Monography

In October 1907, whilst struggling with his book on Jefferies, Edward Thomas made an odd observation in a letter to the Argentinian-American expat W H Hudson, a fellow nature writer:

“Jefferies has a kind of humour, which I want to try to define; at any rate a fantastic playfulness of mind that is very liken it; and he has irony and only too much ungainly sarcasm, don’t you think?”

I don’t know what Hudson thought. I know what I thought when I found the quotation for the first time in John Moore’s excellent The Life and Letters of Edward Thomas (1939). I thought WHAT? Irony I can just about accept, playfulness never, and as for sarcasm I’m afraid I took the sometimes nasty stuff as plain statements of meaning.