The Story of My Heart, 1883

CHAPTER I: THE STORY OF MY HEART [published Oct. 1883] commences seventeen years ago. In the glow of youth there were times every now and then when I felt the necessity of a strong inspiration of soul thought. My heart was dusty, parched for want of the rain of deep feeling; my mind arid and dry, for there is a dust which settles on the heart as well as that which falls on a ledge. ... When this began to form I felt eager to escape from it, to throw off the heavy clothing, to drink deeply once more at the fresh fountains of life. An inspiration―a long deep breath of the pure air of thought―could alone give health to the heart. There is a hill [Liddington] to which I used to resort at such periods. The labour of walking three miles to it, all the while gradually ascending, seemed to clear my blood of the heaviness accumulated at home. On a warm summer day the slow continued rise required continual effort, which carried away the sense of oppression.... I began to breathe a new air and to have a fresher aspiration. ... Moving up the sweet short turf, at every step my heart seemed to obtain a wider horizon of feeling; with every inhalation of rich pure air, a deeper desire. The very light of the sun was whiter and more brilliant here. By the time I had reached the summit I had entirely forgotten the petty circumstances and the annoyances of existence. I felt myself, myself.

13 September 2026

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 transcripts of other archive documents held in other libraries both 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].  

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.