishing regularly in the Pall Mall Gazette and producing books of essays and articles. 

Read more in the full article on the Times Literary website: 
https://www.the-tls.com/lives/autobiography/waterfall-in-the-sky