British author and naturalist who published a work of 'scientific romance' called After London; or Wild England (1885). Arguably his success lay in his vivid descriptions of the returning flora and fauna (which constitute the first, larger, part of the novel) rather than in characterisation or plot.

Footpaths were concealed by the second year, but roads could be traced, though as green as the sward, and were still the best for walking, because the tangled wheat and weeds, and, in the meadows, the long grass, caught the feet of those who tried to pass through. Year by year the original crops of wheat, barley, oats, and beans asserted their presence by shooting up, but in gradually diminished force, as nettles and coarser plants, such as the wild parsnips, spread out into the fields from the ditches and choked them. Aquatic grasses from the furrows and water-carriers extended in the meadows, and with the rushes, helped to destroy or take the place of the former sweet herbage. Meanwhile the brambles, which grew very fast, had pushed forward their prickly runners farther and farther from the hedges till they now reached ten or fifteen yards. The briars had followed, and the hedges had widened to three or four times their first breadth, the fields being equally contracted. Starting from all sides at once, these brambles and briars in the course of about twenty years met in the centre of the largest fields.

Richard Jefferies (1885, 2) After London; or Wild England


One of the more pessimisstic Nineteenth Century Visions? This seems to stem from a general sense of disillusionment with contemporary society and gives us a link to the writings of William Morris and other contemporaries:

I have no more faith than a grain of mustard seed in the future history of 'civilization', which I know now is doomed to destruction, probably before very long: what a joy it is to think of! And how often it consoles me to think of barbarism once more flooding the world, and real feelings and passions, however rudimentary, taking the place of our wretched hypocrisies.

Fowles' introduction, page viii (quoting Morris)

As evidenced by the sheer brutality of much of people's behaviour in the second half of the book, Jefferies did not share Morris' rather rose-tinted view of the collapse and its aftermath.

A second feature that might be pulled out from this is Fowles' observation that the setting of the novel reflects the inner life of the novelist himself. We shall see this observation made again below.

Link to a Biography of Richard Jefferies.

Link to Project Gutenberg edition. And another one.