England after an unnamed catastrophe: London a poisoned swamp, the Thames dammed into an inland sea, and the survivors living in feudal fragments among the ruins. Jefferies published it in 1885, at the very start of post-apocalyptic fiction, and William Morris read it with open delight. This edition adds 58 plates of landscape painting, among them works by John Martin, John Constable and Ernst Gustav Doerell, with subjects from woodland twilight to ruined cities.