The Toilers of the Field

Richard Jefferies (1848–87) remains one of the most thoughtful and most lyrical writers on the English countryside. He had aspirations to make a living as a novelist, but it was his short, factually based articles for The Live Stock Journal and other magazines, drawn from a wealth of knowledge of the rural community into which he had been born, which, when brought together in book form, brought him recognition (though not wealth) and which continued to be read and admired after his early death. This volume, first published posthumously in 1892, contains a collection of essays concerning rural farmers and labourers previously published before Jefferies had achieved public recognition. Jefferies vividly describes the daily life and circumstances of Victorian English farmers, labourers and their wives without sentimentality, illustrating hardships in addition to idyllic pastimes, providing a realistic and valuable description of a now vanished way of life.