Rider Haggard: His Extraordinary Life

Rider Haggard: His Extraordinary Life and Colonial Work. A Literary Critical Biography.

The Online Publication

By Geoffrey Clarke.

INTRODUCTION

There is no excuse needed for basing this biography of Sir Henry Rider Haggard on the personal account of his literary life given in his own words in his autobiography, The Days of My Life. There can be no truer biography than that given by the first hand witness, the author himself. Of course, in my book, I have used memories provided by other family members, friends and colleagues to supplement his very full, subjective life story.

In terms of the methodology in this biography, I have employed traditional literary criticism allied with qualitative approaches to research, such as family letters, portraits on canvas, evidence from correspondence between Haggard and other authors, handwriting in the original texts to discern authorship, sampling, observation, period plate photographs, a cinema newsreel, realia, correspondence with the present author, and in depth interviews with living and erstwhile members of the Haggard family.

Rather than make this biography a chronological survey of the life and work of Henry Rider Haggard, I have arranged the study thematically. In this regard, a general sweep of his career rolls over Norfolk, the Natal, Egypt, Iceland, Mexico, Canada, the United States and so on. It is not to be expected that publications or events in Rider Haggard’s life will be in date order, but will cover geographical, conceptual, mythical and other themes.

As a committed and lifelong Socialist, I cannot always find an affinity with Haggard’s weltanschauung, but his brilliant imagination and scope of spiritual understanding, are elements of his life and writing with which I can empathise.

There is, of course, a danger in looking at Haggard’s literary work from a 21st century perspective in that what may have been acceptable and respectably considered attitudes and behaviour in the late nineteenth–century would not be viewed in the same light now. We must not exchange our prejudices with a past time. It would be like asking Rider Haggard why he killed elephants. Things have changed, but it does not mean that events of a hundred years ago should have been any different than they were. Postmodernism tends to assume totalitarian ownership of former times and people. Haggard and his contemporaries’ arguments on the nature of the Zulus may be considered quite differently today. So, too, would be his and his contemporaries’ attitudes to politics, race, religion, social structures, animal and human rights and sexual orientation.

But this will be essentially a favourable biography. I cannot rise to the argument in some quarters that a highly critical work on Haggard is necessary. I shall leave that to Wendy Katz, Sydney Higgins and Lindy Steibel, and will wait to receive the judgment of posterity. Haggard was a man of his time, with great sophistication and empathy towards other human beings; a state builder and nationalist, and should not always be judged by contemporary postmodern, protofeminist standards of outlook and viewpoint, unknown to the late-Victorians.

Chapter1. Natal.

When Henry Rider Haggard first appeared in public portrayed on canvas by John Pettie in 1889, his picture displayed in the National Portrait Gallery showed an eager looking young man in impeccably starched collar and neatly tied cravat. “Here I am. I have arrived”, it seemed to say. His family background was patrician, landed and wealthy and, as the youngest son of Squire William Meybohm Rider Haggard [1817 – 1893] of Bradenham Hall, Norfolk, he was not expected to inherit his father’s title and land and, thus, had to carve his own way in the world.

His somewhat upward stare in the portrait seems to suggest something of the visionary, one who wished to look ahead at the future with a view to making his fame and fortune elsewhere, perhaps not in England. It was not one of his favourite portraits, for Haggard preferred one painted in later life, by Maurice William Greiffenhagen (1920) according to his descendants,[i] except that he thought it made him appear ‘wrinkled’.

Maurice William Greiffenhagen (1920) © National Portrait Gallery. London, Great Britain.

“These drawings come sketches

for the portrait of Sir Rider Haggard

painted by my husband in 1920

and they now belong to J. E. Scott

Beatrice Greiffenhagen

1936“

Rider Haggard could not roll his ‘r’s so one speculates whether his pronunciation of words like ‘very’ or ‘Greiffenhagen’ would not have sounded like ‘vewy’ or ‘Gweiffenhagen’. A look at Rider Haggard’s handwriting, too, in the manuscripts suggests on examination that he was impeccably tidy, methodical and upright. His bold, copperplate writing iin black ink on thick parchment paper taken out from a ledger suggests frugal economy and a mind that was organised, dedicated to detail and conscious of the effect it might have on others.

Sometimes using oblique shaped nibs, and at others a fine point nib, his penmanship varies between the flowing and the stilted, the clear and the unfocussed. Never a deleter and reviser like Dickens or Conrad, he usually wrote straight from the heart without hesitations, and where additions were needed he slotted them in between the two lines of written text.

Graphologists would be interested in Haggard’s writing style – gripping the pen between the index and second finger and the thumb, [i], rather than holding it lightly between the thumb and the first finger, as is more usual. It may suggest that Haggard’s writing emanated from a deeper cortex of the brain, and that the neural impulses from his cerebrum were of a more active nature by using this method. By this style of pencraft, his imagination was producing a more energised effect than some writers. Using this calligraphy, it could also be argued that his word output was more speedy.

He always carried the great knob-headed walking stick of Cetewayo, King of the Zulus, the tall, heavy hunting staff obtained in Natal at the coronation of the Zulu leader. Dressed in his wing collar and three piece, woolen suit with watch chain at the waistcoat, white broad-brimmed Panama hat, and a floppy cravat and shiny black shoes, spats to the instep, he goes the grounds of the ivy covered [now no longer] lodge and its ponds, greenhouses and gardens. He concentrates on his writing work, mainly in the afternoons, at the brought in desk of Charles Dickens, with his faithful black spaniel, Spot, at his side.

Haggard’s provenance was, through Squire William of Bradenham Hall, from landed and wealthy Danish parentage. The stained glass window at St Mary’s church, Ditchingham[ii] pays tribute to his past glory and contains scenes about Haggard’s life and work and his farm at Hilldrop, Natal. In the side panel is the inscription, Micas inter omnes it shines among all (i.e., it outshines all) (Horace ). Another proclaims per ardua ad astra – through struggle to the stars - and is quoted in Haggard's The People of the Mist.[i] In the main panels is portrayed a kingly image of Jesus Christ with the Archangels Michael and Raphael. There are scenes depicting the Pyramids and a view of Bungay from the Vineyard Hills near the home.

There exists also a portrait of Haggard on the village sign of Bradenham. One side portrays some sheep in front of the River Wissey and on the other is painted Wood Farm and an image of a ploughman. Along with the sheep is a picture of gallows depicting the time in 1794 when a Bradenham farmer was sent to the gallows for the murder of his wife. Rider and his brother discovered the remains of the gibbet and the condemned which were sent for safe keeping to the dungeon of Norwich museum. The nephew of Howard Carter, Haggard’s friend the Egypt specialist, carved the oaken sign, and it also bears a shield commemorating Elizabeth the First’s coronation. A street in Bungay is named Rider Haggard Lane, indicating his popularity and fame in the neighbourhood.

Noted for his good works[iii] throughout life, there are many examples to be found of his charitable giving, help to the poor and needy, national civil service, and his loyalty to the Salvation Army and its good works in America, Canada and Australia.

These indications of Rider Haggard’s character point to the development of a person who was destined to become a gentleman farmer, a politician, a colonial administrator, and one of the most influential people of his generation. He became known later as one of the most imaginative writers of the romance of masculine adventure. His writings run into millions of words. If volume is a criterion, he will simply be remembered for the quantity (70 novels: 3,150,000 words in one estimate, not including the couple of million words in The Private Diaries of Sir Henry Rider Haggard from 1914 until 1925 that Haggard caused to be typed out) as well as the outstandingly creative and intensely imaginative quality of his output.

Rider Haggard was one of six boys and four girls. He was born on the Haggard estate at Wood farm that had, in the meantime, been let out and was now not ready for his mother to give birth. Not a very enterprising start in life. As an eighth child Rider was not expected to be a high achiever and was regarded as a rather slow, dullard sort of child. Other siblings were Ella Doveton [1845-1921], William Henry [1846-1926], who was knighted, Bazett Michael, [1847-1899] who lived near and socialised with R L Stevenson on Samoa, Alfred Hinuber [1849-1916] who entered the Indian Civil Service and who worked alongside Cecil Rhodes in Africa, John George, [1850-1908], who had an international career, Elizabeth Cecilia [1852-1916], Andrew Charles Parker, [1854-1934] who reached the rank of colonel, and after Henry Rider [1856 – 1925] were Eleanora Mary [1858- 1935], who married a Baron, and, last but not least, the author and major, Edward Arthur Haggard, who died at the age of 65 in 1925.

Archival statements from the family reveal that his father, William Haggard, admonished him by heaping “imprecation upon imprecation” upon him.[iv] We learn from Strand Magazine that Rider’s father, Squire Haggard, chided Rider as a young boy for coming down to his supper too early, and finishing it before the others. In the illustration, the overpowering figure of the massive, bearded and great coated Dane queries: “Rider, what are you doing here? Explain, sir. Explain!” “Please, father”, he replied, “I knew that when you all came in there would be no room for me, so I had my supper first”, indicating Rider’s special imaginative approach to life.

I have conducted correspondence and in depth interviews with the living descendants of the author to establish whether they could provide evidence of the domestication of family life, with particular reference to their relative. There may or may not have been difficulties for people in late-Victorian times in the display of affection between family members. It is possible that fathers considered it necessary to establish a distance in their relationships, but there were domestic displays of affection shown between members of the same family.

The maternal grandson of Rider Haggard, the late Commander M. E. Cheyne, insisted to the present writer that his (Commander Cheyne’s) grandfather, Rider Haggard, treated his family with close affection and that his apparently harsh comments to his grandson about eating’ like a pig’, not being able to ‘tie up (his) shoelaces’ and ‘not know[ing] the Lord’s Prayer’ were “all said with a kindly glint in his eye”.[v]

Indeed, Commander Cheyne remembered his grandfather with affection: "...I have always had and still have a tremendous affection and admiration for him." It may seem strange that such memories as these are based on recollections of apparently harsh and unemotional comments by a grandfather, but it was common among late-Victorian fathers to appear stern and lofty in their manner without really relinquishing the affection and love of a grandparent. And indeed, Commander Cheyne, commenting on the repetition to him by the present author of a published quotation about the "imprecation after imprecation" that was "heaped upon"[vi] Haggard by his father, countered by saying that his grandfather did not “follow this course of action upon me.”[vii]

In fact, this was confirmed in an interview with Commander Mark Cheyne's widow, Mrs Nada Cheyne, who was born in the year Rider Haggard died, who commented that: "Rider was much more friendly than his father had been. His father was fierce. Mother whispered.”[viii] Indeed, his great granddaughter, Dorothy, imagined that “he was slightly removed and bemusedly tolerant of the social activities that went on around him of his all-female family, for he was caught up in his writing."[i]

Haggard’s daughter, Lilias was taken on a salmon fishing trip to Wales where she passed “jovial and happy times”,[x] and yet we are not aware whether this was an isolated family event or a regular occurrence. In her memoirs, Lilias recalls that:

As to Rider, he was genuinely devoted to them all. Writing to Louie about the time with regard to having some of Jack’s children home from abroad, he says: “The trouble is they all have too much character, but am always glad to see them. I love them all, and only wish I had enough money…[xi]

And again, the pressures of an impecunious writer expressing a true family spirit by Lilias’s account. Indeed, Dorothy, his great granddaughter added that he was “amusedly tolerant of their young female words".[xii]

I argue that the end result of all this confirms ideas that late-Victorian patriarchs were equally as caring as are modern-day parents and grandparents. Such recollections need to be treated with some caution in case they seek to protect golden memories, or perpetuate long-held myths, but they add to our wealth of knowledge on the issues.

Not being sent to a public school, like most youths of his class and society, Rider was registered as a pupil at Ipswich Grammar school, his parents having failed to enroll him in the Cambridge choir school.[xiii] He made slow progress, so his father made arrangements for him to be tutored at home with private lessons in Mathematics, Latin and Greek.

Haggard’s first imperial opportunity arose in the shape of an arrangement by William Haggard with Sir Henry Bulwer by which Rider Haggard would become a kind of nineteenth century ‘intern’ with the Lieutenant Governor of Natal in South Africa. Haggard travelled out to South Africa in July 1877, aged 21, journeying up from Cape Town to Durban, under sail, and on to Pietermaritzburg on horseback. Once there, he made friends with William Butler, one of the party of Englishmen accompanying Sir Theophilus Shepstone, the Secretary of Natal Affairs.

Haggard was offered the position of secretary to the residency, from which he was given the opportunity to travel with Sir Theophilus and engage with the Boers in the running battles with them in the Transvaal. By sheer coincidence Rider Haggard was handed the task of reading out the Proclamation of the British annexation of the Boer territories in Natal.

Fortune landed smoothly on Rider Haggard’s brow once again. Offered the post, in 1878, at still only 21 — on the death of the incumbent of Master and Registrar of the High Court of Transvaal[xiv] — his fate favoured those who are in the right place at the right time with the proper social credentials from an aristocratic family in Britain. Indeed, Haggard claimed in his autobiography, The Days of My Life that fate had much to do with the events that unfolded in his long career:

There’s a divinity that shapes our ends

Rough hew them how we will.[xv]

Throughout his literary work there exists a constant stream of fatalism. Fate as the imperial mandate enthrones itself in Haggard’s work, for his sense of destiny as part of the imperial project or Pax Britannica is palpable in his background, class, upbringing and life’s work.

In his fiercely imaginative romance, She, the fate of the beautiful ‘She’ who becomes a wizened old hag on entering the crematorial flame and does not survive is matched by the fate of Leo and Holly who escape from the scenario of cremation in Chapter 25 of the novel. Ayesha’s final inability to save herself from the immortal flame underlines the fatalism that besets the work and promotes the idea of the more successful fate of the white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants who colonise South Africa.

Whilst opposed to pessimism Haggard was, nevertheless, in favour of Stoicism and its close relative, Fatalism. Haggard simply could not accept the idea of chance ruling his life. His philosophy was of a spiritual determinism, or Fatalism, the indefinable nature of which leaves room for irrationality and extremism. Justifying Quatermain's Fatalism, Haggard wrote, on his going to the Sulaiman Mountains in search of diamonds:

You may wonder' I went on `why, if I think this, I, who am as I told you a timid man should undertake such a journey. It is for two reasons. First, I am a Fatalist, and believe that my time is appointed to come quite independent of my own movements, and that if I am to go to Suliman Mountains to be killed, I shall go there and be killed there. God Almighty, no doubt knows his mind about me, so I need not trouble on that point.[xvi]

Haggard was often at one with the idea of the survival of the fittest as a notion, with its corollary that the fittest were those destined to rule and that the gene pool must, therefore, contain only the best elements. In She he postulates the idea that the weak are not capable of survival. It is only the superior one in the chain of being who will continue to thrive:

Those who are weak must perish; the earth is to the strong, and the fruits thereof. For every tree that grows a score shall wither that the strong one may take their share.[xvii]

It is sentiments accruing to Fatalism that allow for a right-wing legacy to prevail over the subordinate Other in preference to the rights and opportunities that they are due. It seems likely that Haggard was influenced by Melmoth Osborn, the British Resident in his early days in East Africa. Haggard may have been more open to iconoclasm than is realised, for he allows for scepticism and relativity in religious matters, although always returning in his texts to orthodoxy of faith in a universal order.

If fatalism is the force which takes over where religious authority leaves off, then the question of what determines our actions and of what use they are, Haggard speculates, should not undermine our actions themselves. What matters more than control over these forces is our daily struggle with life and morality.[xviii] In reply to the question of endless incarnations Ernest, in The Witch's Head, who, it could be argued, speaks for Haggard himself, propounds the belief that the fundamental and one deity underlies all religion.

In furtherance of the idea of determinism, in Child of Storm (1913) Haggard proposes that men are predestined to become spirits, and for that purpose he uses the vehicle of his hunter character, Allan Quatermain to propound the theory that:

While man is man - that is, before he suffers the magical death-change into spirit, if such should be his destiny - well, he will remain man.[xix]

In The Witch's Head (1884) his character, Alston, proposes that he believes in a multiplicity of existences on earth and in heaven. Indeed, there is also room for this plasticity of lives in She where the multiplicity of She's existences and incarnations is underscored:

She herself must die, I say, or rather change, and must sleep till it be time for her to live again[xx]

During the same introductory remarks in the novel Child of Storm, Quatermain also claims that:

... in the flesh he can never escape from our atmosphere, and while he breathes it, in the main with some variations prescribed by climate, local law and religion, he will do as much as his forefathers did for countless ages.[xxi]

These sentiments offer little hope for amelioration for his characters and presuppose that there was small chance of their achieving anything different from those who had preceded them, which underlines his sense of Fatalism. They seem fated to be mirrors of their antecedents, and Haggard gives little reason in the texts for the imperialistic activities such as big game hunting in which his characters engage, and what Madhudaya Sinha calls “the ritualised display of white dominance.”[xxii]

Fatalism meant little more than a veneer for the Haggardian character, for much of the revealed philosophy was hostile to male supremacism and unfitted, too, to the ceaseless struggle for progress which the authoritarian experience showed to be the reason behind many of man's efforts.

It is surprising that in exhibiting such fatalistic tendencies, Haggard probably failed to realise that he was revealing many sides of himself in the texts that outline his ambivalences, antipathies and certainties of class superiority.

***

Sojourned by fate to live in Zululand, the land and environment of Africa were attractive to Haggard. He loved to ride across the African vistas shooting for wildlife and hunting the wildebeest. En route for Maritzburg, he travelled at the gallop in a light, four-wheeled carriage. The trophies of the hunt adorned the walls of the residence with the heads of gazelle, hyena, and boar [not Boer] hanging up on display. Camping out under the stars, he enjoyed the primitive nature of the veldt, recounting in The Witch’s Head how his character Ernest Kershaw turns a part of this vast tumultuousness into an English garden, to try to preserve the identity of a rural England in the African wilderness.[xxiii]

Andrew Lang, the Scottish journalist, commenting on Haggard’s work claimed “there is much invention and imaginative power and knowledge of African character in your book…”[xxiv] Haggard formed in Natal a knowledge of African culture and society. On one hand, he developed an attraction for the Zulus and described their kraals and ‘round beehive-like huts’ in his autobiography, Haggard's apparent reverence for the Zulus, whom he fought in the Transvaal, is exemplified in the texts in episodes where warrior-like men exhibiting a strong and independent culture have much to offer the west in terms of philosophy, psychology and sociology. In particular, they are notable for the contrast which they afford to the culture of the wealthy, industrialised and technological society in England and from which it was felt lessons about lifestyles, organisation, valour and independence could be learned.

With only a thin veneer of cultural relativity to mask it, Rider Haggard’s apparent contempt for Africans, and his fundamental sense of superiority is demonstrated in a preface to a story of white deception of the Zulus, which clearly foreshadows his own duplicity towards the leaders of the Zulu nation:

All the horrors perpetrated by the Zulu tyrants cannot be published in the age of melanite and torpedoes.[xxv]

In his autobiography he drew attention to what he thought of Zulu customs and history, which he claimed to have made use of in “Nada the Lily”.

I saw a curious sight the other day, a witch dance. I cannot attempt to describe it, it is a weird sort of thing:

The Chief Interpreter of the Colony told me that he was in Zululand some years ago and saw one of these witch-findings. “There,” he said, “were collected some five thousand armed warriors in a circle, in the midst of which the witches [I should have said the witch-doctors] danced. Everyone was livid with fear, and with reason, for now and again one of these creatures would come crooning up to one of them and touch him, whereupon he was promptly put out of the world by a regiment of the king’s guard.[xxvi]

Yet, it might be argued that Haggard, in King Solomon's Mines, using his authorial voice through the character of Sir Henry extracts a promise from the chief, Ignosi that the practice of witchcraft would be discontinued.[xxvii]

Cultural relativism is only a light to be placed upon the text, for what is apparent is a patronising attitude towards the Zulu people. A Zulu is still capable in novels such as King Solomon's Mines of marrying many wives, acting in Haggard’s phrase “without the law”, being naked, killing an unwanted child, engaging in warlike behaviour, and indulging in sorcery at the same time as the author compliments him for his civilisation, society, morality and professionalism. His admiration for the Zulus, whilst tempered by remarks about their shortcomings, was evidenced in his comments made after the defeats in the Zulu war:

“The natives are the real heroes of the soil and surely should have protection and consideration…”[xxviii]

And yet, in novels like King Solomon's Mines and Allan Quatermain there exists the concept that with the simple, expeditious performance of a conjuring trick, Europeans were able to achieve superiority over African people by virtue of the possession of gunpowder and the promulgation of progressive attitudes in human psychological relationships. With a pair of false teeth and an eyeglass, and Captain Good engaging in some superior marksmanship, they may be able to turn an eclipse of the sun to their advantage by convincing the African people that they could “put out the sun”.

Allan Quatermain claims to have mystical powers and employs magical realism in his confrontation with the potentially hostile Kikuanas. Quatermain tells Twala that he and his companions come from the stars, and their rifles – which are said by the tribesman to be ‘magic tubes which speak’ as well as Captain Good’s eyeglass, false teeth and white legs, are all magical. Sir Henry Curtis does cut a ridiculous figure, of course, without his trousers and in a long shirt and with unkempt hair, but to believe that he could, thereby, terrify and subordinate other human beings is fanciful.

The assumed supremacy of the white man over the black man arises where Sir Henry Curtis is wearing an European made shirt, and because he is, after all, an English gentleman wearing a collar and tie, he retains therefore a badge of moral authority (despite his untidy, unshaven, and barelegged appearance) as a heroic leader of men, and as someone to whom as a gentleman automatic deference was due. Haggard, too, a member of the family of landed squirearchy in Norfolk probably assumed the same from his tenants, labourers and farmers.

In the same year, 1887, Haggard produced the next in the Quatermain series Allan Quatermain[27] Captain Good and the others [not forgetting Umslopagas] journey from the coast of east Africa into the country of the Masai. Whilst staying with a Scottish priest, they are attacked by a Masai group, which they overcome with great courage. They travel by canoe inside an underground river emerging into a lake in the region of the Zu Vendis, reminding us once again of these subterranean psychological undertones that Jung examined.

The Zu-Vendis are a white, warrior, linguistic group remote from other African speakers. At the time of the narrative, they are ruled jointly by two sisters, Nyleptha and Sorais. The two sisters fall irrevocably in love with Sir Henry Curtis, and a civil war ensues. Called to action, Henry Curtis saves the day again in usual imperial fashion. Nyleptha becomes Queen and Curtis her consort, while Allan Quatermain dies from wounds received in the battle.

Illustration by Thure de Thulstrup from Maiwa's Revenge (1888).

