After London (Special Edition) - Softcover

Jefferies, John Richard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 154418820X ISBN 13: 9781544188201

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2017

Synopsis

After some sudden and unspecified catastrophe has depopulated England, the countryside reverts to nature, and the few survivors to a quasi-medieval way of life. Beginning with a loving description of nature reclaiming England -- fields becoming overrun by forest, domesticated animals running wild, roads and towns becoming overgrown, the hated London reverting to lake and poisonous swampland -- the rest of the story is an adventure set many years later in the wild landscape.

About this title

About the Author

John Richard Jefferies (November 6, 1848 - August 14, 1887 ) was an English nature writer, essayist and journalist. He wrote fiction mainly based on farming and rural life. He was born at Coate, near Swindon, Wiltshire, the son of a farmer. From early in life he showed a great love of the countryside, but was temperamentally unsuited to follow his father as a farmer, and in 1866 he found employment as a newspaper reporter for the North Wiltshire Herald and the Swindon Advertiser. His birthplace and home is a museum open to the public. In late 1877, with Jessie and their baby son Harold, he moved to Surbiton (close to the Surrey-London boundary) to be nearer the hub of literary England. The Surbiton years were momentous. The couple's next child, a daughter called Jessie after her mother (but known by her second name, Phyllis), was born, and Jefferies began to make his name at last. His new surroundings defined him, both to himself and others, as a country writer. Articles drawing on Jefferies' Wiltshire experiences were snapped up by the Pall Mall Gazette, then published in book form as The Gamekeeper at Home in 1878, to be followed by similar collections of essays, like Wild Life in a Southern County (1879) and Round About a Great Estate (1880). Also published in these years was the popular Wood Magic: A Fable (1881), introducing his child-hero, Bevis. Bevis itself came out in three volumes in 1882, the year in which he left Surbiton and, after a summer in Exmoor, settled for a while in Brighton. About this time he wrote his extraordinary autobiography, The Story of My Heart (1883). He had been planning this work for seventeen years and, in his words, it was 'absolutely and unflinchingly true'. It was not an autobiography of the events of his life, but an outpouring of his deepest thoughts and feelings. Articles about the Surbiton area were reprinted in the popular Nature Near London (1883), although the last chapters of the book refer to Beachy Head, Ditchling Beacon and other Sussex landmarks. After London (1885) is of the type that could be best described as "post-apocalyptic fiction"; after some sudden and unspecified catastrophe has depopulated England, the countryside reverts to nature, and the few survivors to a quasi-medieval way of life.

Edition details

• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 154418820X
• ISBN 13: 9781544188201
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 186