ABSTRACT
Jefferies By the time Richard Jefferies (1848-87) started writing he could reckon on a predominantly urban audience, since the 1851 census marks the point at which the bulk of the British population turned out to be living in towns rather than the countryside. The son of a farmer near Swindon, Jefferies started work as a journalist and at the age of eighteen was already writing descriptive articles about his local area. His first book publications were fiction, and he continued to write novels for the rest of his life, but he rose to public attention in the late 1870s and 1880s as an essayist on country life.
