Beautifully illustrated with engravings by C. F. Tunnicliffe, "Wild Life in a Southern County" is a meticulous, comprehensive study of the natural and social history of the area of Southern and South-Western England known as Wessex. Richard Jefferies describes the countryside and the animals, birds, fish and plants that lived there both as a naturalist and as an artist, and he pays considerable attention to detail, bringing to life a vision as of the countryside as it was before the mechanisation of farming and the ever-present noise of cars and aeroplanes. He also looks at the villages, hamlets and farms of the area and their inhabitants, recording for posterity their ways of life, their customs and traditions and some of the stories that they told. "Wild Life in a Southern County" is a delightfully-written evocation of the rural idyll of Wessex as it was in the 1870s.