Richard Jefferies: The granddaddy of nature writing

This is another of the columns I write for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy - you can read more about the JCPCP on the Egalitarian Press site.

I believe this column, on this blog's hero Richard Jefferies, was published a few issues ago.

Richard Jefferies: The granddaddy of nature writers

Nature writers lived for decades in the shadow of Evelyn Waugh’s William Boot, author of the Daily Beast’s ‘Lush Places’ column: “Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole." But today Boot would get a respectful mention in a Guardian survey of the new nature writing occasioned by Robert Macfarlane’s latest. 

The granddaddy of nature writing is the 19th-century Wiltshire journalist and novelist Richard Jefferies, who died in 1887 aged only 38. He has enjoyed periods of popularity, notably during the Second World War, when there was a widespread sense that rural Britain was somehow ‘what we are fighting for’, but still awaits a full rediscovery. 

When he is rediscovered, we shall find he is far more than just a nature writer. After London, for instance, is an early essay in post-apocalyptic fiction:

The old men say their fathers told them that soon after the fields were left to themselves a change began to be visible. It became green everywhere in the first spring, after London ended, so that all the country looked alike.

The meadows were green, and so was the rising wheat which had been sown, but which neither had nor would receive any further care. Such arable fields as had not been sown, but where the last stubble had been ploughed up, were overrun with couch-grass, and where the short stubble had not been ploughed, the weeds hid it. So that there was no place which was not more or less green; the footpaths were the greenest of all, for such is the nature of grass where it has once been trodden on, and by-and-by, as the summer came on, the former roads were thinly covered with the grass that had spread out from the margin.

That may just be the best nature writing Jefferies ever produced. It’s certainly good enough to build a convincing world, even if the action of the book is rarely worthy of living in it.

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One of the things I value in Jefferies is his ability to surprise. Try his 1885 essay ‘Wild Flowers’:

If you have been living in one house in the country for some time, and then go on a visit to another, though hardly half a mile distant, you will find a change in the air, the feeling and tone of the place. It is close by, but it is not the same.

To discover these minute differences, which make one locality and home happy, and the next adjoining unhealthy, the Chinese have invented the science of Feng-shui, spying about with cabalistic mystery, casting the horoscope of an acre. There is something in all superstitions; they are often the foundation of science.

Fend-shui is mentioned by some 19th-century Western writers, but they tend to scoff where Jefferies sounds intrigued. More sympathetic accounts appeared in the early 20th century, but it was not until the 1990s that it became a vogue.

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Though it was published as a three-volume adult novel, Bevis: The Story of a Boy is the urtext, the motherlode, of children’s holiday adventure stories. It’s why generations of us grew up on books where nicely behaved kids found buried treasure or rounded up Nazi spies and criminal gangs – a school of fiction that, one critic suggested, began with the agricultural depression of the late 19th century and was killed off by the Beeching cuts and the EEC’s Common Agricultural Policy.

I think I know Bevis well, but when I pick it up, the way the action is told entirely from a child’s point of view still astounds. Mark Twain got there first, but you won’t find many other examples in the fiction of this period. 

And Jefferies can surprise with snatches of social history too:

For seventy years he had laboured in that place, and never once gone out of sight of the high Down yonder, and in all that seventy years no one till Bevis and Mark, and now their pupil Jack, had learned to swim. Bevis's Governor was out of the question, he had crossed the seas. But of the true country-folk, of all who dwelt round about these waters, not one had learned to swim. 

Very likely no one had learned since the Norman Conquest. When the forests were enclosed and the commonality forbidden to hunt, the spirit of enterprising exercise died out of them. Certainly it is a fact that until quite recently you might search a village from end to end and not find a swimmer; and most probably if you found one now he would be something of a traveller, and not a home-staying man.

This explanation sounds deeply speculative, but it’s a fact that few young black Americans can swim and that this is often put down to poverty and historic segregation.

And this is a battle now being fought again in Britain. Jefferies was born at Coate Farm, just outside Swindon. Today the town’s Oasis leisure centre, from which a certain Nineties rock band took its name, lies empty and local politics are all about the struggle to reopen it – and in particular its swimming pool.

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Scoop ends with William Boot home from Africa and writing ‘Lush Places’ again in his study:

“The waggons lumber in the lane under their golden glory of harvested sheaves,” he wrote; “maternal rodents pilot their furry brood through the stubble."

