Jefferies Richard - Landscape with figures: selected prose writings

Richard Jefferies died of tuberculosis in 1887, aged thirty-eight. In a writing life of little more than twenty years, he showed signs of becoming a literary polymath, publishing nine works of fiction and more than 450 essays and pieces of journalism. They range from a tone poem on The Lions in Trafalgar Square, through slight nature notes and political brickbats on the misdemeanours of agricultural labourers, to metaphysical meditations on human perception. What links them is a nagging, inquisitive and, just occasionally, toxic curiosity about what, in the great scheme of things, was the relationship between human beings, nature and the land.

Its not surprising that in Jefferies own breakneck career this passion moved through distinct phases. It began in his teens, with strictly journalistic and often deeply conservative surveys of the worlds of farming and gamekeeping, shifted to sharper enquiries into natural history, and concluded with a kind of inclusive synthesis, in which human nature, the more-than-human world, and the deep mysteries of consciousness all become part of a single field-play. Jefferies was trying urgently to work out who he was, as a displaced, rootless, professional peerer, being rapidly invaded by one of the more destructive manifestations of nature.

Jefferies first perched on my shoulder when I was about twelve years old, and has lurked (not always enjoyably) in the shadows ever since. What fascinates me is how Jefferies phases movements, if you like have been echoed both in my own life, and in the shifting focus of public interest. When I first came across him, I was an adolescent nature-romantic, inclined to solitariness. His numinous landscape writing touched something quite deep and undefined in me, and I aped his style shamelessly in school essays. When I was sixteen I won a prize for one of these pastiches, and chose Jefferies spiritual autobiography, The Story of My Heart, as my reward. It is a measure of how tastes change that the staff in charge of prizes had never heard of either it or its author, and suspected from the title that it was some cheap novelette. So it had to be vetted. They might just as well not have bothered. I found it incomprehensible once Id been presented with the thin volume, and it still seems to me a faintly distasteful piece of pre-New Age self-indulgence.

Half a century on, the reading public is more aware of Jefferies, especially his special contribution to what is now known as nature writing, as distinct from natural history writing. I find Im constantly discovering new aspects of him here as well. His instinctive grasp of ecology was always obvious. Even in his most despairing moments, he understood the individual humans inseparability from the rest of creation, however indifferent creation was to him. But a sharpening of our contemporary interest in what, precisely, these links are has helped highlight what a precocious observer Jefferies was. He was a kind of hedge-scientist, reasoning through analogy, forging explanations by the application of reason and intuition to acute observation. Its not a respectable scientific mode these days, but it creates a space where human imagination can meet the constantly evolving, experimenting pool of life. Jefferies was surprisingly modern in his ideas about perception, too. He was aware of the dangerous subjectivity but also creativity of the senses, of how cultural context, psychological preconception, even pure optical illusion, shape the way nature appears to us. The mutability of the perceived world and of evolving life itself were, in the end, a single phenomenon to him.