Additionally, in his sequel, Maiwa's Revenge published in 1888, the writing on a fragment of leaf reveals that (the reborn) Allan Quatermain’s old friend, John Every, had been detained and tortured by a group of the Butiana people leading to a gallant rescue attempt by Allan Quatermain and the others. Maiwa is one of the wives of Wambe, who has killed his own child, Maiwa’s daughter, whereupon she had sworn vengeance on him and his people.

Landing up with Allan Quatermain, Sir Henry Curtis and Captain Good as well as Umslopagas, she leads them back to Maiwa’s country to exact the revenge she desires. Assembling a large party of warriors, Allan Quatermain leads them into battle, along with Maiwa’s forces, and a fight ensues. In the text Wambe's fighters are:

“a scrubby-looking lot of men armed with big spears and small shields, but without plumes”.[1]

On the other hand, with such little time to spare, Maiwa’s supporter in the conflict, her father Nala, cannot:

“collect more than from twelve to thirteen hundred men, though, being of the Zulu stock, they were of much better stuff for fighting purposes than Wambe's Matukus.”

As we see in Thure de Thulstrup’s illustration, Allan Quatermain recounts his version:

“I mounted on a rock so as to command a view of as much of the koppie and plain as possible, and yelled to our men to reserve their fire till I gave the word,” 'Sixty yards—fifty—forty—thirty. Fire, you scoundrels!' I yelled, setting the example by letting off both barrels of my elephant gun into the thickest part of the company opposite to [me]”.[2]

‘The Battle of the Little Hand’, is so named after the severed hand of her daughter carried by Maiwa. After the routing of Wambe's forces at the rescue of John Every, and the satisfactory enactment of Maiwa’s vengeance on her husband, Allan Quatermain recounts the story to a group of friends, ending with the surprising revelation that he has dreamt that he had wed Maiwa. Thus revealing more deep, subterranean, Jungian desires. and pointing again to Haggard’s domestic life intruding into the corpus.

REFERENCES

McClintock, Anne. Imperial leather: race, gender, and sexuality in the colonial contest. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Alison Blunt, Gillian Rose, . Writing women and space: colonial and postcolonial geographies. New York: Guilford Press, 1994.

[i] Interview. Mrs Nada Cheyne, Ditchingham Lodge. 30 June 2012.

[i] Interview. Ms Dorothy Cheyne, Ditchingham Lodge. 30 June 2012.

[ii] Available. Online. http://www.norfolkstainedglass.co.uk/Ditchingham/home.shtm Accessed 11.07.2012

[iii] D E Whatmore, Rider Haggard’s Good Works, Pamphlet 1. Deeds for the Church December, 1995. Pamphlet 2. Deeds for Young Children and Young People. Pamphlet 3. Deeds for the Salvation Army.

[i] See The People of the Mist (London Longmans, 1894) 17.

[iv] Lilias Haggard, The Cloak that I Left: A Biography of the Author Henry Rider Haggard (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1950).

[v] Commander M. E. Cheyne, Speech to the Rider Haggard Festival, raising funds for Ditchingham church. 14 May 1999. A copy of the text of the speech is in the possession of the present writer. Letter. Commander M. E. Cheyne. 15 January 2000.

[vi] Lilias Haggard, The Cloak that I Left, 50.

[vii] Letter. Cmdr. Mark Cheyne to the present author. 24 February, 2000.

[viii] Interview. Mrs Nada Cheyne, Ditchingham Lodge. 30 June 2012.

[ix] Interview. Ms Dorothy Cheyne, Ditchingham Lodge. 30 June 2012.

[x] Interview. Mrs Nada Cheyne, Ditchingham Lodge. 30 June 2012.

[xi] Lilias Haggard, The Cloak that I Left, 190.

[xii] Interview. Ms Dorothy Cheyne, Ditchingham Lodge. 30 June 2012.

[xiii] Victoria Manthorpe, Children of the Empire: The Victorian Haggards (London: Victor Gollancz, 1996) 37.

[xiv] Introduction, C.J. Longman, to Henry Rider Haggard, The Days of My Life (London: Longmans, 1926) i.

[xv] Rider Haggard, The Days of My Life Chapter 2.

[xvi] Allan Quatermain in Rider Haggard, King Solomon's Mines (London: Cassell, 1885) 55.

[xvii] Haggard, She, 154.

[xviii] Rider Haggard, The Witch's Head, (New York: Harper and Bros.,1884) 214.

[xix] Rider Haggard, Child of Storm (London: Cassell, 1913) 2.

[xx] Haggard, She, 115.

[xxi] Haggard, Child of Storm, 2.

[xxii] Madhudaya Sinha, Unpublished PhD. University of Cincinnati Masculinity Under Siege: Gender, Empire, and Knowledge in Late Victorian Literature (University of Cincinnati, July 2012). See also Madhudaya Sinha, “Triangular Erotics: The Politics of Masculinity, Imperialism and Big-Game hunting in Rider Haggard’s, She.” Critical Survey Volume 20 Number 3 2008. 29-43.

[xxiii]Haggard, The Witch’s Head 3 Vols (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1885).

[xxiv] Haggard, The Days of My Life Chapter10.

[xxv] Haggard, Nada the Lily (New York: Longmans, Green, 1892).

[xxvi] Haggard, The Days of My Life Chapter 3.

[xxvii] RiderHaggard, King Solomon’s Mines (London: Cassell, 1885).

[xxviii] In Lindy Steibel, “Imag(in)ing Empire’s Margins: Land in Rider Haggard’s African Romances” Alternation, 5,2. 91-103. Tom Pocock, Rider Haggard and the Lost Empire (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1993) 51. fn. Available. Online. http://alternation.ukzn.ac.za/docs/05.2/09%20Sti.pdf Accessed 20. 07. 2012.

[1] Rider Haggard, Maiwa's Revenge, (London: Longmans, Green,1888).

[2] Haggard, Maiwa's Revenge, Chapter 8.

[i] British Pathe, A Norfolk Garden Rider Haggard. Camera interview. 14. 08. 1923. Available. Online. http://www.britishpathe.com/video/camera-interviews-sir-rider-haggard/query/rider+haggard Accessed 12. 08. 2012.

CHAPTER 2

The Transvaal.

In 1876 Rider Haggard had joined Sir Theophilis Shepstone as a junior member of his staff. He soon put his talents to use and produced a pencil sketch of Shepstone which was subsequently published in the English journal “The World”. It was here that he encountered ‘Umslopogas’, or more exactly, Mr M’hlopekazi, a Swazi who was on the staff of the Residency. He used the character of Umslopogas, whom he featured in Allan Quatermain and other romances.

In King Solomon’s Mines he is the character, Umbopa, one of the local African chiefs duped by the three Englishmen, as discussed above. Captain Good is probably his brother, Jack, Sir Henry Curtis the archetypal Anglo-Saxon-Berserker hero, and Allan Quatermain could be taken, with only a pinch of salt, to be Haggard himself, as his granddaughter agreed with the present author.[1] Again, in King Solomon’s Mines he is known as Ignosi, a great Zulu head of a regiment of fierce warriors who comes into conflict with Twala, the king. In his autobiography Haggard reports how Umslopogas had reputedly killed ten men in mortal combat. He was “a tall, thin, fierce-faced” man who had “a great hole above the left temple over which the skin pulsated”,[2] which injury Haggard recounts was received in battle.

On hearing that Haggard was using his name in his novels, Mr M’hlopekazi claimed that he should be paid for his inclusion in the romance. Haggard offered him a hunting knife as a means of paying him his royalties. However, when questioned whether he minded being featured in Haggard’s books, Mr M’hlopekazi stated that he was pleased to receive the chance of being remembered by posterity.[3]

The trek with Osborn, Fynney and Shepstone (Sompseu to the Zulus) from Pietermaritzburg to Pretoria took place on 20th December, 1876 when Haggard was 22, the journey lasting into the New Year of 1877. In the heat of the day, he still enjoyed the opportunity to explore the wilderness of the high veldt of the Transvaal with its varied climate and vegetation. On the journey, Osborn recounted some of his adventures. Osborn had witnessed the battles of Tugela, and Haggard went on to describe the tremendous loss of life in that conflict in his story “Child of Storm”. (1913)[4]

In Child of Storm where he encounters a group of impis, a unit of Zulu warriors, engaged in battle, his character, Macumazana experiences terror as the party turns on the Englishman and threatens to kill him:

I became aware of two great fellows rushing at me with their eyes starting out of their heads and shouting as they came:

“Kill Umbelazi’s white man! Kill! Kill!

Then, seeing that the matter was urgent and that it was a question of my life or theirs, I came into action.

In my hand I held a double-barrelled shot gun loaded with what we used to call “loopers” or B.B. shot, of which but a few went to each charge, for I had hoped to meet with a small buck on my way to camp. So as these soldiers came, I lifted the gun and fired, the right barrel at one of them and the left barrel at the other, aiming in each case at the centre of the small dancing shields, which from force of habit they held stretched out to protect their throats and breasts. At that distance, of course, the loopers sank through the soft hide of the shields and deep into the bodies of those who carried them, so that both of them dropped dead…[5]

At the battle of Tugela, Cetewayo’s brother, Umbelazi was killed. There was a total, bloody, annihilation of the Zulus. Armed only with shields and the assegai, the slender javelin or spear of the Bantu-speaking people of southern Africa, the clash of the shields in battle was described by Haggard “like the roar of the sea.”[6] The two armies were lined up against each other and wave upon wave of impis, threw themselves upon the front to be met by death and destruction. Behind each line was a solid array of spearsmen ready to fall into the breach. Each regiment of Zulu warriors took the place of the fallen one and the numbers of dead ran into tens of thousands, and the “ground around them was piled with dead."[7] The attack left tens of thousands strewn upon the battlefield in scenes not to be repeated until the First World War.

In 1873, sixteen years after the battle, Cetewayo (1826 - 08. 02. 1884) was nominated by Shepstone to the throne of the Zulus on the death of his father, Mpande. Subsequently Cetewayo turned against the English administration of Bulwer, and defiantly resisted English colonisation of Zululand. The Boers used the English against Cetewayo. They claimed part of Cetewayo's land and began to build on it, but Cetewayo drove them out. The English, who were called in to arbitrate, legislated in favour of Cetewayo, naming him as King of the Zulus, but took the opportunity to blame him about his kingdom. Cetywayo later visited England as a guest of Queen Victoria, and was feted throughout the land. Subsequently, his kingdom was divided into three parts by the British.

In his work, Haggard stresses the virtues of Zulu society by contrasting it with the rule of law in England, positing African societies as a kind of exemplar for the west, from which much of benefit could be gained, as it appears to place more emphasis upon the person than on property. In Haggard’s phrase “a man may half-kick his wife to death”[8] and be less accountable than if he were to steal something trivial. Haggard’s emphasis on the cultural benefits of Zulu society to the west is part of a larger pattern of Haggard as a committed anthropologist whose reference markers are more frequently to the east than to the west.

Arriving at the Cape Colony in January 1877, Haggard and his group were welcomed with alacrity. Balls were arranged and receptions and dinners held. Relations with the Boers were fraught and anxious while Shepstone conducted negotiations and talks with their leaders. Meanwhile the Zulus under Secocoeni were making peace with the Dutchmen. On March 26 they set out for Secocoeni’s camp. After the parlays and a treaty with the Zulus had been signed, Haggard’s party were able to escape a murderous ambush that had been arranged by the Zulus under Maakurupiiji. Upon the Annexation, peace broke out in the Transvaal and Haggard was able to take notes to be used in his adventures. When he returned home to England, he published his account of the Zulus under the title Cetywayo and his White Neighbours [9]

Cetywayo and his White Neighbours was published privately in Austria on 22 June 1882 with Trubner and Co in green covers when 750 copies of a limited edition were produced. It did not sell particularly well and it was not until Haggard achieved fame with his romances that there was any financial success involved. The work covers the ground in South Africa of the annexation of the Transvaal, and eye opening and absorbing accounts of events in Zululand, and Natal around the First Boer War that Haggard may have witnessed. His cultural take on the Zululand population remains broadminded and fair, taken in terms of his times and his background. One usually writes in accordance with one’s background and experience as exemplified in Haggard’s work with its class position, African knowledge and love of gold, lost kingdoms, adventures and treasure. His anthropological study reveals him as a man of perspicacity and catholicity; and, against the grain for English readers of the times, would express admiration for aspects of Zulu culture such as hospitality, fair dealing and social cohesion.

Parts of the book were reissued later in 1889 by Kegan Paul, Trench and Trubner with the title The Last Boer War the cover of which was simple and monochromatic illustrating a colonial soldier and the contents, because shortened and edited, more available to the general reader. Renowned for their disregard for copyright, the United States publishers issued the book under the title of A History of the Transvaal. The publication included A Zulu War Dance and A Visit to Chief Secocoeni which in 1887 featured in The Gentleman's Magazine that, since 1731, had regularly featured essays, dissertations and topical stories for men.

In A Visit to Chief Secocoeni published later also in revised form In Cetywayo and his White Neighbours Haggard describes, with some derogatory remarks on the general demeanour, attitudes and even cleanliness of the Dutch settlers, the journey by the members of the Commission to visit the Zulu chief. They passed through territory, traveling eastward, that was reputed to be disease ridden, and a gloss can be put on his remarks that the experience was not a pleasant one.

The party was met initially by Maakurupiiji. or otherwise known as Secocoeni’s “Mouth” or first minister.[10] They were greeted hospitably by the chief, however a request for strong spirits was turned down by Haggard’s cautious party. Meeting with hundreds of his men, the actual talks with Secocoeni were bathetic, considering the chief spent the time chewing on an intoxicating leaf and making only a few pithy remarks, as he spat out the juice. On their return, the expedition group encountered further difficulties, when a number of horses died, but they managed to escape the endemic fever and reach safety.

Such an account resembles Haggard’s adventures with their perils, mutinous attacks, pitfalls and dangers, at the same time as which an intense cultural tension around his encounters with the Boers dominates and interesting passing detail enhances the discourse.

Due to English intransigence and obstinacy over issues like African slavery and the rights of the Boers to land, the Boers started the ‘Great Trek’ to the East where they set up Boer republics in the Orange Free State, Natalia and the Transvaal.

Haggard was aware of all the history of the Boers and in The Ghost Kings he sets the story in Zululand at the time of Dingaan, the King of the Zulus and his brother Shaka, who allegedly he murdered. Dingaan is supposed to have mandated that the Boers under Piet Retief recover some stolen cattle before he would listen to any representations with regard to the ownership of land, but Retief was killed allegedly by the Zulu warriors. Mpande, Dingaan’s rival, took his army of Zulus down south to join with the Boers under their leader Andries Pretorius, and the joint forces of Mpande and the Boers were strengthened, so Dingaane’s army was defeated near the Pongolo River.

In the novel, Rachel Dove is the fifteen year old daughter of a priest who has gone as a missionary to the land of the Zulus. They soon settle into domestic harmony despite climate and dietary challenges. Rachel is sent rather unthinkingly on an errand to pick wild gooseberries on the island of a dried up river bed and, marooned by a sudden flash flood, she is only rescued by the courage and fortitude of an Englishman, Richard Darrien, which fateful meeting leads to a romance. After surviving the flood, wild animals and a lightning storm, Rachel is termed by the Zulus Inkosazanna-y-Zoola and Udade-y-Silwana or Lady of Heaven and Sister of the Wild Beasts.

King Dingaan demands the presence of Rachel to which she agrees and, because of the kidnap of her friend, Noie (Nonha) and because she is granted mystic powers after her rescue from the flood, she proceeds fearlessly to cross the Tugela river into Zululand. And after several alarming encounters with ‘witch doctors’ and shows of superb horsemanship, she meets the Zulu king at his great hut.

Inevitably Rachel’s parents have to follow; Rachel is impelled or at least is self impelled to see the Ghost Kings; and she acts as a judge of the Zulu population there because of the spiritual powers she has been given and her social standing amongst the Zulus. Whilst her friend Noie has gone away, and after a premonition that she will see Richard Darrien again, she finally reunites with him and the effect is electric. It was Fate that they should be united in love: ““Yes’’, he answered. “Fate.””[i]

Their reunion is temporary for they are again separated as Richard is poisoned by those who fear him. Long struggles ensue as she loses her spiritual powers and regains them again. Searching for Richard everywhere, only the spiritual understanding of where he could be comes to her aid. Here Haggard avoids the temptation to take the route of the Romeo and Juliet story, for although Rachel is thought dead and therefore Richard wants to give up the ghost, nevertheless they are reunited and the easy Shakespearian path of allowing both to die is averted and they can live to love again.

Similarities abound between the heroine of this story and that of Beatrice, the local school teacher in the novel of the same name. [See Chapter 5] They are outstandingly beautiful, resolute, independent, fearless, headstrong, self willed and courageous, and importantly defiant of marriage with one that they do not love. In the case of Rachel with Ishmail, the ‘renegade Englishman’, and in the character of Beatrice with Squire Owen Davies, neither of whom succeeds in marrying the other. Yet, the former story contains remarkable spiritual passages that reflect Haggard's time among a people who believe completely in the power of their ancestors - the Ghost Kings, the power to transmit messages through the ether without rational explanation, and the total control of human life and destiny at the mere pointing of a wand.

In the adventure, animal rights are surprisingly alluded to and seemingly upheld where the Haggard authorial voice regrets the killing of a buck:

Down it went dead, whereon rejoicing in his triumph like any other young hunter who thinks not of the wonderful and happy life that he has destroyed, Richard sprang upon it exultantly.[i]

This Haggard title cannot be bought as a specimen copy easily in any condition or at any price in these days, and Haggard would surely be delighted to know that some of his works fetch extremely large sums of money with antiquarian booksellers asking thousands of pounds for certain difficult to obtain editions,

***

In 1879 Rider Haggard left South Africa and returned to Bradenham in Norfolk. Subsequent on his conversion to Catholicism, he paid off all his debts and, according to his autobiography he “had got out of Chancery ... and had begun reading for the bar in a Conveyencer’s room”[11] Whilst in Africa, Haggard had purchased land and decided with his brother, Jack, to develop a farm, named Hilldrop, for the raising of ostriches, the feathers of which were favoured in England for wearing in ladies’ hats.

At home in Bradenham, Norfolk, he contracted a marriage at the age of 24 with Louisa Margitson, the daughter of Major Margitson of the 19th regiment. A rather plain girl, she however brought a dowry and the inheritance of a Norfolk estate, Ditchingham, despite opposition from her uncle, which would enable them to return to South Africa and take up ostrich farming in a big way. Having gone to court to fight the ruling in favour of her uncle and to sanction the marriage, they marry on 11 August, 1880. They travel out to Natal in South Africa in November, when Louie was 21. He also persuaded his brother, Will, to travel from Tehran in Iran to join them in the venture.

Louie is the daughter of John Margitson, who had retired from the army due to ill health and sold his commission in 1852. Her mother is Elizabeth Mary-Anna Hamilton who was affectionately known as Mary-Anna. A strong willed girl, she turns out to be quite difficult to manage for her grandmother when her mother was not well and her maiden aunt Hannah takes over her welfare. Mary-Anna suffered ill health and lost three babies in childbirth, mentally and physically wearing her down, so she spent time travelling abroad visiting spas to ‘take the waters’ in a quest for improved health, as was the wont of the upper-classes in nineteenth century South England. She goes back to Ditchingham after the death of her husband in Switzerland in September 1868. Returning to the continent in 1878, she attempts to take the waters in Schwalbach in Germany, but is so weak she dies and is buried there.

Yet all the same Rider needed to provide an income for his family. He applied for the position of Secretary to Melmoth Osborn, and travelled out to the Cape, arriving at Newcastle in April 1881. On 23 May, their first child, Arthur (Jock) Haggard was born. But by August they had seen the difficulty of making a success of ostrich farming at Hilldrop. The land chosen was unsuitable for the raising of ostriches, being too arid, and of course the events of the Boer war were becoming frighteningly close. They had lost four hundred and fifty pounds on the venture.[i] They were decided upon returning to England again with their new family, so they sold up. Returning via Durban, they were leaving Africa for the last time, with George Blomefield given charge of the farm.

Ditchingham House. Kind permission of Ms Dorothy Cheyne.

Home again at Ditchingham House, the grand seventeenth-century mansion, Louie’s parental house, Rider began writing Dawn, a romantic novel involving a disputed will, and about a young woman whom he named Maria Lee. Rider attended St Mary’s church, Bungay with Louie and they both noticed in one of the pews an attractive young girl upon whom the character of Maria became focussed:[13] She is described as:

not very pretty at her then age – just eighteen – but she was a perfect specimen of a young English country girl; fresh as a rose, and sound as a bell…

Indeed, there may have been input from Louie Margitson on the characterisation of Maria, for according to Mrs Nada Cheyne, Louie “helped with plotting, characterisation and detail on Dawn, despite not being accredited”[14] by Haggard, as we will see was the case with Mrs Leonora Blanche Alleyne Lang. The story was eventually self-published in 1884 with Trubner. The first main stream British publisher later that year was Hurst and Blackett. The romance appeared in the three volume format, common at the time. According to Alfred Tella, the first authorised American edition of Dawn appeared in 1887, and was advertised for sale in April of that year under the imprimatur of D. Appleton and Company, 1, 3, and 5 Bond Street, New York, USA.[i]

Haggard also wrote The Witch’s Head, whose character, Alston, was based on the British resident in Natal, Melmoth Osborn. Haggard's anthropological studies had led him to conclusions about the nature of the African people and society. He noticed social arrangements such as polygamy and polyandry, which were practised in Africa. In the novel, Haggard highlights the benefits of aspects of Eastern philosophy and culture such as maternalism, and went on to feature these in later writings. The novel was published in the three volume format, popular at the time, by Hurst and Blackett in 1885.[15]

His brother, Jack, discussed with Rider their various exploits in Africa. Jack’s visits to the diamond mines of Kimberley suggested the vast treasure trove to be found by adventurous English explorers into Africa. The lost kingdom of Queen Sheba was a source for the imaginative mediations between Jack and Rider over a possible African adventure story. Rider Haggard recounts in his autobiography that he had read Robert Louis Stevenson’s gripping and highly original adventure romance, Treasure Island. Actually, he “procured and studied that work, and was impelled by its perusal to write a book for boys”.[16] Jack had taunted Rider with the suggestion that he could not write anything “half as good”. It was enough to set Haggard on his way to writing the story of the fabulous mines of Solomon featuring Jack himself, Rider as Allan Quatermain, and Sir Henry Curtis as the heroic English adventurer.

