Edward thomas, the early years

Edward Thomas was born in London but his background was Welsh. He was close to his paternal grandparents who lived in Swindon, Wiltshire, and Edward spent holidays there. He therefore walked the same hills and fields that Richard Jefferies wrote about in books like The Gamekeeper at Home and The Amateur Poacher – books the young Edward Thomas couldn’t get enough of. The connection with Jefferies seemed even stronger when Thomas discovered that as a young man Jefferies had also lived in London, in the same district young Thomas was now exploring. Jefferies had even written a book, Nature Near London, about the suburban landscape. Thomas’s own first book, The Woodland Life, published when he was only nineteen, dealt with the same subject, albeit in a very different style.

Edward Thomas: Winter woodland

Thomas’s debut book, A Woodland Walk (1897), included a nature journal kept by him over the months immediately preceding publication. This is the entry for December 28 1896:

“Wretched squatter’s dwelling in the midst of a bare joyless common – rude plank shed, patched with sacks, and hedged by a mound of sods with thorns at top, and birches sheltering the cote of the pigeons, who mingle with ducks and curs in the enclosure.”

JEFFERIES THE EARLY YEARS

Richard Jefferies was born at Coates, a hamlet outside Swindon, in November 1848. His father was a printer-turned-gentleman farmer. When his sister died in an accident, Richard was sent to live with his aunt (also married to a printer) in South London. He was ten when he returned to Coates and thus never really found his place in rural society. As a young man he was considered odd, lazy and unmotivated. Then, when he was eighteen, he was out wandering on a hill near his home – and underwent a revelation that changed everything for him.

edward THOMAS VISITS JEFFERIES’ BIRTHPLACE

In his nature diary, included in A Woodland Walk, Thomas recorded his visit to Jefferies’ birthplace at Coate on June 1 1896:

“Opposite the old house of Richard Jefferies, on the Coate road just beyond the stile which leads a path aside to the reservoir, I met an old dame who had lived there in the old low house since a time considerably before the birth of Jefferies. She talked willingly of Jefferies; of his wanderings at all hours and on every side: and of the fact that she, in younger days, prepared the single-windowed cheese-room at Coate Farm for use as his study. The family has left the village: Jefferies himself visited it little after his marriage.”

An edwardian obsession

“We have reached, perhaps, the edge of a great mystery, and we are querulous and chattering as swallows before dawn.”  So wrote Edward Thomas, the prolific prose-poet of all matters country, in the middle years of the first decade of the twentieth century.  The mystery he refers to?  Somewhat anticlimactically, it turns out to be the fact that, apparently, “No class of books is now exempt from announcements of our affection for the country.”

     Thomas was almost certainly right.  The late Victorians and Edwardians and even the Georgians yet to come were obsessed with the countryside.  More to the point, they had a boundless appetite for reading about it, to the extent that most periodicals featured a nature column and collections of them were reviewed in the leading critical reviews.  Thomas himself had been writing nature journalism for the Globe, the Speaker and the New Age since he was sixteen and his first collection, The Woodland Life, had been published by Blackwood’s when he was only nineteen.

the expedition by bicycle 1913

Edward Thomas published In Pursuit of Spring, the narrative of his bicycle journey from London to the Quantock Hills, in April 1914, a year after the excursion itself.  He was thirty-six years old and had published twenty-six books – twenty-five of non-fiction prose and one novel – not counting innumerable contributions to other people’s books and hundreds of reviews and articles.  Although Thomas is today known primarily as a poet, in April 1914, approaching middle age, he had not written a single poem.  He was, however, a leading critic of poetry and a successful writer on nature and country matters.  In Pursuit of Spring would be  among his last contributions to nature prose.  There would be other prose works but from December 1914 when he wrote his first poem, poetry would be his primary literary output, ending with his death at the Battle of Arras on Easter Monday, April 9 1917.