Helen Thomas’s letter to Samuel J. Looker dated 20 June 1948

 

This letter was found amongst Samuel J. Looker's papers that were acquired by the RJS and is now part of the Looker Archives held at the Wiltshire & Swindon History Centre, Chippenham. Helen Thomas wishes to express her thanks to Looker for his address to the audience celebrating the Richard Jefferies Centenary event on Saturday 19 June 1948. The party had walked from the Corn Exchange in Old Town, Swindon, leaving  at 2pm, to Dayhouse Farm, Coate (the birthplace of Jessie (Baden) Jefferies. At around 3pm, Looker gave his talk to the assembled crowd. It is interesting to note in the letter that Edward Thomas’s biography of Richard Jefferies “received hardly any notice” when it was first published in 1909.  

 

20/6/48

Starwell Farm   Sheldon   Chippenham

Wiltshire

Dear Mr. Looker

At the moment when our party had to leave to catch our train, you were so surrounded by people that I felt I could not disturb you.

But I was sorry to leave without saying goodbye to you & thanking you for the lovely day of which the talks about Jefferies were the chief items.

I am quite sure the impassioned utterances would inspire any of the audiences who did not know the works of Jefferies to read him & in the light of all you have said understand and love him.

I also want to thank you for the many more numerous references to my husband’s biog of Richard Jefferies which at the time of publication received hardly any notice at all. It warmed my heart to hear his work so perceived and by one who would be a severe critic of any book about Jefferies, & I left the meeting full of elation & happiness.

I feel sure you must have felt what a deep impression you have made on that most receptive audience, so unaffectedly sincere & interested, & so interesting & so successful in making the day the day it was. I only hope you were not too exhausted by it all.

Many people spoke to me of Edward & of my own little book & I confess I felt emotionally overwhelmed, & so I can well imagine your state at the end of that unforgettable day.

Ever yours sincerely

      

       Helen Thomas

 REFLECTIONS is the title Richard Jefferies gave to his undated thoughts (purchased by Samuel Looker on two sheets of paper) written in his own hand. It is likely that Jefferies wrote the following whilst living in the bleak cottage called 'The Downs' in Crowborough (Sussex). The family lived there from July 1885 to November 1886.

 Oil painting of 'The Downs' by Cyril Wright, July 1976 with owner Delcy Field-Buss at the gate.

Dedication plaque above front door.

As I was starting out it came on to spot raining and being susceptible to moisture (not as a drinking but a rheumatic way) I had to go back and put on my coat. When my boy came to me with a pitiful story of an injury to his tricycle and might he take it to the blacksmiths and get it repaired? At the foot of the steps I met the post­man with a letter that had to be answered and while I was scrawling it a friend arrived.

After we had been in this twelve-month we found that it was too much exposed—the wind came round the corner furiously; the upper rooms were uninhabitable from cold; basement cold. Just when I wanted money most in order to move, the oldest firm in the trade stopped payment--there were assets but it would require 12 months to realise. A tremendous jerk of the elephant. A capital appointment was offered to me but, as I could not move, I could not take it.

Nothing runs like the express—that is the least part of the journey—the real travelling is in the starting and the end: eternal worries to start, all directions, and the one thing forgotten. At the end the cob, dirty, enters the wrong road, refuses to go further, bribery, got a man to show the way, find a box dropped off half a mile back, weary, rheumatic twinges and shaken.

Richard Jefferies' Notebooks

 

Hawthorn leaves from Notebook VII, circa March 1880

The British Library archives include Richard Jefferies' pocket notebooks that start in 1876 and finish 3 months before his death. 

Only 16 of the original 24 or 25 remain. The others are likely to be in private hands--whereabouts unknown. 

In the 1980s and 1990s, Phyllis Treitel undertook the painstaking work at the British Library of transcribing documents in the Jefferies' archive that also included  handwritten correspondence and manuscripts as well as his field notes. This information was then used in The Forward Life of Richard Jefferies: A Chronological Study  by Hugoe Matthews and Phyllis Treitel (Oxford: Petton Books, 1994) as well as that from archive documents held in other libraries in the UK and abroad. 

Samuel Looker published an incomplete version of the notebooks in 1948 in his The Nature Diaries and Notebooks of Richard Jefferies. Walter Besant quoted extracts from the notebooks in his The Eulogy of Richard Jefferies (1888) -- including material that is now missing. 

The early notebooks contained a considerable amount of shorthand based on Pitman but with Jefferies' own twist! John Pearson assisted by John Lewis, a shorthand teacher, deciphered a good portion of the 1876 notebook. Selections from this were later published in the Richard Jefferies Society Journal:  numbers 13 [2004], 14 [2005], and 15 [2006].  

The notes were all in pencil and Jefferies' handwriting was very difficult/impossible to read.

Phyllis also obtained microfiche film of the notebooks from the British Library. 

