Richard Jefferies quoted in the Daily Mail

Richard Jefferies, a hero of this blog and the subject of my Masters dissertation, gets a mention in the Daily Mail today.

In the course of an article celebrating the strength of the community in his Wiltshire village, Mark Palmer writes:

Richard Jefferies, author of Village Churches, wrote in 1875 that "in so busy a land as ours there is no place where the mind can, as it were, turn in on itself so fully as in the silence and solitude of a village church".

Jefferies was a working journalist with a family to support, so he was quite willing to produce articles that mourned the passing of the old ways or ones that welcomed the latest developments in agriculture. And he generally had a clearer-eyed view of country life than the one Palmer takes.

Still, at his most thoughtful Jefferies seemed to be feeling his way towards advocating some sort of Tolstoyan village self-government, so I think he would have welcomed the thrust of Palmer's article.