Still “Wild England” after London: Richard Jefferies’s Post-Apocalyptic Critique Against Anthropocentrism
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In After London, Richard Jefferies reveals the wide ranging influence of anthropogenic climate change by suggesting that many industrial cities have been decimated, and by delineating the devolutionary effect the change has had on both the natural and human worlds. Not only that, he sets the temporal background of the post-apocalyptic story to at least a century after the explosion of London, thus emphasizing the massive effect anthropogenic changes can impose on the human society as well as the ecosystem at large. Jefferies’s acknowledgement of non-human entities as actors, and his attunement to the interdependency of human and non-human entities decenter the human, ultimately reconfiguring human-nature relations. Part II, which deals mostly with the protagonist’s adventures, also offers critical insight into the intractability of anthropocentrism. Jefferies denies a conclusive happy ending for Felix, the protagonist of Part II who has inherited the “modern” spirits of the Victorians, revealing his unwillingness to endorse the character’s anthropocentric pragmatism. This, and his refusal to have Felix put humanity firmly back on the path to industrial “progress” before the novel’s ending, marks After London as a proto-ecocritical work intended to disillusion readers of any “romance” that stories of societies being rebuilt on a slate wiped clean might promise.
Abstract
In After London, Richard Jefferies reveals the wide ranging influence of anthropogenic climate change by suggesting that many industrial cities have been decimated, and by delineating the devolutionary effect the change has had on both the natural and human worlds. Not only that, he sets the temporal background of the post-apocalyptic story to at least a century after the explosion of London, thus emphasizing the massive effect anthropogenic changes can impose on the human society as well as the ecosystem at large. Jefferies’s acknowledgement of non-human entities as actors, and his attunement to the interdependency of human and non-human entities decenter the human, ultimately reconfiguring human-nature relations. Part II, which deals mostly with the protagonist’s adventures, also offers critical insight into the intractability of anthropocentrism. Jefferies denies a conclusive happy ending for Felix, the protagonist of Part II who has inherited the “modern” spirits of the Victorians, revealing his unwillingness to endorse the character’s anthropocentric pragmatism. This, and his refusal to have Felix put humanity firmly back on the path to industrial “progress” before the novel’s ending, marks After London as a proto-ecocritical work intended to disillusion readers of any “romance” that stories of societies being rebuilt on a slate wiped clean might promise.
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