SOURCE: An introduction to Landscape with Figures by Richard Jefferies; edited by Richard Mabey, Penguin Books, 1983, pp. 7-24.

In the essay below, Mabey focuses on Jefferies's treatment of the common land-worker in books such as The Gamekeeper at Home and Hodge and His Masters.

The central character in what Jefferies once called 'The Field-Play' is the land-worker himself. The shift in the way he is depicted—from laggard to victim to hero—is the most striking expression of the movement of Jefferies' thinking. Even his physical characteristics are viewed in different ways. In the early 1870s he is described as a rather badly designed machine. Ten years later he is being explicitly compared to the form of a classical sculpture.

Typically, it was with a shrewd, unflattering sketch of the Wiltshire labourer (today it would rank as an exposé) that Jefferies pushed his writing before a national audience...