Standing to write at his pedestal writing table in his study, after working in the Temple, through the summer of 1883, it was soon finished. It had taken quite a short time for the writing of an African adventure. Haggard recounts “I think the task occupied me about six weeks”[17]

On March 28 1883 Haggard had received a letter from Andrew Lang, the Scottish journalist and editor of Harper’s stating that he had read a copy of a story entitled “Bottles”. In the letter Lang compliments Haggard upon the work, and informs Haggard of the pleasure reading The Witch’s Head had given him. In a further letter dated only ‘Sunday’ Lang told Haggard that he had been reading the manuscript draft of King Solomon's Mines. He had only reached the part about the duel between Sir Henry Curtis and the African king. His remarks were most complimentary, but he was exercised with the problem of finding a publisher for the work suggesting Harper’s Boy’s Magazine.

The issue for Lang, in a further letter dated “Sunday”, was “what is the best, whereby I mean the coiniest, way to publish it?”[18] On its eventual publication, Lang wrote to Haggard acknowledging receipt of his reviewer's copy. Lang's review in the Saturday Review[19] was highly complimentary, excessively so, it might be said, for a routine literary review. For Haggard, Lang was “admitted to be perhaps the soundest and ablest critic of his time.”[20]

Haggard had sent the manuscript to Cassell who decided to make a scoop of it. Using new printing and production methods coming into use in the 1880s such as photomechanical techniques which allowed them to put together and print books much more quickly, they advertised the story all over London with the headline in bold capital letters: ‘King Solomon’s Mines: The Greatest Story Ever Told’. England had seen nothing like it. It was an immediate success and sold 31,000 copies in its first year. The first issue reached a sales figure of 50,000.

Some three years later Lang wrote on 4 August,1888 offering more figures on sales, “We are thinking of beginning to set the type of “Quaritch, V.C.” on Sept. 1st. You will give us your finally corrected sheets, I suppose. We have sold 20,000 copies of “Maiwa” on day of publication.”[21]

The story involves three English adventurers, Captain Good, Sir Henry Curtis and Allan Quatermain, three white, upper class, imperial voyagers on board the Dunkeld - the name of which reminding the reader of a dunker or prophylactic - at Durban South Africa. Also "she is a flat-bottomed punt", as he describes her, is a cause of some merriment.

The continent of Africa in many ways exists as a locale for sexual penetration where imperial and sexual uncertainties and suppressions are made apparent. The search for Africa in which the characters take part often becomes a self-reflexive study of what it is to be English, and Africa proves to be, more often than not, a testing ground for male potency. The exploration party remain intent on a penetrative journey into Africa to discover the lost mines of Solomon, protected only by their shotguns, ammunition and astrological tables.

The association of blackness with eroticism is a constant factor in the novel. Haggard continues to regard black women as unchallengable by men, and as having special qualities of beauty, strength, patience and beauty, their blackness being a particular cause for erotic interest. There is an aspect of supressed sexuality in Haggard's featuring of black women as an object of desire for it may have been impossible in the environment in which he was operating for Haggard to express an open interest in his characters in the delights of sexual congress with the African Other as woman. There is a tension to be seen in Haggard's work, however, between his notion of the black African as being an object of attraction and his repeated contention that the white person is superior.

Reaching the land of Ignosi, after a while Captain Good becomes the object of attraction to a young African girl named Foulata, who falls in love with his attractive white, untrousered legs, but for Allan the significant emotional link is to his son, whom he hopes to assist with his medical studies. Pocketing the scores of jewels, they proceed into the interior.

Andrew Lang

© THE WEE WEB http://www.theweeweb.co.uk/public/author_profile.php?id=88

Lying on Lang’s couch at No. 1 Marloes Road, South Kensington, Haggard would discuss the aesthetics of their fiction and consider the portrayal of sexual matters. But there is an ambivalence in Haggard, for in “About Fiction” he castigated too much realism in sexual characterisation in a paper where he criticises the Realists in strong terms:

Lewd, and bold, and bare, living for lust and lusting for life and its good things, and naught beyond, the heroines of realism dance, with Bacchanalian revellings, across the astonished stage of literature.[22]

Haggard’s own use of sexual imagery, however, undermines his forthright and somewhat ambivalent attitude to the free use of sexual imagery in children’s fiction in the patriarchal mode in which he was operating. He complains about the limitations imposed upon him and upon a fiction which “should be judged by the test as to whether or no (sic) it is suitable reading for a girl of sixteen.”[23] It is unusual that he should mention reading matter for a girl, for Haggard’s work spoke, for the most part, to a male audience.

Concerned about the scenes of violence in She, Lang wrote to Haggard about the hot-potting scene [hot potting entails being boiled alive in a large earthenware vessel] suggesting that: "the potting might be modified slightly in the selling interest of the book, as many people funk giving children or boys anything of that sort."
Despite these rather prudish comments, it appears that Lang, who did not want to “disestablish” the pot in the story, but to “glisser him”,[25] was aware of the problems connected with publishing children’s literature based on a patriarchal system of authorship.

In the corpus of Haggard’s work, the imperialist character more often than not finds himself in Africa in the midst of a crisis which, with his superior wisdom as a white man, his civilising manner and his vastly superior technical knowledge, he has no difficulty in solving. The Haggard hero in some foreign milieu, encounters a situation such as a revolution where battles are being fought, statesmen are being toppled, old regimes swept aside, and new reforming ones being put in their place. Then he enters the arena of action, defies the odds against him, and turns them in his favour.

Haggard's depiction of the Kukuana women who line up in order to view the Westerners is grudgingly flattering for a “native race”:

These women are, for a native race, exceedingly handsome. They are tall and graceful, and their figures are wonderfully fine. The hair, though short, is rather curly than woolly, the features are frequently aquiline, and their lips are not unpleasantly thick, as is the case in most African races.[26]

The description is given in the spirit of an anthropological text book which notes, in turn, various categories for examination — 'the hair', 'the features' [my emphasis] and 'their lips' — which because of the inclusion of the very indefinite definite article, the, robs it of any real, vital, liveliness. Also their features are given as "European" in some sense, or at least, not Negroid, emphasising the shortness of the African women’s black, curly hair, the women’s fine stately figures, and their aquiline features which are usually aspects of northern countenance. Haggard was struck forcibly by "their exceeding quiet, dignified air".[27] Haggard recounts that these particular Africans were, "as well-bred in their way as the habitués of a fashionable drawing room".[28]

Foulata is described as "a beautiful creature" and "our lovely guide".[29] He frequently compares native women in Zululand and western ladies in the refined atmosphere of Victorian, imperial England. In that respect they were not the same as their "cousins" the Masai who were to be found in, "the district behind Zanzibar." The Masai women, presumably, did not carry the same weight with Haggard as possessing the dignity and the refinement of the Kukuanas, but it underlines the fact that Haggard, through the persona of Allan Quatermain, found sections of the Zulu-speaking population to be worthy of his admiration. In the representation of the colonial Other[30] as woman she becomes a figure of desirable sexuality, attractiveness and beauty. The association of blackness with beauty is a remarkable feature of the discourse; African women are portrayed as polite, noble and respectful of their elders.

Empire and visions of Empire were a stimulus to adventure romance, based on notions of hyper masculinity in an adventure genre that subsumed itself to imperial concerns, (or that, alternatively, fed upon the rise of colonialism in Britain). The adventure novel was from the 1880s an increasingly commercialised form, gaining money for writers and publishers alike. The nineteenth-century adventure romance was read principally by boys, male juveniles, and bachelors, and, indeed, the adventure romance defines its intended readers as being boys rather than girls and men and women. The emphasis was to be on manliness, male bonding and masculine adventure. The novels were born in the ferment of empire and begin to show some of the negative effects of colonialism. The character of Ignosi is resolute that only the three adventurers would be allowed into Kikuanaland and that no other European interlopers could enter. If so, he would turn them away.

Haggard seems to be aware of the dangers of imperialism to Africa, and, after his first-hand experiences, he felt that the provision of guns, alcohol and the spread of western diseases would have a deleterious effects on the inhabitants. In his memoirs, Haggard lamented that the imperialist Boer war “cost us twenty thousand more lives and two hundred and fifty millions of treasure”.[31] He regretted that nothing had been achieved. According to Haggard, “the annexation of the Transvaal, which cost a million to surrender and two or three hundred times that sum to reconquer, was effected at an expense of about 10,000 pounds in all.”[32]

The imperial project was not exactly the “civilising mission” that missionaries had led the English to believe. Expansionism was thought to be a continuing process that has recently been termed by a prominent contemporary commentator as “a Good Thing”,[33] but that was an interpretation put upon Empire by nineteenth century propagandists to extol its advantages to a doubting public at home. Of course, Empire could be viewed as a noble self-sacrificing project, but the claim by missionaries that the Empire had a redemptive or improving mission sheds a hypocritical light on their motives in view of the venality of imperialism.

When Haggard expressed his ideas about the Jameson Raid to Sir Abraham Bailey, at a dinner party, he was quickly told “You are old fashioned”. On speaking about the Jameson Raid, Sir Abraham disagreed with Haggard's view that it was not a success. On the contrary, it was not a failure either, because it led to the Boer war and all that resulted from the war, Sir Abraham argued. When Haggard pointed out the cost to England in lives, as mentioned above, Bailey replied: “What matters? Lives are cheap”.

After finishing Jess on 18 March 1886, Haggard only paused for one month before he commenced work on his most successful novel, She, the story of the African Queen, Ayesha known as She Who Must Be Obeyed. The deep psychological traits of her character may have had their provenance in Rider Haggard’s early romantic attachment with Mary Archer and her subsequent rejection of him. The characterisaton of Ayesha draws on images of a matriarchy derived from within Haggard's anthropological studies, and his knowledge of societies where women were all-powerful, domineering and dictatorial. He had observed in Zululand a matricentred society in which women made choices affecting marriage. In his notebook Haggard had sketched out a plan which imagined She as a "...mental vampire in shape of a woman sucking the life out of a man who worships her."[34]

In early scenes, Leo Vincey and Ludwig Holly reveal the great seal of Amenartus, the wife of Kalikrates, the Pharaoh, (sic) written on a broken piece of potsherd which Haggard transcribes in the actual calligraphy of Egypt, into Latin and other scripts. The artefacts were kept in a chest, which Leo’s father had deposited earlier with the narrator of the story. Upon reaching his majority, Leo claims the contents of the box which had not been opened for twenty years and decides upon an African adventure to rediscover the “rolling Pillar of Life” and, failing that, in any event he claims “I shall get some first class shooting.”[35] Arrived in Africa, after some initial shooting of game,[36] Leo and Holly encounter She Who Must Be Obeyed, or Ayesha, the white African queen of legend. Yet, they are not to be killed since She has given orders that “if white men come, kill them not”.

Ayesha remains the omniscient female leader of a matrilineal tribe. The character of She is not a monstrous figure but a combination of Lover and Avenger. Her final inability to save herself from the immortal flame underlines not only the danger to Englishmen which she represents, but the danger of handing over power to men — by granting immortality to Leo which he can achieve in the all-consuming flame. Her lack of the power of self-preservation shows the danger of the reversal of power from men to women in the Otherland which Haggard has created.

Rider Haggard uses ‘black’ Africa as a springboard for its usability as a place of sexual metaphor. In many of the Haggard romances Africans as associated with exotic and attractive sexual features. Ayesha, although not black, is "an incarnation of lovely tempting womanhood" whose eyes “pierced me through with their beauty”[37] and Holly says “The woman had attractions I could not forget”[38] The treatment of women here is exaggerated: “No merely mortal woman could shine with such a supernatural radiance. As to that, at least, she had been in the right - it was not safe for any man to look upon such beauty.”

She is another tale, like King Solomon's Mines, told by a returned traveller. In this work, the emphasis on male ties is reflected in the devotion of Leo and Holly for each other and the dogged affection given by Job to his employer. The hypercharged relationship between master and servant in the some of the late-Victorian novels is thematically dominated by male bonding, and it crosses class, master, servant divides and gender differences. In turn, it wreaks vengeance on women.

In She, the relationship between Leo and Holly generates a greater sexual compulsion due to the proximity of their companionship. In the scene where Leo and Holly are escaping danger each must help the other to jump across a yawning chasm, a “rocky chamber... for ever sealing the passage that leads to the Place of Life”, clearly a sexual reference. Leo reconfirms their mutual ties:

I heard his sinews cracking above me, and I felt myself lifted up as though I were a child, till I got my left arm around the rock, and my chest was resting on it. The rest was easy; in two or three more seconds I was up, and we lay panting side by side, trembling like leaves, and with the cold perspiration of terror pouring from our skins.[39]

One can sense the depth of the experiences they share together. At another point, running away from the allegedly cannibalistic warriors we learn that:

There was a curious gleam in Leo's eyes, and his handsome face was set like a stone. In his right hand was his heavy hunting knife. He shifted its thong a little up his wrist, then he put his arm round me and embraced me.[40]

This discourse presents unusual intimacy in an era renowned for its prudery and repressions. One wonders what has occasioned the “curious gleam in Leo’s eyes”: could it be a sexual attraction for Holly? Violence is juxtaposed with the vocabulary of male bonding, for during the fight with the allegedly cannibalistic warriors: "they did not know but that we could continue shooting for ever."[41]

Leo, Holly and the Queen set out for the Pillar of Life, which is depicted as a magical flame. The queen, Ayesha, who has already endured one such experience, enters into the crematory fire, and beckons Leo to follow but she does not survive, and is turned into a hideous burnt out old hag with the face of a wizened monkey, while Leo does not enter. With no option but to return home, Leo Vincey and Ludwig Holly travel back to England where they can contemplate further adventures to complete the unfinished story.

The size of the readership of popular/adventure fiction in the 1880s may be gauged by the number of people who purchased the abridgement of Haggard's She (1887) by the firm of W. T. Stead, in the Penny Novelist volumes.[42] Sales amounted to a total of 500,000.[43]

Indeed, Lang confirms sale figures in a message stating:

"You have broken the record — at least so I am told. We have subscribed over 10,000 copies of “Quatermain” in London, which they say is more
than has ever been subscribed of a 6 /— novel before. . . . We printed 20,000 of “Quatermain,” as you know and we are now ordering paper
in readiness for another lot."[44]

In 1897 Lang could also obtain assistance from Haggard in the act of examining his proofs. A letter from Lang dated 2 June, asking if his work could be padded out, stated: "I send you five chapters of my romance." Lang requested Haggard to send the work on to the publishers rather than return it to him, if it was satisfactory, perhaps hoping for the assumed cachet of its provenance from Haggard's address: "Can I get any more flesh on the dry bones?"[45] he asks.

In further evidence of their co-operation, Lang wrote to Haggard informing him that he had incorporated some of his (Haggard's) ideas into the text, and asked for further assistance: "I've worked in your dodge in my fairy tale; it's no more an extravaganza than anything you like...Could you read it when typewritten?"[46]

Lang wrote: “I really must congratulate you. I think it is one of the most astonishing romances I ever read. The more impossible it is, the better you do it, till it seems like a story from the literature of another planet.”[47]

Yet, even so, ten years earlier, Lang had produced a parody of She with W E Pollock in the St James’s Gazette. It announced on 24 February, 1887 that

[T]here is to be published immediately by Messrs Longmans and Co a travesty of Mr Rider Haggard’s She. The writer is the author of Much Darker Days.

The parody was prefaced by a sonnet, and the whole work was published ultimately as a shilling (5p) edition by W Reade including a cover design that, in turn, imitated or reflected the cartouche of Kallikrates, the priest in the novel from whom Leo Vincey was reputed to have been descended. It bears the title He (by the author of She, King Solomon's Wives, Bess, Much Darker Days, Mr Morton’s Subtler and other romances). It is dedicated to “Dear Allan Quatermain”, and dated “Kor, Jan 30th, 1887”.

The sonnet, scanned in Shakespearean form, declares:

Not in the waste beyond the swamps and sand

The fever-haunted forest and lagoon,

Mysterious Kor thy walls forsaken stand,

Thy lonely towers beneath the lonely moon,

Nor there doth Ayesha linger, rune by rune

Spelling strange scriptures of a people banned.

The world is disenchanted; over soon

Shall Europe send her spies through all the land.

Nay, not in Kor, but in whatever spot,

In town, or field, or by the insatiate sea,

Men brood on buried loves, and unforgot,

Or break themselves on some divine decree,

Or would o’erleap the limits of their lot,

There, in the tombs and deathless, dwelleth SHE!

In his notebook Haggard had explained that She was a “mental vampire in the shape of a woman sucking the life out of a man who worships her”.[48]

W T Stead, the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, was featured in the parody of She as ‘old Pell Mell’ possibly because he had led an attack on Haggard’s work in an article entitled “Who is She and Where Dis She Come From?”[49]

Haggard was dispirited by the accusations that had been made against him, and had threatened to give up his writing. Thereupon, Lang encouraged Haggard to prevent him from taking that course, threatening “If you jack up Literature, I shall jack up Reading.”[50]

Lang also sent a satirical poem to Haggard that drew attention to the problem of copying another writer’s work, referring to ‘cribs’ which are an euphemism for derivative versions of original work which the author had plagiarised unscrupulously, and ‘crabs’ meaning both literary efforts and to grumble or complain:

“The Critics, hating men who’re Dabs

At drawing in the dibs

Declare that Haggard cribs his crabs

And so they crab his cribs.”[51]

The production of these parodies was the “amusing emanation of the ‘gay mind’”, as Lancelyn Green puts it, and can be seen in the spoof of She that Lang sent to ‘Hyder Ragged’ entitled “Twosh”:

Not ‘mid the scamps who swagger in the Strand

The siren-haunted concert and saloon,

Mysterious Twosh, thou takest oft a hand

At double-dummy with some wandering “coon”!

Not there doth Noegood with Fullarder spoon,

Wrapped in wild music of some brazen band;

Nay, these proceedings are not opportune,

But such as the Police would scarcely stand.[52]

The poem has the hallmarks of a piece of Late-Victorian effervescence. From “amusing emanations of the ‘gay mind’”, we move on to Egypt, the publication of Cleopatra, and Haggard’s cooperation with Lang on The World’s Desire.

REFERENCES

[1] Interview. Mrs Nada Cheyne, Haggard’s maternal granddaughter. 30 June, 2012. Ditchingham Lodge, Bungay, Norfolk.

[2] Rider Haggard, The Days of My Life (London: Longmans, 1926) Chapter 4.

[3] Haggard, The Days of My Life Chapter 4.

[4] Rider Haggard, Child of Storm (London: Cassell, 1923).

[5] Haggard, Child of Storm, 240 -241.

[6] Haggard, Cetywayo and his White Neighbours, 10.

[7] Haggard, Cetywayo and his White Neighbours, 11.

[8]Rider Haggard , Allan Quatermain, (London; Hodder and Stoughton, 1887) 536-7.

[9] Rider Haggard, Cetywayo and his White Neighbours or Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal. 2nd. ed. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1882)

[10] Haggard, , “A Visit to Chief Secocoeni” In Cetywayo and his White Neighbours, 55.

[i] Rider Haggard ,The Ghost Kings (London: Cassel, 1908) 126.

[11] Haggard, The Days of My Life Chapter 7.

[12] Victoria Manthorpe, Children of the Empire, The Victorian Haggards (London: Gollanz, 1996) 103.

[13] Manthorpe, Children of the Empire).

[14] Interview. Mrs Nada Cheyne. 30 June 2012. Ditchingham Lodge, Bungay, Norfolk.

Dorothy Cheyne, “So What Do We Know About Louie?”, Talk given to the Rider Haggard Society, 20 September, 2008.

[15] Haggard, The Witch's Head 3 Vols (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1885).

[i] Rider Haggard, The Ghost Kings (London: Cassel, 1908) 55.

[i] Alfred Tella, The First Authorised American Edition of Dawn. Rider Haggard Society, The Haggard Journal (ed. Roger Allen).

[16] Haggard, The Days of My Life Chapter 9.

[17] Haggard, The Days of My Life Chapter 10.

[18] Letter from Lang dated only “Sunday” Haggard, The Days of My Life Chapter 10.

[19] Andrew Lang, Saturday Review LX (10 October1885) 485-6.

[20] Haggard, The Days of My Life Chapter 10.

[21] Haggard, The Days of My Life Chapter 11.

[22] Rider Haggard, “About Fiction” Contemporary Review 51 (1887): 383.

[23] Haggard, “About Fiction”, 384.

[24] To Haggard, 24 July 1886. Quoted in Morton Cohen, Rider Haggard: His Life and Works (London: Hutchinson, 1960) 182.

[25] To Haggard, 24 July 1886.

[26] Haggard, King Solomon's Mines, 310 - 11.

[27] Haggard, King Solomon's Mines, 310.

[28] Haggard, King Solomon's Mines, 310 -11.

[29] Haggard, King Solomon's Mines, 394.

[30] 'The Other', a term derived from Lacan, in whose psychoanalytical theory it means that which initiates desire in one by a lack of that element in oneself. See Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection (London: Tavistock, 1977).

[31] Haggard, The Days of My Life Chapter 6.

[32] Haggard, The Days of My Life Chapter 6.

[33] Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London: Allen Lane, 2003).

[34] Jotting books for the year 1886, quoted in Norman Etherington, (Boston: Twayne, 1984) 9.

[35] Rider Haggard, She (London: Collins, 1887) 37.

[36] Madhudaya Sinha, “Triangular Erotics: The Politics of Masculinity, Imperialism and Big-Game hunting in R Rider Haggard’s, She.” Critical Survey Volume 20 Number 3 2008. 29-43.

[37] Haggard, She, 143-44.

[38] Haggard, She, 129.

[39] Rider Haggard, She (New York: Dover Publications, 1951) 230.

[40] Haggard, She, 78.

[41] Haggard, She, 78.

[42] W. T. Stead issued a form of abridged novels in this series, which Punch magazine referred to as the "Penny Steadfuls", a pun on W. T. Stead's involvement in the genre of the "penny dreadful". Frederic Whyte, The Life of W. T. Stead (no date) I. 229.

[43] Richard Altick, The Common Reader (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957) 315.

[44] Haggard, The Days of My Life Chapter 11.

[45] Lang to Haggard, Lockwood Collection, University of Buffalo, 2 June 1897. Lockwood Memorial Library, State University of New York at Buffalo.

[46] Lang to Haggard, Lockwood Collection, 1 January 1897.

[47] Lang to Haggard. Roger Lancelyn Green, Andrew Lang: A Critical Biography with a short Bibliography (Leicester: E. Ward, 1946) 120.

Sol Adeyemi, Review of Haggard,’ Diary of an African Journey’ H-Afr- Lit Cine (Oct 2000) inH-Net Reviews in Humanities and Social Sciences Avail;abe Online www.h-net.msu.edu

[48] Peter Beresford Ellis, Rider Haggard A Voice from the Infinite (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987) 124

[49] Pall Mall Gazette, 11 March 1887. Peter Beresford Ellis, Rider Haggard A Voice from the Infinite (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987) 124.

