Bevis: The Story of a Boy

Bevis Books #2

by Richard Jefferies

Whiz! Away it went, bend first, and rose against the wind till the impetus ceased, when it hung a moment on the air, and slid to the right, falling near the summer-house. Next time it turned to the left, and fell in the hedge; another time it hit the nothing could make it go straight.Mark tried his hardest, and used it both ways, but in vain--the boomerang rose against the wind, and, so far, acted properly, but directly the force with which it was thrown was exhausted, it did as it liked, and swept round to the left or the right, and never once returned to their feet.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Childrens, 19th Century

Paperback

First published January 1, 1882

About the author

(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.

Reviews

[Lucy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a marvellous book, to be read slowly and to lose yourself in. Take this descriptive passage:
"The leaves with light under them as well as above became films of
transparent green, the delicate branches were delineated with finest
camel's hair point, all the grass blades heaped together were apart, and
their edges apparent in the thick confusion; every atom of sand upon the
shore was sought out by the beams, and given an individual existence
amid the inconceivable multitude which the sibyl alone counted. Nothing
was lost, not a grain of sand, not the least needle of fir. The light
touched all things, and gave them to be."
This encapsulates one aspect; the other is the exuberant joy of the healthy adolescent as the hero and his friend build rafts, guns, learn to swim, re-enact battles - and live in your mind. It is a book of its time - no-one shoots otters and thrushes any more - and there is some incidentally strong stuff about the poverty of agricultural workers: I assume this is why 'Bevis' is forgotten while 'Swallows and Amazons' live on. I'd urge everyone to read this, it's free online, and one of the most un-put-down-able books I've read. Bring back Bevis!

[Limopilot · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was a good, yet slow read.
A little Huckleberry Finn / Tom Sawyer, mixed with a shot of Lord of the Flies, and maybe an inkling of Bridge to Terabithia.....
A good read for those who would play explorer or war as kids - sections brought me back to a simpler childhood, in which your mind is allowed to wander.
Overall a decent read that will stay in my collection, but probably not picked up again...

[Martin Cosby · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is the most wonderful evocation of times long gone. My favourite book about childhood, an essential read.

[J L · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has to be read with regard to its historical context; a late Victorian reminiscence of a mid-19th-century rural English childhood. As such it's simply fascinating, a wonderfully evocative paeon to youth in a landscape and era that together form a quintessential part of English identity, yet have relatively little other representation in Victorian children's literature and popular perceptions of 'Industrial Britain'. Brutality, sexism, class, conservatism, imperialism, the title character doesn't transcend his era, he embodies it in microcosm. His biography prefigures in many ways Barrie's Peter Pan, with its depiction of the casual cruelties, contradictions and callousness that children can exhibit yet all the while remaining deserving of empathy and indeed love. There is no complex, fast-paced narrative thread that builds towards a single interwoven climax - here the book is written to be enjoyed as children experience, immersed in the rich imagery of the moment, utterly absorbed in transient passions and purposes as games and plays unfurl and evolve in a world more spacious and vital than our own. As such, this book will frustrate and bore some children. But others will be transported completely, finding far more commonality with the eponymous protagonist in his small adventures than one might expect across 150-odd years of cultural, environmental and technological transformations. Jefferies writes beautifully, and his depiction of the English countryside is glorious - anyone who knows rural England will find much poignancy in the nostalgic descriptions of its fertile grandeur, now much faded but not yet fully erased.
I will be reading this book to my thoughtful son who loves such gently-paced, contained narrative worlds, but also of course to my brave, imaginative daughter - I hope this most boyish of boys inspires her own headstrong adventures as it did mine.

[Gerlinde · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a huge surprise. Nothing quite like it. It's full of adventures that especially suits boys; discovering lands, hunting, fishing, building forts, making sails and a mast, having battles and surviving in a Bear Grylls sort of way but written almost a century ago and full of outstanding observation of both people and nature. Men should read this book to their or with their sons and I'm glad I read it for the insight into the way some males feel and think. Actually the technical things bored me, i.e. building a matchlock gun, but nothing else did. Really enjoyed it. It deserves to be read, a treasure hidden unfortunately, because it takes work and perseverance to get the gold.

