Richard Jefferies: A Critical Study 9781487589110

Table of contents :
Preface
Contents
Abbreviations and References
Acknowledgments
I. Jefferies' Life and Times
II. The Rural Vision: From Article to Essay
III. The Country Books
IV. The Story of My Heart
V. The Romances: Wood Magic, Bevis, and After London
VI. Jefferies' Fiction
VII. The Final Essays
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

RICHARD JEFFERIES A Critical Study This book, a critical study of the essays and novels of Richard Jefferies, an English writer of the latter part of the nineteenth century, is an attempt to define the nature of Jefferies' contribution to English literature, and to isolate the more important and effective qualities of his work. Although he was not a major figure in English letteres, Jefferies was highly regarded for his essays on nature and the English countryside, studies of rural conditions, and regional novels; his work mirrors the rapid change taking place in agriculture at the time, and is of interest today to social historians and economists. This study begins with a brief biological account, and then proceeds to a discussion of individual works. An important feature is a comprehensive bibliography of Jefferies' books and pamphlets, arranged in order of publication to assist the readers in checking chronology. w. j. KEITH first became interested in Jefferies in secondary school in England. He is a graduate of Jesus College, Cambridge, and of the University of Toronto. Since 1962 he has been Assistant Professor of English at McMaster University in Hamilton.

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH Studies and Texts, No. 13

Richard Jejferies

A CRITICAL STUDY BY W.J.KEITH

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS LONDON: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1965

© University of Toronto Press 1965

Preface

THIS BOOK is an attempt to define the nature of Richard Jefferies' contribution to English literature, and to isolate the more important and effective qualities of his work. The first chapter provides the basic background material—a brief biographical account and a survey of Jefferies' historical context. The form of subsequent chapters is dictated by the genre of individual books, and not necessarily by chronological order of composition. This is necessary for my particular approach, and the bibliography of Jefferies' books and pamphlets (pp. 170-2) is arranged in order of publication so that the reader should have little difficulty in checking chronology. I have been assisted in the preparation of this book by many people, and it is a pleasure to acknowledge at least the most obvious debts of gratitude. First and foremost, a serious student of Jefferies must continually be aware of the deep debt he owes to the lifelong research of the late Samuel J. Looker, whose painstaking labours have made so much of Jefferies' previously unpublished or uncollected writings available to the reader. My own debt to Mr. Looker is further increased by his encouraging interest in my work and his readiness to answer queries through several years' correspondence. I would also like to record here that the list of Jefferies' contributions to the Live Stoc^ Journal, which Mr. Looker printed at the end of Field and Farm, greatly assisted my own check-list of Jefferies' essays and articles. Indeed, it would have been quite impossible to write this book without the benefit of Mr. Looker's work and example, for which I am deeply grateful. I am also obligated to Mrs. Frances J. Gay, Chairman of the Richard Jefferies Society, Swindon, who has been of incalculable assistance in

6

PREFACE

lending me books and pamphlets, relaying information, checking references, and giving general encouragement. I would also like to express appreciation to Professor N. J. Endicott of the University of Toronto for helpful criticism and advice during an earlier stage in the writing of this book, and to the Canada Council and the University of Toronto for scholarships that enabled me to engage in lengthy preliminary research. I would also like to record here that a correspondence with Mr. Eric Jones of Oxford helped to clarify some of my ideas concerning Jefferies' agricultural writings. The publication of this book has been assisted by grants from the Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Publications Fund of the University of Toronto Press. Without the generous support of both these organizations, it is doubtful if this study could have been published. I also owe a particular debt of gratitude to two members of the University of Toronto Press who have been especially helpful : the Editor, Miss Francess Halpenny, for general counsel and encouragement, and Miss M. L. Pearson, for expert advice during the preparation of the manuscript. Countless others have helped me verbally or by correspondence; their names are too many to be listed individually here, but I hope they will accept this generalized acknowledgment of their services. The inadequacies are my own. McMaster University January 1965 W. J. K.

Contents

i.

Jefiferies' Life and Times

15

ii. The Rural Vision : From Article to Essay

40

in. The Country Books

54

iv. The Story of My Heart

So

v.