[50] Lang to Haggard, Lockwood Collection, in Peter Beresford Ellis, Rider Haggard A Voice from the Infinite, 124.

[51] Lang to Haggard, Lockwood Collection, in Peter Beresford Ellis, Rider Haggard A Voice from the Infinite, 124.

[52] Letter. Lang to Haggard with poem entitled Twosh. Lancelyn Green, Andrew Lang (Leicester, Edmund Ward, 1946).

Chapter 3

In 1887, at the age of thirty, Rider Haggard travelled to Egypt, visiting the tombs of the ancient Egyptians, and marveling at the sarcophaguses on display and the artifacts to be viewed in the Boulak museum. As his daughter, Lilias recounts:

“Rode to the tombs of the Kings, and saw those of Seti, Rameses III, and Amenhotep II, all lit with electricity. A wonderful and weird place this Valley of the Kings, with its rugged, naked cliffs, shattered by sun and time.”[1] –

He saw the burial tombs of the ancient kings and queens of Egypt and inspected the mummies of the Pharaohs. He travelled far and wide to visit the excavations that were being made in order to transfer the bodies of the dead to the Museum at Cairo where the naked skeletons were mummified. .Jess was published and She was “fairly launched”,[2] so Haggard was able to take a holiday and absorb sufficient local information to write his Egyptian romance Cleopatra.

With Jess published Haggard was able to justify the expenditure because he was ‘fascinated’ with Egypt.[3] Jess remains a rather spanking tale, showing remarkable similarity in the characterisation of John Niel to the Haggards — the Ostrich farmer taking passage to the Cape, member of the officer class, the allowance from a relative of a thousand pounds, and, of course, the girl, Jess Croft, her beautiful sister, Bessie, and the ‘broken’ engagement, reminding us of Lillith Jackson.[4]

Besides the romantic heroine, another woman appears in the Haggard novel. She remains in the background during the early part of the work, coming to the fore as a force only towards the end, when the hero has lost the heroine and realises, on the rebound, that he may have to accept a less than perfect match. She emerges as a young lady who truly loves him, is a good manager and companion and might not be so unsuitable after all. The hero marries her and the couple live in perpetual contentment thereafter. It was, indeed, conventional in the Victorian novel for a hero to settle down with an ordinary fair-haired girl from England after having previous amatory adventures in places far away from home.

In Haggard's The Witch's Head (1885) the most pointed failure of the hero, Ernest Kershaw, to win his first love, Eva Ceswick, is such a feature of the tale. Ernest's acceptance of a more practical relationship with the woman who manages the keys and accounts at Dun's Ness, called Dorothy Jones, which is a rather uninteresting name after Eva Ceswick, seems to suggest Haggard's own personal life at Ditchingham House.[5] Though Dorothy is a second choice and though Ernest knows he can never love her in the way he once did Eva, he looks forward to a quiet life of contentment as a gentleman-farmer in the aura of domestication of the period.

Through the diligent research of Sydney Higgins, we have been able to establish that Haggard’s first love was a woman named Mary Elizabeth [‘Lillth’] Archer (nee Jackson). In his autobiography, Haggard confessed that he had had a first meeting with 'a very beautiful young lady a few years older than myself'. They had met at a dinner dance at Richmond and, at the end of the dinner party, he escorted Elizabeth to her carriage through a grand floral arch that had been specially built for the ball. And, as they walked through that flowering canopy of roses, the world stood still for Haggard and the flash of thunder that passed across his emotions registered strong, loud and enduringly. She was to remain his love for the rest of his life, despite marriage, travels, and life crises that kept them apart physically but spiritually rarely or never.

Haggard records that the woman died “thirty-five years later”, which was in 1909. She had died after contracting syphilis from her stockbroker husband, Francis Bradley Archer, who had been bankrupt, had fled to Africa and died. Higgins showed that a reference in The Private Diaries of Sir H Rider Haggard refers to a person who had 'looked after poor Mrs Archer'. Subsequently Haggard helped her with money and arranged the education of her sons, illustrating his generous nature. In his work The Days of My Life he recounts how he wanted to return from Africa to follow up “urgent private affairs” but due to the circumstances “the lady married someone else, with results that were far from fortunate…”[i]

In Jess the substitution of one beautiful lady for a less attractive, vibrant and exciting woman is only achieved by the plot assassination of the character, Jess. Although Bessie is physically more beautiful than Jess, Jess remains John’s true love; but as ‘a murderess’[6] she has to be replaced with another to appease late-Victorian culture.

Two nieces, whose father dies, left with no one to look after them and sent out to South Africa to be cared for by an uncle, arrive at the ostrich farm where the romance takes place. The plot construction is reminiscent of a melodrama a la Rochester in Jane Eyre in which the heroine, making her thunderous appearance out of the dust pursued by an angry cock ostrich, and the hero, mounted on horseback, coming to the rescue of the maiden in distress, has an overpowering and psychologically superior advantage over her which can only lead to … her sister.

Anti-Boer sentiment pervades the plot as John Niel is nearly killed by his rival suitor, an Anglo-Boer named Frank Muller, who Haggard describes as a “half-breed”.[7] His character is painted as violent, aggressive and stubborn, “Ah, he is a devil of a man that Frank Muller.”[8] In the story, he would “get” Bessie, even if he had to kill her, and despite her being engaged, at that point, to John. The Boer characters are referenced as ‘the Unicorn’ or ‘the Vilderbeeste’ underlining their animal nature as ‘Other’[9], or even sub-human; typical imperial cant.

The events of the Boer war unfold with references to Heidelburg where the Boers proclaimed the Republic; the Triumvirate of Paul Kruger, Pretorium and Joubert; Bronker Spruit where the 94th regiment suffered losses; the possession of Laing’s Nek by the Boers; and a brief mention of the holding of Potchefstroom, Lydenburg, Rustenburg and Wakkerstroom by the English. [History records that the English were defeated in a number of battles fought around Newcastle; Ingogo, Laing's Nek, and Amajuba.]

The native inhabitants are downgraded as ‘Kafirs’[10] and as ignorant and ‘stupid’. In one scene a young girl is described as “that stupid girl and she pointed to a Kafir intombi… really… one needs the patience of an angel to put up with that idiot’s stupidity.”[11] African and Boer characters are disposable, as the Boer gunmen and Mouti are killed. The imperial presence is maintained, the Union Jack is raised, and an ascendant ‘Rule Britannia’ echoes throughout the Transvaal.[12]

Racism is rabid and what Madhudaya Sinha referring to Haggard’s work has termed ‘beastly’[13] with South African people described as ‘monkeys’. “Where is that black monkey Jantje? Here, Jantje, take my horse, you ugly Devil, and mind you look after him, or I’ll cut the liver out of you.”[14] At one point a ‘baboon’ answers them from amongst the rocks. It is not made clear whether it is a human being or an animal.[15] The inhabitants of the Cape Colony are pejoratively described as ‘Hottentots’ or 'kaffirs' with the character, Jantje, as a dog in his ‘Hottentot’s kennel’, even though he has given his food to a hungry English girl.[16] And to increase the racist demonology, “the worst dispositioned donkey in the world is far, far easier to deal with than a sulky Hottentot.”[17]

The slaughter of animals goes on apace and rivals only Hemingway in its unconscionable delight in decimating African wild life, particularly ivory.[18] The characters hunt eland, bucks, and does, and can easily top some game in time for breakfast.

Laziness is a besetting sin for ”it was practically impossible to arouse the slumbering Kafirs … where they were taking their rest— for a native hates the cold of the dawning”.[19] Haggard’s character’s view of the Zulus is that they are not unintelligent, but they do not work hard, and one of the people was “lounging about in a way characteristic of that intelligent but unindustrious race.”[20]

Andrew Lang, writing from 1, Marloes Road, confesses that he is not able to read Jess because he found it so “gloomy and painful”, for it was “a bit of history put into tangible and human shape.” Indeed, Haggard found Lang’s nature to be as “susceptible as a sensitive plant.”[21] After all, Haggard had dedicated She to Lang and, once the friendship had sprung up, over the years their relationship developed. Lang had presented a lapis lazuli ring[22] to Haggard, cementing their friendship and acknowledging their “literary marriage”. Indeed Haggard and Lang write to each other confirming that they are “most entirely in tune”.

Kipling, now his closest friend, writes to Haggard with massive support for the work enthusing: “What is your secret, old man? [‘old man’ was a term of endearment]. It goes and it grips and it moves with all the freshness of youth…” He is so taken up with the novel that he stays up late reading, to Carrie Kipling’s annoyance: “I got into a row with my wife because I had to finish it with the electrics turned on. It’s ripping good and I’m damned jealous.” But writing in his private diary, Haggard complains that Moon of Israel “was but scantily reviewed.”[i] Nevertheless, published in 1918 when shortages had resulted from the first world war, it went on to great success and was a means of providing an income for Haggard at one and a half old pence money per copy in royalties from John Murray. But by 1921 Haggard was receiving an advance of 900 pounds sterling on receipt of the manuscript and GBP 1,000 on publication, a large sum of money remembering that a house could be purchased at that time for a hundred pounds.

The Egyptian novels include Moon of Israel in which the morphology of Merapi, Moon of Israel is from slave to Queen. The characterisation of the novel flows from the historical and the imaginary. With a large cast of Egyptian personages from the all powerful Pharaoh Seti, who is the half brother of Userti, Ana the Scribe and his grandfather, Pentaur the poet, Pambasa, the Royal son of Ra, Amenmeses the son of the older brother of the Pharaoh, Khaemuas, Rameses who had 300 children, Bakenkhonsu a main character, Ki the magician, to Thoth, the Pharaoh, Meneptah who was thought of as a god among the Egyptians, and his Vizier Nehesi, Roy the high priest, Hora the chamberlain and Meranu the washer of the king’s hands, to Yuy the private scribe and a roll call of many more characters who form a pagentry of exotic ancient Egypt for the modern twentieth century reader molly coddled by the three -volume drawing room novel.[i

As Haggard reveals in his autobiography, Lang had asked his wife, Leonora Blanche Alleyne, to give him the ring of Taia as a token of his affection:

At some date before he died Lang asked his wife to give to me a certain ring in token of remembrance. I have now received and shall always wear this ring. It belonged to Queen Taia, the wife of Amenophis III, or perhaps to Nefertiti, her daughter-in-law, who married the famous Khu-en-aten, the fourth Amenophis …On this ring, which, I think, from the length of time that it had evidently been worn, must have adorned the hand of Taia some 3500 years ago, is engraved a cat adoring Ra or the Sun, or perhaps the “Aten” or Disc. I already possess the sister ring that, from the less amount of wear it shows, was probably worn by the shorter-lived Nefertiti, Khu-en-aten’s adored and, I believe, sole wife. Both of them were obtained by us from the Rev. W. J. Loftie in the year 1887…[23]

When Haggard states that he would “always wear this ring” he continued to use it in his fiction, because the seal of Amenartus, which Haggard features in She, is crafted from the ‘Strand’ ring that is mentioned in the article by Harry How in issue Number 13.[24] It was a ‘golden circle’ and appears, as stated, in the scaraboeus, a miniature painted on ivory which formed the signet ring with the words ‘Suten se Ra’ [Royal son of the sun} that was used to seal the parchment that features in the story.[25] Today, the study of hieroglyphics has improved, yet it was in its infancy in 1890, but its practice has become better so that more is understood of its meaning. Strand magazine recounts that the origins of Haggard’s signet ring[26] were from the excavations in Egypt at Deir – al – Bahari:

“Then Mr Haggard takes from his finger a signet ring he always wears. It was found at Deir – al – Bahari. Its red stone is believed to chronicle the portrait of Rameses the Great, the Pharaoh of the Oppression, with whose coffin it was discovered.”

When Rider Haggard dedicated She to Andrew Lang its emphasis on male bonds could be considered, to follow Wayne Koestenbaum, as “a reflection of the author’s collegial affection for the dedicatee.”[28] The bonding between the two authors continued to grow in strength, despite the fact that their two wives were marginalised. Andrew Lang was accredited as being the editor of the Olive Fairy Book (1907), despite the work having been undertaken largely by Leonora Blanche Alleyne, Mrs. Lang. There were also the Red Fairy Book (1890), the Red Book of Heroes (1909) by Mrs Lang , and the Red Book of Animal Stories (1899) issued just at the turn of the century. Leonora Blanche Alleyne undertook all the work for this series, freeing Lang from the research and writing, leaving himself open thereby to charges of male chauvinism. It is evident that writers such as Lang failed to give attribution to their writing partner, with the result that the work was accredited as if by a sole author.

As the present author pointed out in “The Lingering Clasp of the Hand”,[29]
“At the Savile Club in Piccadilly, Haggard and Lang meditated on a co-authored novel entitled The World's Desire (1890)[30] in the form of a Hellenic, lyrical fable, which explores the fictive world of masculinity but ends in misogyny and makes extensive use of the tropes and themes of the romance and adventure of Scott (The Waverley Novels), Tennyson (Idylls of the King), Mallory's Morte d' Arthur, and The Odyssey. The generic works from which Haggard and Lang took their inspiration were concerned with battles, heroism and chivalry, and offered romantic assertions of a lost past, recreating a more masculine content for erotic literature."

Lang held that the romance would be an energising revival of manful literature at a time when English men were allegedly effete and spineless. He wanted to introduce a boys' literature that would reawaken a cultural dawn and bring back the myths of manliness and male supremacy that had been dormant, albeit since Daniel Defoe and Henry Fielding.

There is in the desire for boys' literature, and in the intense, wishful, make-believe and the masculine aspiration to belong of the boys' organisations like the Boy Scouts and the Boys' Brigade, a rejection of the forces of patriarchy and paternalism. I suggest that it was caused partly by changes in the nature of the mass reading public, and the emergence of new media such as the novel of masculine adventure, which I have pointed to. There existed a feeling that romance offered men a refuge from an England that they thought Queen Victoria's reign had feminised. The overpowering image of matriarchy which Queen Victoria represented, as well as standing for many more complex changes such as in increasing civilisation, enfranchisement, and a growing middle class, may have acted as a repressive figure to the artists of the period; it may be even true to say that they were actually de-sexualised by her reign.

Haggard explains in his autobiography how Lang came to write the “Song of the Bow”. "As readers of the book will know, the bow was ultimately made to sing in words. I suggested to Lang that such words might be arranged to imitate the hiss of arrows and the humming of the string. The result was his “Song of the Bow,” which I think a wonderfully musical poem."[31] The engagement to write with Lang continued to be an inconclusive and staggered affair with Lang at one point losing the ms. for over a year. The journal records:

"After this I believe that I worked away at the story, of which I did a good deal, and sent it to Lang, who promptly lost it so completely and for so long a time that, not having the heart to recommence the book, the idea of writing it was abandoned."[32]

Haggard and Lang's chivalrous work recounts, in a story reminiscent of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, the second journey of Odysseus. Returned to his ancestral home from his wanderings, and finding among the ruins of a destructive attack the remains of his wife, Penelope, the Wanderer hears the invocation of the bow of Eurytus and resolves:

"Let us forth again Let us feed our fill On the flesh of men."[33]

Having thus sworn vengeance, Odysseus acts hastily but expends his energies in looking for another wife. He clothes himself in armour, selects two spears from a stand of lances, throws a quiver of arrows over his shoulder and takes the great bow of Eurytus, which no one else can bend. Then he goes forward to fulfill his mission, but spends the rest of the novel seeking the love of a woman rather than in revenging his slain wife. It is this bow which produces the song of the tale:

Lo, the hour is nigh

And the time to smite

When the foe shall fly

From the arrow's flight!

Let the bronze bite deep!

Let the war birds fly

Upon them that sleep

And are ripe to die!

Shrill and low

Do the gray shafts sing

The song of the bow

The militaristic tone reflects Lang's love of chivalry, masculinity, myth and epic. Hyper-masculinity, then, is a recurrent theme of epic narrative, resplendent with martial imagery. Later in the novel Odysseus is visited by Aphrodite, who promises him Helen of Troy, the "goddess" whom all men desire. Soon afterwards, Odysseus is captured by Sidonian merchants who plan to sell him as a slave, but he defeats them and escapes with the treasure by ship to Egypt where he finds both the Pharaoh's sorceress wife, Meriamun, and the beautiful Helen. He is overwhelmed by the lovely Helen and rejects Meriamun in favour of "The World's Desire". But the Wanderer cannot conquer Helen easily, for she appears to change shape, although that shape is unclear. What does the image of the star represent? Is it male or female? In his pursuit of Helen his directions are clearer:

By the star of Love shalt thou know her. On the breast of Helen, a jewel shines, a great star - stone. From that stone fall red drops like blood and they drip from her vestment.[35]

The star of love is the indicator by which Helen will thus be known, drawing attention to the erotic. But it is from this moment, Wayne Koestenbaum argues in Double Talk,[36] that the falling drops of blood suggest themselves as symbolic of the menstruating female figure. It is the basis of Koestenbaum's study concerning the co-authored work, The World's Desire, that its sexually heightened imagery can be used to demonstrate that the joint authors were engaged in homoerotic writing. Koestenbaum suggests that, by reaching into a box with her hand, Meriamun could be said to be taking part in an act of female onanism. In the poem which prefaces the work, Haggard and Lang, in an obscure reference to a Star and a Snake, appear to be using the imagery of a star to represent female love and the long, snaky member possibly to represent male love:

Not one but he hath chanced to wake

Dreamed of the star and found the snake

Yet, through his dreams, a wandering fire

Still, still she flits, the World's Desire.[37]

The star as the symbol of hope and of the guiding way for mariners and travellers has been a long-standing image since early civilisation, but as Morton Cohen has reminded us: "the psychological symbols present a challenging puzzle to the specialist as well as the casual reader."[38] Their symbolism is nowhere explained in the story itself, but whatever significance Haggard and Lang intended these symbols of the snake to hold, it is difficult to avoid the suggestion of masturbation or insemination engendered by the idea of a long, snaky, object which spits venom.

In Western literature, from its earliest beginnings, masturbation seems to be associated primarily with the realm of the imagination and with its dangers, as Foucault suggests in A History of Sexuality.[39] It is not easy to dismiss here an erotic, nocturnal, onanistic symbolism. The sequence of dreaming, waking up, and finding the snake perhaps suggests a sleeper, aroused by thoughts of a writhing and swelling creature, turning half in dream, to self-indulgence. Perhaps, associating the snake with a penis, Haggard is making a visual reference to the erotic fantasies created by masturbation. Of course, I do not eliminate the correlation between the snake and Eve, whose name, 'Hawa' in both Aramaic and Arabic is close to 'snake' — 'haya',[40] which all relates, possibly, to the position of women at that time. The snake is associated with the earth and with a reptile. The image of a snake, of the genus squmata, a worm-like creature, is one which squirms its way along the ground, in trees, scrub, and in foliage. It has long had resonances of a sexually charged object and, as it sheds its skin, of rebirth and rejuvenation. In Genesis it is the snake which plants the idea of the temptation in the mind of the woman. This leads us to an interpretation of the main imagery, for the confusion over the emblems of the Star and the Snake could be taken to suggest a more intriguing, fundamental, human choice between love and evil; the choice between pure love and the profane, and between lust and purity.

The allegory in the romance The World's Desire swings from star to snake and back again, as it would appear that the authors change from male to female imagery:

'What did I tell thee,' says Aphrodite. 'Was it not thou shouldst know the Golden Helen by the Red Star on her breast, the jewel whence fall the red drops fast, and by the Star alone? And did she not tell thee, also, that thou shouldst know her by the Star? Yet when one came to thee wearing no star but girdled with a snake, my words were all forgotten, thy desires led thee whither thou wouldst not go. Thou wast blinded by desire and couldst not discern the False from the True. Beauty has many shapes, now it is that of Helen, now that of Meriamun, each sees it as he desires it. But the Star is yet the Star and the Snake is yet the Snake and he who, bewildered by his lusts, swears by the Snake when he should have sworn by the Star, shall have the Snake for guerdon."[41]

The images of the snake and the star seem to present here a difficult choice between which woman to love, the holy Helen or the wicked Meriamun. The quandary about femininities throughout the Haggard romance genre is constantly to the fore here. The choice is difficult and fraught with danger because it will influence the outcome of Odysseus's quest. Is he to choose evil or good, beauty or wickedness? The imagery leads to perplexing and confusing issues in the minds of the readers over whether the imagery can be taken to represent Haggard’s and Lang's difficulties in recognising the intensity of their own relationship.

Both Haggard and Lang dislike, it appears, the female sex because their construct of masculinity seems to avoid any exemplification of feminine characteristics. The image of the curling snake arguably represents the male sex because of its vitality and penis-like attributes.[42] When the long curling snake is revealed to possess the head of a human, albeit a female one, that of Meriamun, the reader is faced with the difficulty of deciding what the serpent represents — sin or beauty. Sin is personified in this image as a snake which takes the form of a human. When Meriamun is questioned by the snake about what s/he represents, her answer confirms the idea of an alleged duplicity of the female psyche which Haggard so despised. The psychological allegory of the images appears to be that the snake represents sin, not purity and chastity. The snake proceeds from the evil side of the queen's nature not the beauteous one. Freud, referring to snakes in his interpretation of the Medusa's head dream[43] viewed the decapitated head with its snaky looks as a "genitalized head", an upward displacement of the genital organs so that the mouth stands for the vagina dentata and the snakes for pubic hair. Freud, thereby, seems to confirm long-held suspicions of the snake's identification with sexuality, of the phallus, with encirclement, all-envelopment and, in particular, with the pubic and erogenous areas of a woman's body. Haggard and Lang seem to assert that beneath the beauty of the female lies duplicity and evil, beneath the disguised sex of the serpent there is a fundamental criticism not only of female nature but of human nature. Haggard and Lang collaborate in an equivocal epic genre in a story filled paradoxically with malice, duplicity and lust to represent beauty, and a story of beauty, attraction, desire, and faith in humanity to represent evil:

Tumescence is the subject here, as the snake grows.[45] The idea of growth and tumescence, and of detumescence, is a feature of the heated genre of male adventure. The snake and the woman take part in a lengthy conversation and then imitate a serpent devouring itself. The image is the standard emblem of eternal life, represented by the unending circle of the snake's body and with, importantly, the serpent shedding its own shrivelled skin and revealing a shining one, suggesting new life or immortality. Its venoms suggest an ejaculatory threat, and the power to penetrate areas associated with the female body is mooted. We have here the idea of a ring, a common fetish of Haggard's, possibly suggesting marriage, or, at least, union, as they unite in collaboration. Haggard and Lang seem to suggest to each other, “I could eat you” – a conventional image for sexual desire. It is a common image of union, of total commingling intimacy. Every time the pair of writers use this imagery of a snake devouring itself they are tapping the same metaphor, using powerful images of swallowing and being swallowed. The imagery is ambiguous for the snake was associated in Christian traditions with fertility and femininity while the recoiled serpent indicated infinitude and life. Haggard uses the emblem of the star as a guiding star for his characters, which has connotations of Lucifer, and, most paradoxically — in view of my remarks about the serpent being a male image, because the serpent in the garden was traditionally female — connotations of Eve, for the star is associated with birth and rebirth, tokens of potency, fertility and fecundity, with which Haggard particularly associated himself.

