Books with title After London: Or, Wild England

It became green everywhere in the first spring, after London ended, so that all the country looked alike. The meadows were green, and so was the rising wheat which had been sown, but which neither had nor would receive any further care. Such arable fields as had not been sown, but where the last stubble had been ploughed up, were overrun with couch-grass, and where the short stubble had not been ploughed, the weeds hid it.(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)About the Publisher Forgotten Books is a publisher of historical writings, such as: Philosophy, Classics, Science, Religion, History, Folklore and Mythology.Forgotten Books' Classic Reprint Series utilizes the latest technology to regenerate facsimiles of historically important writings. Careful attention has been made to accurately preserve the original format of each page whilst digitally enhancing the aged text. Read books online for free at

"It became green everywhere in the first spring, after London ended." So begins Richard Jefferies's After London, a pioneering "eco-apocalyptic" dystopian novel. Dystopian Classic Editions publishes works of dystopian and utopian literature that have survived through the generations and been recognized as classics. A dystopian society is an imagined society in which the people are oppressed, however the government propagandizes the society as being a utopia or a perfect society. Typical themes in dystopian literature include public mistrust, police states, and overall unpleasantness for the citizens. Authors of dystopian works strive to present a worst-case scenario and negative depiction of the way things are in the story so as to make a criticism about a current situation in society and to call for a change. Each Dystopian Classic Edition selected for publication presents such a story.

After some sudden and unspecified catastrophe has depopulated England, the countryside reverts to nature, and the few survivors to a quasi-medieval way of life. Beginning 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 rest of the story is an adventure set many years later in the wild landscape.

Excerpt from After London: Or Wild EnglandBy the thirtieth year there was not one single Open place, the hills only excepted, where a man could walk, unless he followed the tracks of wild creatures or cut himself a path. The ditches, of course, had long since become full of leaves and dead branches, so that the water which should have run off down them stagnated, and presently spread out into the hollow places and by the corners of what had once been fields, forming marshes where the horsetails, flags, and sedges hid the water.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Published in 1885, it describes the ecological repercussions of some unspecified disaster, and posits a return to barbarism. England's lost towns have spewed out their mice and rats, pets and domestic animals have perished or reverted to a few wild breeds, and the overgrown countryside is now populated by lurking savages: Bushmen, Romanies and "foot gypsies." Descendants of the "ancients" live an embattled existence in settlements around a great inland lake, but little of the old civilisation remains: "There are few books, and still fewer to read them; and these are all in manuscript, for though the way to print is not lost, it is not employed since no one wants books" (Chaper 4). Although Jefferies did not foresee the space age, his novel is pioneering in another way, as an inspiration for the post-apocalyptic genre of science fiction.

Richard Jefferies' After London is uncanny and intriguing, an adventure story, quest romance, dystopia, and Darwinian novel rolled into one, but also a pioneering work of Victorian science fiction. Imagining a mysterious natural catastrophe that plunges its people into a barbaric future, Jefferies remarkable novel drowns and destroys London and depicts a challenging 'Wild England' dominated by nature and filled with evolved animals and devolved humans. Of its time but also distinctively modern, After London can, in its uneasy expression of Victorian and post-Victorian anxieties about industrial development, urbanisation, natural resources, and climate, be regarded as one of the first novels of the Anthropocene. This new critical edition provides one of the earliest examples of a global catastrophe novel that is part of a flowering of nineteenth-century science fiction. It situates After London in a tradition of mid-late Victorian texts that respond to the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace and responds to a host of other key social, political, and cultural issues of the period.