Yet amidst all these familiar aspects, there is a new 

 Jefferies, less comfortable, less certain. He had 

 begun to see behind the pastoral facade of rural 

 England, and could not reconcile himself to what he 

 saw. The wheat is beautiful,' he writes at the end of 

 *One of the New Voters', *but human life is labour.' 

 It could not have been more starkly put; the apparent 

 paradox of that intimate rural coexistence of toil and 

 beauty increasingly preoccupied him, and is touched 

 on in many of the pieces here. 



If it seems a comparatively obvious insight, it is 

 worth recalling how fast and how far Jefferies had 

 travelled to reach it. He published his first journalism 

 in the early *70s and his first ^country' book. The 

 Gamekeeper at Home, in 1878. His rather blinkered 

 apology for agrarian capitalism, Hodge and his 

 Masters, antedates The Open Air by just five years. 

 Hodge's life is nasty, short and brutishly ignorant, 

 but that is his fault, not a consequence of a sad flaw 

 in the world. In parts of The Open Air, Jefferies is 

 not even sure about the brutishness, recognizing a 

 culture where before he had just seen vacant faces. 

 EarHer in *One of the New Voters', he describes a 

 scene in a pub after the day's work is over: *You can 

 smell the tobacco and see the ale; you cannot see the 

 indefinite power which holds the men there - the 

 magnetism of company and conversation. Their con- 

 versation, not your conversation; not the last book, 

 the last play; not saloon conversation; but their's - 

 talk in which neither you nor any one of your con- 

 dition could really join.' 



If there is a dominant theme in The Open Air it is 

 this search for ways of escape, from labour, from 



