‘A PROSE ARTIST OF BEWITCHING POWER’
JEFFERIES, Richard.
Hodge and his Masters …
London, Smith, Elder, & Co. … 1880.
2 vols., with a half-title in each volume and two leaves of advertisements at the end of volume II; a fine copy, unopened, in the original brown pictorial cloth, blocked in black and blind, each volume with a different gilt front cover vignette: the first a team of plough-horses, the second a steam-plough.
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Hodge and his Masters …
First edition, an influential volume of sketches of rural life, collected from Jefferies’ articles in the Wiltshire and Gloucestershire Standard. Jefferies (1848-1887) had published his first novel The Scarlet Shawl in 1874, after some years as a rural newspaperman; with Hodge and his Masters and other similar works, he established himself as the foremost country writer of his day.
‘Richard Jefferies is among the purest and most sensitive observers of nature England has produced …[but he] wrote as much about people as about nature and his country books are an indispensable source for the rural history of late nineteenth-century England. Hodge and his Masters (1880) in particular presents a magnificent panoramic view of a southern English farming community at the start of what came to be known as the great agricultural depression … Jefferies was also a considerable novelist, an important bridge between Hardy and D. H. Lawrence, and a prose artist of bewitching power, the master of a simple, flowing, apparently effortless style’ (Oxford DNB).
Sadleir 1209 (‘one of the few two-or-three volume books of which the front cover blocking is not uniform’); Wolff 3620.
