Main Ideas: 

In looking at the ways in which Jeffries'' story presents a technologically advanced society under threat, Maynard exposes the conservative project behind such an apocalyptic vision.  .

She exposes the "illogicality"  of Jefferies' ideology as manifested in its critique of technology and its desire to terminate modernity.  The political, scientific, and economic contexts of nineteenth-century culture come under attack by Jefferies' reversionist agrarianism, which attempts to naturalize the vision of the city of London.

p. 133 Jefferies' anti-industrialism -- 

Both Marx and Jeffries take up anti-industrial positions, and they might be said to share in a romantic condemnation of contemporary civilization.  .  .  .But where one takes the form of a democratic socialist utopianism, the other takes that of a conservative escapist one, based on a mythic appreciation of the land and a distrust of democratic movements. 

p. 139 -- contradictions in Jeffries' ideologies:

• although Jeffries writes a cautionary take about what happens when society is deprived of technological support, there also appears to be an unarticulated desire for such a catastrophe to occur, a desire for devastation and for reversion. 
• liberal anxiety but also a reactionary 'back to nature' impulse. 
• p. 140 -- Edie's narration hovers between chronicle and modern historical discourse. 

p. 143  the absent presence of national anxieties --in 1870's over the wars, the end of protected market which opened Britain to the import of foreign goods, over whether the nation can still dominate the world market.

Phillip // Disraeli's buying of shares in the Suez Canal in 1875. 

[examples of Jeffries' critique of urban society and his ruralization of urban scene in his other writings.]

p. 151 Jefferies may recoil from the effects of urban accumulation, but he recoils back into a fantasy of wilderness, of adventure, of a soul overwhelmed by the magnitude and unreason of nature.