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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
- Sprache: Englisch
Richard Jefferies' "After London; Or, Wild England" offers a hauntingly vivid portrayal of a post-apocalyptic landscape, where nature reclaims its dominion and humanity grapples with its demise. Through an engaging blend of lyrical prose and intricate descriptions, Jefferies presents a world transformed by a mysterious catastrophe, contrasting the remnants of civilization with the wildness of flora and fauna. The novel exceeds its genre, immersing readers in existential reflections and environmental themes, resonating with contemporary ecological concerns while drawing upon romanticism and naturalism. Richard Jefferies, an influential Victorian writer and early nature mystic, found inspiration in his deep appreciation for the English countryside and the frailty of human constructs. His experiences with rural life and observations of nature informed his writing philosophy, contributing to his exploration of man's relationship with the environment in this seminal work. Jefferies was also influenced by the industrial age's encroachment, heightening his desire to envision a world where nature prevails. "After London; Or, Wild England" is a must-read for anyone intrigued by speculative fiction and environmental literature. Its rich imagery and profound themes challenge readers to reflect on the delicate balance between civilization and the natural world, making it an essential addition to any literary collection. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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After London; Or, Wild England
Table of Contents
Introduction
When the engines of civilization fall silent, the earth takes back its own and asks what, if anything, of humanity can still endure. Richard Jefferies' After London; Or, Wild England imagines a far-future England long after a nebulous catastrophe has erased the industrial world. Published in 1885, the book marries speculative vision with the author's acute eye for the natural world. Forest, fen, and thorn reclaim roads and walls; human communities shrink, harden, and adapt. Rather than a spectacle of ruin alone, the novel offers a sustained meditation on survival, culture, and the fragile scaffolding that once propped up modern life, now smothered beneath the returning wilderness.
Situated at the crossroads of adventure narrative, future history, and ecological meditation, the novel is widely regarded as an early work of post-apocalyptic fiction. Its setting is recognizably England, but time and vegetation have altered the map, leaving isolated settlements, forgotten routes, and treacherous wildlands. Composed in the late Victorian era, it reflects a period captivated by technological progress yet haunted by urban crowding and environmental degradation. Jefferies brings to this imagined future the sensibility of a noted countryside observer, turning speculative collapse into an occasion for close attention to soil, water, weather, and animal life. The result is speculative fiction anchored in tangible processes and textures.
The book unfolds in two complementary movements. The opening portion adopts the tone of a chronicle, surveying how England changed after the fall: trade routes broken, knowledge thinned to legend, and the old metropolis rendered uninhabitable by a noxious inland expanse where London once stood. The latter portion narrows to the journey of a young man, Felix, whose ambitions and curiosity propel him beyond the safety of his agrarian home into the hazards of Wild England. Together, these parts provide both an expansive panorama and a ground-level view of adaptation, revealing how people improvise customs, hierarchies, and skills amid ruins that are rapidly becoming part of the landscape.
Readers encounter a prose style at once patient and vivid, attentive to the way reeds crowd a shore, how birds return to abandoned masonry, and how weather shapes paths and perils. Jefferies' sentences accommodate suspense without hurry, allowing dread and wonder to accumulate through observation rather than spectacle. The atmosphere is richly ambivalent: pastoral sunlight gives way to menace at the forest edge; beauty coexists with decay and risk. The narrative's rhythm alternates between survey and quest, offering a blend of cartographic curiosity and intimate ordeal. This measured pace invites immersion, rewarding attention with a world that feels grown, not merely invented.
Among the book's central concerns are the fragility of complex societies and the endurance of the nonhuman world. Nature here is not a benevolent sanctuary or an enemy to be defeated; it is an indifferent power whose cycles proceed whether human designs flourish or fail. The story probes what happens when scientific knowledge contracts into rumor, when history and myth blur, and when authority rests on control of resources and routes rather than on institutions. It considers how memory survives in practices and stories, and how ambition, courage, and cruelty find new forms when familiar technologies are absent. Survival becomes an ethical as well as practical question.
For contemporary readers, the novel's questions feel startlingly current. It asks how communities respond to ecological change, what kinds of knowledge matter when systems break, and how landscapes bear the marks of previous use. Its rewilded England resonates with present-day discussions about climate disruption, resilience, and the long aftermath of urban expansion. At the same time, the book resists simple lessons, refusing to romanticize either the past or the wilderness. By imagining a future that is emphatically local and material, it invites reflection on the daily skills, forms of cooperation, and attentiveness that underpin any sustainable way of life.
Approached as both an adventure and a thought experiment, After London offers a distinctive experience: an early, quietly radical vision of life after collapse rendered with the precision of a field naturalist. Readers can expect an eerie calm threaded with danger, a landscape that is as much protagonist as setting, and a steady interrogation of what civilization means when measured against time and terrain. Without disclosing outcomes, it is fair to say the journey challenges complacency and rewards patience. In tracing the contours of Wild England, Jefferies maps questions that remain urgent, making this nineteenth-century work feel unsettlingly close to our own horizon.