The star does not necessarily therefore represent love, but rather its brightness could be taken, I would argue, to represent South East Africa, where Haggard saw his ambitions and love for life blossom, and the snake does not represent evil but stands for the venom which Haggard felt over the patriarchal proscriptions which surrounded him. Haggard, a committed imperialist,[46] especially in his activities in the Empire, saw his future as only represented by the star of hope.

The recognition of complaisant, heterosexual and courtly love is finally made by Haggard and Lang in the novel despite its toying with passionate togetherness in a gender-free environment in which the two authors write adventures where femininities are complex and distorted and where the masculinities which they sought to portray were bolder and more realistically elaborated than had been previously.

In The World's Desire Helen decrees that, although he is clearly mortal, "Thou shalt live again, Odysseus, as thou hast lived before, and life by life we shall meet and love till the end is come."[47] So the wages of love is life after death, resurrection for heterosexual love. The courtly ideal contained in heterosexual love is prominent in the romance form. In this passionate, heterosexual scene Helen promises Odysseus immortality, but it also indicates the desire of the author, Haggard, for immortality through reincarnation, for it is well documented that he was a firm believer in the rebirth of the self. The joint work over The World’s Desire[48] was to be the beginning of a long series of collaborations by Haggard with Lang, (The World’s Desire) Kipling, (Red Eve) and putatively with Stevenson, although they never worked together ultimately, despite Stevenson having suggested a “deed of contract”.[49]

***

Haggard had continued his journey to visit the royal tombs of Thebes, looking at the tomb of King Seti. [50] In 1905 he again travelled to the area with Howard Carter, the great Egyptologist, who raided the Pharaonic sites in the Valley of the Kings at Luxor, finding on 4th November 1922 the steps leading to Tutankhamen’s grave, eventually breaking through and desecrating the tomb on the 26th.

Harry How, Strand Magazine, No. 13. January, 1892.

Writing at his Charles Dickens writing desk in his diary after work on the estate, in the first floor room at Ditchingham House, with his favourite bulldog, ‘Caesar’ lying at his side, and dressed as usual in his ‘plus fours‘ in the afternoon of 30 November of that year, Haggard records that:

"Mr Howard Carter, whom I know and who, I believe, now works on behalf of Lord Carnarvon, has made a marvelous discovery in the Valley of Kings at Thebes. There below the tomb of Rameses VI, he has found a sealed cache of several chambers full of all the funeral furniture, also the chariots and throne of Pharaoh Tutankhamen, who was one of the shadowy successors to Akhenaten, the heretic Pharaoh. Whether his body is in one of the chambers that remains unopened remains unknown."
[51]

Haggard recognised the contradiction in opening graves for the benefit of archaeology and science when he wondered “how we dare to meddle with these hallowed relics, especially now in my age.”[52] He had written to The Times on the subject of the desecration of mummies in which letter he had spoken about raiding the tombs and he demanded that “Tutankhamen’s body should be buried in the Great Pyramid where it could be left undisturbed.”[53]

From the first visit he was able to obtain sufficient information to be able to commence his imaginative romance, Cleopatra. After his encounter with thousands of bats in the tombs, Haggard wrote of “the great bat that was a spirit which haunted the pyramid where Cleopatra and her lover, Harmachis sought the treasure of the Pharaoh, Men-kau-ra”.[54] The tombs of Thebes (Luxor) had inspired Haggard to write of the forebears of the kings and queens whose mummified bodies he had seen. The story of Cleopatra and Harmachis became the vehicle to deal in the antiquities of Egypt, the story being delivered on papyrus scrolls through the first-person narrator account of Harmachis, the son of Amenemhat, and told using the second person singular as in the bible.

The plot concerns the royal family of ancient Egypt, who are represented by the Priest, Isis. The characters, Mark Anthony of Rome, Caesar’s envoy, and Ptolemy XIV who became the supreme ruler after deposing Cleopatra, his elder sister, are ignored or marginalised leaving out the later, conventional, love story preferred by Hollywood, in favour of Harmachis, the high priest and his dual affairs with Charmion and with queen Cleopatra. Indeed. Andrew Lang, worrying about Cleopatra’s reception wrote “I like Anthony, but I feel that that inexplicable person has not had full justice done to him.[55]

The impact of the introduction of the two lovers remains in the melodramatic tradition, with a thunderous appearance by the protagonist, as he fights to the death with an adversary in front of the interested Cleopatra whose face “seduced Caesar, ruined Egypt, and was doomed to give Octavian the sceptre of the world”. Harmachis is similarly attracted and looks at “the flawless Grecian features, the rounded chin, the full, rich lips, the chiselled nostrils, and the ears fashioned like delicate shells”, and falls under her spell, “and I lost myself as it were in a vision…”.[56]

The deep Freudian interpretation of a dream story, that involves an unsuccessful, misogynous plot to reject Charmion and to hatefully murder Cleopatra, is to be found in the domestic affairs of Haggard whose true love was substituted by a more eligibly endowed partner. The indecision between lovers, between Charmion and Cleopatra, (Lilith and Louisa), is again a reflection from the plot lines of Jess, where the inability to decide between two sisters dominates the tale. During visits to Marloes Road, South Kensington, Andrew Lang collaborated with Haggard with the writing of Cleopatra, supplying the poem The Song of Charmion:

Between two shores of
Death we drift.
Behind are things forgot:
Before the tide is driving swift
To lands beholden not.
Above, the sky is far and cold:
Below, the moaning sea
Sweeps o’er the loves that were of old
But, oh, Love! kiss thou me.[57]

On returning to England, Haggard received a letter from Lang who carefully analyses the work and makes suggestions for foreshortening, editing and presentation, writing “I want it to be A1 in its genre – a dreadfully difficult genre it is.”[58]

Going by the account in The Days of My Life, Haggard records that “Cleopatra” ran serially through the Illustrated London News, (the first edition of which sold 26,000 copies, but slowed down after competition with sixpenny magazines), before its appearance in book form”.[59] The effect of this would have been to bring the story to the attention of more groups of readers and possibly a less sophisticated audience of younger readers and a more general public.

A general expansion of popular journalism occurred between 1850 and 1890 which could be attributed to the introduction of new techniques of mass production, as well as to the abolition of the last "taxes on knowledge", on newspapers, pamphlets and other publications by 1855.[60] Taken together with a great rise in the technology of the times when improvements were being made in all sorts of areas, such as type setting, steam presses, motorised vehicles and tram cars, electric railways, street and house lighting, public libraries, larger schools, colleges and institutions of adult education,[61] the production, distribution and consumption of these novels was assured. Britain was becoming an increasingly modern country usually at the forefront of many of the changes taking place in Europe, particularly in relation to intellectual pursuits, inventions and innovation. The requirements of, on the one hand, a group receiving higher education[62] and on the other, a mass population in tune with these commercial changes, were now creating literary markets.[63]

In the 1880s, the innovations in machinery were such that the demands of a new generation of readers could be satisfied by the improved techniques of printing. Compositors were able, by virtue of the new steam type composing machine to set up about 12,000 types per hour as against an earlier average of two thousand. The machine invented by McKenzie was regulated by a perforated, thick paper in a continuous strip of about 5 cms wide.[64] Improvements in type setting meant that problems in book editing such as spacing, adjusting the length of the line and hyphenating words that must be separated were taken care of. The copy was composed on the steam type composing machine and the pages printed out far more rapidly than was possible before. Corrections could be handled more easily and editing instructions easily undertaken by the machine and this would help to account for the fact that romances were actually aided by technology and new inventions.

The late-Victorians had to come to terms with a rapid increase in technology that made them reconsider their culture and often reexamine their way of life. There was an emphasis on steam, on speed, on factories, changes in technology leading to industrial inventions, as well as improvements in transport and communications. It opened up whole new futures to the populace where increasing challenges were being placed in their path, not only in technology but in revolutionary new philosophies, exciting new geographical, scientific and other discoveries, and challenging and worrying theories on the nature of evolution.

If the late-Victorian period was an age of ‘transition’,[65] to use Shaw’s term, then where the romance novel would progress to is a matter of some concern to the literary critic. Haggard’s novels certainly appealed to the masses who were experiencing this transition from old established forms into new ones. These changes taking place in technology, particularly in editing, printing and distribution, to which we referred, allowed for the rapid production of the romance novels and their early success.

Co-authored work and the writing of alternate chapters were the hallmarks of the balance of forces existing between Haggard and Lang. Both writers had been in correspondence with and visited each other at Redcliffe Square and Marloes Road since the publication of The Witch's Head (1885) when, in a postscript, Lang had recorded: "I am glad to take this opportunity of thanking you for the great pleasure The Witch's Head has given me. I have not read anything so good for a long time".[66] Haggard also advised Lang over the writing of the story, Old Friends (1890),[67] for Lang writes to ask such questions as: "Doesn't my fairy tale need a more vivacious beginning, and what about Alphonso and Enrico?"[68]

Haggard and Lang were tramping along the "leagues of the long Academy", as Haggard described them, while they discussed the merits of the works of art on display:

"Today I have been to the private view of the Royal Academy. The pictures seem much the same as they were five and thirty years ago when I used to look at them with Andrew Lang, trudging through the identical `leagues of the long Academy' as he called them."[69]

In an inspiring, artistic atmosphere, with publication in mind, and the finery of the paintings on display, Haggard and Lang live the heightened life of a literary coterie. A pair of men who were imbued with an artistic talent in a homophobic, patriarchal and intensely energised artistic metropolis indulge in reverie and nostalgia for a past that was more harmonious and sympathetic to the artistry they had previously forged.

Haggard echoed Lang’s sentiments, writing that the latter was “among men my best friend, perhaps, and the one with whom I was most entirely in tune."[70] Here again there exists evidence of the close ties between Haggard and Lang and the remarks, whilst conventional enough, suggest the existence of a more strongly felt bonding than had hitherto been the case amongst writers in the late-Victorian period.

Lang read the manuscript draft of King Solomon's Mines and on its publication wrote to Haggard acknowledging receipt of his reviewer's copy. Lang's review in the Saturday Review[71] was highly complimentary, excessively so, it might be said, for a routine literary review. Lang could obtain assistance from Haggard in the act of examining his proofs. A letter from Lang dated 2 June, asking if his work could be padded out, stated: "I send you five chapters of my romance." Lang requested Haggard to send the work on to the publishers rather than return it to him, if it was satisfactory, perhaps hoping for the assumed cachet of its provenance from Haggard's address:
"Can I get any more flesh on the dry bones?"[72] he asks.

In a further revelation of their co-operation, Lang wrote to Haggard informing him that he had incorporated some of his (Haggard's) ideas into the text, and asked for further assistance: "I've worked in your dodge in my fairy tale; it's no more an extravaganza than anything you like...Could you read it when typewritten?"[73]

With Haggard as leader, the writing continued in stages, Lang accepting Haggard’s role as a 'model object'.

The deference shown by Lang may have stemmed from the paternalist and homophobic atmosphere that they were continually struggling to circumvent. The writers were able to carry on these correspondences, engage in writing sessions, meet and talk and publish their work in collaboration openly at such a time whilst the texts themselves prevaricate over, perform a duplicitous action in, and yet nevertheless tentatively allow the production of a sexualised fiction. Haggard and Lang write to tell each other that they are “most entirely in tune”, and they plan together a story, She,[74] that denigrates a woman as an ageing hag. They mention sex with references to physical matters, yet deal in an innocent childhood fiction as if there were no such thing as sexuality; working together in teams, their bondings are reflected within the fiction.

Lang collaborated with Haggard over the plotting and story details of the fiercely imaginative novel, She, and the novel was dedicated to him by Haggard. In 1886 Lang read the novel while it was in proof form before being turned into printers’ galleys ready for publication in The Graphic. Lang wrote: “I really must congratulate you. I think it is one of the most astonishing romances I ever read. The more impossible it is, the better you do it, till it seems like a story from the literature of another planet.”[75] Lang advised Haggard on his defence of the novel from the attacks in the press. On the construction which went into the writing of She, Lang advised Haggard to, "Screw it a little tighter, and I think it is undeniably an artistic piece of work. ... I'd like if you don't mind to read over the early part with you..."[76] Again, the reference to helping Haggard places Lang as the ‘model object’ in the relationship.

The hidden psychological motives and implications of the co-operation over the production of She by Haggard and Lang have an important bearing on my argument that repressions and suppressions and late-Victorian inhibitions, particularly with reference to sex matters ( antimacassars on chair legs, the skirt length dress code, veils on hats worn compulsorily, separation of the genders in schools and public places, controls on the timing and consumption of spirits, hangings, restrictions on queer life, homophobic attacks, and murders of prostitutes ), lay behind the writing of romance fiction.

She (1887) exists as a misogynistic story depending for its success largely on a Victorian masculine readership attempting to throw off patriarchal pressures. The heroine, Ayesha, possesses what Haggard supposes to be the ideal qualities of the superwoman, permanent youth, perennial prettiness, supernatural strength, and she is white. Ayesha is of the Arab nation, for which Haggard felt a strong affinity, regarding it as pure, and culturally in accord with his values, its people being strong, virile and attractive to Westerners, a model for Haggard's heroes and protagonists.[77] Ayesha appears in historical costume and is very wise. Morton Cohen[78] sees her as Sagacity itself; “Wisdom's Daughter” he calls her, referring to another Haggard title.[79]

Haggard's thinly veiled women figures are usually seen high on a plinth, stressing their unapproachability, or illustrated on another unreachable “pylon's brow” that is adorned with hieroglyphics, giving them a classical unavailability. The works are especially resonant with imagery of the Star of Love. In the sequel to She, entitled Ayesha, the story is also a quest for the perfect woman. But the reader cannot easily follow the route that her/his search unfolds, nor can s/he distinguish the various priestesses, shamans, goddesses such as Meriamun and Ayesha or the immortal women such as the Hathor, Khania or Atene with which Haggard peoples his novels.

Andrew Lang had referred to the exotic concepts in Cleopatra, and in She Ayesha originates from The Yemen. She arrives in Egypt by an indistinct route, probably by sea. Once there, the reasons for her antagonism towards the Egyptian royal, Amenartus, are unclear, but probably connected with racism or with her jealousy of Amenartus for their rivalry over Leo/Kalikrates.[80]

After Boer wars, ambushes, perilous escapes, ostrich farming and Egyptian travel, and collusion with Andrew Lang over The World’s Desire, we now move to Iceland to see the progress of Haggard’s career and his joint work with Rudyard Kipling.

[1] Lillias Haggard: The Cloak that I Left: A Biography of the author Henry Rider Haggard, (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1950).

[2] Haggard, TheDays of My Life, Chapter11.

[3] Haggard, TheDays of My Life, Chapter11.

[4] D S Higgins ‘Haggard’s Secret Love’ London Magazine, February 1987, Volume 26, No. 11, 38-45

[5] Higgins ‘Haggard’s Secret Love’, 38-45.

[6] Haggard, Jess, 155.

[7 ]Haggard, Jess, 78.

[8] Haggard, Jess, 125.

[9] 'The Other', a term derived from Lacan, in whose psychoanalytical theory it means that which initiates desire in one by a lack of that element in oneself. See Jacques Lacan, Écrits:A Selection (London: Tavistock, 1977).

[10] Dictionary definition.Disparaging and Offensive(in South Africa) a black person: originally used of the Xhosa people only. See http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Kaffir Accessed 22. 04 12.

[11] Haggard, Jess, 72.

[12] Gerald Monsman, H. Rider Haggard on the Imperial Frontier (Greensboro: NC. ELT Press 2006.)

[13] Madhudaya Sinha, “Triangular Erotics: The Politics of Masculinity, Imperialism and Big-Game hunting in Rider Haggard’s, She”.Critical Survey Volume 20 Number 3 2008. 29-43.

i] Haggard, The Days of My Life, Chapter 2. Youth.
[14] Haggard, Jess, 24.

[15] Haggard, Jess, 55.

[16] Haggard, Jess, 207.

[17] Haggard, Jess, 219.

[18] See BBC Panorama “Ivory Wars: Out of Africa”http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006t14n/broadcasts/2012/04 Accessed 12 Apr 2012.

[19] Haggard, Jess, 95.

[20] Haggard, Jess, 135.

[] 8 November 1918. D. S. Higgins, The Private Diaries of Sir H. Rider Haggard (New York: Stein and Day, 1980) 149.21]

Haggard, The Days of My Life, Chapter 11.

[22] Lapis lazuli ring quoted in Shirley M Addy, Rider Haggard and Egypt, Appendix 9. “Lapis lazuli ring.” 93.925.19 This is a Lapis lazuli plaque inscribed with hieroglyphics on both sides, and is set in a swivel ring of gold wire. This is described by Blackman (item no. 9). Petrie dated it to the reign of Amenophis II or Tuthmosos III. It is in store at Norwich castle Museum.

[23] Haggard, The Days of My Life, Chapter 10.

[24] Harry How, Strand Magazine, No. 13. January, 1892.

[25] Haggard, She, 21.

[26] See plate photographs. Available. Online. http://www.bmdbooks.com/bch_hrh_brochure.pdf Accessed 19. 06. 12.

[27] Harry How, Strand Magazine, No. 13. January, 1892.

[28] Wayne Koestenbaum, Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration (New York and London: Routledge1989) 1.

[29] Geoffrey Clarke, Unpublished PhD thesis ‘The Lingering Clasp of the Hand’ (Hull University Library, 2004).

[30] Haggard and Lang, The World’s Desire (London: Macmillan, 1890).

[31] Haggard, TheDays of My Life, Chapter15.

[32] Haggard, TheDays of My Life, Chapter11.

[33] Poems evincing resonances of classical epic such as Tennyson's "To Ulysses" (1889) are noteworthy. Christopher Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson (London: Longmans, 1969) 1,396. Tennyson's praise of Ulysses is a similar poem to the one quoted which extols masculinity, and shows admiration for former classical heroes.

[34] Haggard and Lang, The World's Desire, 15.

[35]Haggard and Lang, The World's Desire, 243.

[36] Wayne Koestenbaum's highly fetched Double Talk is an interesting, but unconvincing attempt to relate the doubled nature of Lang and Haggard to actual texts. It concentrates on vocabulary rather than criticism. Wayne Koestenbaum, Double Talk, The Erotics of Male Fiction (London: Routledge, 1989) 159.

[37] Haggard and Lang, The World's Desire, 245.

[38] Cohen, RiderHaggard, 102.

[39] Michel Foucault, Trans. Robert Hurley, A History of Sexuality Vol. 3. The Care of the Self (New York: 1985; London: Lane, 1973; Penguin, 1988) 125.

[40] Pamela Norris, The Story of Eve (London: Picador, 1998).

[41] Haggard and Lang, The World's Desire, 177.

[42] Misogyny, the modus operandi of the romance writers, is examined in some detail later in the chapter. See Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, "Heart of Darkness: The Agon of the Femme Fatale" in Sexchanges. No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989).

[43] S. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (London and New York: 1955). Standard ed. 4-5.

[44] Haggard and Lang, The World's Desire, 140.

[45] According to Peter Schwenger, in James Joyce's Ulysses there is the use of two adjacent styles in the Nausicaa episodes - tumescence and detumescence. Similarly Hemingway in Death in theAfternoon comments on what he terms "erectile writing". See Peter Schwenger, Phallic Critiques: Masculinity and Twentieth Century Literature (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984).

[46] Haggard was, in his early life, an ostrich farmer in Natal. A recent study has dealt with his agricultural surveys, activities for the resettlement of soldiers and farmers, attendance on committees, that is, as a servant of empire. See Tom Pocock, Rider Haggard and the Lost Empire (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1993).

[47] Haggard and Lang, The World's Desire, 90.

[48] Haggard, The World's Desire (London: Longmans and Co., 1890).

[49] Post script to a letter from Skerryvore, Bournemouth from R L Stevenson in Haggard, TheDays of My Life, Chapter11.

[50] Shirley M Addy, Rider Haggard and Egypt (Accrington Kessingland: A L Publications, 1998.) 24.

[51] Rider Haggard, Diary entry, 30 November 1922. D. S. Higgins, (ed.) The Private Diaries of Sir H. Rider Haggard (New Yotk: Stein and Day, 1980)248.

[52] Haggard,TheDays of My Life, Chapter11.

[53] Quoted with permission of Shirley M Addy, Rider Haggard and Egypt, 24.

[54] Haggard, The Days of My Life, 16.

[55] Haggard, TheDays of My Life, Chapter 11.

[56] Rider Haggard, Cleopatra (Leipzig: Bernard Tauchnitz, 1889.) 58.

[57] Haggard, Cleopatra, 96.

[58] Haggard,TheDays of My Life, Chapter 11.

[59] Haggard,TheDays of My Life, Chapter 11.

[60] Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965) 215.

[61] Alan Bott, Our Fathers (London: Heinemann, 1931) 1 - 255.

[62] For “light” and “heavy” reading see Patrick Brantlinger, “What is Sensational about the Sensational Novel”, Journal of Nineteenth Century Fiction. 37. I. (1982-3): 1-28. In terms of different groups in a newly emerging class of readers Rider Haggard refers to what he suggests was a "superior critic" who was not "the average reader". Rider Haggard, ed. C. J. Longman, The Days of My Life (London: Longmans, Green, 1926).

[63] Of course, there is a distinction to be made between high culture and low culture which develops into an argument about “higher” reading and “lower” reading. This is to be seen within the context of the commoditisation of literature and particularly novels for a wider reading public. Another term that is employed is “low modern”, which Maria DiBattista terms a “near oxymoron” to bring to the fore the connections with literary high mindedness for the realism, accessibility and taste for such arenas as journalism and cinema that are often called “low”. See Maria DiBattista and Lucy McDiarmid (eds.), High and Low Moderns: Literature and Culture 1889–1939 (Oxford University Press) 259.

[64] Allan Bott, Our Fathers. 1870 - 1900. Manners and Customs of the Ancient Victorians: A Survey in Pictures and Text of their History, Morals, Wars, Sports, Inventions and Politics . (London: William Heinemann, 1931).

[65] G. Bernard Shaw, “The Transition to Social Democracy”, Lecture to the British Association. 21. The FabianSociety.. Fabian Essays in Socialism. Available. Online. http://archive.org/details/fabianessaysinso00fabirich Accessed 17. 07. 12.

