The Amateur Poacher

The Amateur Poacher is a collection of reminiscences of a now vanished rural way of life.

Richard Jefferies (Author)

9781108004091, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 20 July 2009

256 pages
21.6 x 14 x 1.5 cm, 0.33 kg

Richard Jefferies (1848–87) remains one of the most thoughtful and most lyrical writers on the English countryside. He had aspirations to make a living as a novelist, but it was his short factually based articles for The Live Stock Journal and other magazines, drawn from a wealth of knowledge of the rural community into which he had been born, which when brought together in book form brought him recognition (though not wealth) and which continued to be read and admired after his early death. The Gamekeeper at Home (also reissued in this series) and The Amateur Poacher were both collections of essays in the style of reminiscences of a rural way of life which, though never idyllic, was by the 1870s beginning to undergo a period of rapid change, through both the onset of mechanisation and agricultural depression.

Preface
1. The first gun
2. The old punt: a curious 'turnpike'
3. Tree-shooting: a fishing expedition
4. Egg-time: a 'gip'-trap
5. Woodland twilight: traitors on the gibbet
6. Lurcher-land: 'the park'
7. Oby, and his system: the moucher's calendar
8. Churchyard pheasants: before the bench
9. Luke, the rabbit-contractor: the brook path
10. Farmer Willum's place: snipe-shooting
11. Ferreting: a rabbit-hunter
12. A winter night: old tricks: pheasant-stalking: matchlock versus breechloader: conclusion.

Subject Areas: Social & cultural history [HBTB]