Rediscovered the Richard Jefferies anthology Landscape with Figures, selected by Richard Mabey. Jefferies was a Victorian essayist and journalist. The collection features One of the New Voters. It was written in 1884, when the English franchise had been further extended to agricultural workers, like the harvest reaper that the essay sketches. If you like great writing, here’s how it ends:

I am not trying to make out a case of special hardship, being aware that both men, women, and children work as hard and perhaps suffer more in cities; I am simply describing the realities of rural life behind the scenes.

The golden harvest is the first scene: the golden wheat, glorious under the summer sun. Bright poppies flower in its depths, and convolvulus climbs the stalks. Butterflies float slowly over the yellow surface as they might over a lake of colour. To linger by it, to visit it day by day, at even to watch the sunset by it, and see it pale under the changing light, is a delight to the thoughtful mind. There is so much in the wheat, there are books of meditation in it, it is dear to the heart.

Behind these beautiful aspects comes the reality of human labour – hours upon hours of heat and strain; there comes the reality of a rude life, and in the end little enough of gain. The wheat is beautiful, but human life is labour.

The picture is Sir George Clausen‘s The Mowers from 1892.