[Sylvester (Taking a break in 2023) · Rating 2 out of 5]

Gol-leee. I liked it. The boys were having fun, building a raft, having a mock war, behaving like wild things. And then it just went on and on and on. I think I learned how to sail, how to make a gun, how to shoot it, all in painstakingly boring detail. I admit to skim-reading to the end. Nope. Not for me.

[aconstellationoftomes · Rating 1 out of 5]

0,5 stars

This is probably the worst book I've ever read.

Boring, dull and unnecessarily descriptive. The descriptions of nature are beautiful, but long-winded. There's also about four pages dedicated to swimming and a bunch more which describe the technical details about building rafts, making guns, shooting and hunting. None of it is interesting. 

Bevis depicts the lives of children in the English countryside in the 19th century well, but I couldn't connect with any of the characters. Bevis and his friends are not great. I get that this book is a product of its time, but there's racism, sexism, discrimination and animal cruelty. 

I don't recommend. 

[Natalie Skiller · Rating 3 out of 5]

A life of adventures of children. Beautifully written, although due to the time it was written it is very much written for boys. However I believe that it is a story of innocence, childhood mishaps and fun.
Would be nice if stories like this one were written for girls at the time. The only one close to as adventuring from the time period might be Anne of Green Gables.

[Nate · Rating 1 out of 5]

If I were a young kid I probably would enjoy it.

[Linda]

https://openlibrary.org/works/OL11768...

[Kari]

I just have to remember that I'm on volume 1, chapter 5.

[Laura H · Rating 3 out of 5]

very period, quite descriptive

[Pollymoore3 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Worth reading for chapter 35 alone: the most wonderful, luminous description of the night sky, which includes this: "When the few leaves left on this young oak were brown, and rustled in the frosty night, the massy shoulder of Orion came heaving up through it -- first one bright star, then another; then the gleaming girdle, and the less definite scabbard; then the great constellation stretched across the east. At the first sight of Orion's shoulder Bevis always felt suddenly stronger, as if a breath of the mighty hunter had come down and entered into him".
However, hunting was the problem with this book. The boys' resourcefulness in making things from scratch, the nature descriptions and the spacious sense of freedom and the outdoors, all make this book special. But I sickened at the casual slaughter of wildlife: anything at all that moved was literally fair game. Pike, a thrush, an otter, hares, herons, all destroyed for nothing; they didn't eat all they shot. Worse still, we haven't really moved on from this mindset, have we? As for females and "natives"; I pity them when Bevis is fully grown! Poor Pan the spaniel is casually beaten, too; nasty.
Then I recently came across "Wood Magic", which deals with Bevis's young childhood. It should really be called "Wood Horror". Bevis here is a really nasty-tempered little devil, always losing it and often hurting or killing something innocent as a result. Jefferies himself reveals fully his sadistic streak here, revelling in descriptions of a hawk slowly and painfully dying in a snare, a weasel caught in a trap. Poor Pan gets treated cruelly even by the people who should love and care for him as their dog. I certainly won't be keeping this one.

[AC · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was a chore. It's truly a relic of its times (1800s) and is fascinating as an authentic view in the details of a boy's life back then, including but not limited to:
- building a matchlock gun completely from scratch, including visiting the blacksmith to craft a metal tube for the barrel
- building a raft and sailboat from scratch and running off to live on an island for 2 weeks
- not having anyone discover that you're missing for 2 weeks because no internets (or even regular mail service)

I guess these are all things mentioned in Huckleberry Finn, but it's easily dismissed as maybe a romantic literary notion, until you read several hundred pages in detail of how to build a gun and skin a rabbit, along with snarky footnotes from a 1980s editor that call out how dated the book is, while also sounding very dated himself.

[Tim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this years ago as a Pre teenager. Didn't like the class differences at the time, Bevis being particularly nasty, but realised in later years this was normal for the time.
It's beautifully written, Bevis and friends were able to do whatever they wanted, including making guns !
As someone else has commented, it's a British Huck Finn

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Settle down Bevis.