Available now for Kindle pre-order. Publishing Sept 16 and only 99p - the second of three linked monographs on English prose writing about nature and landscape in the heyday of the genre around 1900.
Edward Thomas was only a boy when he discovered the nature writing of Richard Jefferies (1848-87), author of The Gamekeeper at Home and (Thomas's favourite) The Amateur Poacher. It was Jefferies who inspired Thomas to start writing, an enthusiasm which only deepened when Thomas discovered that Jefferies had also lived in South London, having been brought up near Swindon, where Thomas's grandparents lived.
In 1908 Thomas wrote a biography of his hero, which for half a century was the prime authority.
But there was one book by Jefferies that Thomas could not come to terms with. 'The Story of My Heart' describes a revelation, a religious awakening that overwhelmed Jefferies, aged 18, walking up a hill near Swindon. He underwent a similar experience later, in a very different location, the heart of the City of London. Based on these experiences Jefferies created a personal religion, a sort of nature worship but much more radical than, for example, Wordsworth's pantheism.
There we also notes for a revised edition, which Jefferies kept working on during the long, slow illness that killed him - scribbling feverishly until he no longer had the strength to hold a pencil. These musings are extreme and dark. He writes of a force 'greater than God', of 'Cosmic algebra.'
'Measuring the Infinite' is fully annotated with its own bibliography.
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