“Progressing Backwards”: Rural Outsider Figures in Richard Jefferies, W.H. Hudson and Edward Thomas

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper explores representations of rural outsider figures in Richard Jefferies, W.H. Hudson and Edward Thomas. It begins by suggesting that there has been limited recognition of these authors before moving on to explore Raymond Williams’ critique of various ways of representing the countryside that can be found in their writing: including the fetishisation of the past and the creation of an overly simplistic binary between country and city. Against this it is proposed that Williams’ objection to texts that falsely idealise rural life may be seen to reflect a progress-oriented ideological bias, which in the context of the present environmental crisis might be viewed as problematic. This paper subsequently returns to these three authors in order to determine whether their representations of rural outsider figures can be seen to offer an indirect critique of the left’s adoption of the capitalistic fantasy of progress, or whether they should indeed be viewed as a reactionary defence of a largely imaginary idealised past.