ABSTRACT
In comparing the ecological visions of Richard Jefferies and D. H. Lawrence, Rebecca Welshman recalls that the term “ecology” fi rst appeared in print in an 1866 work by eminent German biologist Ernst Haeckel (51). Welshman reminds us that Haeckel created this new term by combining the Greek words oikos (“household” or “homestead”) and logos (“study”); and, like other commentators before her, Welshman explicitly links the etymology of the word to Darwin’s discussion of the “economy of nature” in On the Origin of Species. In emphasizing the literal dimension of the term-ecology as the study of the homestead-Welshman opens up a remarkably productive way of approaching much of Richard Jefferies’s work. In this essay I examine a series of Jefferies’s essays that fi rst appeared in the Tory newspaper The Standard and that were later collected into his two-volume Hodge and His Masters in 1880. The individual pieces in this collection literally focus on the homestead, as Jefferies analyzes sweeping changes within the economic, social, political, and natural environments of agricultural communities in the southern county of Wiltshire in England during the late 1870s, in the midst of several years of severe agricultural depression. In this context, Hodge and His Masters offers a compelling account of the plight of middleclass farmers as well as agricultural laborers struggling to survive in a rapidly changing environment. In fact, Hodge and His Masters can be studied as an early example of what we today would call one variety of ecocriticism. As I shall argue, Jefferies’s attitudes toward the environment are often (although not exclusively) based in conservative political and philosophical positions that are not always easily reconcilable with twenty-fi rst century environmentalist thought. However, this ideological position links him to a modern-day version of the georgic and contemporary writers such as Wendell Berry in America.
