There the slender plovers stay undaunted - Richard Jefferies knows what it is like to be a fish

It has been a while since I wrote about the ecological apocalypse novel of Richard Jefferies, After London, or Wild England (1885), in which the author so loathes London that he submerges it in a poisonous swamp.  Finally, I have read some more Jefferies, the magazine writing collected in the Penguin collection Landscape with Figures, covering 1872 through 1887, when Jefferies died, not yet forty years old.

The story the anthology tells is that Jefferies began as a writer on agricultural subjects, a country reformer.  These pieces, the first third of the book, are largely of historical and sociological interest.  As he shifted toward nature writing, though, to descriptions of the country itself, both his subject and style become richer, and stranger.

Richer meaning that he independently seems to me to be ahead of his time in his understanding of ecology, the interconnections between different species – see “Rooks Returning To Roost” (1878) for the effects of deforestation on rooks – and ethology, or animal behavior – actually, see “Rooks” for that, too, although I was thinking of the startling “Mind under Water” (1883), in which Jefferies tries to inhabit the mind of a fish.

Most people will only grant a moderate degree of intelligence to fish, linking coldness of blood to narrowness of intellect, and convinced that there can be but little brain in so small a compass as its head.  (162)

Jefferies has written a precursor of Thomas Nagel’s “What Is It Like To Be a Bat?” (1974), much of it wrong  in detail but on a promising track.  See also “A Brook – A London Trout” (1880), in which Jefferies falls in love with the title fish, as did I, as might you.

I have never seen him since.  I never failed to glance over the parapet into the shadowy water.  Somehow it seemed to look colder, darker, less pleasant than it used to do.  The spot was empty, and the shrill winds whistled through the poplars.  (152)

Near the end of his life, his imaginative power had become quite free.  Few of us will be the “you” in this passage:

If you will look at a grain of wheat you will see that it seems folded up: it has crossed its arms and rolled itself up into a cloak, a fold of which forms a groove, and so gone to sleep.  If you look at it some time, as people in old enchanted days used to look into a mirror, or the magic ink, until they saw living figures therein, you can almost trace a miniature human being in the oval of the grain…  And I do not know really whether I might not say that these little grains of English corn do not hold within them the actual flesh and blood of man.  Transubstantiation is a fact there.  (“Walks in Wheat-fields,” 1887, 214)

That essay is much recommended to readers of Wendell Berry.  Meanwhile, in his pure nature writing, Jefferies is discovering a strange poetic yet precise prose.  The last line is the winner:

From their hereditary homes the lapwings cannot be entirely driven away.  Out of the mist comes their plaintive cry; they are hidden, and their exact locality is not to be discovered.  Where winter rules most ruthlessly, where darkness is deepest in daylight, there the slender plovers stay undaunted.  (“Haunts of the Lapwing: Winter”, 1883, 206)

A great little benefit of reading Jefferies is that I found the original of William Boot, the nature writer in Evelyn Waugh’s  Scoop (1937).  Boot writes “a lyrical but wholly accurate account of the habits of the badger” and begins a column with “Feather-footed through the plashy fens passes the questing vole.”   The last line of the novel is “Outside the owls hunted maternal rodents and their furry broods.”  I had wondered, who is Waugh imitating?  Now I know.

Its cactus-like branches formed a carmine fringe - invasive species and Victorian ecosystem fiction

The Old Book Conundrum:  I make startling discoveries that are already well known to anyone who cares about the subject.  I plant my flag on the peak, not noticing the other flags, and the little book in the tin box which has been signed by thousands of other climbers, and the little café that sells hot cocoa and strudel.

Everyone already knew, yes, that in early English science fiction much of the “science” under discussion was Darwinism?  I had no idea.  I guess I thought it was all about machines.  The inventor in The Time Machine (1895) invents a time machine.  The invading Martians in The War of the Worlds (1898) crush humanity with their ray guns and space dreadnoughts and ansibles and whatnot.  Perhaps Jules Verne really is a bit more about machines?  Like I know from Jules Verne.

The time machine of The Time Machine is not related to science in any way – it’s pure fantasy.  Necessary, though, because H. G. Wells correctly understood the time scale of Darwinism.  If he wanted big evolutionary changes, he needed millions of years.  Thus, a veneer of time travel was draped over a story about advantageous evolutionary traits and natural selection.  Thus, the strange decision of the time traveler to constantly push forward – I hardly see how, for the sake of the story, Wells needed the final vision of the entropic death of the Earth.  But that scene, stripped of human content, is the thematic climax of the novel, and the best thing in the book.

