Hodge and His Masters
Richard Jefferies
(Author)
Description
Richard Jefferies (1848-87) remains one of the most thoughtful and most lyrical writers on the English countryside. He had aspirations to make a living as a novelist, but it was his short, factually based articles for The Live Stock Journal and other magazines, drawn from a wealth of knowledge of the rural community into which he had been born, which, when brought together in book form, brought him recognition (though not wealth), and which continued to be read and admired after his early death. This two-volume work, first published in 1880, contains a collection of essays first published in The Standard. Jefferies describes the daily life and circumstances of Victorian English farmers, labourers and their wives without sentimentality, illustrating daily hardships as well as idyllic pastimes, and providing an accurate and thus valuable description of a now vanished way of life.
Product Details
Price
$54.04
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Publish Date
November 10, 2011
Pages
374
Dimensions
5.5 X 8.5 X 0.83 inches | 1.04 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9781108035828
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John Richard Jefferies (6 November 1848 - 14 August 1887) was an English nature writer, noted for his depiction of English rural life in essays, books of natural history, and novels. His childhood on a small Wiltshire farm had a great influence on him and provides the background to all his major works of fiction. Jefferies's corpus of writings covers a range of genres and topics, including Bevis (1882), a classic children's book, and After London (1885), a work of science fiction. For much of his adult life he suffered from tuberculosis, and his struggles with the illness and with poverty also play a role in his writing. Jefferies valued and cultivated an intensity of feeling in his experience of the world around him, a cultivation that he describes in detail in The Story of My Heart (1883). This work, an introspective depiction of his thoughts and feelings about the world, gained him the reputation of a nature mystic at the time, but it is his success in conveying his awareness of nature and people within it, both in his fiction and in essay collections such as The Amateur Poacher (1879) and Round About a Great Estate (1880), that has drawn most admirers. Walter Besant wrote of his reaction on first reading Jefferies: "Why, we must have been blind all our lives; here were the most wonderful things possible going on under our very noses, but we saw them not.