SOURCE: "The Last Essays," in Richard Jefferies, Twayne Publishers, 1982, pp. 135-52.

In this excerpt, Taylor studies four ofJefferies's essay collections, suggesting that his "numerous essays originated in his obsessive early cataloguings of the details of the natural world.'

The volumes of collected essays which saw publication in Jefferies's lifetime were Nature Near London (1883), The Life of the Fields (1884), and The Open Air (1885). Field and Hedgerow, published as "Being the Last Essays of Richard Jefferies, Collected by his Widow," appeared in 1889, two years after his death. These four volumes repay more detailed examination and it is the essays which comprise them which will be examined in this chapter. A large number of Jefferies's essays were, however, collected together in comparatively recent years, many at the instigation of the late Samuel J. Looker. The Toilers of the Field appeared in 1892, and Mr. Looker edited the anthologies Jefferies' England (1937), Jefferies'...