Jefferies' birthplace, Coate Farm, Swindon.
'The commonest pebble, dusty and marked with the stain of the ground, seems to me so wonderful; my mind works round it till it becomes the sun and centre of a system of thought and feeling. Sometimes moving aside the tufts of grass with careless fingers while resting on the sward, I found these little pebble-stones loose in the crumbly earth among the rootlets. Then, brought out from the shadow, the sunlight shone and glistened on the particles of sand that adhered to it. Particles adhered to my skin - thousands of years between finger and thumb, these atoms of quartz and sunlight shining all that time, and flowers blooming and life glowing in all, myriads of living things, from the cold still limpet on the rock to the burning, throbbing heart of man.' -- Richard Jefferies, 'Hours of Spring'.
Richard Jefferies' portrayals of rural life in the south west of England earned him a special place within late Victorian and twentieth-century readership. Described by Victorian playwright and critic, Joseph Comyns Carr, as one of the most eminent authors of the nineteenth century Jefferies was an acute observer of nature, and wrote with highly imaginative and engaging insight about the human response to landscape. By the time of his early death in 1887, aged 39, Jefferies had published 19 books - 6 of which were compilations of his many and varied contributions to periodicals. Jefferies was born in Coate, a hamlet outside of Swindon, where he lived until he was twenty-seven. The Wiltshire landscape was to remain a source of unfailing inspiration for the rest of his life. Smaller than Hardy's Wessex, yet as intricately understood and sensitively appreciated, Jefferies' Land lies in a circle of 10 miles radius, the centre of which is Coate farmhouse. After his death Richard Jefferies' work became increasingly popular, leading to the publication of a 'Pocket Richard Jefferies' along with other authors of the time, such as Hardy, Dickens, and R.L.Stevenson.
The Richard Jefferies Society, founded in 1960, has recently republished some of Jefferies' early novels and continues to work to preserve the author's birthplace, now a museum.
My PhD thesis titled Imagining Archaeology: Nature and Archaeology in the Late Nineteenth Century considers the relation between the literary and archaeological imagination in the work of Richard Jefferies and Thomas Hardy.
Links
The Richard Jefferies Society
