Far Away and Long Ago: A History of My Early Life was published by J.M. Dent in 1918. Hudson was seventy-seven, living in poverty in London boarding houses, when he wrote this account of his childhood on the Argentine pampas — and the distance between his present circumstances and the remembered paradise gives the book its peculiar intensity.
Hudson grew up on a ranch (estancia) near Buenos Aires in the 1840s and 1850s — a world of limitless horizons, horsemen, wild birds, and a child’s absolute freedom to wander. His descriptions of the pampas landscape (the flat grasslands stretching to infinity, the violent storms, the gaucho culture) have the precision of a naturalist and the emotional force of a poet recovering Eden. The birds particularly — Hudson was a self-taught ornithologist of genius — are described with a specificity and love that makes them unforgettable.
The book is not simply nostalgic. Hudson traces the development of his consciousness: how he learned to observe, how he came to feel the natural world as numinous, and how the first encounters with death and violence broke into the childhood paradise. The writing is extraordinarily achieved — simple, clear, rhythmic, with a quality of rapturous attention that recalls Traherne’s Centuries of Meditations.
Collecting Far Away and Long Ago
First edition (J.M. Dent, London, 1918): Blue cloth, gilt lettering.
Market values:
- First edition, fine: $100–$300
- Very good: $40–$100