The Romances : Wood Magic, Bevis, and After London

100

vi. Jefferies' Fiction

123

vu. The Final Essays

151

Bibliography

170

Index

195

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Abbreviations and References

TO AVOID excessive footnoting, I have used abbreviations in the text when referring to Jefferies' own works. Where possible I have quoted from modern texts that would be more accessible to the reader. A key to the abbreviations and texts is given below. Details of first editions will be found in the bibliography. AF AL AP B CH DM FF FH GFF GH HM HV JL LF N

Amaryllis at the Fair. Everyman edition (with After London). London : Dent, 1939. After London; or, Wild England. Everyman edition. See above. The Amateur Poacher. World's Classics edition (with The Gamekeeper at Home). Oxford : University Press, 1948. Bevis. London : Jonathan Cape, 1932. Chronicles of the Hedges. London : Phoenix House, 1948. The Dewy Morn. London : Bentley, 1884. 2 vols. Field and Farm. London : Phoenix House, 1957. Field and Hedgerow. London : Lutterworth Press, 1948. Greene Feme Farm. London : Smith Elder, 1880. The Gamekeeper at Home. World's Classics edition. See under The Amateur Poacher above. Hodge and His Masters. London : Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1949. The Hills and the Vale. London : Duckworth, 1909. Jefferies' Land. London : Simpkin, Marshall, 1896. The Life of the Fields. London : Lutterworth Press, 1947. The Nature Diaries and Note-Boo1(s of Richard Jefferies. Edited by Samuel J. Looker. London : Grey Walls Press, 1948.

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NNL OA OHC RGE RD REA RHH SH SS SY TF WL WM

ABBREVIATIONSANDREFERENCES

Nature Near London. London : Chatto & Windus, 1883. The Open Air. London : Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1948. The Old House at Coate. London : Lutterworth Press, 1948. Round About a Great Estate (with Red Deer). London : Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1948. Red Deer (with Round About a Great Estate). See above. Reporting, Editing, and Authorship. London : John Snow, 1873. Restless Human Hearts. London : Tinsley, 1875. 3 vols. The Story of My Heart. London : Constable, 1947. The Scarlet Shawl. London : Tinsley, 1874. The Spring of the Year. London : Lutterworth Press, 1946. The Toilers of the Field. London : Longmans, 1892. Wild Life in a Southern County. London : Lutterworth Press, 1949. Wood Magic. London : Longmans, 1934.

Acknowledgments

MY CHIEF DEBT of acknowledgment is owed to the late Samuel J. Looker, who has generously allowed me to quote freely from those writings of JefTeries which he was the first to publish and of which he held the copyright. These include The Nature Diaries and Note-Booths of Richard Jefferies, The Old House at Coate, the first draft of The Story of My Heart, and the hidierto unpublished material in Chronicles of the Hedges and Field and Farm. Acknowledgments are also due to the following : Lutterworth Press and J. M. Dent and Sons for permission to quote from their editions of Richard Jefferies; Penguin Books, Ltd. for the quotations from the Pelican Guide to English Literature and Victor Bonham-Carter's The English Village; the Daily Telegraph (London) for a passage from a review-article by J. H. B. Peel; Q. D. Leavis for passages from her Scrutiny article on Jefferies; and Mrs. Edward Thomas and Faber and Faber, Ltd. for permission to quote four lines from Edward Thomas's poem, "Lob."

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RICHARD JEFFERIES A Critical Study

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i. JeíFeries' Life and Times

THE NAME of Richard Jefferies is often to be found on the periphery of the English literary scene in that indistinct no-man's-land that skirts the boundaries of creative literature, natural history, and rural sociology. Indeed, his neglect can partly be explained as a difficulty of classification, an uncertainty whether he should be considered alongside Thomas Hardy, or Gilbert White, or William Cobbett. He has links with all these, and it may be argued that the range of his interests should serve as a distinction rather than as an encumbrance. He can claim a wider knowledge of rural life than Hardy, a more active imagination than White, a greater intellectul subtlety than Cobbett. This is not to deny that he lacks several of the distinctive qualities of these and other rural writers, but for a comprehensive view of the English countryside at a challenging and decisive moment in its history, there is no more reliable guide than Richard Jefferies. All this would suggest that, when in search of what is valuable in Jefferies, we should turn to his writings rather than his life, and the emphasis of this book will therefore be more critical than biographical. It may be readily admitted that a knowledge of at least the general tenor of his life is essential for an understanding of his literary output, but the important consideration is not so much the facts of his life as the nature of it. Few writers can have been more influenced by their childhood en* vironment, and the ideals and concerns that underlie his writing were all moulded and governed by his early memories. It is in this sense that we can describe him as an intensely personal writer : his essays are the fruit of an intimate but solitary love for the Wiltshire countryside, his powerful

