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(John) Richard Jefferies (1848-1887) is best known for his prolific and sensitive writing on natural history, rural life and agriculture in late Victorian England. However, a closer examination of his career reveals a many-sided author who was something of an enigma. To some people he is more familiar as the author of the children’s classic Bevis or the strange futuristic fantasy After London , while he also has some reputation as a mystic worthy of serious study.

Jefferies, however, has been an inspiration to a number of more prominent writers and W.H. Hudson, Edward Thomas, Henry Williamson and John Fowles are among those who have acknowledged their debt to him.

He was born at Coate in the north Wiltshire countryside - now on the outskirts of Swindon - where his family farmed a smallholding of about forty acres. His father was a thoughtful man with a passionate love of nature but was unsuccessful as a farmer, with the result that the later years of Jefferies' childhood were spent in a household increasingly threatened by poverty. There were also, it seems, other tensions in the family. Richard’s mother, who had been brought up in London, never settled into a life in the country and the portrait of her as Mrs Iden - usually regarded as an accurate one - in his last novel, Amaryllis at the Fair , is anything but flattering. Remarks made in some of Jefferies’ childhood letters to his aunt also strongly suggest an absence of mutual affection and understanding between mother and son. A combination of an unsettled home life and an early romantic desire for adventure led him at the age of sixteen to leave home with the intention of traversing Europe as far as Moscow. In this escapade he was accompanied by a cousin, but the journey was abandoned soon after they reached France. On their return to England they attempted to board a ship for the United States but this plan also came to nothing when they found themselves without sufficient money to pay for food.
A self-absorbed and independent youth, Jefferies spent much of his time walking through the countryside around Coate and along the wide chalk expanses of the Marlborough Downs. He regularly visited Burderop woods and Liddington Hill near his home and on longer trips explored Savernake Forest and the stretch of the downs to the east, where the famous white horse is engraved in the hillside above Uffington. His favourite haunt was Liddington Hill, a height crowned with an ancient fort commanding superb views of the north Wiltshire plain and the downs. It was on the summit of Liddington at the age of about eighteen, as he relates in The Story of My Heart, that his unusual sensitivity to nature began to induce in him a powerful inner awakening - a desire for a larger existence or reality which he termed 'soul life'. Wherever he went in the countryside he found himself in awe of the beauty and tranquillity of the natural world; not only the trees, flowers and animals, but also the sun, the stars and the entire cosmos seemed to him to be filled with an inexpressible sense of magic and meaning.

Jefferies succeeded in befriending the gamekeeper of the local estate and regularly accompanied him on his rounds. He became skilled at shooting game, though, after a while, the sense of wonder he experienced in observing the wildlife often prevented him from pulling the trigger. His scruffy appearance and apparent idleness at this time aroused derision among the locals and gave his family cause for concern. However, the knowledge he was acquiring of natural history and the workings of a large estate was to prove valuable when he embarked on his writing career. He was also a voracious reader of literature and developed a particular liking for Shakespeare, Scott, Byron and the Greek and Roman classics. In 1866, at the age of seventeen, he succeeded in obtaining a reporter's job on the North Wiltshire Herald, based in Swindon. A mysterious illness the following year interrupted his journalistic career, but he had already gained many valuable insights into the agricultural economy and rural society in Wiltshire and Gloucestershire. He joined the Wiltshire and Gloucestershire Standard in 1868 and also started to write articles and pamphlets on various agricultural issues and local history topics. He achieved little success as a freelance writer until 1872 when The Times published three letters by him on the condition of the rural labourers of Wiltshire. This was in response to the controversy surrounding Joseph Arch's attempt to form a trade union for agricultural workers. He was unable, however, to follow up this success and several difficult years followed.

It seems that from quite an early age Jefferies dreamed of becoming a great writer of fiction, and in 1874 he produced his first published novel The Scarlet Shawl . The book was a complete failure – his nineteenth century biographer Walter Besant remarked that ‘...the book affords not the slightest indication of genius, insight, descriptive or dramatic power, or indeed of any power, especially of that kind with which he was destined to make his name’. The next two novels, Restless Human Hearts (1875) and World's End (1877) showed some improvement but brought him no money whatsoever. By 1875 he was married and living in Swindon and gradually finding openings for his agricultural articles. In late 1876 or early 1877 he moved to Surbiton in south London to try to establish himself as a writer on agriculture and the countryside, contributing articles to The Live Stock Journal, Fraser's Magazine and other publications. Soon other opportunities began to appear. Drawing on his experience of gamekeeping and his knowledge of natural history, he wrote a series of articles for the Pall Mall Gazette which were reprinted in 1878 as The Gamekeeper at Home by Smith, Elder & Co. The book sold well, as did a second collection of Pall Mall Gazette articles, Wild Life in a Southern County (1879).

These two books contain many fine and vivid sketches of the countryside around his former home at Coate and show Jefferies' remarkably keen eye for observing the activities of living creatures and the subtle workings of nature. They were written in a direct and simple style with a freshness that showed his complete immersion in the scenes and activities he describes. After a decade of unproductive writing he had now finally found his subjects and his market. Further collected-article books soon followed: The Amateur Poacher (1879), Hodge and His Masters and Round About a Great Estate (both 1880). He now displayed the full range of his knowledge of life in the agricultural villages and country towns of his native Wiltshire, creating some thoroughly believable characters, some of them based on people he knew. Hodge and His Masters, collected from his Wiltshire and Gloucestershire Standard articles, pictures the rapidly changing rural life at the start of the great agricultural depression of the late 19th century. Jefferies had an affection for the traditional practices and customs of the communities he knew but wrote without sentimentality on these subjects and saw that ‘the new’ could often exist harmoniously alongside ‘the old’.

In the 1880s, the last decade of his life, Jefferies often departed radically from the style of writing and the material that had brought him his success. A return to fiction produced some novels of striking imaginative power and, in a highly individual way, he found expression for the esoteric feelings and aspirations which had been with him from his teenage years.

(John) Richard Jefferies (1848-1887) is best known for his prolific and sensitive writing on natural history, rural life and agriculture in late Victorian England. However, a closer examination of his career reveals a many-sided author who was something of an enigma. To some people he is more familiar as the author of the children’s classic Bevis or the strange futuristic fantasy After London ... More