But Waugh adds a chillier observation of his own: “Outside the owls hunted maternal rodents and their furry brood.”

Jefferies was well aware of this. In his Wood Magic, the young Bevis can talk to the animals and understand their speech. The world he discovers through this is far from the pieties of the Victorian nursery – it’s not one where birds in their little nests agree. 

Instead, Jefferies uses a convoluted tale of imperial conquest and political intrigue to make us understand that nature is a Darwinian war of all against all.

It’s not a jungle out there, but it is an English woodland.

Coate Water, Swindon, filmed from the air

Coate Water in Swindon was formed by diverting the River Cole. It was originally a reservoir for the Wilts & Berks Canal, and when the canal was abandoned in 1914, it became a pleasure park for the people of the town.

It was the inspiration for the New Sea of Richard Jefferies' book Bevis: The Story of a Boy, which was published in 1882 and is the urtext of all children's holiday adventure stories. In a later book, the postapocalyptic fantasy After London, the New Sea has effectively expanded to cover much of Southern England.

Jefferies' birthplace was Coate Farm, which is close to the reservoir and is now a museum devoted to his life and writings.

Listen to a short radio essay on Richard Jefferies' The Pigeons at the British Museum

The life of the country writer can be riven with contradictions. This blog's hero Richard Jefferies, for instance, spent a significant period of his childhood in South London, and seems to have been happier there than he was with his family back in Wiltshire. 

This makes me wonder if the endless adventures and exploration we see in his Bevis: The Story of a Boy are as autobiographical as is usually assumed. 

And Coate Water outside Swindon, beside and upon which these adventures were set, was an artificial reservoir built to supply the Wilts & Berks Canal.

As an adult writer, Jefferies moved nearer to London - to a still-rural Surbiton - to be closer to the market for his work. This proximity to the capital made its mark on that work - one example of this is an essay that was the subject of a Radio 3 Sunday Feature in 2022:

New Generation Thinker Will Abberley reconsiders Richard Jefferies' The Pigeons at the British Museum and argues that an essay written in 1884 should be essential reading today. He talks to Andrew Blechman, the author of Pigeons: The Fascinating Saga of the World's Most Revered and Reviled Bird, and to nature writer Richard Mabey.

You can listen to the feature on the BBC website.

Desmond Morris, surrealism, The Naked Ape and Richard Jefferies

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The Rest is History podcast on history's greatest monkeys was a disappointment in that there was no mention of the Barbary ape that bit King Alexander of Greece in 1920 and caused his death - perhaps it didn't go to the right school? - but it was invaluable for another reason.

Because it mentioned that Desmond Morris is still alive and living in Ireland at the age of 96. This led me to look at Morris's remarkable career and discover that his grandfather was a school friend of Richard Jefferies, about whom I wrote my Masters dissertation many years ago.

Morris's book The Naked Ape was a bestseller, and a scandal to some, in the Sixties. It sought to explain human behaviour as the result of the conditions under which we evolved, annoying both the religious right and the cultural left.

His qualifications for writing the book were that he had a doctorate in zoology and had worked for the Zoological Society of London in various capacities for some years. He was also, alongside David Attenborough, a well-known presenter of natural history programmes on the BBC.

But before all that he had enjoyed a radically different career. In his early twenties Morris was one of Britain's foremost surrealist painters.

All of which explains Getty's caption for the photo above:

16th December 1966: English zoologist Dr Desmond Morris at home. Morris, who has been the curator of mammals at London Zoo since 1959, leaves in the new year to take up an appointment as director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Morris is a keen artist himself and the walls of his home are decorated with many of his own contemporary paintings. 

There is a full chronology of Desmond Morris's life on his website.

Morris came from Swindon - if you saw him in the Seventies it was often on a chat show where he was paired with the town's most famous daughter, Diana Dors.

Desmond Morris's great grandfather was William Morris (not that William Morris), who founded Swindon's first newspaper and was an importance influence on the young Richard Jefferies.

Walter Besant wrote in The Eulogy of Richard Jefferies:

His chief literary adviser in those days was Mr. William Morris, of Swindon, proprietor and editor of the North Wilts Advertiser. Mr. Morris is himself the author of several works, among others a "History of Swindon," and, as becomes a literary man with such surroundings, he is a well-known local antiquary. 