Richard Jefferies explored new Darwinian ideas in After London, or Wild England (1885) by eliminating the machines altogether, regressing to medieval technology.  He was working on the idea of the ecosystem, although he did not yet have that word.  His novel was, in part, a mental experiment:  remove human pressure on the environment, and see what happens to fields, forests, rivers, wildlife, and, not least importantly, humans.  I’m sure a modern biologist would find it all too simple, but I was able to detect Jefferies’s excitement about the idea that it all fits together.  Or perhaps the new idea was that the system is dynamic, but coherent and understandable.

Wells was studying the ecosystem, too, in The War of the Worlds, this time by introducing invasive species.  I knew about the highly evolved Martians, of course, but not about the other invasive species:

[T]he seeds which the Martians (intentionally or accidentally) brought with them gave rise in all cases to red-coloured growths.  Only that known popularly as the red weed, however, gained any footing in competition with terrestrial forms…  It spread up the sides of the pit by the third or fourth day of our imprisonment, and its cactus-like branches formed a carmine fringe to the edges of our triangular window.  And afterwards I found it broadcast throughout the country, and especially wherever there was a stream of water.  (II.2.)

The red weed spreads throughout the novel, until it, too, succumbs to the clever ecological trick ending, when the terrestrial ecosystem strikes back.

I have not read any other Wells.  I would guess that The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) has more of this, while The Invisible Man (1897) does not, although I am probably wrong.  The novel about bicycles is presumably really about bicycles, maybe?

A day or two more, I guess, poking at the hideous corpses of the Martians.

They regretted when they emerged from the trees - a Richard Jefferies forest fantasy

Five years before Richard Jefferies published After London, or Wild England, John Ruskin had published his own fantasy of poisonous London, in the form of an essay about how novels are bad for us. The primrose, daisies, and purple thistles of his youth have been destroyed by encroaching London, and replaced by garbage, sewage, and, most noxious of all, printed matter.  I invite my readers to reacquaint themselves with this little masterpiece: “festering and flaunting out their last publicity in the pits of stinking dust and mortal slime.”  Ruskin may well be the finest writer of English prose of his century.

Jefferies, too, wants to recover those thistles.  The heart of his novel is in the subtitle.  Jefferies is going to regrow, or at least conjure up, Wild England.

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.

That is actually the first two lines, the first paragraph, of the novel.  First lines can be made to do a lot.  The next three pages or so are about plants, nothing but plants.  The couch grass invades the arable fields.  The wheat soon shares space with “quantities of docks, thistles, oxeye daisies, and similar plant.  Charlock, too… sorrel, wild carrots, and nettles…”  Nettles and wild parsnips “spread out into the fields from the ditches and choked [the grain crops].”

Brambles, aquatic grass, hawthorn bushes, sapling ashes, horse-chestnuts.  The brambles protect the saplings until they become the new forest.  Ditches fill, streams and rivers recover their freedom, marshes spread.  “By the thirtieth year there was not one single open place, the hills only excepted, where a man could walk, unless he followed the tracks of wild creatures or cut himself a path.”

Jefferies begins his novel with the creation of a forest, in detail, based on his own observations and botanizing.  It’s a bit like Henry David Thoreau’s essay “The Dispersion of Forest Seeds,” but lightly fictionalized.  Jefferies is trying to rebuild the entire ecosystem.  The abundance of unharvested wheat creates an explosion in the mouse population.  Domestic animals adapt to the forest, as do men.

The sylvan fantasy reaches a peak early in the more novel-like part of the novel, when the protagonist and his brother spend a couple of chapters (6 and 7) riding through the forest.  The hero is happy, as is, I suspect, the author – “it was still fresh and sweet among the trees.”  Cuckoos, thorn bushes, wood-pigeons, “furze now bright with golden blossom.”

There were several glades, from one of which they startled a few deer, whose tails only were seen as they bounded into the underwood, but after the glades came the beeches again. Beeches always form the most beautiful forest, beeches and oak; and though nearing the end of their journey, they regretted when they emerged from the trees and saw the castle before them.

The novel’s arguments do not suggest that Jefferies wanted to exchange English civilization for the long-depleted English forest.  But he missed that forest, and did something about it.  His novel is still a way to visit it.

All the rottenness of a thousand years - Richard Jefferies's surprisingly humanist eco-apocalypse

The world of After London, or Wild England is essentially medieval - feudal barons, catapults, serfs, that sort of thing.  Steel-making has been lost, and the Christian Church is oddly stunted.  Antigone is performed at a party, so Sophocles has survived, unlike later English works, which were too long to bother copying out in manuscript – “so many of them were but enlargements of ideas or sentiments which had been expressed in a few words by the classics” (Ch X).  Ha!  Take that, English literature!