[66] Letter dated 28 March 1885. Andrew Lang, Old Friends: Essays in Epistolary Parody. [Reprinted. From St. James’ Gazette].

Longmans, 1890).

[68] Ms. letter from Lang to Haggard. Norfolk Record Office Ditchingham House collection. No date.

[69] Letter dated 30 April, 1920.

[70] Haggard, The Days of My Life, Vol. II. 72, 80.

[71] Andrew Lang, Saturday Review LX (10 October 1885): 485-6.

[72] Lang to Haggard, Lockwood Collection, University of Buffalo, 2 June 1897. Lockwood Memorial Library, State University of New York at Buffalo.

[73] Lang to Haggard, Lockwood Collection, 1 January 1897.

[74] Haggard, She, 221.

[75] Lang to Haggard. Roger Lancelyn Green, Andrew Lang: A Critical Biography with a short Bibliography (Leicester: E. Ward, 1946) 120.

[76] Lang to Haggard, undated. Cohen, Rider Haggard, 184.

[77] Cohen, Rider Haggard, 85.

[78] Cohen, Rider Haggard, 85.

[79] Rider Haggard, Wisdom's Daughter, The Life and Love Story of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed (London: Hutchinson, 1923).

[80] Online Available at:

http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?q=h+rider+haggard&um=1&hl=en&sa=N&biw=1366&bih=616&tbm=isch&tbnid=O4uX6PoLiQjeYM:&imgrefurl=http://idynamo.wordpress.com/2009/12/04/a-review-part-iv-she-by-h riderhaggard/&docid=8OUCRG2Ikr0MlM&imgurl=http://idynamo.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/ip31.jpg&w=450&h=557&ei=1UyyT9a_J8Wo8QOS1uykCQ&zoom=1 Accessed 14. 05 12

CHAPTER 4

Iceland

There is now a new theme entering Haggard’s life. Because he believed that in one of his earlier incarnations he used to be an Ice Age warrior, he decided in 1888, at the age of 32 to visit Iceland. The result was an imaginative burst that produced the saga, Eric Brighteyes and later, Allan and the Ice Gods , based on the further adventures of Allan Quatermain (Haggard himself).

Travelling on the emigrant ship, The Copeland, he and a friend moved around Iceland on ponies, viewing the salmon rivers, lakes, water falls, mountains, volcanoes and geysers of the country in the vicinity of Reykjavik. After a subsequent perilous shipwreck of The Copeland, which they gallantly survived, they continued their journey home.

Lang took the opportunity to read and comment on the story, Eric Brighteyes, and was, as usual, highly complimentary and encouraging to the writer:

"Eric” begins A1. I don’t know what about the public, but I love a saga but even too well, especially if it be a bloody one delicately narrated, or a very affectionate thing indeed but brutally set down, as Shakespeare says. I have only read Chapter I, but it’s the jockey for me. [1]

Later, he continued to encourage Haggard over the writing during periods of depression and lack of confidence.[2]

As a saga it was to be the beginning of a number of ancient Icelandic stories based on his visit to Iceland. ‘Eric’, Haggard recounts, “was dedicated to the late Empress Frederick” and the author went to great trouble to ensure that the dedication was accepted by Empress Frederick, even pasting her letter of acceptance as dedicatee into the original ms. [3]

The same psychological principles appear in this novel, as in Jess where Haggard, divided between two lovers, reveals his basic ‘anima’ mirrored by his torn love between Gudruda the Fair and Swanhild, Gudruda's half-sister and opponent. It is now becoming very apparent that a deep ravine appears in Haggard’s imagination driven by the forces of his ‘id’ (an area of the unconscious mind, according to Freud) where the effects of his domestic life between Lilith Jackson and Louisa Haggard replicate themselves in his novels. I cannot but interpret this as a fundamental conflict in Haggard’s psyche between which woman in his life to love and with whom to settle down and marry.[4]

The sagas had come into Haggard’s orbit aptly through Lang’s encouragement, and also through this journey to Iceland. Haggard and Lang had researched these myths which had come into Anglo-Saxon literature by “the Sacred Way”, the amber routes of old. A favourite was the story of King Arthur whose mother, Ygerne, was reputed to have been featured in a medieval comparison. Homer and Shakespeare were other sources for the tale recounted in the Haggard romances. Menelaus features in the role of Paris, who won the love of Helen, and The Tempest was used, according to M. Mannoni, as a springboard for the story of Prospero, Caliban and Ariel, whom Mannoni thinks were possibly the original precursors of imperial action and positively the original characters for the naissance of the isolation novel, Robinson Crusoe which recounts, says Mannoni “the long and difficult cure of a misanthropic neurosis”

The Icelandic sagas had survived in Iceland because of its remoteness and cultural integrity. Icelandic men, according to Lang, were fearless and "the best of soldiers, laughing at death and torture”. Certain of these myths had been by Haggard’s friend William Morris who translated the Icelandic sagas in his own verse at the same time. He was part of the Burne-Jones circle of Pre-Raphaelite painters such as Millais, President of the Royal Academy, whose well-known paintings, Bubbles and The Boyhood of Raleigh, were a backdrop to the period. William Morris made a number of visits to Iceland leaving his bored wife in their large country home to the seductive devices of Rossetti. He did not waste his opportunities.[5]

The Icelandic sagas had also been translated by Henry Sweet whose Anglo-Saxon Primer[6] was on the reading lists of former undergraduates such as the present writer in years past. Another possible source of the sagas may have been The Ingoldsby Legends [7] which Haggard refers to in Allan Quatermain. These were a spoof on other legends such as ‘The Jackdaw of Reims’, monologues which are unknown today, by the Rev. R H Barham, published in London in 1840. Haggard had been chided by R L Stevenson for an inaccurate reference to The Ingoldsby Legends in a letter in The Days of My Life. Stevenson scolds the reverend who was the author and demands to know:

"But how, in the name of literature, could you mistake some lines from Scott's 'Marmion' - ay, and, some of the best - for the slack-sided, clerical-cob effusions of the Rev. Ingoldsby?" [8]

Replying, Haggard pointed out that it was a ‘literary joke ‘to have Allan Quatermain claim only to have known two works of literature – The Old Testament and The Ingoldsby Legends. However, it was in character for Quatermain was neither erudite nor literate, although he did claim that “I sometimes like to read a novel”[9]

***

The other star in the firmamant, Rudyard Kipling, became acquainted with Haggard in London, a circle of friends having introduced Kipling to membership of the Savile Club where he and Haggard met. The cultural significance of this particular club lies in its membership of an artistic coterie of people including Haggard, Lang and James. "I took to him at once", Kipling remembered, "he being the stamp adored by children and trusted by men at sight." The Savile Club was in a state of heightened expectation when Kipling joined its ranks. John Addington Symonds recalled the rivalry and jealousy occasioned in Haggard by the arrival on the literary/social scene of Kipling, noticing that,

the Savile was all on the qui vive about him, when I lunched there with Gosse. Rider Haggard appeared really aggrieved at a man with a double-barrelled name, odder than his own, coming up. Literally.

There may well have been a class significance in the surnames of writers, such as Lockwood Kipling, in the period. The rivalries and pettinesses of literary cliques over such matters are part of the “objections” occasioned by jealous writers.

Leslie Ward ('Spy') Vanity Fair cartoon 1887 Rider Haggard. Norwich Museum.

Haggard reminisces about his life in "On Going Back" in Longman's Magazine, and he realises that his literary career led in later life to emotions of disappointment and dejection about the experiences which he had accumulated. He refers to the fact that he felt that when young his experiences had been sharper and more alive than when he was old, concluding:

How keenly one felt in those days, much more keenly than now! Between then and now stretches a long period of twenty years - years of struggling, active life, of strenuous endeavour, crowned now with failure and now with triumph, of rough adventure, of voyaging by sea and land. Twenty years of experience also of that inner life of a kind that keeps pace with and even outruns the physical life.[1]

Haggard, according to a letter written by Henry James to Stevenson, was an "immortal" who had been "killed" by Kipling's arrival on the literary scene:

We'll tell you all about Rudyard Kipling - your nascent rival. He has killed one immortal Rider Haggard, the star of the hour, aged 24 and author of remarkable anglo-indian (sic) and extraordinarily observed barrack life -Tommy Atkins tales.

Kipling confessed that he took the idea for his Jungle Book from an inspiration which came to him on reading Haggard's Nada the Lily (1892):

It chanced that I had written a tale about Indian Forestry work which included a boy who had been brought up by wolves. In the stillness, and suspense, of the winter of '92 some memory of the Masonic Lions of my childhood's magazine, and a phrase in Haggard’s Nada the Lily combined with the echo of this tale. After blocking out the main idea in my head, the pen took charge, and I watched it begin to write stories about Mowgli and animals, which later grew into the Jungle Books.

24 Redcliffe Square SW10

Jumping on to a horse drawn tram at 24 Redcliffe Square SW10, Haggard proceeded to Villiers Street WC2 off the Strand at Charing Cross to visit Rudyard Kipling, home from newspaper editing in India, and his brother-in-law Walcott Balestier, who were living in a lodging house at No. 43 opposite the Variety theatre. Later, when Kipling was a very successful author, Haggard co-authored with him on the writing of Allan and the Ice Gods (1927) and documentary evidence of this work exists in the note which Haggard signed:

Synopsis of story drawn up by Rudyard K & myself at Batemans (sic) [Feb. 1922]

H. Rider Haggard. [10]

The plot contains the story line of Wi the Hunter and his adventures in an imaginary Ice Land. In a handwritten note Haggard recounts that:

I have just returned from spending a most interesting day with the Kiplings at Bateman's. As usual Kipling and I talked till we were tired about everything in heaven above and the earth beneath. Incidentally too, we hammered out the skeleton plot for a romance I propose to write under some such title as Allan and the Ice Gods. [11]

Bateman's is a grand, Jacobean house built of sandstone taken from a local site and the tiles are all made from Wealden clay. The grand mansion is set in a hollow in thirty-three acres of attractive and spacious grounds skirted by the River Dudwell with its watermill constructed in 1750, which has been restored and is open for public visits.

Ditchingham House in Bungay, Norfolk, is a magnificent eighteenth – century mansion in spacious grounds and bordered by its farms, cottages and outhouses. Ditchingham Lodge is one of the three properties on the land that Haggard inherited from Louisa Margitson and is also an seventeenth – century mansion full of Haggard’s books, drawings and portraits. It sits in its own grounds, where grouse, rabbits, squirrels and kestrel eagles are to be seen. The main house has orchards, fields, grape houses for the production of wine, and in Haggard’s day had an orchid glass house. His gardener referred to the orchids always as ‘awkwards,’ perhaps because of the difficulty of rearing them.[12]

Yet they are such a beautiful flower, when carefully tended, they do not deserve such epithets. Watered by the river Waveney, a more pleasant house in the whole of England cannot be imagined, and the present writer was given the privilege of a visit to the estate by the Cheyne family, who retain the property.

Kipling reciprocated with a visit to another of Haggard’s houses at Kessingland Grange, that he had taken for the Summer, near Lowestoft in Suffolk.[13] The Grange was a converted coastguard station, looking out over the sea, on the cliffs. A remote place where two writers could work alone, it possessed a clear atmosphere of the sea; and, evocative of the navy also, a bust of Admiral Lord Nelson, dated 1812, was on display in one of the anterooms. This figurine had been carved out of a beam of the flagship ‘Victory’. In a letter, Kipling described the house: “for all practical purposes the side of a ship. The garden runs about fifteen yards to the cliff – then the sea and all the drama of the skirts of war laid out before us.”[14]

The four manuscript sheets of the synopsis of Allan and the Ice Gods, listing the characters‘ names in regular block capitals and the note of their characteristics in longhand, also reveal Kipling's neat, compact handwriting reflecting his careful nature. Haggard’s hand is copperplate, methodical and regular indicating a composed and astute mind. The fact that there is more input in Kipling's hand than in Haggard's points to his (Kipling's) detailed involvement in the saga. Editing their work together, alone,[15] and including names for their creations in the world of the Icelandic gods, the two writers outlined ideas for a novel covering the whole philosophy of the two worlds of earth and heaven. It deals in characters whose names — "Whaka, the Bird-of -Ill-Omen: one who howls", and "Pitokite, a churl" — suggest an unusual undertaking for an author who wishes to write heavenly romances but turns to the lower world of witches and "churls”.[16]

Haggard and Kipling return to a form in Allan and the Ice Gods in which they can play out their fantasies. The use of hallucinatory drugs by the characters Allan Quatermain and Captain Good, is a disturbing element in their final text. Allan cannot resist the silver box filled with Taduki leaves. It sends him on what the advanced publicity for the novel in 1927 described as "A Strange and Thrilling Adventure".

The effects of the Taduki leaves can cause the user to transcend time, so that when Allan indulges he falls into a deep sleep and becomes Wi, the Hunter. Haggard ensures that, as Wi, he conquers the giant, Henga, and becomes the chief of the whole tribe in the land of the Ice gods; and Kipling, in the mantle of Moananga, captures the affections of Tana with whom he forms a relationship. They engage in a dream sequence where their fantasies can be played out at leisure. Allan wakes from the dream with a clear mind, having taking part in a vision of extraordinary range travelling to the ancient lands of the Iceland to meet Pag, Laleela, Aaka, Wini-Wini and many others from the mysterious ice world on a "vast central glacier, the house of the gods". It becomes a world of witches and ‘she-gods’ and they appear in a text in which Haggard and Kipling imagine a drug-induced adventure, with all the implications of heightened awareness that may be ascribed to the effects of drug. When Quatermain and Good recover after inhaling the opiate, they compare notes and find, to their amazement, that they have both taken part in the same adventure and can fill in gaps and explain its details to each other. In the adventure Allan also meets Moananga who is Captain Good's alter ego and interacts with him as Wi, the Hunter, to the extent that Good believes that he (Wi) was his brother. Coming round from the trance, Good exclaims:

"Dash it all! Wi, you haven't forgotten your own brother, have you, who stuck to you through thick and thin -well, like a brother in a book".[17]

Haggard and Kipling create a scenario about which a late-Victorian audience would be apprehensive, since it was so drug-induced and far-removed from its conventional realities. The use of laudanum was a prevalent part of late-Victorian social culture creating great distress. It was exemplified by the “Confessions of a Young Lady Laudanum-Drinker” of 1889[18]. Laudanum or opium-imbibing continued to be a source of inspiration to some artists, but its use was prohibited by law. Indeed, the use of opium was widespread in Victorian times and the drug may have been more freely available than the basic necessities of life, as Mathew Sweet has suggested.[19]

As they recover from the effects of the drug, Allan cannot understand why Moananga (Good) did not want to know from him about the girl, Tana, rather than enquire about the whereabouts of Laleela. Good explains that one tall woman, possibly Laleela, had sacrificed herself to the others in the ill-fated canoe, as it sped away in a fierce current, by jumping out. But it may just as easily have been the other tall woman, Aaka, so the mystery remained as to both their fates in the dying moments of the drama to escape the break-up of the ice-floe. It is strange that Haggard should acknowledge, in the finished text that the envelope in which the letter he receives from Lady Ragnall should have been sealed with the ancient Egyptian ring that her husband, Lord Ragnall, had given her:

...the envelope, by the way, was sealed with the ancient Egyptian ring that my late friend Lord Ragnall had found and given to his wife just before his terrible fate overtook him.

This is too close to the actual giving of a lapis lazuli ring by Lang to Haggard to be mere coincidence. I argue that it is a permanent and deeply rooted feature of Haggard's relationship with the other writer, Lang, and has not been mentioned by previous commentators. Haggard's diary shows an ability on his and Kipling's part to enjoy each other's presence without irritability or embarrassment. Haggard would sit and Kipling would write for days on end:

On Sunday and Monday I sat in his study while he worked and after a while he got up and remarked to me that my presence did not bother him a bit; he supposed because we were two of a trade.

A lengthy conversation with Kipling was seemingly all that was required to prove the depth of their understanding, and their relationship could go ahead founded on discussions and musings in the study. Revealingly, Haggard owned to his diary.

"...A long talk with Kipling is now one of the greatest pleasures I have left in life, but I don't think he talks like that with anyone else; indeed he said as much to me."

Visiting him at 24 Redcliffe Square SW10 after a minor accident, Haggard recalls how Kipling and he were in real accord and friendship. Mrs Nada Cheyne, Haggard’s granddaughter, stated in my interview with her that she had visited Bateman’s also, and confirmed that it was part of the close friendship with Kipling.[20]

“Whilst he was driving towards my house his hansom collided with a van in Piccadilly, and there was a smash in which he had a narrow escape. From that time forward we have always liked each other, perhaps because on many, though not on all, matters we find no point of difference.”

Their synergy is indicated by Haggard’s remarks about his work with Kipling. Haggard appears to be so appreciative of him that he had dedicated The Way of the Spirit (1906)[21] to Kipling with a note to the effect that they had both planned the outline of the novel together.

“My dear Kipling, - Both of us believe that there are higher aims in life than the weaving of stories well or ill, and according to our separate occasions strive to fulfil this faith. Still, when we talked together of the plan of this tale, and when you read the written book your judgement thereof was such as all of us hope for from an honest and instructed friend - generally in vain. So, as you found interest in it, I offer it to you, in token of much I cannot write. But you will understand.”

One wonders what the inability to write was occasioned by: how sure was the knowledge that Kipling would ‘understand’; and what the content of the book that he could not write would have been.

As a matter of fact, signalling possible discords in the relationship, Kipling's collaboration with Haggard over the production of Allan and the Ice Gods and Red Eve is not acknowledged on the spines of the books or on the dedication pages. Whilst it is the characters, particularly Murgh, who were produced by Kipling's fertile imagination, it is the story line of Wi the Hunter and his adventures in an imaginary Ice Land which is credited to Haggard, his name being given as the author.

In order to assess the imapct of these stories on the public, it might be well to look at sales figures of Kipling's poems. A comparison of the print runs of Kipling's Barrack Room Ballads between the sales-figures quoted in the third edition of Twenty Poems in 1922, and the production figures given in the subsequent fifth edition of the collection of poems of 1930, shows that they had increased from almost 200,000 to over 250,000 copies between 1922 and 1930. A quarter of a million sales by the popular author of empire - no mean achievement for poetry compared with Haggard's narrative of She, running to eighty three million - the eighth most popular book titlle published in the modern world.

http://www.squidoo.com/the-best-book-ever-review#module161434727

Turning to another aspect of the Iceland theme: psychic dreams; in his romance When the World Shook, a dog dies in mysterious circumstances. He dreamt in the middle of the night that his black retriever dog, Bob, had been involved in an accident and had suffered great pain , lying on his side in some bushes and near some water. He discovered the next morning that the dog had been found under a bridge near the river Waveney, having been hit on the branch railway line by the last train from Ditchingham to Bungay. Haggard wonders whether creatures have telepathic powers, or whether all life is somehow linked together in the spiritual world.

There are documented cases of telepathy, of course, yet there is the possibility that simple coincidence plays a part in our lives, or perhaps there is a wave length or chord on which we communicate with others as Haggard suggests in The Treasure of the Lake ("You see, he is a magician, and magicians talk with their minds. It is their way of sending telegrams"). In a more modern take, “You fly down the street on a chance that you'll meet. And you meet, not really by chance”, in the words of the song lyric.[22]

Dreams played a part in Haggard’s mind, and he refers to the constant dreams that played around in his mind when he was apt to take a rest or sleep: not being able to control the imaginative wanderings that his mind took:

Many people have their favourite dreams, and within the last year or so I have developed a very fair specimen of this class of illusion which comes to me in an oft-repeated vision of the mind.[23]

There was also a most unusual example of coincidence in his writing in the case of Fair Margaret. In the Spectator of October 19, 1907,[24] in a letter, he describes how imagination could be substantiated by the actual facts, where he had written about a character named Peter Brome who was killed at the battle of Bosworth Field. Subsequently Colonel Peter Brome Giles, the High Sheriff of Buckinghamshire, wrote to Haggard inquiring how he had obtained the details of Peter Brome.

Haggard had made up the character from his own imagination, and had invented the name as being one that he had never heard of. In the Colonel’s letter he explains the true history of the name of Peter Brome:

Your hero’s father was the son of Sir Thomas Brome, the Secretary of Henry VI. He was, as you relate, killed at Bosworth, but I never heard they had property in Essex, but had in Suffolk and Norfolk. . . One branch of the family took the bird” [that is, as a coat-of-arms] “as you describe. . . . The father of your hero was the first Peter, and was born 1437, and was 50 when killed. . . . Since the Peter of 1437 there have always been Peter Bromes: my father was, I am, and so is my boy. We assumed Giles in 1761.25

As the text of Fair Margaret reveals:

“…How are you named?

“Peter Brome, Sire.”

“Ah!. There is a certain Peter Brome who fell at the battle of Bosworth Field – not fighting me,” and smiled.

“Did you know him, perchance?

“He was my father, Sire, and I saw him slain – aye, and slew the slayer.”[25]

Such amazing coincidence or telepathic knowledge continues in Haggard’s works and seem to have little explanation, apart from that they were purely coincidental. Additionally, Haggard believed that he had been an Ice Age warrior and had experienced other reincarnations, and his psychological insight and telepathic powers, that he often discussed with Lang, were only a hidden part of his abilities.

Presentiment and premonitions played a part in Haggard’s writing and speechmaking. On a visit to Canada for the Dominions Royal Commission in 1912, before the First World War, he made a speech anticipating the onset of the war that became quite prescient when hostilities broke out on 28 July 1914 that continued until 11 November1918. However, with the rise of German militarism and its expansionist foreign policy, it was not perhaps difficult to anticipate international problems occurring.

Haggard’s stance on reincarnation is heterodox, in the sense that, apart from the Second Coming, the orthodox thinkers of his era did not hold to the rebirth of the soul. Haggard, however, had a strong belief that he had somehow lived a previous existence, just as some children tell with clarity of their previous lives, in the roles of Egyptian royal, Ice Age warrior, Viking chief and Restoration figure.

His interest in the paranormal was stimulated by Andrew Lang, who belonged to the Society for Psychical Research and which still today retains its premises at 49 Marloes Road, South Kensington, near Lang’s previous residence at No. 1. The society held beliefs in the paranormal existence. Founded by Cambridge Professor, Henry Sedgwick, its prominent members were Arthur Balfour, Andrew Lang and William Barrett, the physicist, and his colleague Lord Rayleigh, another physicist.

Professor William James, Henry James’s brother, established in the United States a similar society that interested itself in psychic powers, and William James delivered a speech to the London society that Lang and others attended.[26] It discussed the paranormal, hypnotism, clairvoyance, trances, séances , mind reading, coincidental happenings, transference of thought, and so forth.