Mr. Morris allowed the boy, who was at school with his own son, the run of his own library; he lent him books, and he talked with him on subjects which, one can easily understand, were not topics of conversation at Coate. 

Afterwards, when Jefferies had already become reporter for the local press, it was the perusal of a descriptive paper by Mr. Morris, on the  "Lakes of Killarney," which decided the lad upon seriously attempting the literary career.

Richard Jefferies died in 1887 at the age of 38. If he had lived to 79, he could have dandled the infant Desmond Morris on his knee.

Chicken missing from the Richard Jefferies Museum found in pub

After this morning's sad news about a duck race, here is a happier fowl-related story. A chicken missing from the Richard Jefferies Museum at Coate Water, Swindon, was found in the pub down the road.

As the Swindon Advertiser puts it:

On a sunny Sunday, staff at the Sun Inn pub near Coate Water were shocked when an unusually feathered customer paid them a surprise visit, bringing an altogether different type of hen party to the one they might be used to. 

Bewildered at the arrival of the runaway bird and trying to find out where it had come from, the pub posted a picture of it onto its social media and asked 'anybody lost a chicken'. ...

The chicken was called Maxima and had taken a quick trip down the road from the nearby Richard Jefferies Museum. 

Her owner, Suzie Simmons made her own post on the Swindon Community Notice Board Facebook page, thanking the boozer for its hospitality. 

And here is Richard Jefferies, illuminating as ever, in his 1874 essay The Farmer at Home:

The brewhouse was an important feature when all farmers brewed their own beer and baked their own bread. At present the great majority purchase their beer from the brewers, although some still brew large quantities for the labourers' drinking in harvest time. 

At a period when comparatively little ready money passed between employer and employed, and the payment for work was made in kind, beer was a matter which required a great deal of the attention of the farmer, and absorbed no little of his time. 

At this day it is a disputed matter which is cheapest, to buy or to brew beer: at that time there was no question about it. It was indisputably economical to brew. 

Richard Jefferies, Bevis and ice hockey: A mystery solved

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It did freeze and hard. The wind being still, the New Sea was soon frozen over except in two places. There was a breathing-hole in Fir-Tree Gulf about fifty or sixty yards from the mouth of the Nile. The channel between New Formosa and Serendib did not “catch,” perhaps the current from Sweet River Falls was the cause, and though they could skate up within twenty yards, they could not land on the islands. Jack and Frances came to skate day after day; Bevis and Mark with Ted, Cecil, and the rest fought hockey battles for hours together.

This passage comes from the very last chapter of Bevis: The Story of a Boy by Richard Jefferies, which was published in 1882.

One of the reasons I like Jefferies so much is the way he drops in unexpected observations - here it is village lads playing ice hockey in Victorian England. The 'New Sea' here is the boys' name for the reservoir at Coate in Swindon, where Jefferies was born.

Since posting this passage for the first time, I have looked for other references to the game in 19th-century England but failed to find them.

This evening I have found out why.

I'm listening to the second instalment of The Curiously Specific Book Club podcast on The Nine Tailors by Dorothy L. Sayers. And, discussing the sport of speed skating that used to flourish in the Fens, they mention that there was also a game called bandy.

Google bandy and you will find all sorts of references, including a Wikipedia entry. Bandy was a precursor of modern ice hockey codified in Britain in the year Bevis was published, though it is still widely played in its own right in Scandinavia and Russia.

So the game Jefferies called hockey in 1882 was probably then called bandy by most people and references to early varieties of ice hockey will most likely be found under that name.

A Richard Jefferies Wildlife Walk to mark his 175th birthday

From the Richard Jefferies Museum site:

This year, to commemorate and celebrate Jefferies' 175th birthday, we are planning a grand walk to expore the nature of "Jefferies' Land", and record it all in a book. Our route starts from Jefferies' grave in Worthing and take us via all the main places where he lived in his short life, ending up back at his birthplace (the museum) on his 175th birthday - 6 November 2023.

But don't worry, we're not trying to walk the whole thing in one go, and not on our own - will you join us?

After Worthing, the walk passes through Hove and Rotherfield in East Susses, before heading north to Eltham, Sydenham and Tolworth in South London. From there it heads for the Richard Jefferies Museum at Coate Water on the edge of Swindon.

Follow the link above for more on the project.

