3i8 THE LIFE OF RICHARD JEFFERIES 



Frederick Gyde, draughtsman and engraver. Uncle and 

 aunt sent books to Coate Farm, Father and grandfather 

 had a taste for books. 



The boy gave no early promise, and no special care was 

 taken of him. He attended the ordinary schools of the 

 poorer middle class, and those irregularly and never 

 after he was fifteen. When not at school, he was out of 

 doors, picking up the usual knowledge of a farmer's son, 

 but carefully, and more and more with the help of books. 

 Home life was not happy ; he was a retiring and un- 

 popular boy, not strong, but of great courage. Whether 

 he was more unpopular than any unusual boy is likely 

 to be I do not know ; but all through his life he seems 

 to have attracted little affection, and his writings show 

 that, in return, he loved, but had no likings. Something 

 there was in him, perhaps, akin to his uncomfortable 

 humour, which unconsciously repelled — something that 

 creeps into his writings, particularly in the more emphatic 

 parts, and gives us a twinge as at an unpleasant voice. 

 He dreamed away much time, and came early to a sense 

 of loneliness among men and of peculiar intimacy with 

 Nature, whom he first courted as a sportsman. Un- 

 willing to work on the farm, he was obliged to do something 

 soon after his schooldays, and he took to reporting for a 

 local newspaper when he was seventeen. He began to 

 read books of science and philosophy. He found himself 

 at still greater odds with his family, who accused him of 

 indolence. He expressed himself in crude, sensational 

 stories and in local histories. He suffered from severe 

 illnesses and great weakness several times. When he 

 was not much past twenty he was engaged to the daughter 

 of a neighbouring farmer. 



Then he was moved by the agitation of the agricultural 

 labourers for higher wages to write some articles on the 

 condition of the Wiltshire labourer, and these were printed 

 as letters in the Times. Here he first showed a power of 

 forcible and simple expression, and a knowledge of those 

 things among which his home life and work had thrown 



