Episode ten, the final episode of After London, or Wild England, by Richard Jefferies.
To start this story from the beginning, find it on my podcast homepage by searching "Storytime with Martin Lovell" on whichever app you are listening on, and select After London Episode 01.
After London, or Wild England, by Richard Jefferies. John Richard Jefferies 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.
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. 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."
After London can be seen as an early example of "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.
"The Relapse into Barbarism", is the account by some later historian of the fall of civilisation and its consequences, with a loving description of nature reclaiming England. "Wild England", is largely a straightforward adventure set many years later in the wild landscape and society (here too Jefferies was setting an example for the genre); but the opening section, despite some improbabilities, has been much admired for its rigour and compelling narrative.
Critics dissatisfied with the second part often make an exception of chapters 22–24, which go beyond recreation of a medieval world to give a disturbing and surreal description of the site of the fallen city.
Jefferies's interest in catastrophes predates After London: two short unpublished pieces from the 1870s describe social collapse after London is paralysed by freak winter conditions. In the better achieved of these, the narrator is a future historian piecing the story together from surviving accounts. The fantasy of the second part also has a predecessor in a short work, The Rise of Maximin, Emperor of the Occident, serialised in The New Monthly Magazine in 1876, in this case an adventure set in a remote and imaginary past.
Although the society that Jefferies depicts after the fall of London is an unpleasant one, with oppressive petty tyrants at war with each other, and insecurity and injustice for the poor, it still served as an inspiration for William Morris's utopian News from Nowhere (1890). In a letter of 1885, he writes of his reaction to After London: "absurd hopes curled around my heart as I read it." After London also influenced M.P. Shiel's post-apocalyptic novel, The Purple Cloud.
Richard Jefferies died on 14 August 1887 of tuberculosis and exhaustion.
This story is over one hundred years old. This means it is very much of its time and can use words and phrases that, by today’s standards, could be considered offensive or at best, strange to our modern ears.
I have done my best to change words or phrases that are obviously needlessly offensive, however, I cannot guarantee that I have found them all, or am even aware of the possible origins of some, and so if what I read does have negative connotations that causes offense, I apologise and direct you to the author of the works being read.
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