If we want better public health we must defend local sports facilities

In a recent The Rest is Politics podcast, Alastair Campbell talked about the way many countries see sport as responsibility of the health ministry. In Britain, however, it's lumped in with culture as one of those things that are nice to have but where government spending when can be cut when times are hard.

John Harris has an article in the Guardian today looking at the results of this mistaken policy:

Clearly, this is a country that needs to get better at looking after itself. But while glaring facts about the intersection of poverty and ill health are serially ignored, public health is also hindered and damaged by a dismal failure to join up one area of policy with another. 

If you want particularly vivid proof of that very British syndrome, try this: as hospitals break and buckle, local leisure centres and swimming pools are also in the midst of crisis.

Piece through the news archives, and there it all is: recent closures in such places as Huddersfield, Milton Keynes, Rye in East Sussex, Coventry and Hull. In Gateshead, people are waiting for a council decision about two big leisure centres, which could spell the end of pools, gyms and squash courts. 

One high-profile local doctor recently nailed what is at stake: "Take a poor area with massive health inequalities. Remove the last remaining public exercise facilities from the poorest bits of said poor areas. Watch what happens to health. It’s an experiment that the people of Gateshead don’t deserve to be a part of."

It's already happened in Swindon, where there is a campaign to reopen the listed Oasis Leisure Centre, which has been closed since November 2020. The video above shows what the town has lost - it already feels like a relic of a lost civilisation.

Because it's Swindon, I thought of Richard Jefferies and a passage from Bevis that I have quoted before.

In it, an astounded farm labourer watches two boys swimming:

For seventy years he had laboured in that place, and never once gone out of sight of the high Down yonder, and in all that seventy years no one till Bevis and Mark, and now their pupil Jack, had learned to swim. ...

Very likely no one had learned since the Norman Conquest. When the forests were enclosed and the commonality forbidden to hunt, the spirit of enterprising exercise died out of them. Certainly it is a fact that until quite recently you might search a village from end to end and not find a swimmer; and most probably if you found one now he would be something of a traveller, and not a home-staying man.

The increasing polarisation of incomes in Britain means Jefferies may here be giving us a picture, not of our past, but our future.

Diving board at Richard Jefferies' Coate Water to be restored

Swindon Borough Council is to spend close to £150,000 to restore the Art Deco diving platform at Coate Water.

Wiltshire Live reports the news, gleefully adding the detail that the board is "covered in bird poo".

At this point I can do no better than repeat a post from 12 years ago:

Richard Jefferies, who his best remembered as a nature essayist but, almost in passing, invented post-apocalyptic science fiction (in After London) and the children's holiday adventure (in Bevis), was the subject (or victim) of my Masters dissertation.

His birthplace near Swindon now houses a museum devoted to his life and works. New readers should start with this guest post on Jefferies and Coate by Rebecca Welshman.

The museum stands next to Coate Water, a reservoir constructed in 1822 to provide water for the Wilts & Berks Canal. In Bevis it features as a boyhood paradise and in After London is transformed into a vast inland sea.

When the canal closed in 1914 Coate Water was turned into a park to serve the town of Swindon. Memory Lane at Coate Water describes its use in the 20th century:

Visitors to the park were charged an entrance fee and a variety of small wooden buildings around the lake provided boating and changing facilities. A wooden diving platform was built in 1921 and there was wooden staging separating the swimming and diving areas of the lake. Later a full size swimming pool and a children's paddling pool were added although today the swimming pool has been filled in and changed to a children's paddling pool and the original paddling pool has been filled with sand and turned into a play area for children. 

By 1935, the 'Art Deco' Diving board provided a nationally renowned platform for diving competitions and the lake was also regularly used for regattas and water polo. 

Although swimming in the lake was stopped due to public health and safety concerns in 1958, the diving board can still be seen today and has become a local landmark associated with the park and its history.

The diving board, occupied by the lake's more daring waterfowl, is indeed the landmark that most strikes visitors to Coate today. The video above describes Sophie Hart's ambitions to see it preserved.

I had to use the Wayback Machine to find Memory Lane at Coate Water again, but Sophie Hart's video is still where it ever was.

A virtual tour of the Swindon railway village

I spent a few days holiday in Swindon back in 2009 so I could visit the Richard Jefferies Museum at his birthplace at Coate. 