Synopsis
After London; Or, Wild England presents a post-apocalyptic vision of Britain in which a vague catastrophe erases industrial civilization and allows nature to overrun the land. Richard Jefferies divides the book into two linked parts: an opening chronicle that surveys the transformed country, and a subsequent narrative following a young man’s travels across it. The synopsis first outlines the anonymous historian’s account of the landscape, peoples, and conditions that have emerged, then follows the sequence of events in the fictional journey. The book combines environmental description, social observation, and adventure, portraying a reconfigured England whose contours and customs recall an earlier, more fragmented age.
The initial section explains, without precise scientific detail, that a great convulsion altered rivers, swamped lowlands, and depopulated towns. London ceased to exist as a city and became a vast, fetid basin bordered by reeds and treacherous ground. Vapor rising from its waters poisons birds and men, discouraging approach. Elsewhere, forests thicken, lakes spread, and former roads vanish under thicket and mire. Human numbers shrink, and communities retreat to defensible heights and open downs. Travel grows uncertain, guided by paths rather than maps, and the very shape of England shifts as inland seas and marshes replace familiar valleys and plains.
With the landscape remade, society reorganizes into small kingdoms, baronies, and tribal groups, each guarding territory and water access. Authority rests on personal allegiance, harvests, and the ability to field archers and horsemen. Technology reverts to practical crafts; iron is precious, often scavenged from ancient ruins. Written knowledge persists unevenly, mainly in monasteries and among a few educated households, while superstition and custom govern daily life. Trade is localized and risky, conducted by pack, riverboat, or gypsy caravan. Law resembles customary justice enforced by lords and captains. Jefferies’ chronicler catalogs these structures to show a workable but precarious order.
Nature dominates the scene. Deer multiply in vast oakwoods; wild cattle roam heaths; boar, wolves, and serpents make the margins perilous. The great lake that covers the Thames valley forms a central, unpredictable barrier. Its outer belts of reeds hide shallows, quicksands, and drifting islands. Beyond lies the Black Water, an inner expanse tainted by the buried remnants of the old metropolis. Weather, currents, and miasma shift without warning, sealing routes and isolating settlements. The chronicle emphasizes how people adapt: building palisades, watching sky and wind, and treating abandoned artifacts with caution, for some relics help and others bring hazard.
The second part turns to Felix Aquila, a youth of modest noble origin whose family values learning yet lacks influence. Felix seeks distinction and the means to marry Aurora, daughter of a neighboring chief, whose prospects depend on honor and wealth. Dissatisfied with quiet duties and inspired by tales of distant places, he studies the waters and fashions a small craft. When patient waiting proves unpromising, he chooses a bolder path: to voyage downriver toward the great lake, test his skill, and win renown. His departure marks the shift from survey to personal quest within the altered England.
Felix’s route follows narrow channels and wooded banks where ambush and accidents are constant risks. He evades gypsy bands and wary shepherds, trades discreetly for provisions, and learns to read ripples, reeds, and bird signs. Storms test his canoe, calms strand him amid floating weed, and sudden squalls sweep through gaps in the hills. By night he steers by stars; by day he hides among willows. He observes remnants of old embankments and broken causeways, reminders of the world that was. Each stage southward deepens his resolve while revealing the practical limits of courage without allies or supplies.
A decisive episode carries him near the poisoned reaches associated with the former capital, where he confronts the lake’s deadliest waters and confirms rumors about their effects. Skirting danger, he afterwards reaches a fortified city-state whose walls, armories, and regulated markets contrast with the scattered hamlets he has known. There, crafts flourish under strict guilds, and civic pride sustains order and defense. Felix notes clocks, archives, and disciplined patrols that hint at recovered method rather than lost machines. His prowess with bow and boat earns attention, and he learns the city’s rivalries, codes, and the careful balance sustaining its security.
Drawn into local conflicts, Felix contributes observations and daring moves that influence skirmishes and negotiations. Service brings him access to libraries and talk with scholars, where he pieces together fragments about geography, currents, and hidden routes. Expeditions inland show him additional relics and the possibilities for safer travel between isolated polities. His reputation rises, yet obligations and jealousies complicate his position. All the while, thoughts of home and Aurora shape his choices. Events converge to test whether skill and knowledge can translate into standing, and whether a path exists to unite personal aims with the era’s hard realities.
The narrative closes by reaffirming the book’s central perspective: that England, after catastrophe, has become a wild, living country whose rhythms set the terms for human ambition. The story presents civilization as fragile but renewable through patience, observation, and disciplined effort. It highlights the interplay of landscape and society, where lakes and forests create both barriers and opportunities. Without resolving every strand, it leaves the impression of a world in which courage, craft, and prudence matter more than inherited power. After London thus conveys a cautionary, exploratory vision in which survival, adaptation, and modest advance define the possible future.
