In 1885, England was the most powerful industrial nation on earth. London was the largest city in the world and the Empire covered a quarter of the globe’s surface.
That same year, Richard Jefferies published After London, or Wild England — a novel in which all of it had been destroyed, the city had sunk beneath a poisonous swamp, and a handful of survivors were scratching out a quasi-medieval existence in a country that the vegetation had rapidly reclaimed.
No one had written quite this book before. Which makes Jefferies, the Wiltshire-born naturalist and essayist, the father of English post-apocalyptic fiction by accident, as if he arrived there while walking to somewhere else.
Who Jefferies was
Richard Jefferies (1848-1887) is not particularly well known today outside the circle of readers interested in Victorian nature writing. In his own time he was a successful and respected essayist and novelist whose work — The Story of My Heart, Bevis, Wood Magic, The Amateur Poacher — described the English countryside with a precision and a visionary intensity that influenced writers from Thomas Hardy to Henry Williamson to W. H. Hudson.
He was born and grew up on a farm at Coate, near Swindon, on the edge of the Wiltshire Downs. The prehistoric landscape — the Ridgeway, the chalk uplands, Uffington and Avebury and the downs rolling south toward Salisbury Plain — was the landscape of his childhood and of his imagination. He was largely self-educated, deeply read in classical literature, and deeply attentive to the biological and geological facts of the English countryside.
He was also, from the 1880s onward, dying. Tuberculosis combined with other complications produced years of suffering, and much of his late writing is coloured by the knowledge of his own impending end. He died at thirty-eight. After London was written when he was thirty-six or so, already seriously ill, and what the book contains — rage, grief, longing for a simpler world, hatred of industrial civilisation — feels like a dying man’s testament, which in a sense it was.
The book itself
After London divides into two unequal halves. The first, titled “The Relapse into Barbarism,” is a pseudo-historical account of the catastrophe that destroyed civilisation.
Jefferies never specifies what happened (a literary decision I’ve copied in a story I’ve recently written myself). The population of England collapses suddenly; London sinks and becomes a lake; the countryside reverts to wildness with startling speed. The account is written in the style of a history produced a century or two after the events, when the details have already been largely forgotten. We read an account of a catastrophe that the narrator already regards as ancient history, which means the disaster feels both vivid and irretrievably past.
The second half follows Felix Aquila, a young man of noble family in the post-collapse feudal world, who sets out on a boat journey across the great inland lake that now covers the Midlands and the south. He is searching for something — for himself, really, for a place in a world that has no obvious use for him. His journey takes him to the edge of the area around old London, now a poisonous swamp of toxic gases and blackened vegetation where nothing lives.
It is one of the most striking passages in Victorian fiction: an English pastoral writer producing something that reads like a vision of Hell, and locating it at the heart of what was, in 1885, the world’s greatest city.
Why it matters
The book was admired by William Morris, who acknowledged its influence on News from Nowhere (1890), his own utopian vision of an England freed from industrial capitalism. H. G. Wells read it and it left traces in The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds. It inaugurated a tradition of English catastrophe fiction that runs through John Collier’s Tom’s A-Cold (1933), John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951), John Christopher’s The Death of Grass (1956), and into the contemporary moment.
What distinguishes After London from its successors is its emotional register. Jefferies is not interested in the thriller aspects of survival. He is not interested in the mechanics of rebuilding civilisation. He is interested in what England would look like if it was given back to itself — if the railways and the factories and the city’s vast accretion of human history were removed and the country allowed to return to something older.
There is a powerful strand of ambivalence in the book’s attitude to the catastrophe it depicts. Jefferies hated industrial capitalism. He hated what the Victorian economy was doing to the English countryside and the English rural poor. The collapse of civilisation in After London is genuinely catastrophic — people die in vast numbers, the knowledge of centuries is lost, barbarism returns — but the wild England that emerges from the ruins is described with unmistakable love. The animals are back. The forests have reclaimed the fields. The chalk downs are clean and empty. The catastrophe is real, and Jefferies does not flinch from it, but it has produced something he cannot entirely mourn.
The resonance now
After London is remarkably easy to read now, if you’re willing to enter a world of slower writing and steadier pacing.
Jefferies understood something about the English relationship to landscape that the post-apocalyptic genre he founded has explored ever since: that there is a fantasy at work in the imagination of catastrophe, and that the fantasy is not primarily about survival. It is about subtraction. About what would remain if the complications were removed. About what England was before it became what it became.
It is what fascinates me and influences my attempts to write post-apocalyptic fiction. And I originally had no idea where this fascination came from until I began to dig into the story of the genre. The question of what England was and would become again had preceded my birth by one hundred years.
When the dying Jeffries arrived at this question in 1885, with the Empire at its height and the countryside he loved being destroyed around him. He wrote the answer in a novel almost no one reads now, which invented a genre by accident and described a feeling, a strange mix of curiosity and desire, that has not gone away.
In 1885, England was already dreaming of its own ruins. It has not stopped since.
A victorian apocalyptic novel sound like one of most favourite things ever. And I've never heard of it. Thanks.