After London
After London; Or, Wild England: In Two Parts: Part 1 – The Relapse into Barbarism; Part II – Wild England is a 1885 novel by Richard Jefferies, published by Cassell and Company.[1] It is an early work of science fiction, set in near future England, a century after a mysterious disaster caused the fall of modern civilization and reverted English society to the medieval level.[1]
The novel is a defining work for the Ruined Earth genre.[2] Its setting has also been described as related to pastoral fiction.[1] It has been described as "an important example of Victorian s[cience] f[iction]" and a popular novel in its time.[1]
Book
[edit]The book has two parts. The first, "The Relapse into Barbarism", purports to be the account by some later historian of the fall of civilisation and its consequences, with a loving description of nature reclaiming England: fields becoming overrun by forest, domesticated animals running wild, roads and towns becoming overgrown, the hated London reverting to lake and poisonous swampland.
The second part, "Wild England", is largely a straightforward adventure set many years later in the wild landscape and society. Its chapters 22–24 go beyond recreation of a medieval world to give a disturbing and surreal description of the site of the fallen city.
Analysis
[edit]The novel has been subject to numerous scholarly analyses.[3][4][5][6][7]
References
[edit]- ^ a b c d Clute, John; Eggeling, John (2024). "SFE: Jefferies, Richard". sf-encyclopedia.com. Retrieved 2025-03-15.
- ^ Nicholls, Peter; Clute, John; Langford, David (2025). "SFE: Ruined Earth". sf-encyclopedia.com. Retrieved 2025-03-15.
- ^ Sumpter, Caroline (1 September 2011). "Machiavelli Writes the Future: History and Progress in Richard Jefferies's After London". Nineteenth-Century Contexts. 33 (4): 315–331. doi:10.1080/08905495.2011.598669.
- ^ Kü Baysal, Bra (2023), "Suffering Nature, Suffering Humans: After London As A Portrayal of Anthropocentric Violence", Shades of Violence: Multidisciplinary Reflections on Violence in Literature, Culture and Arts, Transnational Press London, pp. 145–159, retrieved 15 March 2025
{{citation}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link) - ^ Lindner, Oliver (1 July 2006). "'After London': The Death of the Metropolis in the Fiction of Richard Jefferies". Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik (in German). 54 (3): 249–263. doi:10.1515/zaa-2006-0303.
- ^ Plotz, John (1 March 2015). "Speculative Naturalism and the Problem of Scale: Richard Jefferies's After London, After Darwin". Modern Language Quarterly. 76 (1): 31–56. doi:10.1215/00267929-2827538.
- ^ Mizin, Sarita Olga (22 March 2019). "After London; or Wild England". Nineteenth-Century Prose. 46 (1): 261–265.
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