Historical Context
After London is set in a far-future England that has suffered a sudden, undefined catastrophe, leaving the metropolis buried beneath a poisonous inland lake and the countryside reclaimed by forest, fen, and scrub. Political authority has fragmented into petty principalities, baronies, and small towns, with technology regressed to late medieval levels. Geography is recognizably English—the ruined Thames basin, the downs, and the western shires—but transformed by silting, subsidence, and waterlogged plains. Travel is dangerous, navigation uncertain, and literacy rare. The landscape’s rewilding produces both abundance and peril, with feral herds and marsh vapors shaping daily life. The setting dramatizes environmental reversal and the brittleness of complex urban civilization.
The Great Stink of 1858 in London, driven by an exceptional hot summer and the direct discharge of sewage into the Thames, forced Parliament to adjourn and catalyzed a modern sewage system. Under engineer Joseph Bazalgette, the Metropolitan Board of Works began intercepting sewers in 1859; by 1865, over 80 miles of main interceptors and more than a thousand miles of street sewers were integrated, rerouting effluent eastward. This crisis confirmed how a capital’s health could hinge on infrastructure. After London transposes that fear onto a grand scale: the wrecked city becomes a pestilential lake, its vapors and sludge embodying anxieties born in 1858 about urban effluent overwhelming nature and society.
Cholera epidemics repeatedly struck Britain—1831–1832, 1848–1849, 1853–1854, and 1866—exacting tens of thousands of deaths. In 1854, John Snow traced an outbreak to the Broad Street pump in Soho, pioneering epidemiology by removing the pump handle and correlating cases with water supply data. The 1866 epidemic centered on the East London Waterworks, underscoring the peril of contaminated sources. Although germ theory gained ground, miasma fears persisted in public discourse. Jefferies channels this public-health memory: the lethal airs, stagnant waters, and caution around low-lying districts in After London echo cholera-era urban terrors, recoding them as a naturalized, permanent condition after civic collapse.
Mid-Victorian London’s explosive growth and coal combustion produced notorious pea-souper fogs and river pollution. The city’s population rose from about 1 million in 1801 to over 4.7 million by 1881, straining drainage and water supply. Legislative steps—the Thames Conservancy (1857), the Rivers Pollution Prevention Act (1876), and the Epping Forest Act (1878) safeguarding a remnant woodland—signaled anxieties about air, water, and green space. Reported dense fogs in 1873 and 1880, along with industrial smoke, fed dystopian imagination. After London inverts these measures: instead of successful reform, regulation fails or arrives too late, leaving a colossal lake, encroaching forest, and miasmatic marsh to erase the metropolis and discipline survivors.
The Agricultural Depression of 1873–1896 reshaped rural Britain. Falling wheat prices, driven by American and Russian grain via steamship and rail, devastated arable districts; British wheat fell from around 56 shillings per quarter in the late 1860s to near 31 shillings by the 1890s. The wet summer of 1879 compounded losses, while earlier cattle plague (rinderpest) in 1865–1867 disrupted herds. Repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 had opened markets; by the 1880s, rural underemployment and out-migration to cities intensified. Movements for allotments and small holdings gained momentum, culminating in the Allotments Act of 1887. Jefferies, steeped in agrarian life, recasts this crisis as a return to subsistence estates, craft farming, and localized lordship.
Mass politics and social agitation transformed Britain from the 1830s to the 1880s. Chartism (1838–1848) galvanized workers with demands for universal male suffrage; flare-ups included the 1839 Newport Rising and the 1842 strike wave. Electoral reforms followed in stages: the Reform Acts of 1832, 1867, and 1884 broadened the franchise, with the Redistribution Act of 1885 reshaping constituencies. Irish struggle over land and governance, including the Land War (1879–1882) and agrarian agitation led by the Land League, signaled how centralized authority could be strained by mass mobilization. After London mirrors these tensions in reverse: democracy’s expansion gives way to political entropy, fragmented sovereignty, and fortified manor-states wary of the crowd and the city.
Victorian Britain’s power rested on networks—railways, telegraphs, and imperial logistics. Railway mileage expanded rapidly, from roughly 6,000 miles by 1850 to over 15,000 by 1870, while the 1866 Atlantic cable knit London to New York in minutes. Imperial crises underscored overextension: the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878–1880), the Mahdist uprising culminating in Charles Gordon’s death at Khartoum on 26 January 1885, and the 1884–1885 Berlin Conference partitioning Africa. These events dramatized dependence on rapid communications and supply. After London imagines the sudden erasure of such webs: roads vanish under forest, signaling breaks down, and long-distance governance collapses, exposing how imperial and domestic order relied on brittle, high-maintenance connective tissue.
As social and political critique, the book arraigns late Victorian confidence in progress, infrastructure, and metropolitan centrality. It exposes how environmental degradation, public-health neglect, and extractive urbanization can render a great city uninhabitable, turning its heart into a toxic lagoon. The re-feudalized countryside indicts class rigidity and the precarity of rights once collective institutions fail. By depicting petty barons hoarding resources, stagnant knowledge, and perilous travel, it questions the equitable distribution of technology’s benefits. The vanished networks and drowned capital warn that governance premised on distant command, polluting industry, and fragile systems leaves the poor most exposed and civil peace contingent on ecological stewardship.
