The fourth and final volume covers Jefferies’ last five years 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 we survey Jefferies’
fluctuating reputation since his death and propose reasons why he remains worth
reading in the twenty-first century, why indeed his message remains more urgent
than ever before.
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