The Gamekeeper at Home
Sketches of Natural History and Rural Life

The Gamekeeper at Home is a collection of reminiscences of a now vanished rural way of life.

Richard Jefferies (Author)

9781108004107, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 20 July 2009

232 pages
21.6 x 14 x 1.3 cm, 0.3 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 and The Amateur Poacher (also reissued in this series) 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 man himself: his house and tools
2. His family and caste
3. In the fields
4. His dominions: the woods, meadows, and water
5. Some of his subjects: dogs, rabbits, 'mice, and such small deer'
6. His enemies: birds and beasts of prey—trespassers
7. Professional poachers
the art of wiring game
8. The field detective: fish poaching
9. Guerilla warfare
gun accidents
black sheep.

Subject Areas: Social & cultural history [HBTB]