That visit had to be carefully planned to include the one Sunday that month when the museum was open to the public. Since then, however, it has experienced a renaissance,

While I was in Swindon the place grew on me - both the old town on the hill and the new town, built in the 19th century largely to serve the Great Western Railway's works, down below.

The railway village in the new town was in a poor state, with some of its most important buildings boarded up.

This video suggests the establishment of a heritage action zone to cover it has led to some promising developments.

The quest for Richard Jefferies

Wiltshire Man and his bike take us to some of the county locations associated with the 19th-century nature writer Richard Jefferies: Swindon's Old Town, Coate Water and Liddington Hill.

Richard Jefferies: Primrose Gold in Our Village

The Swindon Advertiser brings news that the Richard Jefferies Museum at Coate in Swindon is to be used as a polling station in next month's general election.

Which gives me an excuse for quoting from Jefferies 1887 essay Primrose Gold in Our Village. 'Primrose' here is a reference to the Primrose League, which was founded in 1883 to spread Conservative principles.

Jefferies writes:

The old grocer, who is not a 'professional tradesman', who exposes dirty Radical prints in his window for sale, who said several hard words to the clergyman a few years ago for refusing to bury his Nonconformist baby, who is a regular old sanded brute - is not boycotted. 

Certainly not. No private notice sent round, or placards stuck up remarking that if you deal there you will get lead pepper. Still it is not necessary to buy there if the 'professional' tradesman's brother sets up another shop. It is not that you shall not go to the old grocer, but it is suggested how much better it would be to go to the other one and so encourage him. The caucus does not say you shall not deal here; the caucus says you shall deal there. It is boycotting reversed. 

By and by the doctors found out that the prevalence of disease was due to there not being sufficient air-holes to the drains; so in making these improvements one was casually opened by the old grocer's shop. Always a beastly Radical effluvia just there. Don't stop there - spores, germs, pah! 

The old gentleman has written letters about it, but somehow the official wheels don't move. Ex-officio people are plentiful on country board, and they are mostly heathen Tories.

My understanding of Jefferies is that he was chiefly a jobbing writer who would supply whatever editors wanted. But essays like this do suggest he had become a thoroughgoing Radical by the time of his death.

Blue plaque installed at Richard Jefferies' birthplace

A blue plaque was put up today at Coate Farm, Swindon, the birthplace of the Victorian writer Richard Jefferies.

Coate Farm is now a museum dedicated to Jefferies. Its director Mike Pringle told the Swindon Advertiser:

"This is fantastic, it’s an acknowledgement that someone great was here. Richard Jefferies was a big name in his day but it seemed like his time had come and gone for a while. 

"However, it feels like society is coming round to him again with climate change on the agenda and ideas about re-wilding and being out in nature becoming more popular – these things were all hugely important to him and his work. 

"I think he would have really enjoyed the fact that we are celebrating the things he loved as much as we are celebrating him."

Richard Jefferies features in the Swindon Spring Festival

The first Swindon Spring Festival will take place across the town between 6 and 19 May, and this blog's hero Richard Jefferies will play a prominent part.

Dr Will Abberley, says The Swindonian, will give the first Richard Jefferies Lecture, making the case for Jefferies as a pioneer for modern nature writing.

And the Jefferies museum at Coate Water will host many other events as part of the festival.

You can find full details on the Swindon Spring Festival website.

The Richard Jefferies Museum plans expansion

Much has changed at the Richard Jefferies Museum in Swindon since I visited it in 2009.

Here is the Swindon Advertiser:

Mike Pringle, along with poet and cultural event organiser Hilda Sheehan, took over the running of the Richard Jefferies Museum about a decade ago. 

At the time, the museum devoted to the passionate Victorian nature writer was attracting perhaps 800 visitors per year. 

Last year there were about 15,000.

This increase in visitor numbers arises from the museum being open more often and its use as an arts venue.

Welcome as it is, this rise is putting strains on the museum, particularly in bad weather.

The museum occupies the farmhouse in which Jefferies was born and there are now plans for a new building on the site once occupied by its cowshed.

I rather liked it when the museum was a secret known only to a few, but Jefferies deserves to much better known. (Come to think of it, I am meant to be writing a little book on him for David Boyle.)

And I like what Pringle says to the Advertiser:

"For us, if a kid sits under the mulberry tree here, they’re sitting under the same mulberry tree, experiencing the same things that Jefferies did, and that’s much richer than trying to persuade a child to read a bit of Victorian text."

