One day, many years ago, I half-listened to a reading on the radio in the middle of some chore. Suddenly, the prose caught my ear. I had to pay attention. What I heard was extraordinary: a memory of lying on a hillside on a summer’s day that bloomed and soared into the most ravishing, hypnotic account of an ecstatic union with nature and its healing powers that I had ever come across. ‘I was rapt and carried away,’ the author confessed. And so was I.
Then something distracted me. I missed the programme’s closing credits. Who had given voice to this ‘whirlwind of passion’ for ‘the great sun burning with light; the strong earth, dear earth; the warm sky; the pure air; the thought of ocean; the inexpressible beauty of all’? At length, I managed to find out. I had heard the opening chapter of The Story of My Heart by Richard Jefferies. Published in 1883, four years before its author’s death, this compact but incandescent autobiography deals not in facts and dates but in the progress of a soul. The passages that bewitched me come from Jefferies’ description of youthful walks on Liddington Hill in Wiltshire, part of the North Wessex Downs. This was the heartland, in every sense, of a uniquely talented, and troubled, Victorian writer.
You may consider Richard Jefferies as a pioneer ecologist; as the godfather of a genre of literary nature-writing that flourishes today in the hands of figures such as Robert Macfarlane, Helen Macdonald and Richard Mabey; as a peerlessly keen observer, and critic, of rural and semi-rural life in an age of agricultural crisis and suburban sprawl. All of those labels fit in their way, but none quite captures the intense intimacy – so impassioned, so vulnerable, so utterly un-Victorian – of his enchanted forays into fields, woods, downs, hedgerows, lanes.
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Subscribe now or Sign inOne day, many years ago, I half-listened to a reading on the radio in the middle of some chore. Suddenly, the prose caught my ear. I had to pay attention. What I heard was extraordinary: a memory of lying on a hillside on a summer’s day that bloomed and soared into the most ravishing, hypnotic account of an ecstatic union with nature and its healing powers that I had ever come across. ‘I was rapt and carried away,’ the author confessed. And so was I.
Then something distracted me. I missed the programme’s closing credits. Who had given voice to this ‘whirlwind of passion’ for ‘the great sun burning with light; the strong earth, dear earth; the warm sky; the pure air; the thought of ocean; the inexpressible beauty of all’? At length, I managed to find out. I had heard the opening chapter of The Story of My Heart by Richard Jefferies. Published in 1883, four years before its author’s death, this compact but incandescent autobiography deals not in facts and dates but in the progress of a soul. The passages that bewitched me come from Jefferies’ description of youthful walks on Liddington Hill in Wiltshire, part of the North Wessex Downs. This was the heartland, in every sense, of a uniquely talented, and troubled, Victorian writer. You may consider Richard Jefferies as a pioneer ecologist; as the godfather of a genre of literary nature-writing that flourishes today in the hands of figures such as Robert Macfarlane, Helen Macdonald and Richard Mabey; as a peerlessly keen observer, and critic, of rural and semi-rural life in an age of agricultural crisis and suburban sprawl. All of those labels fit in their way, but none quite captures the intense intimacy – so impassioned, so vulnerable, so utterly un-Victorian – of his enchanted forays into fields, woods, downs, hedgerows, lanes. The great poet and nature-writer Edward Thomas, a Jefferies disciple, wrote in a biography of his forerunner that Jefferies’ prose could ‘express the whole range of a man’s experience in the open air’. In Jefferies country you find mystery and bliss; but also boredom, dread, exhaustion and profound loneliness. He always insists that his rapturous devotion to nature goes unrequited and scoffs at ‘the old, old error: I love the earth, therefore the earth loves me’. On the contrary: ‘I thought how the apple tree in blossom before us cared little who saw its glory.’ Ruefully, he admits that ‘The earth is all in all to me, but I am nothing to the earth.’ Mystical, poetical, exact, but wholly unsentimental, Jefferies stands country miles apart from every crude image of the rustic literary type. His very marginality appealed to me, as the son of a Cornishman who had come to London when young but never lost his hankering for greener scenes. Throughout my childhood copies of the now defunct journal The Countryman – its pages stuffed, I now realize, with Jefferies tribute acts – thudded on to our doormat. Jefferies was far from a pure countryman himself. Born in 1848, he grew up in an old house on a financially precarious smallholding at Coate, south of Swindon: now a council-run museum. But the family had extensive London connections, especially in the printing and engraving trades around Fleet Street. He knew from an early age not just about birds, beasts, crops and flowers, but how you might con vey rural characters and scenery, wildlife and ways, to an increasingly urban public. The lanky, long-haired lad who haunted woods and hills near Coate – and earned a reputation for idle eccentricity – started early in print: as a reporter, aged 16, for the North Wilts Herald. Constant insecurity forced him into overwork. While early books such as Wildlife in a Southern County and The Amateur Poacher (both published in 1879) report on human and non-human rural life with picturesque charm and verve, the later works – The Story of My Heart foremost among them – throb and glow with a private, visionary fervour. Tuberculosis and its agonizing complications blighted his last years. By his early death, at the age of 38, he had written nineteen books, split between novels and essay collections, and over 400 articles. For me his wide-ranging fiction, from the autobiographical episodes of Amaryllis at the Fair (1887) to the apocalyptic fantasy of After London (1885), often struggles with plot and form, but he really takes wing when nature fires his imagination. ‘Many have died once. I have had the misery of dying many times,’ a late notebook laments. Yet this shadow of pain and doom lends his mature writing a feverish ardour and candour that made it irresistible to me – beyond and above his exquisite gift for description. You sense that the nature that nourishes Jefferies is actually keeping him alive. A wonderful essay, ‘Out of Doors in February’ (every season and all weathers delighted him), claims that ‘One memory of the green corn, fresh beneath the sun and wind, will lift up the heart from the clods.’ Frail in health, with an erratic income and (eventually) a wife and two children to support, Jefferies needed proximity to the capital to make a living. He had spent long stretches of his childhood with an aunt in Sydenham and, from the mid-1870s, lived for years in Surbiton: then the outer fringe of suburbia. Jefferies never scorned the metropolis. London excited him and, in a mystic epiphany on London Bridge, he felt ‘the presence of the immense powers of the universe’. The essays gathered in Nature Near London (1883) sound strikingly modern in their recognition that the creeping city does not obliterate the countryside but entangles and intersects with it in ever surprising ways. He admires the ‘astonishing quantity and variety of life’ around him and lists sixty wildflowers in one suburban lane on the way to Ewell. Nightingales serenade the new-built villas in a profusion unknown to more unspoiled landscapes. One bird ‘sang under the shadow of a hornbeam for hours every morning while “City” men were hurrying past to their train’. Read his Surbiton idyll now and you may mourn a natural abundance no longer so evident in the outer suburbs. But not all is loss. He exults in seeing ten magpies on 9 September 1881, ‘not twelve miles from Charing Cross’. I can spot twice as many on any walk here at the edge of Ealing. And he never witnessed the ascent of the fearless urban fox. He would have relished its impudence and ubiquity. As I read more of him, Jefferies spoke as well to my unease about class divisions in the countryside – and the sort of people who often claim ownership of it. He was born into a homestead of small-time cultivation on the brink of viability: the so-called ‘farm’ comprised fewer than forty acres. The agricultural depression of the 1870s would force Jefferies’ father to leave it for work as a jobbing gardener. His early pieces on ‘the Wiltshire labourer’ are packed with vivid touches but seem to be apeing the condescending attitude of his imagined genteel readership; some first appeared in The Times. Later, a more authentic note begins to sound. He sees, and protests, the grinding hardship, the low horizons, endured by landless hands amid the beauty he adores. ‘Walks in the Wheatfields’ – surely one of the classic essays of the nineteenth century – leaps brilliantly from a single stalk of wheat that seems to reveal ‘a miniature human being in the oval of the grain’ to the harsh, gruelling, but tradition-rich country life that the crop sustains. Boldly, it flies out to the ocean-going commerce that now ferries cheap American or Australian grain on vast clipper ships back to the villages whose livelihood this new globalized economy threatens. Then, typically, we swoop down to the Wiltshire wheatfields after reaping, where sparrows, chaffinches, linnets and buntings scavenge the stubble that feeds them with ‘a constant dole like the monasteries of old, only here it is no crust, but a free and bountiful largesse’. Truly, Jefferies sees the world not (as Blake did) in a grain of sand, but in a grain of wheat. He feels both the splendour of the landscape and its creatures, and the human sweat and tears behind them. ‘One of the New Voters’ – the title alludes to the 1884 extension of the franchise to poorer rural men – depicts hard-grafting, hard-drinking ‘Roger the Reaper’ as he toils under a withering August sun to bring in the harvest. Light blazes, flowers dazzle, butterflies flit, birds warble, but ‘This loveliness gave him no cheese for breakfast.’ ‘The wheat is beautiful,’ we grasp, ‘but human life is labour.’ Now, however, the enfranchised labourer may hope to change his fate. Sometimes Jefferies casts a bitterly satirical eye on rural hierarchies and snobberies. Published in his final year, 1887, ‘Primrose Gold in Our Village’ shows the old order of parson and squire, which he warily respected, being supplanted by a new class of Tory professionals backed by a formidable party machine. This powerful caucus, snug in their comfortable villas, won’t exactly boycott the atheist cobbler or the radical baker. Still, they make it clear that if you prove ‘pliant and flexible’, then ‘you have nice things put in your way’. And if not, then not. This barbed sketch of politics and society in deepest England not only held good for 1887 but – in certain places I could name – still holds now. Much as he cares about the wellbeing of Roger the Reaper, social criticism occupies only one patch of Jefferies’ broad literary meadow. At its heart is the super-charged sensitivity to the natural world that flows from essay to essay, even though he curses the limits of language and learning as they grapple with the mystery of a single bloom. Despite Darwin, Linnaeus or any other of the naturalists he avidly read, ‘the flower has not given us its message yet’, and ‘all the books have to be written’. ‘Colour and form and light are as magic to me,’ he writes, although nature’s plenitude demands ‘a language of ideas to convey it’ that no human can yet speak. At these moments Jefferies sounds less like a writer, however eloquent, than a painter bedazzled by the miracles around him and striving to transmit his awe. Fiercely observant, yet burning with an inner flame, he can read, and feel, like the Vincent van Gogh of English prose. Consult van Gogh’s letters – the Dutch artist could be an inspired writer too – and you meet the same mix of ecstatic joy in natural beauty and frustration that its radiant reality will forever elude pen or brush. Strangely enough, Vincent’s youthful years in London would have brought him close to Jefferies. Both loved to walk along the Thames near Teddington and Richmond; Jefferies has a gorgeous essay, ‘The River’, about this stretch. When Vincent lodged in Isleworth in 1876, the pair of haunted visionaries might even have crossed paths along its banks. Perhaps they doffed shabby caps to each other as they passed.Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 90 © Boyd Tonkin 2026
About the contributor
Boyd Tonkin is a winner of the Royal Society of Literature’s Benson Medal for career achievement. He lives in west London, but with rabbits, skylarks, herons and horses at the end of the road.
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