After London

After some sudden and unspecified catastrophe has depopulated England, the countryside reverts to nature, and the few survivors to a quasi-medieval way of life. Beginning with a loving description of nature reclaiming England -- fields becoming overrun by forest, domesticated animals running wild, roads and towns becoming overgrown, the hated London reverting to lake and poisonous swampland -- the rest of the story is an adventure set many years later in the wild landscape.John Richard Jefferies (November 6, 1848 - August 14, 1887 ) was an English nature writer, essayist and journalist. He wrote fiction mainly based on farming and rural life.He was born at Coate, near Swindon, Wiltshire, the son of a farmer. From early in life he showed a great love of the countryside, but was temperamentally unsuited to follow his father as a farmer, and in 1866 he found employment as a newspaper reporter for the North Wiltshire Herald and the Swindon Advertiser. His birthplace and home is a museum open to the public.In late 1877, with Jessie and their baby son Harold, he moved to Surbiton (close to the Surrey-London boundary) to be nearer the hub of literary England. The Surbiton years were momentous. The couple's next child, a daughter called Jessie after her mother (but known by her second name, Phyllis), was born, and Jefferies began to make his name at last. His new surroundings defined him, both to himself and others, as a country writer. Articles drawing on Jefferies' Wiltshire experiences were snapped up by the Pall Mall Gazette, then published in book form as The Gamekeeper at Home in 1878, to be followed by similar collections of essays, like Wild Life in a Southern County (1879) and Round About a Great Estate (1880).Also published in these years was the popular Wood Magic: A Fable (1881), introducing his child-hero, Bevis. Bevis itself came out in three volumes in 1882, the year in which he left Surbiton and, after a summer in Exmoor, settled for a while in Brighton.