Listen to a short radio essay on Richard Jefferies' The Pigeons at the British Museum

The life of the country writer can be riven with contradictions. This blog's hero Richard Jefferies, for instance, spent a significant period of his childhood in South London, and seems to have been happier there than he was with his family back in Wiltshire. 

This makes me wonder if the endless adventures and exploration we see in his Bevis: The Story of a Boy are as autobiographical as is usually assumed. 

And Coate Water outside Swindon, beside and upon which these adventures were set, was an artificial reservoir built to supply the Wilts & Berks Canal.

As an adult writer, Jefferies moved nearer to London - to a still-rural Surbiton - to be closer to the market for his work. This proximity to the capital made its mark on that work - one example of this is an essay that was the subject of a Radio 3 Sunday Feature in 2022:

New Generation Thinker Will Abberley reconsiders Richard Jefferies' The Pigeons at the British Museum and argues that an essay written in 1884 should be essential reading today. He talks to Andrew Blechman, the author of Pigeons: The Fascinating Saga of the World's Most Revered and Reviled Bird, and to nature writer Richard Mabey.

You can listen to the feature on the BBC website.