The Toilers of the Field

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.