The Gamekeeper at Home: Sketches of Natural History and Rural Life

by Richard Jefferies

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242 pages, Paperback

Published September 10, 2017

About the author

(John) Richard Jefferies (1848-1887) is best known for his prolific and sensitive writing on natural history, rural life and agriculture in late Victorian England. However, a closer examination of his career reveals a many-sided author who was something of an enigma. To some people he is more familiar as the author of the children’s classic Bevis or the strange futuristic fantasy After London, while he also has some reputation as a mystic worthy of serious study. Since his death his books have enjoyed intermittent spells of popularity, but today he is unknown to the greater part of the reading public. Jefferies, however, has been an inspiration to a number of more prominent writers and W.H. Hudson, Edward Thomas, Henry Williamson and John Fowles are among those who have acknowledged their debt to him. In my view his greatest achievement lies in his expression, aesthetically and spiritually, of the human encounter with the natural world – something that became almost an obsession for him in his last years.

He was born at Coate in the north Wiltshire countryside - now on the outskirts of Swindon - where his family farmed a smallholding of about forty acres. His father was a thoughtful man with a passionate love of nature but was unsuccessful as a farmer, with the result that the later years of Jefferies' childhood were spent in a household increasingly threatened by poverty. There were also, it seems, other tensions in the family. Richard’s mother, who had been brought up in London, never settled into a life in the country and the portrait of her as Mrs Iden - usually regarded as an accurate one - in his last novel, Amaryllis at the Fair, is anything but flattering. Remarks made in some of Jefferies’ childhood letters to his aunt also strongly suggest an absence of mutual affection and understanding between mother and son. A combination of an unsettled home life and an early romantic desire for adventure led him at the age of sixteen to leave home with the intention of traversing Europe as far as Moscow. In this escapade he was accompanied by a cousin, but the journey was abandoned soon after they reached France. On their return to England they attempted to board a ship for the United States but this plan also came to nothing when they found themselves without sufficient money to pay for food.

A self-absorbed and independent youth, Jefferies spent much of his time walking through the countryside around Coate and along the wide chalk expanses of the Marlborough Downs. He regularly visited Burderop woods and Liddington Hill near his home and on longer trips explored Savernake Forest and the stretch of the downs to the east, where the famous white horse is engraved in the hillside above Uffington. His favourite haunt was Liddington Hill, a height crowned with an ancient fort commanding superb views of the north Wiltshire plain and the downs. It was on the summit of Liddington at the age of about eighteen, as he relates in The Story of My Heart, that his unusual sensitivity to nature began to induce in him a powerful inner awakening - a desire for a larger existence or reality which he termed 'soul life'. Wherever he went in the countryside he found himself in awe of the beauty and tranquility of the natural world; not only the trees, flowers and animals, but also the sun, the stars and the entire cosmos seemed to him to be filled with an inexpressible sense of magic and meaning.

Reviews

[Pam · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is an interesting perspective on the position of the 19th century gamekeeper in Britain. The estates being tended were private preserves of wealthy landowners in a time when landed aristocracy was fading and the owners tended to be wealthy up-and-comers who wanted to entertain friends that were interested in hunting and fishing parties. The ethics of the slaughter is a separate story. The hunting parties seemed to have been the whole purpose of country estates. That sounds totally frivolous and wasteful, but in the process of living the high life, ancient ways of life and natural beauty were preserved. These estates were looked after by huge staffs including professionals who guarded everything from hares, foxes, fish, and birds for private hunts to acorn crops, dead wood and crops that would feed the game birds. Readers of earlier books might remember poachers losing their lives stealing the king’s deer or being caught in monstrous man-traps, an example of which the author points out hanging on the wall of an outbuilding. It would be about 3 feet long with heavy metal jaws that would snap onto poachers. This brutal piece of equipment had been illegal for years but is a reminder of the history of estates and poachers. This book covers a more modern period. Deer were never mentioned although they could have been if the book had gone into Scotland.

Birds, hares and fish were to be saved from the predation of locals in particular although there was such a thing as gangs of poachers from London. Songbirds were captured for London ladies who wanted a goldfinch in a cage. The amazing lengths people went to to collect hares or pheasants for selling on the black market was incredible. People did not normally collect for their own dinners at this time. There was a thriving black market. The ongoing game of the illegal versus the gamekeeper adds spice to the story.

I enjoyed the story of the gamekeeper as a bit of nearly lost natural England. Yearly life cycles and respect for nature was clearly an important part of British life. I came away not feeling the gamekeeper was a bad guy but rather an early ecologist.

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

nicely observed book about the rural world of the gamekeeper in England, around about 1870. touches on a whole lot of different topics like the changing face of the countryside as a result of industrialisation, rural class tension and human interaction with nature and natural resources.

"The crow among birds is like the local professional among human poachers: he haunts the place and clears everything—it would be hard to say what comes amiss to him. He is the impersonation of murder. His long, stout, pointed beak is a weapon of deadly power, wielded with surprising force by the sinewy neck. From a tiny callow fledgling, fallen out of the thrush’s nest, to the partridge or a toothsome young rabbit, it is all one to him. Even the swift leveret is said sometimes to fall a prey, being so buffeted by the sooty wings of the assassin and so blinded by the sharp beak striking at his eyes as to be presently overcome. For the crow has a terrible penchant for the morsel afforded by another’s eyes: I have seen the skull of a miserable thrush, from which a crow rose and slowly sailed away, literally split as if by a chisel—doubtless by the blow that destroyed its sight. Birds that are at all diseased or weakly—as whole broods sometimes are in wet unkindly seasons—rabbits touched by the dread parasite that causes the fatal ‘rot,’ the young pheasant straying from the coop, even the chicken at the lone farmstead, where the bailiff only lives and is in the fields all day—these are the victims of the crow."

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a brief portrait of a typical Victorian gamekeepers on country estates. It's a bit of the English pastoral mixed with observations on poaching and gamekeeping. A gentle picture of a bygone era.