After London by Richard Jefferies

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Many view “After London” as the first apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic novel and as such take note of it as the prototype of what has become a significant genre.

The novel is spilt into 2 parts, the first is a fairly short scene setter – giving the context and some sketchy history to the state of England, while the second part is the narrative “proper”. I noted when considering The Day of the Triffids that the events of the apocalypse itself are often very lightly treated, and that is certainly the case for After London which is set a few generations after whatever it was that wrought the collapse of civilisation. In the first part there are only dimly remembered myths of the “old” order before the apocalypse.

The post-apocalyptic world imagined by Jefferies has a significant resemblance to an early medieval world, perhaps the England of the Saxons during the Viking incursions – there is a suggestion of some sort of King or over-Lord but power and authority is primarily held by local Barons. It is difficult to decide it there is a particular moral message behind Jefferies tale. There is in an post-apocalyptic tale a message to the current civilisation of its own vulnerability – writing to a late-Victorian audience which had lived through such technological progress, and for whom the curve of civilisation was clearly on a continuing upward curve the mere suggestion that this could all come to naught (whether for good or ill) is in itself a radical thought.

One of the things that was particularly interesting was the way in which the hierarchy of the new order was founded on the literacy (or lack of it) of survivors. In this new society access to literacy is closely guarded by the ruling elite, and the descendants of those who were illiterate at the time of society's collapse have been reduced to de facto slaves. What was the contemporary message of this division? You can see it as a call for an expansion of literacy within Victorian society as a guardian of freedom for the “common man”, or perhaps, if you were one of the literate elite, you might see it as a reminder of the dangers of letting the masses have access to education which might illuminate for them the bondage in which you currently hold them?

Coupled with this division of society by education the most interesting point made by Jefferies is that in this new order it was only ancient texts that survived – that is those manuscripts which were hand written onto velum – the mass of “modern” knowledge that was contained only in printed books had been lost.

This was for two reasons, first Velum manuscripts had survived, while the cheap paper books had decayed to dust. But also, the new society had a limited capacity to copy out texts, and so could maintain as needed new copies of the inherently concise ancient texts written to be transcribed by hand, but without access to printing technology the often verbose “modern” writers works were simply too long to be retained. This insight, true when Jefferies wrote, is even more applicable to us, the Wikiepedia generation.

We now have unimaginable amounts of information at our fingertips, but only as long as the National Grid is up and running. How much of the riches (?) of the knowledge we have available via the internet would still be available to us a year, 5 years, 50 years after an “apocalypse” - the survivors would have to search their attics for dust covered and out of date encyclopedias for the remnants of our technical know-how.

And so while the story of Felix, which is the main narrative, was not particularly captivating to me there were with the set up some ideas which have really stuck with me.