20 August

England’s finest naturalist–novelist is buried

1887 Richard Jefferies was born near Swindon in Wiltshire. His father was a farmer in a small way, with 40 acres. He was unlucky, being bankrupted in 1877, and ending up a jobbing gardener. James Luckett Jefferies (1816–96, he outlived his son by several years) is immortalised as Iden, in Amaryllis at the Fair (1887).

Richard was educated locally and at Sydenham, in Kent, among aunts and uncles. Aged sixteen he demonstrated his independence of spirit by running away to France with a friend. They intended to make their way to Moscow, or failing that, America.

Jefferies finally settled on Swindon, where he began to write for Wiltshire newspapers, journals and magazines – mainly on local historical and natural history topics. His views were strongly Conservative, and conservationist.

In 1867 he suffered severe illness and was never again to be in good health. Tuberculosis had, in fact, been diagnosed in his early childhood. He married Jessie Baden, a farmer’s daughter, in 1874 and began writing.

It was some time before Jefferies could find a publisher for his more sensitive and introspective work, The Dewy Morn (eventually published in 1884). In it he found his distinctive mix of ruminative countryman essay and fictional plot. His essays on rural distress in The Times, in the early 1870s, were influential, and publicised his name.

In 1876 he moved to London, where his reprinted papers The Gamekeeper at Home (1878) and Wild Life in a Southern County (1879) were well received. The two strands of Jefferies’ prose – descriptive essay and fiction – merged, triumphantly, in Wood Magic (1881). It was followed by the childhood autobiographical novel, Bevis (1882), and the spiritual autobiography of adolescence, The Story of My Heart – his masterpiece and a work that Jefferies had been meditating for seventeen years.

In 1881 Jefferies’ health collapsed. Tuberculosis and a painful fistula (and numerous operations on it) made writing an agony. The remainder of his life was passed as an invalid in various health resorts, impecuniously. He nonetheless refused aid from the Royal Literary Fund, on moral principle. His last works were dictated to his wife from his death bed. He died of tuberculosis, at Goring on Sea, aged only 38, leaving his wife and three children virtually penniless. His remains were buried on 20 August 1887 at Broadwater cemetery, Worthing. Despite the wretched pauperism of his last years, Jefferies’ reputation has risen steadily over the century following.