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 couple'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 Jefferies' 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 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 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 "The New Sea"), fishing and even shooting with a homemade gun.
About the Author
Richard Jefferies, 1848-1887
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.