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R I C H A R D J E F F E R I E S : A CRITICAL STUDY

but unequal novels are most successful when most dependent upon his personal knowledge and experience, while The Story of My Heart, his spiritual confession, presents the obstinate questionings of a determined, uncompromising, personality. Edward Thomas has already provided us with an excellent biography in Richard Jefferies: His Life and Wor\. Here I am content to give the main facts that are essential as a background to what is for me the more important process of serious discussion and evaluation of Jefferies' work. Richard Jefferies was born on November 6, 1848, at Coate Farmhouse near Swindon, Wiltshire. His father, the original Iden of Amaryllis at the Fair, farmed an area of less than fifty acres, and was destined in later years to fight a losing battle against poverty in an age of increasing agricultural depression. During the years of Jefferies' childhood, however, the family was comfortable enough, and from the earliest years the boy was impressed by the traditional association between his family and the locality in which it had lived and worked for centuries. There is evidence to suggest that Jefferies' family, like Hardy's, had declined in recent generations. Both writers were descended, it seems, from independent yeoman stock which was fast becoming obsolete in the nineteenth-century rural class-structure, and both were affected by the traditions and attitudes of an earlier time. It is helpful at this point to quote from a description by one of Jefferies' cousins, Miss F. C. Hall, of the life at Coate Farm, appreciation of which is vital to an understanding of his general approach to agricultural matters : James Luckett Jefïeries, the father of Richard, has been always placed on a line with the ordinary small tenant farmer, but this is a grave error, as the possession of land in all time has been productive of very different sentiment to that arising from occupancy by tenancy. . . . The farmhouse in which Richard Jefïeries was born was the freehold of his father, presented to him on his marriage by his father, John Jefferies, and anyone who ever lived or even visited at the old home, would know how every individual inch of the ground, every sapling tree, every flowering shrub or nest-hiding hedgerow was loved and treasured by its owner. . . . The land was his—a little Naboth's vineyard, much coveted by surrounding landowners.1 l. Jefferies Luckett [Miss F. C. Hall], "The Forebears of Richard Jefferies," Country Life, March 14, 1908, 375.

JEFFERIES

L I F E AND TIMES

VJ

When he came to write about farmers and farming, Jefferies continually stressed the importance of a traditional connection with, and love for, the land. "I am a son of the soil," he wrote in a late letter, and added that "my family have been farmers and landowners for nearly three hundred years" (FF, 41). Jefferies was allowed considerable freedom during his childhood, and has left an idealized picture of his early days in Bevis. His formal schooling seems to have been somewhat irregular and unsettled, but this was more than balanced by the natural education that he received in the Wiltshire countryside. It was in the period of boyhood and adolescence that Jefferies developed his loving familiarity with rural things, the material that was later to become the staple of his writing. The few records of his early days that have come down to us bear witness to his shyness and love of solitude. Though he became known in the neighbourhood for his habit of taking long walks on the Downs, he seems to have been somewhat delicate and showed little interest in the more boisterous sports of his fellows. Instead, he was a keen reader and borrowed eagerly from the libraries of relatives and friends. He acquired a reputation as solitary, perhaps even as eccentric, but we can now appreciate that this was a time of accurate observation and learning, a time that laid the firm foundations of his subsequent career as naturalist and writer. When old enough to handle a gun, he adds the role of sportsman to his other achievements, and his friendship with Keeper Haylock of the nearby Burderop estate, the original for The Gamekeeper at Home, further increased his rural knowledge. To be set against this, however, is the comment from a local squire : "That young Jefferies is not the sort of fellow you want hanging about in your covers."2 This need not have been an altogether unjustified suspicion concerning the future author of The Amateur Poacher. His intimate knowledge of the local district was soon to stand him in good stead. Though a loyal countryman, Jefferies had no interest in a career in farming, and at the age of seventeen he obtained a post as reporter on a local newspaper, the North Wilts Herald; a little later, he joined the staff of the Wilts and Gloucestershire Standard. Provincial journalism may not be the ideal training for a creative writer, but there can be little doubt that it was helpful to Jefferies in giving him plenty of practice in detailed and compact description. Although there are indications that his talents 2. Quoted in Edward Thomas, Richard Jefleries: His Lije and Wort^ (1909), p. 47.

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RICHARD JEFFERIES:

A CRITICAL STUDY

as reporter were limited, he seems to have taken his work seriously, and his first separate publication was a pamphlet somewhat ironically entitled Reporting, Editing, and Authorship. This appeared in 1873, an