Bevis's Council Oak at Coate Water

Phil, Tom, Ted, Jim, Frank, Walter, Bill, 'Charl', Val, Bob, Cecil, Sam, Fred, George, Harry, Michael, Jack, Andrew, Luke and half a dozen more were talking all together, shouting across each other, occasionally fighting, wrestling, and rolling over on the sward under an oak. There were two up in the tree, bellowing their views from above, and little Charlie ('Charl') was astride of a bough which he had got hold of, swinging up and down, and yelling like the rest. Some stood by the edge of the water, for the oak was within a few yards of the New Sea, and alternatively made ducks and drakes, and turned to contradict their friends.

The Swindon Advertiser names its top 10 free outings in Wiltshire. It includes Coate Water and mentions the trees around it, but not the Council Oak from Richard Jefferies' Bevis. You can see it in my photograph above.

"Ducks and drakes" here, it seems, means skimming stones.

A blue plaque for Richard Jefferies at Coate

Good news from the Swindon Advertiser:

A blue plaque to pay tribute to the Swindon-born poet Richard Jefferies is being planned for 2019. 

The museum and place where the poet was born, which was recently re-thatched by Swindon Borough Council costing £30,000, may soon have a new addition to its walls.

They may have said  it twice, but Jefferies was not a poet.

He is most celebrated as a nature essayist, but I am more interested in his Bevis, which was a huge influence on the holiday adventure genre of children's books, and After London, which was an early work of post-apocalyptic science fiction.

Anyway, my photograph shows the Richard Jefferies Museum at Coate in Swindon.

Yield to the Night and Talking Pictures TV

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The most welcome development of the past week has been the appearance of Talking Pictures TV on Freeview.

You no longer need an HD set or receiver to view it. Just do a reinstall and it will appear on channel 81.

Talking Pictures offers a diet of vintage British films, leavened with a few from America and interspersed with the sort of old travel films I often post here.

Already I have seen one film that I have long been looking out for.

Yield to the Night was made released in 1956 and deals with the last days of a woman murderer who is waiting to be executed.

The makers denied that it was inspired by the case of Ruth Ellis, who was hanged the year before. But having seen the film - the murder in particular - I cannot believe them.

Yield to the Night stars Diana Dors and shows what a good actress she was. It is being shown again on Talking Pictures on Sunday evening.

Billed as the British Marilyn Monroe, she died in 1984 aged only 52. In her later years she was happy to play character roles that contrasted with her years as a pin up.

She was born in Swindon and her real name was Diana Fluck.

As she was fond of saying:

"They asked me to change my name. I suppose they were afraid that if my real name, Diana Fluck, was in lights and one of the lights blew…"

If I blog less often blame Richard Jefferies

I have started work on a short ebook on Richard Jefferies. Some of the writing will require visits that are now best left until the spring - Worthing, Surbiton, Swindon... Writing is a glamorous life.

So if I post on here a bit less often than has been my habit, I hope that is the reason. (Mind you, I notice this is my fourth post today and I have scheduled one from Lord Bonkers for tomorrow morning.)

There is also the sad fact that neither blogging nor the Liberal Democrats are what they were a decade ago. I have been thinking for a while that I cannot just go on for ever pretending things have not changed.

Quite what to do about it is less clear. Having more quality guest posts sounds a good idea. Beyond that I am not sure.

One thing I may do is finally join Facebook. I have felt for a long time that I should be there, if only to promote this blog.

I suppose I'm afraid a Facebook page might supersede the blog. After all, I was using Liberal England like a Facebook page before Facebook was invented.

And then there is the fact that Facebook is clearly Satan's picture book.

Still, things change. I started writing this blog to promote Lord Bonkers' website - and that vanished years ago, by which time the blog had become far more important to me and my readers.

Nothing may come of all this, but if I blog less often in future, I hope it will be Richard Jefferies' fault.

Happy Birthday Richard Jefferies

Richard Jefferies - nature writer, novelist and an a huge influence on later writing for children - was born at Coate Farm, Swindon, on 6 November 1848.

Today Coate Farm is home to the newly thriving Richard Jefferies Museum and the Richard Jefferies Society has been running since 1950.

I wrote my Masters dissertation on Jefferies in the 1990s and also gave the Richard Jefferies Society's Birthday Lecture in those days.

There are lots of posts on this blog's Richard Jefferies label.