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Wild Life in a Southern County
Immersed in the detail of this ancient landscape, its people and the habitats of its wildlife, what emerges from Jefferies’ dazzling prose is his sense of perpetual wonder and the deep affection he felt for his homeland, from the clatter of a milkmaid’s boots to a pike lying in ambush.
- GenresNature
272 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1879
About the author
Richard Jefferies
226 books62 followers(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. Since his death his books have enjoyed intermittent spells of popularity, but today he is unknown to the greater part of the reading public. 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. In my view his greatest achievement lies in his expression, aesthetically and spiritually, of the human encounter with the natural world – something that became almost an obsession for him in his last years.
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 tranquility 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.
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 tranquility 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.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
March 7, 2015
This was an audio edition of part of the book read by Simon Vance. Very good, short, & interesting, just natural observations of birds & other wild life in part of England written in 1878 or so.
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August 27, 2020This would have been lovely nature writing even at initial encounter, with its careful observations and considered deductions, its wonderful evocations of, for instance, relaxing in an orchard: "Put away all thought of time: often in striving to get the most value from our time it slips from us as the reality did from the dog that greedily grasped at the shadow: simply dream of what you will with apples and plums, nuts and filberts within reach." Though it should be noted that this passage is not in the chapter titled The Orchard; on the one hand Jefferies is a natural ecologist, understanding the connection of each to all, but equally that means he's no natural at structuring chapters, with fascinating but not immediately relevant snippets frequently wedged in wherever they occur to him.
What really deepens this, though, is all the layers of distance it holds within itself. The landscape it describes is now lost beneath the streets of Swindon - and even back in those heady days when some conurbations had excitement to compensate for that loss, Swindon was not one of them. Where the English countryside does linger, it is nowhere this full of wildlife, nor of strange old customs (though Jefferies does admit a far amount of bullshit lingers in the latter, and that the scholar's interest in what aged locals remember of times past is apt to be frustrated). And even when Jefferies was writing, it was from a distance; he reads as though cataloguing the world around him, but was in fact recreating what he'd left behind when he moved to London. One of several things, the imagery of caravans across the wilderness being another, to make me bracket him somewhat with Arthur Machen. Not that he would last to the same grand old age; though he looks every bit the solid Victorian gentleman on the jacket, he died in poverty before he was 40. Also unexpected: to see someone looking like that, then and there, speaking quite unselfconsciously of feng shui.
The illustrations, dense yet cosy in a sunset sort of way, are by CF Tunnicliffe, and complement the text wonderfully. Richard Mabey's introduction is also mostly very good, especially for context, though I was slightly annoyed by the pious incomprehension he affects over how Jefferies can love nature so much, then also shoot it. Yes, I was a little taken aback when a passage on the glory of the kingfisher segued into tips for potting them, but this was how most people who have lived among nature have related to it for most of history, and indeed before.
What really deepens this, though, is all the layers of distance it holds within itself. The landscape it describes is now lost beneath the streets of Swindon - and even back in those heady days when some conurbations had excitement to compensate for that loss, Swindon was not one of them. Where the English countryside does linger, it is nowhere this full of wildlife, nor of strange old customs (though Jefferies does admit a far amount of bullshit lingers in the latter, and that the scholar's interest in what aged locals remember of times past is apt to be frustrated). And even when Jefferies was writing, it was from a distance; he reads as though cataloguing the world around him, but was in fact recreating what he'd left behind when he moved to London. One of several things, the imagery of caravans across the wilderness being another, to make me bracket him somewhat with Arthur Machen. Not that he would last to the same grand old age; though he looks every bit the solid Victorian gentleman on the jacket, he died in poverty before he was 40. Also unexpected: to see someone looking like that, then and there, speaking quite unselfconsciously of feng shui.
The illustrations, dense yet cosy in a sunset sort of way, are by CF Tunnicliffe, and complement the text wonderfully. Richard Mabey's introduction is also mostly very good, especially for context, though I was slightly annoyed by the pious incomprehension he affects over how Jefferies can love nature so much, then also shoot it. Yes, I was a little taken aback when a passage on the glory of the kingfisher segued into tips for potting them, but this was how most people who have lived among nature have related to it for most of history, and indeed before.
April 2, 2023
Jefferies is perhaps the greatest English nature writer of the nineteenth century, and this is perhaps his best book. His attention to minute detail and the complex ways in which organisms interact is comparable to Darwin’s, but he renders these details and processes with the language of poetry.
September 23, 2023
Wild Life in a Southern County is at its heart, really just a detailing of nature’s bounty. However, Jeffries has a knack for drawing you in with exquisite detail and immersive sensory elements that makes you feel like you are right there with him. I hate bugs and insects of any kind but found myself enthralled with the technicality of how a spider captured a fly, and how it proceeded to devour its prey. You learn about everything from the vegetation to the wildlife and everything in between. A beautiful rendition of how mother nature can pull you to a particular place and imprint your heart forever with that location.
April 26, 2017
I picked up a free kindle download of this after hearing Tony Robinson talk about it on one of his (very interesting) walking programs. The free version does have a few errors, so it's worth investing in a properly published copy if that is an issue for you.
The book itself is a glimpse of country life in the latter part of the nineteenth century. It's nature writing of course, but because it's now nearly 150 years old, it's also a historical document. It describes an area of countryside around Swindon starting on the ramparts of an ancient hill fort dropping down towards a farm and village, through woodland to a stream and a lake. The sections in the village about the people and their work are particularly evocative, connecting the reader with a world long gone.
The thing that struck me most was the sheer quantity and variety of the wildlife (particularly birdlife) that Richard Jefferies describes. He knows he is documenting a changing world - he speaks of hedges and other habitats being destroyed for agriculture and of species that have become rarer within his own lifetime. His knowledge of the habits of some of the creatures can only come from many hours of long and detailed study. To the modern nature lover though it is shocking how nonchalantly he then speaks of picking up his gun and shooting for sport. How anyone could shoot a kingfisher I will never know.
It's an interesting and informative and beautifully written. My only (very slight) criticism is that for a relatively short book, it did seem to go on a bit. Recommended for anyone interested in nature and/or history.
The book itself is a glimpse of country life in the latter part of the nineteenth century. It's nature writing of course, but because it's now nearly 150 years old, it's also a historical document. It describes an area of countryside around Swindon starting on the ramparts of an ancient hill fort dropping down towards a farm and village, through woodland to a stream and a lake. The sections in the village about the people and their work are particularly evocative, connecting the reader with a world long gone.
The thing that struck me most was the sheer quantity and variety of the wildlife (particularly birdlife) that Richard Jefferies describes. He knows he is documenting a changing world - he speaks of hedges and other habitats being destroyed for agriculture and of species that have become rarer within his own lifetime. His knowledge of the habits of some of the creatures can only come from many hours of long and detailed study. To the modern nature lover though it is shocking how nonchalantly he then speaks of picking up his gun and shooting for sport. How anyone could shoot a kingfisher I will never know.
It's an interesting and informative and beautifully written. My only (very slight) criticism is that for a relatively short book, it did seem to go on a bit. Recommended for anyone interested in nature and/or history.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews