Richard Jefferies, After London; or Wild England

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.

Mark Frost is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Portsmouth. He writes widely on environment, literature, and culture in the nineteenth century, and published The Lost Companions and John Ruskin's Guild of St George in 2014. Recent and forthcoming works include studies of Ruskin, Charles Dickens, William Morris, Richard Jefferies, and ecology in late Victorian science fiction. His current research is focused on pastoral in Victorian fiction.