To pick up the point, again, Fair Margaret is a Tudor piece featuring cutlasses, jewels and gowns, and remains a period story with a character list involving the Spanish Ambassador, de Ayala, Betty and her cousin the beautiful, fair Margaret Castell, and the son of Peter Brome who had fought, as mentioned, on the side of the Cavaliers in the Civil War. There is fighting in Essex between the Englishmen and the Spaniards, at the time of Ferdinand and Isabella. We hear of fights at sea, missing jewels at the hands of the chaplain or priest from the ship that he thought was sunken but was not, and the dashing, turbulent events of the reign of Henry VII. (1485 – 1509).

Margaret is in love with Peter, but the fortunes of war drive them apart:

Peter Brome, for he was so named, looked a little anxiously about him at the crowd, then turning, addressed Margaret in his strong, clear voice. “There are rough folk around,” He said. “ Your father might be angered, Cousin.”[27]

Peter is concerned that de Ayala will become a rival to him for the love of Margaret, but she remains faithful to Peter Brome: “But now she laughed at him, saying that all her heart was his.”[28]

A Spanish nobleman cheats her cousin Betty into kidnapping Margaret, and they take her by sea to Spain. Peter follows them to try and save her, but is frustrated, fights a duel with the Spanish nobleman, Morrello, and winning, escapes to England with his wife, the fair Margaret.

Haggard creates a rumbustious, swashbuckling adventure for an early twentieth-century audience, and whilst it is a conventional romance, it nevertheless achieved critical acclaim by reviewers used to the Haggard modus operandi.

Rebirth of the soul and reincarnation is also a preoccupation in Stella Fregelius where the character Morris persuaded into an engagement of convenience with his cousin meets a dazzlingly refreshing and mysterious lady, Stella, who becomes his instant passion and joy. Echoes of the Haggard life story abound in this romance, for Morris is of Danish provenance. Like Haggard, he is of the colonel rank similar to many of his famlly, and he experiences a shipwreck as Haggard did in The Copeland in Iceland. There is an inheritance of land and fortune from the wife's family, as is the case with Louie Margitson. Louie was invited on 6 November 1879 by his sister Mary Haggard to stay at Bradenham Hall with a chaperone, a married aunt, with a view to marriage with Rider.

The setting of the tale is a seaside house, reminding us of the Kessingland Grange property overlooking the Norfolk coast, where happy memories abounded. There was a tennis court, a river for swimming, a farm to enjoy and the sea to frolick in. Cycling was the vogue, and many the excusions taken to Norwich, Bungay and Ditchingham.

An eccentric inventor who dreams up the first mobile phone and electric bike has premonitions about the death of Stella and cannot remove her image and spiritiual presence from his mind. His love is very real for:

Now I understand that love; the real love between a man and a woman, if it be real, embraces all the other sorts of love. More--whether the key be physical or spiritual, it unlocks a window in our hearts through which we see a different world from the world that we have known.

Ultimately Morris communes with Stella who has perished in the storm and it confirms Hagagrd's heterodoxical ideas of reincarnation where the soul returns in another dimension, as she returns to physical form: "and there, over against her, the mortal woman, and he--wavering--he lost between the two." Believing that he is attached to the other woman for ever, it has repurcussions on his marriage, as his affair with Lilith must have had with Louie. Haggard believed that Lilith, who had predeceased him, was waiting for him and that he would rejoin her only on his death.

Again, on the subject of coincidences that was alluded to earlier, in the text of his novel, When the World Shook, Haggard has an extensive passage on the economies that Humphrey Arbuthnot was able to make on his property portfolio:

“Behold me once more a man without an occupation, but now the possessor of about £900,000. It was [v]a very considerable fortune, if not a large one in England; nothing like the millions of which I had dreamed, but still enough. To make the most of it and to be sure that it remained, I invested it very well, mostly in large mortgages at four per cent, which, if the security is good, do not seriously depreciate in capital value. Never again did I touch a single speculative stock, who desired to think no more about money. It was at this time that I bought the Fulcombe property. It cost me about £120,000 of my capital, or with alterations, repairs, etc., say £150,000, on which sum it may pay a net two and a half per cent., not more. This £3,700 odd I have always devoted to the upkeep of the place, which is therefore in first-rate order. The rest I live on, or save.”

Coincidently, this discourse may be compared with a passage in Haggard’s autobiography in which he explains the use to which the outright cash sale of Cleopatra was put. It is not fanciful to argue that Humphrey Arbuthnot speaks for Rider Haggard and how Haggard dreams of a much better financial outcome than that of the proceeds from the Egyptian novel:

“Some of this money I lost, for really I had not time to look after it, and the investments suggested by kind friends connected with the City were apt to prove disappointing. Some of it I spent in paying off back debts and mortgages on our property, and in doing up this house which it sadly needed, as well as countless farm buildings, and a proportion was absorbed by our personal expenditure. For instance we moved into a larger house in Redcliffe Square and there entertained a little, though not to any great extent.”

Returning from horseback riding in Iceland, Haggard the great sportsman, hunter, shooter, rider (uh huh), coach and horses driver, fisherman and cyclist continued his sporting life with rounds of the ancient game of golf at Bungay and Waveney Valley golf club. The membership fee was held at 5 shillings [25p] for an eighteen hole course. Louie continued membership of the club from 1889. With a handicap of as much as five, she won the Handicap Prize as well as the ladies’ medal presented by the club. Her interest was so strong she became the Hon. Secretary and a member of the management committee in 1892. Captain of the ladies’ team by 1902, she became the chair of the ladies’ section [ladies had sections in those days] in 1905. Continuing to play regularly, Lady Haggard presented the silver rose bowl to a lady winner in 1914, and continued her membership as a widow right up to 1934 on her retirement from the game.

Rider Haggard became a member of the management committee of the golf club in 1890, a member of the green committee from 1891, and was elected as a vice president of BWV golf club in 1903 at the age of forty-seven. His handicap and score sheet are not extant in the club’s minutes, but it is recorded that Rider Haggard played golf there with Andrew Lang who described the playing on the Outney Common links in a newspaper article as “nothing but bush whacking from beginning to end.”[1] Haggard complained to the committee that after one round of golf we “have just been obliged to give up playing owing to the loss of all the balls, one after another, and that with two boys ahead.”[2] He “earnestly requested”[3] that more of the roughage on the course, including gorse bushes, should be cut back so that play would be easier on the greens. Haggard was elected president of the club in 1915 at the age of 59.

The Haggards often went to the Bungay races, when the golf links on Outney common were closed, to watch the hurdles and flat racing from the eighteenth fairway. With large crowds of racegoers, the Haggards would have enjoyed a warm Spring day out at the 1904 to 1909 Spring races in Bungay, where thousands of spectators gathered in the covered, Union flag blazoned stands and at the very few wooden rails that were there to watch the quite overweight jockeys perform their laid back antics on horseback while the punters groaned or cheered, according to the horses that they had backed. The races were discontinued in 1914 at the outset of the first world war, when the military took over the use of the links. The racecourse and stands became part of Bungay Rangers and Ditchingham Rovers football clubs in 1925.

After shipwrecks, tram rides in London to Villiers Street, Charing Cross, literary engagements with Lang and visits to Bateman's in Kent, 24 Redcliffe Square SW10, and Ditchingham House in Bungay, we now move to Mexico.

References

[1] Haggard, The Days of My Life Chapter 10.

[2] Haggard, The Days of My Life Chapter 10.

[3] Haggard, The Days of My Life Chapter 10.

[4] D S Higgins ‘Haggard’s Secret Love’ London Magazine, February 1987, Volume 26, No. 11, 38-45

[5] I am indebted to Morris Russell for this insight.

[6] Henry Sweet, Anglo-Saxon Primer (Oxford: OUP, 1980).

[7] Rev. Richard Harris Barham, The Ingoldsby Legends (London: R.E. King and Co. 1840).

[8] Haggard, The Days of My Life Chapter 10.

[9] Allan Quatermain in Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines, 240.

[10] Morton Cohen, Rider Haggard: His Life and Works (London: Hutchinson, 1968) 206.

Rider Haggard, "On Going Back", Longman's Magazine, XL November, 1887 - April, 1888. 65-66.[11] Morton Cohen, Rider Haggard, 206.

[12] Interview. Mrs Nada Cheyne, Haggard’s maternal granddaughter – in - law. 30 June, 2012. Ditchingham Lodge, Bungay, Norfolk.

[13] Charles Carrington, Rudyard Kipling (London: Pelican Books, 1955) 492.

[14] Carrington, Rudyard Kipling 332.

[15] On the concept of being together, alone, see Richmal Crompton, “The Revenge”. More William (London: Macmillan Children's, 1983). ““All right!” agreed Thomas. “You play by you’self an’ me play by myself, an’ we’ll be together — playin’ by ourselves.””

[16] Haggard, Allan and the Ice Gods, 6.

[17] Haggard, Allan and the Ice Gods, 6.

See Frontispiece of Twenty Poems 3rd. ed. (London: Methuen, July, 1922) i and Frontispiece of Twenty Poems 5th. ed. (London: Methuen, 1930) i.[18]

“Confessions of a Young Lady Laudanum-Drinker," Journal of Mental Science, 34 (1899), 137-39.

[19] Matthew Sweet. Inventing the Victorians (London: Faber and Faber, 2001).

[20] Interview. Mrs Nada Cheyne, Haggard’s maternal granddaughter. 30 June, 2012. Ditchingham Lodge, Bungay, Norfolk.

[21] Dedication in The Way of the Spirit (London: Hutchinson, 1906) Letter of dedication dated 14 August 1905.

[22] Perry Como, “Hello Young Lovers”. (New York: CBS Interactive Music Group, 2012).

[23] Haggard, The Days of My Life, Chapter 16.

[24] Quoted in Haggard, The Days of My Life, Chapter 16.

[25] Rider Haggard, Fair Margaret (London: Hutchinson 1907). (Rare Book Publishers, Kessinger Publishing Co. June 2004) 11.

[26] William James, Essay: ‘What Psychical Research Has Accomplished’. Available. Online. http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/23336/ Accessed 06. 08. 2012.

[27] Haggard, Fair Margaret, 6.

[28] Haggard, Fair Margaret , 56.

Rider Haggard Stella Fregelius: A Tale of Three Destinies (London: Walking Lion Press, 2008 )

Dorothy Cheyne, "So What Do We Know about Louie? Talk to the Rider Haggard Society 20. 09. 08.

1] Andrew Lang, newspaper article, 1899, quoted in A Centenary of Golf on Outney Common 1889 to 1989, ed. Brian Edwards and Jack Bull. Richard Clay Printers Bungay, 9.

[2] Quoted in A Centenary of Golf on Outney Common 1889 to 1989, 9.

[3] A Centenary of Golf on Outney Common 1889 to 1989, 9.

Chapter 5

Mexico

Image of Mexico-Tenochtitlan from the Codex Mendoza

The aristocratic class in England would leave their children in the care of nannies or friends and travel on holiday and follow their life styles wherever it took them. Rider Haggard was no exception, for he travelled to Mexico in 1891 at the age of thirty-three. This visit led to the writing of Montezuma’s Daughter,[i] published in 1893. Tragedy hit the family when, after six weeks, they received news by a telegraph message that their son, Jock, aged nine, had contracted and died from the measles. Having “passed away peacefully”, he was to be buried in Ditchingham churchyard at the ‘chancel door’. The Hagggards took the decision to remain in Mexico City and continue with their holiday and not to return forthwith to Norfolk, for “what was the good of returning home?”[ii]

The Haggards travelled through the South of America over rough and dangerous terrain, sometimes attacked by marauding bands of Indians, and beset by disease, influenza and heatstroke. Eventually, Haggard’s health suffered and ultimately he returned to Norfolk to write the romance that he had researched. Travelling by sea via Liverpool, and by train arriving at the newly constructed Charing Cross station, (see illustration Mary Evans ©) and Liverpool St. Station, they continued their journey after one night by hansom cab and rail, via Norwich, Beccles and the branch line, despondent and exhausted to Ditchingham Station, only to see the grave of their loved and lost child.

Rider and Louis were thrown together after the death of Jock and their love grew stronger. Letters from Haggard to Louis show the depth of his affection for his wife, and omit any feelings for his former love Lillith. Back in the fire of early love they could write endearing words of love:

Rider and Louis were thrown together after the death of Jock and their love grew stronger. Letters from Haggard to Louis show the depth of his affection for his wife:

"My Dearest Louie; A week ago you were scarcely a name to me, today you are more than all the World.... My own sweet love, you can never know what a rest and happiness this is to me... my past life has been so very lonesome and unhappy, that the prospect of your sweet companionship, of your true love, seems almost too good to be true. It is like coming out of the darkness into light. Dearest and best you shall never regret this step if I can help it; if it is in the power of a man to make you happy you shall be happy.”[i]

Writing again in the same vein when apart Haggard declares that Louie is his true companion:

My own sweet Louie… I have learnt to love you so very dearly, sweet Louie that it is a great trial to me being away from you… I can hardly realise that you have promised yourself to me to be my very own, my wife, my sharer of all my hopes, of all my joys and sorrows, giving your sweet companionship and comfort to my life… If anything were to take you away from me now, I don’t know what I should do. I don’t indeed. Sweet my love, it shall be my life’s endeavour to make you happy, and to prove to you that your hand rested on no broken reed.[ii]

Louie replied in similar affectionate terms writing her confirmation of her bond with Rider Haggard:

My Dearest Rider, Dear, your words of love and trust are doubly precious to me. I am so thankful for them; and more than ever I feel that I can give myself up to you without one shadow of fear or regret and God helping me "I will do you good and not evil all the days of my life."[iii]

There is nothing of Louie in public, nor of Carrie Kipling, nor a great deal of Blanche Leonora Alleyne (Mrs Lang). Yet Louie subalterned herself in domestic hobbies and entertainment. She put on plays and tableaux vivants one of which was based on Montezuma's Daughter, and another, grander one - a performance in Ipswich of of The Pearl Maiden for charity. Louie used her extensive community networks to provide the actors and singers. She enjoyed croquet, again exhibiting her class preferences, and played tennis on the grass courts at Ditchingham House.

On the occasion of Rider Haggard 's knighthood, she received a letter from her cousin-in-law condemning the Haggard family in round terms:

"My dear Louis, I am so delighted to hear of the very well deserved honour that has come to you and Rider... He stood out conspicuously in the list as the most distinguished man of them all and I have repeatedly heard it said in our rough Lancashire way that "they were a rotten lot, only Haggard" - after all they know a man when they see one ... You! Dear old Louie have done your part too none the less nobly and you have, as we say in cricket, "kept up your end" splendidly whatsoever came along - with dauntless courage and ability... I hope we shan't be struck off the visiting list!!! But we must be very circumspect when we do visit Sir Henry and her Ladyship."[iv]

A slightly ironic and quietly mocking, self aware, recognition of Louie's continued support and help to Haggard as a true helpmeet; yet suggesting that all was not what it seemed in the Haggard household....

Resulting from the visit of Rider and Louie to Mexico, Montezuma’s Daughter is the outcome. Again, the perennial theme in Haggard’s Montezuma’s Daughter is of a man torn between two lovers, as Haggard declares through the voice of Thomas Wingfield:"she knew well that yonder across the seas I had children whom I loved by another wife, and though they were long dead, must always love … That I had been the husband of another woman she could forgive, but that this woman should have borne me children whose memory was still so dear, she could not forget…"[iii

A great and moving love story that is shadowed in many of the narratives that Haggard produced, reflecting his emotional life torn between two women and needing to forget his great and abiding passion.

In Montezuma’s Daughter there existed another suitor, Geoffrey, just as Victoria Manthorpe has revealed about the Haggard brothers, his older brother in Ditchingham, and Andrew Haggard’s involvement with Louisa.[iv] It appears that Andrew was in love with and was actively negotiating an engagement with Louisa prior to Rider’s acceptance in marriage. In the text, this causes a rift between the two brothers, but to follow Manthorpe this was not the case with Andrew and Rider Haggard. There is a dead baby, son of Thomas and his wife, Otomie, to assuage Haggard’s tragic loss of his own son, as it were.

It is revealing that Thomas’s love should be called Lilith, reflecting Haggard’s own life – his love for Lilith Jackson. There are rumours, started by Sydney Higgins, that Haggard had relationships with African women whilst in Natal, and that he had always loved Lilith Jackson. D S Higgins discovered her death certificate at the General Register Office in London in her married name of Elizabeth Archer. In his autobiography Haggard recounts that “[I ] was present at her death-bed - for happily [I] was able to be of service to her in later life.”[i] Mrs Nada Cheyne, Haggard’s granddaughter, opined that "if [Haggard] had a strong love in early life that would have explained" [it]. She added that “one’s first love is always the strongest.”[ii]

The author of Early Days in East Africa, Frederick Jackson, the first Governor of Uganda, who is the brother of Mary Elizabeth Archer. wrote a letter to his cousin, Arthur C. Hunter, giving the revealing information that "[I] have been away, staying with Rider Haggard and Lilly since the second and only returned last night." Lilly cannot surely refer to Louie, but assuredly, in its family terms, refers to Elizabeth Jackson. Does it mean staying with them together, or visiting them separately? Higgins does not say. It seems unlikely, with Rider Haggard's children born eighteen years before, that this speculation can be true [i]

Thomas wears the mantle of Teule, a Spanish descendant of the god, Quetzal. Captured in the early part of the novel by priests of Anahuac or Mexico, Thomas is saved from a cannibalistic ritual to Quetzal by Marina, the future mistress of Cortes. He goes on to marry the daughter of the king, Montezuma, and becomes integrated into Aztec society until the war with the Spaniards intercedes.

It is singular that Thomas Wingate should have joined forces with a cannibalistic group of savages, yet Haggard appears to have an awareness that his character has sided with a nation whose savagery, slavery and brutality were legion and allows him to return to England to marry (again) and settle down.

Haggard’s search for Aztec treasure whilst in Mexico had emanated from his friendship with Gladwyn Jebb, who had Information about a sulphur mine at the bottom of which a great treasure trove including “the golden head of Montezuma and jars of treasure”[i] was reputed to be hidden. Although mining attempts were made, and some minor finds obtained, he never discovered the treasure hoard of the Aztecs, and after the death of his son the search was discontinued.

The examples of life drawing from his personal experiences are clear throughout the novel, for example, his perennial search for lost kingdoms and Aztec gold; but it is difficult to see where Lang’s input has much influence on the plot, except perhaps for the incidences of ring giving throughout the narrative.

One of the many friends that Haggard made was Sir Gladwyn Jebb. He was recommended to Haggard by someone in the City of London and subsequently became a close friend and had continued their friendship in Mexico where they searched for Montezuma’s treasure. Haggard used the introduction to his biography, written by his widow[i] to praise and regard Gladwyn Jebb in the highest light:

"But his record remains, the record of a brave and generous man who, as I firmly believe, never did, never even contemplated, a mean or doubtful act. To those who knew him and have lost sight of him there remain also a bright and chivalrous example and the memory of a most perfect gentleman."

When they were in Mexico they were attacked at night by a band of robbers who attempted to climb up to the bedroom where Glebb was sleeping. He was fearless and did not even call the Haggards, who were staying, to help him and coolly waited in his bedroom with loaded pistols until, because of the barking of their guard dog and some loose plaster, they failed to scale the walls and enter the unsecured window. As Haggard remembers:

"I remember thinking, and I still think, that this conduct showed great courage and great unselfishness on the part of Mr. Jebb. Most people would have retreated at the first alarm; but this, with the utter fearlessness which was one of his characteristics, he did not do, since the dollars in his charge were too heavy to carry, and, before men could be found to assist him, they would have been secured by the robbers, who knew well where to look for them."[ii]

Haggard’s interest in myth had taken him to Mexico, where there existed a long held belief in a divinity in the shape of a crocodile. In other places, including Egypt, it was the long lost story of an ancient reptile that possesses divine powers. Haggard considered that the reptile featured in his story The People of the Mist, 1894, was regarded as a god by some of the inhabitants of a far-flung province of Mexico called Chiapas.[i] Originally imagined as a snake, [see The World’s Desire where the snake or the star are the binary choice] the creature is changed to a crocodile to obtain more literary credit for the author.

In the Introduction, he explains that an editor of a South African newspaper called “The Zoutpansberg Review” wrote that the people of the district venerated the crocodile as a god and worshipped its image:“a holy crocodile which they name the snake, the biggest crocodile in the whole world, and the oldest…”[ii] This suggested to Haggard that his own imagination, as we saw with Peter Brome in Fair Margaret, was often linked to actual events in real life of which he could have had no knowledge.

Leonard Outram remains the younger son of Sir Thomas Outram, falls in love with and is engaged to the lovely Jane Beach, but is not expected to inherit money due to the family’s financial crash. (Young men being lost in their fortunes being a common theme from Dickens’s Oliver Twist onwards, and also with Haggard, reminding the reader of his family circumstances.) Rejected by Jane’s father, he vows to return to Jane a rich man again. Leonard determines to make a fortune elsewhere – as with Rider – gold mining with his elder brother, Thomas, in Africa. Haggard’s treasure was always organic and mineral – ivory,ostrich feathers, diamonds and gold. In 1892 the Kalinin diamond had been found by the de Beers Company under Cecil Rhodes. Weighing 600 grams,(1 pound 5.16437720ounces) it presented as off coloured, irregular and huge. Subsequently, it was offcut into many other saleable diamonds. Of gold there was much, but it needed to be separated from the quartz, requiring advanced mining skills.

With Thomas dead from fever and toil, Leonard survives to carry on his vow to obtain wealth and return to find and marry Jane. He composes a document that promises to reward him, on finding the treasure of the people of the mist, with a ruby that would make his fortune. When he has written the document, “perhaps one of the most remarkable that were ever written since Pizarro drew up his famous agreement for the division of the prospective spoils of Peru”,[iii] they proceed on the long journey along the Zambezi to the mountains where the rubies are to be found.

After much slaughter and human sacrifice the ruby is won, and Juanna and Otter, the two main activists, can supply the reader interest further until Leonard can return home to England with Juanna as his wife and Otter still in tow. Fortune rests on Leonard's shoulders once again as a legacy comes into his hands and he can discover the news that Jane has died, and her fortune and ancestral property is passed by a will made to him.

The romance has the usual features of a Haggard story, despite turgid, lengthy passages of pointless, potboiling page filling to remind the reader of the "Two Minute Haggard" with its resemblance to the Haggard personal life history thus: Protagonist in love with local maiden - Travels to Africa to find fortune - Beautiful native girl falls in love with him -Difficulties, hardships and major fighting with local warriors- Finds subterranean passage/underground river leading to the gold - Ancient ceremonies, human sacrifice and killing with the protagaonist saved - Fills pockets with treasure - Leaves Africa and returns to marry local maiden and live happily ever after.

