World's End

Before Richard Jefferies became one of the great English writers of nature and the countryside, he was an ambitious young novelist writing in the popular sensation mould of his day. World's End (1877), his third novel, is a melodrama built on one of the period's favourite engines: a vast, long-contested inheritance.

At its centre stands the great manufacturing city of Stirmingham — a thinly disguised Birmingham, rendered as a smoking colossus of half a million souls — and the immense fortune locked up in the very land on which it stands. When the city's founder dies, rival claimants, forged pedigrees, and legal machinations converge on the question of who is the rightful heir to the ground beneath a whole metropolis.

Away from the smoke, in a lonely village on the open downs, lives Aymer Malet, a poor young artist in love with nature and the ideal — a figure into whom Jefferies poured much of himself — who becomes engaged to Violet Waldron. Their courtship, set in a fresh and closely observed rural world, is the warm heart of the book; but the baleful reach of Stirmingham and its contested estate forces its way even here, in intrigue, villainy, and at last a brutal murder.

Early, uneven, and frankly ambitious, World's End is most rewarding as a book at war with itself — a conventional Victorian melodrama that keeps breaking open to let something truer shine through. In its scenes of the downs, and in its unease before the hungry growth of the industrial city, the future nature writer is already visible. For readers who know the later Jefferies of After London and The Story of My Heart, it offers the rare pleasure of watching a major writer before he knew what kind of writer he was.