Philip Edward Thomas was born in 1878 in Lambeth, a suburb of London, to which his parents, Philip Henry and Elizabeth Thomas, had moved from Wales. Although most of his boyhood and adolescence were spent in the London area, where his father was a clerk for the Board of Trade, frequent visits to relatives in Wales and Swindon fired in the young Thomas a lifelong love of the countryside. "Almost as soon as I could babble," he once said, "I babbled of green fields." One of Thomas's teachers at St. Paul's Public School in Hammersmith, which Thomas entered when he was sixteen, recalled the adolescent Thomas as "an exceptionally reserved and quiet boy who usually had in his pocket a rat or so, and a few snakes, which he would shut in his desks with his books, and occasionally peep at stealthily."
At the age of fifteen, Thomas had begun writing accounts of his frequent walks in the country, consciously imitating the style of Richard Jefferies, a Victorian naturalist whose writing Thomas greatly admired. (He later wrote a biography of Jefferies, published in 1909.) These adolescent writings soon took a more serious form. Encouraged by the critic and writer John Ashcroft Noble, Thomas began having nature essays published in several important London periodicals, and, at the age of eighteen, he saw his first book in print, a collection of essays entitled The Woodland Life (1897).
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