Jefferies

Jefferies, JOHN RICHARD, generally known as RICHARD JEFFERIES, English writer on rural subjects, was born at the farmhouse of Coate, 2½ miles from Swindon, in Wiltshire, on 6th November 1848. He started life as a journalist on the staff of the North Wilts Herald about 1866, and for twelve years was busy with this kind of work and with writing crude novels. His name first became known by a long letter to the Times, in November 1872, on the labourers of Wiltshire. This procured him an opening to the magazines as a writer on agricultural and rural topics. In 1877 he abandoned country journalism, and moved nearer to London, hoping to make a living by his pen. In the following year he won his first real success with The Gamekeeper at Home; its subtitle, 'Sketches of Natural History and Rural Life,' indicates the kind of work by which his future fame was won. Other books written in the same vein, or on similar subjects, are Wild Life in a Southern County (1879), The Amateur Poucher (1880), Round about a Great Estate (1881), Nature near London (1883), Life of the Fields (1884), Red Decr (1884), and The Open Air (1885). The book entitled The Story of My Heart (1883) is a strange autobiography of inner life. Besides these he wrote some later novels of indifferent merit; After London, or Wild England (1885) is a curious romance of the future. Within his own province, although it was not a wide one, Jefferies was an admirable writer. He possessed a wonderful insight into the habits and ways of animals and birds and creeping things, and a great love of them. No English writer has shown a more minute and accurate acquaintance with the life of the hedges, and woodlands and fields of southern England. He had also a reverent feeling for nature, not only of her outward phases and aspects, but also of what may be termed her inner life. Nor were human beings excluded from the range of his observation and sympathy: he has left admirable sketches of country-folk—farmers, gamekeepers, labourers, village-loafers, &c. He died at Goring in Sussex on 14th August 1887, after a painful illness of six years' duration. See Sir Walter Besant's Eulogy (1888) and the Life by H. S. Salt (1893).