After London

Some unnamed catastrophe has emptied England of its modern civilization, and nature has quietly taken it back. Richard Jefferies opens with a coolly detailed survey of how the fields, roads, and cities of the old world vanished under forest and a vast inland lake, the ruins of London reduced to a poisonous, half-drowned swamp. The second half follows Felix Aquila, a thoughtful, restless young man out of step with the feudal, semi-barbaric society that has grown up in the wilderness, as he sets out by boat across the great water in search of a place for himself. One of the earliest English visions of civilization’s collapse, it later shaped writers from William Morris onward. Free PDF and EPUB editions are available here.