Armed with all this previous intensive work Jean Saunders transcribed and compiled an electronic version of the notebooks and added scans of Jefferies' illustrations.

This document is available as a pdf but has not been published as it requires a considerable amount of more work.  

Richard's drawing for his brother aged 8

 This pencil drawing by Richard Jefferies is dated 2 September 1860. He would have been 12 years old at the time. The drawing is dedicated to his younger brother Harry (Henry) aged 8. 

It reveals some of young Richard's interests at that time: trains, weapons and thumb-screws!

Coate Stone Circle

Coate Stone Circle, circa 2001

Richard Jefferies was the first person to document the Coate stone circle. In his ‘History of Swindon’ in an article published in the North Wiltshire Herald on 9 November 1867. He wrote:

 The road from Coate makes a wide semi-circle round to Chisledon. Day-house Lane cuts off the angle, and was formerly much used, until the road was widened and macadamised. There may be seen on the left side of Day-house Lane, exactly opposite the entrance to a pen on Dayhouse Farm, five Sarsden stones, much sunk in the ground, but forming a semi-circle of which the lane is the base-line or tangent. There was a sixth upon the edge of the lane, but it was blown up and removed, in order to make the road more serviceable, a few years ago. Whether this was or was not one of those circles known as Druidical, cannot now be determined, but it wears that appearance. It would seem that the modern lane had cut right through the circle, destroying all vestige of one half of it. In the next field, known as the Plain, lies, near the footpath across the fields to Chisledon, another Sarsden of enormous size, with two smaller satellites of the same stone close by. If the semi-circle just spoken of was a work of the Druids, or of the description known as Druidical, which some think a very different thing, it may be just possible that these detached stones in the Plain had some connection with it.

The Coate Stone Circle was listed as a Scheduled Ancient Monument in 1955 but a photograph, dated 31 March 2019, that accompanied the listing brought no joy or comfort. It shows the same field as above but with the housing estate that is now being built at Coate/Badbury Wick. 

Ben Ellwood, Historic England, 31 March 2019

More thoughts on this tragedy can be read here:

Memorial Direction Indicator at Coate Water

 

 

‘Bursting of the Canal at Coate. Great Alarm in the District'

 

The changing face of the Old House at Coate

 A new illustrated guide, that looks at the changes to the front of the Jefferies' family dwelling house can be accessed here. The images are collected from original drawings/paintings, newspaper articles, and postcards and include the following -- the first dating from around 1845.

New Richard Jefferies Society website

Oil painting of Liddington Hill by David Brackston, 2010, courtesy of Jean Saunders

As of 9 September 2026 there is a new Richard Jefferies Society website at https://richardjefferiessociety.org/.

This blog will remain available as an archive of material related to Richard Jefferies but independent of the RJS (their decision). 

It was built and maintained, using Google's free blogger programme, by a former RJS Honorary Secretary (2005-2025). The pages about the RJS have been transferred to the new website.

The blog has proved to be a valuable source of information and has had half-a-million views from all around the world by September 2026. 

Thank you for your support.

Richard Jefferies died 139 years ago on 14 August 1887

 

The first memorial plaque to be added at the Old House at Coate read ‘BIRTHPLACE of RICHARD JEFFERIES BORN NOVEMBER 6TH 1848’ and was set into the garden wall next to the gothic gate. Thanks to the North Wilts Field and Camera Club the plaque, made of Aberdeen granite, was unveiled at a small ceremony on 6 June 1903. In his speech Nevil Story Maskelyne read the inscription on the tablet. He said that 

'it did not record the date of his death, for he was not really dead to us; his name would live immortal.'

Richard Jefferies and His Home in Wiltshire

This article by Bertha Newcombe (1857-1947. A suffragette and socialist) was published in Sylvia's Journal, March 1894. 

A Peculiarly English Genius Special Offer

 

Special pre-order price (before 6 November 2026) including post to UK only: £45 (Retail price: £60)

Pre-order price for RJS members (UK post): £35. 

Overseas postage extra (please contact). 

The fourth and final volume of this biography by Andrew Rossabi, the President of the Richard Jefferies Society, covers Jefferies’ last five years. This brings to a closure 18 years of painstaking research, expertise and total dedication by the author to whom our gratitude is immense. 

It will be published by Petton Books on 6 November 2026. Retails at £60.

Volume IV explores Jefferies' life and works from July 1882, when he moved with his family to Hove in East Sussex, until his death at Goring-by-Sea in August 1887--years that saw the reactivation of the tuberculosis that was to kill him, years of often intense physical suffering and mental anguish, during which Jefferies fought a heroic but losing battle against what he called the three giants of Disease, Despair, and Poverty. His woes were immeasurably compounded when in March 1885 he lost his infant son, Oliver Launcelot, to meningitis. His grief was such that he was unable to attend the funeral.

