British Classics PDF EPUB

The Toilers of the Field

First published: 1892
Pages: 166

Read online EPUB Download Save

About this book

Richard Jefferies gathered these essays from the rural England he knew firsthand, having grown up on a Wiltshire farm near Swindon. Published after his death in 1892, the collection studies the agricultural labourers, tenant farmers, and their families who worked the fields of Victorian England. Jefferies writes without sentiment, weighing low wages, hard seasons, and cramped cottages against the older customs and quiet pleasures of country work. The volume also reprints his 1872 letters to The Times on the Wiltshire agricultural labourer, the writing that first brought him public notice. It holds up now as clear-eyed social observation and as an early record of a way of life that industrial farming would soon erase. Anyone drawn to the English countryside, or curious about how ordinary rural people actually lived, will find plain and exact reporting here.

About the author

Richard Jefferies

Richard Jefferies (1848-1887) was an English nature writer and novelist born on a Wiltshire farm at Coate. Celebrated for essays and books rooted in the countryside, among them The Story of My Heart and Bevis, he combined precise natural observation with mysticism before dying young of tuberculosis.