Analysis of Richard Jefferies’s Bevis

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on May 1, 2025

Like most fiction written for boys in the late 19th century, Richard Jefferies’s Bevis, the Story of a Boy is an adventure novel. Its main characters enjoy their own quest, as its plot mimics that of adult adventure novels in the style of Henry Rider Haggard. The adults in the novel remain conveniently absent, allowing the boys complete freedom.

Jefferies’s own unhappy childhood had offered little escape from harsh reality, and as an adult, he wanted to construct children’s literature for 10- to 12-year-old boys that would allow them relief from everyday stress. He called on one of his few happy memories of the family farm, with its fields, stream, and large lake, to provide a setting for Bevis. An island in the middle of just such a lake provides endless pleasure for Bevis and his best friend, Mark.

During the first third of the book, Bevis, as one of several boys, fights Indians, sails the Suez Canal, seeks the Mississippi, and discovers Arabs in Africa. Not only do readers enjoy the boys’ adventures, they review classical history through the exploits of Bevis and his “chums.” Blessed with great imaginations, the boys re-create the Battle of Pharsalia, atop cliffs that jut out over the lake. They use wooden swords and spears as weapons, and Bevis, as Caesar, is on the verge of defeat by Pompey, portrayed by a boy named Ted. However, Mark arrives in the supportive guise of Mark Antony, called to the scene by little Charlie. Pompey’s defeat sparks a fight between the boys, and when Bevis rolls over the cliff, the terrified Ted fears he has killed him. In reality, Bevis lies on a contrivance fashioned to catch sheep, a sheep-hurdle, just out of sight of the boys.

Bevis hides in a small boat, moored beside the white-capped lake, which drifts onto the waves, carrying him to the mostly unexplored island. In a moment of high tension, he pulls himself into a tree just before his boat sinks. The imagery of the battle and subsequent “journey” across water, with a “shipwreck” on a “foreign shore,” all support the familiar quest plot. Meanwhile, Mark wants to hunt for Bevis but is locked in a cellar by the farm manager. While he can unscrew and remove the bars from the window, the opening is too small for escape. Instead, Mark uses a bar to pry open the door and returns to the lake with the devoted spaniel Pan, symbolically named for a nature deity.

Bevis explores the island, scaling its hill, where he lights a fire seen by Mark. Procuring a boat, Mark crosses to the island during a full moon, as “the raging waters rushed and foamed around him.” The two friends reunite and thoroughly explore the mysterious island, building a hut and pretending to shoot kangaroos, taking aim at rabbits. They name their secret land New Formosa and make trips back and forth from the island to home, gathering supplies and clueing Charlie in on their game. Naming their boat the Pinta, they bring a gun to the island and hunt rabbits and squirrels, thus beginning multiple adventures that delighted several decades of boy readers.

Jefferies peppers the novel with exciting narrative and well-designed verbal exchanges between the best friends, reproducing dialogue that rang realistic to the young ear:

“‘We must go back,’ said Mark. ‘We can’t turn round.’
‘We can’t paddle backwards. There, I’m in the weeds.’
‘Turn round on the plank.’
‘Perhaps I shall fall off.’
‘Sit sideways first.’
‘The plank tips.’
‘Very well, I’ll do it first,’ said Bevis.”

When Bevis puts his confident plan into action, the plank pitches him into water, satisfying not only Mark, but readers as well.

As their adventures continue, something visits the hut and eats their bacon, and the boys speculate whether their visitors might have been lions, tigers, boas, or panthers. Before long their friends, Charlie, Val, and Cecil, want to join them on the island, but Bevis and Mark remain determined to keep secret their exact location. One scene features the boys engaged in storytelling, while Bevis keeps a journal. Thus, Jefferies emphasizes the importance of the imagination and echoes the theme of tale swapping from the prototypical quest tale, Homer’s Odyssey. The boys refer fancifully to areas of their island, naming a stream the Nile and a rise Kangaroo Hill. Deciding the invader is a panther, they set a trap, fitted with rabbits, bacon, and potatoes, but in a comic climax, succeed only in catching Loo, a girl who disgusts the boys, because a girl has discovered their hideout. They immediately make her a slave, and contentedly pass their days until they do at last make a big killing, not of the fabled panther, but of an otter.

That exotic encounter marks the end of their summer adventure, and upon their return home, they admire the night sky, something they have done repeatedly throughout the book. Jefferies again stresses mythological imagery, writing: “Large Sirius flashed; vast Orion strode the sky, lording the heavens with his sword . . . ‘We must go to the great sea,’ said Bevis. ‘Look at Orion!’ The wind went seawards, and the stars are always over the ocean.”

Bevis, and other books for young readers from the 19th century, mark a crucial change in juvenile literature, that of existence for pure entertainment’s sake. Following in the steps of Lewis Carroll, Jefferies and others produced stories without didactic intent. Jefferies’s work remains available in hard print.

Bibliography
Williamson, Henry. Introduction. Bevis, the Story of a Boy by Richard Jefferies. London: Dent, 1966, vii–x.