Illness caught Jefferies in a vicious spiral. It severely reduced his earning capacity by confining him indoors for long periods. As he told C.P. Scott, for whom he wrote a short history of his illness, he was entirely dependent on being in the open air, in direct contact with nature for inspiration. Doctors’ fees quickly eroded his savings, so that he began a slow but ineluctable slide into penury, a slide only temporarily halted by a grant of £100 from the Royal Literary Fund. Towards the end he became so weak that he was unable to use a pen and dictated to his devoted wife Jessie, who acted as his amanuensis.

Yet these were also the years in which, by a triumph of the human spirit over adversity, Jefferies produced his very finest work, including his masterpiece, the short volume of spiritual autobiography titled The Story of My Heart (1883), the cornerstone of his oeuvre. In it, Jefferies recounts the various stages of his spiritual progress from the time when, as a youth in his late teens, alone on a hill three miles from his home in his native Wiltshire, he received his illumination, a vision of eternity. In language of great freshness and purity, he describes his rapturous communion with sun, sky, stars, sea, and down, and his vision of a world free from want and needless toil.

In the final chapter Rossabi surveys Jefferies’ fluctuating reputation since his death and proposes reasons why he remains worth reading in the twenty-first century, why indeed his message remains more urgent than ever before.

****

PURCHASE DETAILS

Stitched hardback, Wibalin cloth, dust jacket. ISBN: 9781838391713, 800pp., 90 black and white illustrations. Retail price £60. Publication date 6 November 2026 -- Jefferies' 178th birthday anniversay.

Special pre-order price including post to UK: £45 (RJS members, £35). Overseas postage extra (please contact). 

Please note that there is no index in the final volume. All purchasers of the hardback book will be emailed an electronic version (pdf) of the text to use for word search. 

The book is also available as a pdf for £10. 

Please email Petton Books for more information or to order a copy. 

The Earth Prayer

'The Earth Prayer' was the title that Samuel J Looker gave to this poem in Jefferies' hand. Looker published it in the Chronicles of the Hedges in 1948 along with the comment that it 'is obviously part of the feeling that inspired the writing of The Story of My Heart' (i.e. the opening passage). 

N.B. Jefferies writes beautiful poetic prose. Forgive his clumsy attempts at poetry. 

                             Imaginative water colour of Liddington Hill by Jane Muir FCSD

 

12 July 2026 marks the centenary of Jessie Jefferies' death

 

Jessie Jefferies

The July Fly

 

The following extract comes from 'The July Grass' first published on 24 July 1886 in the Pall Mall Gazette and later collected in Field and Hedgerow. The "July fly", described by Jefferies, is the pretty burnet moth [a day-flying moth] and the birdsfoot "lotus" is birdsfoot trefoil that he would have seen in the meadows. 

Nature Notes in June

 

Samuel Looker transcribed the following page of un-dated notes by Jefferies and published them in Field and Farm with the title Bird Notes in June.

Wayland Smith's cave

 

                                 photo courtesy of Tom Saunders

Richard Jefferies wrote about the Wayland Smithy (just off the Ridgeway) in an article for the North Wilts Herald published on 2 November 1867. He wrote under the name 'Geoffrey' and there were eight articles in all as part of his 'History of Swindon and Antiquities of its Environs' that was later published as Jefferies Land and edited by Grace Toplis in 1896.

It also featured as the dolmen in Greene Ferne Farm.

 

                                                                                  photo courtesy of Hedley Thorne

Richard Jefferies memorial elm in Tolworth

Andrew Rossabi (President of the Richard Jefferies Society) gave a talk at Surbiton Library on Richard Jefferies’ Tolworth years on 26 September 2018. It was a beautiful sunny day and this memorable occasion was followed by a walk to the Richard Jefferies Bird Sanctuary where a young English elm sapling, that was Dutch elm disease-resistant, was planted as a Jefferies’ memorial in The Wood next to the Sanctuary fence and behind Surbiton Station.

'The Pageant of Summer' as an Epic Found-poem

Richard Jefferies' footstone on his grave in Broadwater Cemetery, Worthing describes him as the 'Prose Poet of England's fields and woodlands'.  Never could there be a better example of how well his prose reads beautifully as lyrical poetry as in his glorious essay 'The Pageant of Summer' that was collected in The Life of the Fields (1884).

R.D. Stapleford has introduced and edited the essay (in May 2026) and expressed it as an epic found-poem (click on the link to read in full) that begins:

Green rushes, long and thick,

Standing up above the edge of the ditch,

Told the hour of the year

As distinctly as the shadow

 

Walk around Tolworth 6 June 2026

 This guided walk, in the footsteps of Richard Jefferies' Tolworth years, will be led by local ecologist and Richard Jefferies Society member, Alison Fure. 

Please note that you need to book a place if you wish to attend. Numbers are limited for insurance reasons. Email bentonbat@gmail.com.