By 1885, when the Richard Jefferies's novel was published, the use of the Middle Ages in social criticism was well-established.  In Past and Present (1842), Thomas Carlyle argued for a particular English monastery run by a particular hero-monk as the ideal model for the organization and governance of modern society.  If Carlyle, a devilishly tricky ironist, did not actually advocate a return to the Catholic monastery, he was entirely serious about the value of the model – substitute, perhaps, “factory town” for “monastery” and “industrialist” for “abbot.”  John Ruskin, William Morris, and many more writers developed their own medieval critiques of modern society.

I had assumed that Richard Jefferies, a proto-environmentalist, was working in that tradition, and he is, in the sense that he is working against it.  Life in the New Middle Ages is, it turns out, horrible.  The novel is a demonstration of the power of the ideas of Thomas Hobbes.  Strong men rule their tiny domains, warfare is continual, life is short, ideas and beauty are valued only to the extent that they reinforce power.

The story takes these ides in some fruitful directions, and I won’t pursue them.  Felix, the non-Carlylean hero, embodies a different spirit, a hopeful one.  He values knowledge, he experiments, he explores the giant lake.  The conceit of the fictional book, the manuscript we are reading, is that his work was valuable, worth transmission.  Perhaps a New High Middle Ages is possible.

Jefferies was obviously not comfortable with his own world, since he destroyed London in a sewage explosion, for pity’s sake.

They say the sun is sometimes hidden by the vapour when it is thickest, but I do not see how they can tell this, since they could not enter the cloud, as to breathe it when collected by the wind is immediately fatal.  For all the rottenness of a thousand years and of many hundred millions of human beings is there festering under the stagnant water, which has sunk down into and penetrated the earth, and floated up to the surface the contents of the buried cloacae. (Ch. V)

So modern England is appalling, but neo-medieval England is awful in its own way.  What does Jefferies actually want, what is the fantasy at the heart of the novel?  The spectacular London apocalypse is so interesting that I have ignored the novel’s subtitle.  Tomorrow, Wild England – the best part of the book.

London is a posionous swamp - the wishful thinking of After London

After London, or Wild England, by Richard Jefferies, 1885.  The premise has two connected pieces.

First, a comet, or some other meaningless device, caused massive environmental changes to England, and presumably the rest of the world.  Most dramatically, central England is now covered by a huge freshwater lake.  The catastrophe destroyed civilization, which has returned, in terms of technology, population, and social organization, to the early Middle Ages.

Second, the accumulated filth of London so overwhelmed its infrastructure that the city literally exploded, becoming a toxic swamp, death to any living creature who enters it.

The novel has an odd structure.  The first fifty pages are a description of this new world by some sort of scholar who compares the current day to what little is known of the past.  Chapters are titled “The Lake” and “Wild Animals,” things like that.  Wildlife, political structures, geography.  There follows the story of Felix Aquila, a restless young man from the impoverished nobility who, it turns out, will become the first person to seriously explore The Lake.  The scholar seems to be telling this story as well, although it is, mostly, written like a third person novel, from the limited point of view of Felix.

When the “story” part of the novel began, I knew nothing about it, or, really, just one thing – if Felix did not somehow make it into, and, I guess, out of, that nightmarish, poisonous London, then the novel would be a complete failure.  But of course, he does, and it is not.  I’m just saying, to dangle that in front of the reader and not use it!

Although the genre had not been invented yet, we are clearly at the beginnings of the post-apocalyptic science fiction novel.  I kept picking up little flashes of later examples, other novels set in a ravaged England, some of which I certainly do not remember in any detail.  J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962) also puts London, and most of England, underwater.  Brian Aldiss’s Greybeard (1964) features a similarly empty England, as does a novel I almost dread mentioning, because it is so much more accomplished than any of these: Russell Hoban’s ingenious Riddley Walker (1980). Please see Fred’s Place for a taste of Riddley Walker.

I first heard of After London in another clever book, In Ruins (2003), by architectural historian Christopher Woodward, a cultural history of ruins that deftly blends literature, art, and architecture.  One chapter, as I remember it, is devoted to fantastic ruins, imaginary ruins, and one key example is After London.  Woodward describes Jefferies, a great nature lover, trapped by his poverty in a London slum, so desperate in his hatred of the city that he repeatedly destroys it in one fictional cataclysm after another.  The Oxford World’s Classics edition of Jeffereis that I have includes one of the alternatives, in which a blizzard is so severe and lasts so long that it literally demolishes English civilization in a mere six pages.

Not bad.  But the symbolic potential of the industrial sewage swamp is much richer.  A day or two more with After London, and then maybe we’ll destroy the city a different way.