ONE of Swindon’s greatest sons was the Patrick Moore of his day.

That’s according to Rebecca Welshman who has discovered that Richard Jefferies, Swindon’s famed Victorian author and naturalist, was studying the stars above Swindon 140 years before the UK Space Agency arrived in town.

Rebecca, a post-graduate researcher based at Exeter University, spoke about Jefferies at the Swindon Festival of Literature yesterday lunchtime at the Arts Centre.

She discovered previously lost letters from Richard Jefferies to a national journal devoted to the study of astronomy. In the letters, published in 1870 and 1871, Jefferies demonstrates his early interest in science describing a ‘meteor’ and ‘spots on the sun’ that he had observed from his house at Coate, which is now a museum to his memory.

Written during his time as a reporter for the Swindon Advertiser and the Wiltshire and Gloucester Standard, the letters to the editor of the Astronomical Register – a magazine for amateur observers, and those interested in astronomy – are the earliest known works by Jefferies in a national magazine. They pre-date Jefferies’ letters to The Times on the agricultural labourer in 1872, which gave him significant national coverage and developed his literary career.

Rebecca, who is studying for a PhD on Richard Jefferies and contemporary author Thomas Hardy at Exeter University, said: “The finds are particularly significant for the study of Jefferies’ early life and work when he was living at Coate in the years before his marriage to Jessie Baden in 1874, a period for which scholars have very little material.”

By a bizarre coincidence, the day Rebecca made her amazing discovery was April 3 this year, 140 years to the day after one of the letters was published.

Although Richard Jefferies hints at his interests in science in his correspondence with his Aunt Ellen, these early letters on astronomy show that Jefferies was thinking seriously about and observing scientific phenomena in his local area.

The letters offer an insight into the accessibility and popularity of science during the late Victorian era, and demonstrate Richard Jefferies’ passion for ideas and the workings of the world around him.