The lost world story The People of the Mist had been published as a serial in the magazine Tit-Bits Weekly from December, 1893 to August, 1894. The first book edition was a little later brought out in London by Longmans in October, 1894. In a later revamp as a paperback by Ballantine Books, its importance was proven as the 63rd volume of the renowned Ballantine Adult Fantasy editions in December, 1973.

http://www.britishpathe.com/video/stills/camera-interviews-sir-rider-haggard

Romantic stories from Haggard are autobiographical, sentimental and often follow a similar pattern where two sisters are involved and the romantic interest revolves around a lost fortune retrieved through travel, adventure and success in life.

In Beatrice a middle-aged barrister, Geoffrey Bingham, out shooting for curlew and duck at the water’s edge becomes trapped by the tide. Our heroine, Beatrice, the local schoolteacher, saves Geoffrey by taking him on board her paddling canoe. Geoffrey takes over the paddle but it breaks in the storm leaving them in danger of drowning. But they land upon an open flat rock known as Table Rock and are then thrown into the water. Washed nearly ashore, with Beatrice holding up the drowning barrister they are saved by a rescue party that had set out in a boat.

Geoffrey is married to Lady Honoria and the autobiographical element can be seen in Haggard’s love affair with another woman, Lilly Jackson. Honoria is a cold, hard woman leaving her child and Geoffrey for three weeks as boarders in the Bryngelly vicarage where the two sisters, Beatrice and Elizabeth live. Haggard inserts a premonition at this stage that someone would be surely drowned in the stricken canoe.

Squire Owen Davies, the local landlord of the castle who has returned from sea as a wealthy man with an inheritance is in love with Beatrice but she rejects his proposal of marriage and has eyes now only for Geoffrey. Also Elizabeth is in love with Owen, and this leads to rivalry between the two sisters: “… so brooded Elizabeth in her heart, madded with malicious envy and passionate jealousy.” And later in the narrative: “Elizabeth’s jealousy was indeed bitter as the grave.”[i]

Unlike Rider Haggard, Geoffrey Bingham becomes an MP by only 10 votes (Haggard lost by a couple of hundred only) and takes solace in work and a furtive correspondence with Beatrice, who provides wisdom and counsel in his endeavours. The quality of their letters is remarkable and provides the opportunity for Haggard to show his intellectual capacities and spiritual and moral power to the full: “But what are letters! One touch of a beloved hand is worth a thousand letters…”[i] Indeed Beatrice loves him, yet it is not possible for the late-Victorian novelist to bring to completion an affair with a married lover, nor for early twentieth century novelists either, due to the moral code of the period. “Oh! What a position was hers. And it was wrong, too. She had no right to love the husband of another woman. But right or wrong the fact remained: she did love him.”[ii]

Geoffrey and Beatrice meet again and express their own undying love for each other. Sleepwalking, anonymous letters and a threat of divorce from Honoria complete the tale, but the only solution possible for the author is the death of the heroine who paddles out to sea never tor return so the story ends in Beatrice’s suicide at sea in her lonely and fated canoe.

As mentioned previously, Haggard believed that in previous incarnations he had been a Norseman, an Icelandic warrior, an Egyptian royal and a Restoration gentleman. In When the World Shook his character claims that he was a descendent of his father, the Rev Humphrey Arbuthnot, who had an ancestral connection with what he terms the Carolian times, because his ancestors had lived in that time [of Cromwell] and had given support to the parliamentary side.[i]

Wishful thinking takes a great part in Haggard’s writing, for a resemblance exists between the actual recorded biographical details and the plot of When the World Shook. Humphrey Arbuthnot becomes a rich man and a successful author, and one can relish the idea of Haggard, as if he were writing autobiographically, sitting down to compose this self-congratulatory passage:

"A marvel came to pass; my first book was an enormous success. The whole world talked of it. A leading journal, delighted to have discovered someone, wrote it up, other journals followed suit to be in the movement. One of them, I remember, which had already discussed it with three or four sneering lines, came out with a second and two- column notice. It sold like wildfire and I suppose had some merit for it is still read, though few knew that I wrote it, since fortunately, it was published under a pseudonym.["ii]

Lost treasure and lost worlds were the preoccupation from Mexico, South America and the Andes to Spanish gold and Montezuma’s silver. In The Treasure of the Lake there exists a lake named Mone to be found in the secret land of the Dabanda of the holy lake, which lay beyond the Ruga Ruga mountains. The main object of the journey is to visit Engoi on the island formed in the lake for “she is the shadow of the Engoi upon Earth” [i] and is the reason Haggard names her Engoi or Shadow, and to carry the authorial centre of the story as ‘Lord Macumazahn’ - Allan Quatermain. Other minor characters he draws are Hans and White Mouse.

White Mouse is the romantic interest, for she is pretty and vivacious. She is captured by the party that Haggard terms ‘the Arabs’[i] and when asked to hand her over to Allan Quatermain the group reply that she is a witch and has changed into the shape of an owl and escaped from them to “Satan, her Master”,[ii] thus introducing the occult into his stories again.

There are also the early versions of Tom and Jerry, who are reputed to recall the famous “gay dogs” of the eighteenth century in England. Two exciting episodes relate to the terrifying storm that breaks over the land, and the second is about the elephant dance.

From the forest in front of us… they came into the moonlit open space and marched towards the mound with their regulated tread …there were at least a thousand of them…The herds arrived. They arranged themselves in a semicircle, deep, curved lines of them…The bulls massed themselves together… and charged past the mound from right to left, trumpeting as they charged. Then began a kind of dance, so swift and intricate I could not follow it, a kind of unearthly quadrille… Perhaps it was some kind of ceremony of betrothal, I do not know.[iii]

Proceeding through a long tunnel and finally emerging, by using a rope, through a steep funnel–shaped hole in the terrain Kaneke, Hans and the narrator Macumazahn continue on the usual Haggard adventure, only to be chased by elephants and to run back to camp with the ignominy for Quatermain of being the great white hunter who fled.

Haggard imagines a white man named Arkle, who had had a vision in Trafalgar Square of a beautiful woman to be found in an island on a lake behind some mountains formed from an extinct volcano. Pursuing his vision and dream of a soul mate, Arkle travels with Quatermain to the lake to the north of the Congo, where he finds the beautiful woman named Shadow, who confirms that she is the one claiming to be his soul mate in the vision he had in London. Finding a lost African soul mate for the English adventurer, like Ayesha and Foulata, is an infrequent occurrence in Haggard. And so as an Allan Quatermain novel it is fresh and vigorous for a posthumous publication - 24 September, 1926.

The novel was issued with a dust wrapper, plus it was also issued in Hutchinson’s Adventure Story Magazine as a serial from February 1926 to May 1926. It sold seven thousand copies. A second edition was produced in 1971 by Hutchinson, yet before that there existed an American edition from Doubleday, Page and Co in New York with the slightly different title of Treasure of the Lake - 1926. Hutchinson’s Adventure Story Magazine issued stories of African adventure, thrillers and “stirring stories from all parts of the world”[ii] There was also Hutchinson’s Mystery Story Magazine which merged with it a year later to become Hutchinson’s (Adventure and) Mystery Story Magazine. There was also a colourful and luridly illustrated front cover to the issue, which Haggard had contributed to at the very end of his career

[i] Rider Haggard, Montezuma’s Daughter, (London: Longmans, 1893).

[ii] Haggard, The Days of My Life, Chapter 14.

[iii] Haggard, Montezuma’s Daughter, 8.

[iv] Victoria Manthorpe, Children of the Empire The Victorian Haggards, (London: Victor Gollancz, 1996) 98.

[i] Letter Haggard to Louie Margitson, 29. 11. 1879. Cheyne Family Collection.

[ii] Letter Haggard to Louie Margitson, 9. 12. 1879. Cheyne Family Collection.

i] Letter Louie Margitson to Haggard, 3. 4. 1880. Cheyne Family Collection.

[1] Mrs Nada Cheyne, interview Ditchingham Lodge, 30. 06 12.

[i] Letter in Royal Commonwealth Society, 15 January 1899. D S Higgins, Haggard’s Secret Love, London Magazine, February 1987, Volume 26, No. 11, 38-45.

[v] Haggard, The Days of My Life, Chapter 14.

[vi] Mrs Gladwyn Jebb and H. R Haggard. A Strange Career: Life and Adventures of John Gladwyn Jebb (London and Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1894).

[vii] Haggard, The Days of My Life, Chapter 15.

[i] Rider Haggard, When the World Shook, Being an account of the adventures of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot.(London: Cassell 1919).

[ii] Haggard, When the World Shook, 155.

[i] Rider Haggard, The People of the Mist published as a serial in the magazine Tit-Bits Weekly from December, 1893 to August, 1894. (London: Longmans 1894) 2.

[ii] Haggard, The People of the Mist, 45.

[iii] Haggard,The People of the Mist, 105.

[i] Rider Haggard, Beatrice (Kessinger Publishing, 2004).

[i] Haggard, Beatrice 136.

[ii] Haggard, Beatrice 140.

[i] Rider Haggard, The Treasure of the Lake (London: Hutchinson, 1926).

[ii] Hutchinson’s Adventure Story Magazine (London: Hutchinson, 1926).

[i] Phrases such as ‘half-breed Arab’, ‘Arab villain’ and ‘their religious practices’ serve to 'Other’ the group of combatants in the adventure.

[ii] Haggard, The Treasure of the Lake, 93.

[iii] Haggard, The Treasure of the Lake, 103.

Chapter 6

Rural England

There is another great change of theme at this stage of Haggard's biography. For some time after the death of his son, Jock, he had not felt fulfilled by the task of romance writing:

...the unrealities of fiction writing greatly wearied me, oddly enough much more than they do at present, when they have become a kind of amusement and set-off to the more serious things and thoughts with which my life is occupied.

The “serious things and thoughts” [1] were more to do with a wish to explore rural England and to become involved with the land, agricultural reform and the colonies.

He ”grew to think”[2] that he was destined (destiny playing a large part in his thinking) to play a part in the research of agricultural affairs. Haggard commenced in 1898 a book entitled “A Farmer’s Year”.[3] It was to be a record of the lives and state of being of people engaged in agriculture in England at the very end of the nineteenth-century.

A Farmer’s Year was subtitled “Being the Commonplace Book for 1898.” Haggard remained, after all, an expert in farming – he had farmed for many years at Ditchingham on land of 365 acres purchased for six thousand pounds in 1865 by Major John Margitson (Louisa’s father). As such, he had a good understanding of the agricultural life of England. His work is radical in that it proposed changes to farming methods that had been established over centuries – more rotation of crops, better drainage of fields (he called for his agricultural labourers to “lay drainage pipes in the ditch”)[4] and improved husbandry of cattle. Haggard promoted the use of footpaths and hedgerows to encourage the spread of wild life. He was concerned about the rural depopulation starting to increase at the turn of the century due to the population escape to the towns and competition from foreign imports of cereals. It was such that “a neighbouring farm of nearly two hundred acres had been reduced to that of the bailiff in charge of it and one horseman through the winter months.”[5]

Haggard introduced better methods of remunerating agricultural labourers[6] and paid his own workers a good rate for the time. He mildly supported the spread of mechanised farming that was being introduced into East Anglia making farming of cereals on an industrial scale. He believed in the manuring of crops for he spent “about two shillings (10p) the load as it lies upon the heap.”[7]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Agricultural_Practices

http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/ag180

But Rider would be amazed to see the conditions of cattle today where an artificially inseminated heifer neither sees the bull, nor is even allowed to suckle her offspring. He would have been revolted at the conditions in English farming, including feed for ruminants containing animal material, that persists to this day and caused the outbreak of mad cow disease in the eighties which led to the slaughter and burning of tens of thousands of cows.

Modern agriculture has changed the whole character of East Anglia, altering the landscape, destroying hedges and wildlife and generally contributing to a deleterious environment, plagued by pesticides and genetic plant breeding and promoted by huge, unaccountable corporations like Monsanto.[8] Stuck with second world war (1939 - 1945) ideas of silage, which is basically rotten vegetation subject to disease, the modern (?) method of rolling up the hay into a giant roll, where the centre rots, cannot be sustained environmentally. Cube shaped bundles of wheat and corn are no better, since they rot at the interior where no oxygen can reach. Forced by the mechanisation of farm production, these methods need total revision by farmers in this country.

Nevertheless as one (much later) balanced and fairly appreciative, American comment on A Farmer's Year enthused:

“How entertainingly passes along Mr. Rider Haggard's "A Farmer's Year' in Longman's Magazine. You read of corn, of beets, potatoes, of horses, cows, sheep, of rabbits, foxes, of crows, swallow, and then there are absurd comments on landlords, publicans, and farm laborers. (sic) You get an insight into English rural politics. Then Mr. Rider Haggard tells you of old churches…”[9]

And then …parsnips, peas and pollen…probably (ed.).

Ditchingham, his home village, is described, too, giving details as in a census:

“I turn now to describe the land I farm here at Ditchingham. Ditchingham is a parish of about eleven hundred inhabitants, containing something over two thousand acres of land. In shape it is large and straggling, but the most of the population live at the Bungay end, for the village and the town meet at the bridge over the Waveney;”[10]

It is little changed today, (ed.).

Rider Haggard, with his trust in God, believed that the farmer had a divine duty to plant, nourish and garner his crops and if he had a bumper crop, he was not to be subjective about it to the extent that it was his own work – it was the work of the Almighty.

Haggard was aware that he was farming on land that had been there for thousands of years, and he wonders, in passing, about the previous tenants of the land - who they were, and what had become of them. He saw it in a spiritual way, its antiquity being its finest recommendation. The soil at Bodingham was harsh and unworkable, making the farmer’s life a difficult one. And, since he had lived out of England, he relished the opportunity to return home to the epicentre of traditional social groups that had been joined together by their unchanged lineage, because:

We learn to take a kind of comfort in the contemplation of communities linked together from century to century by an unbroken bond of blood, and moulded to a fixed type of character by surroundings and daily occupations which have scarcely varied since the days of Harold.[11]

Haggard was on the bench at Bungay magistrates for many years. He carried out his duties as a magistrate in an exemplary fashion, even being called out from church while reading the Lesson, to interview a woman with mental problems and to certify and sanction her to the appropriate authorities, demonstrating his sensitive and sympathetic nature.[12]

Now well in to his farming career, Haggard was harbouring some doubts. Leaving the writing of novels and returning to farming were not as easy as supposed, for Haggard regretted that:

“Ploughing, I can assure the reader, is one of those things that look a great deal easier than they are, like the writing of romances, which is supposed by the uninstructed to be a facile art.”[13]

Again full of intellectual vigour and prolific mental energy and not content with writing A Farmer’s Year, he commenced forthwith A Gardener’s Year (1903). As a dedicated orchid grower, he was able to give his help and support to other gardeners on this exotic flower. A flower that thrives in wet conditions, such as those we have experienced in twenty-twelve, he produced them in his greenhouses at Ditchingham. Ancient boilers and pipes kept the flowers warm, and even grapes were produced by this method. From orchids to amaryllis, from angreoum Sesquipedale to anthurium, from primrose to daffodil, he goes on to describe the flowers in his garden. Each month in the garden is chronicled, and homilies to gardeners abound from a polymath of literature and rural life in England.

Declaring that he “had earned the bread of (my)self and others”[14] by writing romances, even though he was more interested in “administration, politics or even law”, [15] Haggard turned to government work. In 1905, when he was 49, Haggard was asked by the Secretary of State for the Colonies to work in the United States with the Salvation Army. The Colonial Office organised “assisted passages” to Canada and Australia to help people dwell on land for farming. Both Canada and Australia wanted only “white” settlers with skills, money and enterprise to colonise their areas felt to be underdeveloped.

The Empire Settlement Act legislated for migrants to get allowances, ‘assisted’ travel and training to enable them to settle down in those lands.[16] The Salvation Army ran “Labour Colonies” in the United States of America to help men and women to work as farmers or domestic servants [you guess which was which] to try to alleviate the poverty and unemployment in cities like Glasgow. This movement, with its insistence on “white” emigration, has a eugenics feel about it. From a present day standpoint, it smacks of reactionary and top down government involvement in social engineering.

Haggard visited Philadelphia, looking at the Liberty Bell in Liberty Hall, and Washington where he met President Roosevelt on the banks of the Potomac at the White House. The President had read Rural England, [i] Haggard’s (1902) account of agricultural counties of England and expressed his view that he remained in accord with the ideas and intentions outlined in the work. Later meeting him again in London on a hurried visit, Haggard was praised in person by Roosevelt for his book entitled “Regeneration” (1910) his account of the social work of the Salvation Army in England. Of its origin, Haggard explains that:

Before going further, it may, perhaps, be well that I should explain how it is that I come to write these pages. First, I ought to state that my personal acquaintance with the Salvation Army dates back a good many years, from the time, indeed, when I was writing 'Rural England,' in connexion with which work I had a long and interesting interview with General Booth that is already published. Subsequently I was appointed by the British Government as a Commissioner to investigate and report upon the Land Colonies of the Salvation Army in the United States.[ii]

During the First World War he assisted the Royal Colonial Institute by travelling to South Africa, Malaysia, Australia and Canada with the work of settling former British soldiers onto land in the colonies. A member of the nongovernmental Commission, he sailed to South Africa from Plymouth, and from Capetown to Tasmania on the SS Turakina to West Australia on the Katoomba and on to Vancouver, Canada on the SS Niagara. The voyages took place during the war, so he was risking his life for his duties as a commissioner. Even on board the SS Kenilworth Castle in February 1916 he was required to wear lifebelts at dinner for fear of torpedo attack from German submarines.[iii] The champagne and oysters were a little unsettling on the tummy in the circumstances.

His final visit to South Africa over, he continues to Tasmania where he meets the Premier Mr Earle, who is sympathetic to the Commission’s cause and offers him an agreement for the resettlement of three hundred soldiers in Australia after the war.[iv] This was less than Haggard had anticipated, but he accepted that, under the conditions of the political infighting that went on, he would need to be satisfied. In Queensland he secured a promise of a million acres of land for the returning solders and their families, ‘sweethearts’ etc. In Sydney, a now tired Haggard receives from a generous Labour government a letter offering one thousand farms in Yarroo, Queensland.

On to Vancouver where he is met on the quayside by his brother Andrew whom Haggard found aged and thin.[v] Home at last via Liverpool and Euston Station, with Louie and Angie, via the Waveney Valley line and then by car from Beccles “(15/-!)” to Ditchingham, only to be bombarded by German airships dropping bombs nearby: “…it is odd that I should have emerged from all risks of a round the world trip in these days to run into Zeppelins at home”, he sighs.[vi] And looking back in his diaries for 1917 he comments that, despite whatever judgment the press would make of it: “At any rate we have worked hard, gratuitously and disinterestedly, for five years on behalf of the Empire.”[vii] A great imperial servant satisfied with his untiring work, and happy in the knowledge that he has done his best for his nation’s red colouring-in book.

69 Gunterstone Road Google images

En route to Madeira on this round the world trip he was taken up in his imagination with a story that evolved from seeing Madeira from a distance and being intrigued with the skyline and the wake of the ship forming an unbroken link. The albatrosses that followed the ship day and night were woven into the original title as: The Fatal Albatross 1916. It was eventually published posthumously in 1929 by Hutchinson with only three thousand copies being printed.

Andrew Atherton is a modern type of chap who is duped by his senior medical specialist who marries Andrew’s lover Rose behind his back. Andrew prefers to work for little pay in an East End hospital rather than obtaining a good salary as a doctor in a fashionable practice.

Rose is the doctor’s daughter and is described in what sets out as a domestic tale with strong descriptive writing as formidably beautiful:

Anywhere Rose Watson would have been reckoned a beautiful woman, one among ten thousand. She had all the points of beauty; an exquisitely tinted face, large blue eyes, a shapely head on which her plentiful golden hair was coiled like a crown, a sweet mouth, a well cut nose not too sharp, and long delicate hands and feet. Also her voice was low and gentle and her movements were full of native grace. In short, she was lovely, a perfect type of the Eternal Feminine.[viii]

Andrew out of his socialist principles likes to lodge in Whitechapel with Mrs Josky. He eventually marries Clara instead and is sent as the Governor General of Oceana. In the adventure story part of the novel, and then because he believed Clara drowned in their shipwreck, takes up with another shipwrecked local lady, Mary of Marion Isle.

Mary is a native girl who speaks in the third person: “Mary she love you. She never leave you, Andrew.” They have a child and only then Andrew is saved by the resurrected Clara whilst taking refuge in a cave on the desert island, the news of his survival from the shipwreck having been transmitted by means of a metal dinner plate attached to the neck of a ‘fated albatross.’ Yet it is not Mary who drowns to assuage moral proprieties, but indeed Clara who does not survive her trip in an open boat.

The modern moral of the tale is that a couple can live together as partners without wedlock and for the time can be considered as morally groundbreaking, for Haggard seems to allow for an alternative society not to emerge until the post war period.

Billed by Morning Post as being as good as his African tales, it went on to say that it is: ”Worthy of the author of She and King Solomon’s Mines.” The journal added “Those who read it will recapture something of the rapturous interest with which they followed the doings of his African adventurers.”

His agricultural work, Rural England (1902) is a survey of agricultural counties of England – Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire (now defunct and part of Cambridgeshire), Oxfordshire, Northamptonshire, Lincolnshire, Rutland (the smallest unitary authority in England) Nottinghamshire, Suffolk and Haggard’s own Norfolk. It contains the names, and very little detail, of people long gone like Mr A Tuck of Ditchingham Lodge, Mr C P Allix of Swaffam Prior and his neighbour, Mr Hall. Also mentioned are Mr Robert Stephenson of Burwell Cambridgeshire, Mr T B Potter of Blackstone House, Bewdley, Mr A P Turner, Mr Williams of Knebworth, Hertfordshire (notice the Welsh connection ed .) Mr Wright, Mr Yerburgh and Mr Young.[19] These would have been gentlemen farmers on a great scale, and they would have been in the forefront of agricultural life in South east England. His fears, however, were of a return to forest and grassland in Cambridgeshire, and that there would be a chance of civil strife over the issue of Protectionism of food imports by the imposition of taxes on foreign food. Haggard’s opinion was that “among the remedies for our evils the hope of Protection cannot be reckoned.”[20]

Haggard was also concerned about what he termed ‘the price of labour’, wondering whether agricultural wages were too high, and that the supply of labour was diminishing due to the competition of other industries likes ports, fishing, brick making, building and construction and so on. Furthermore, rural depopulation was having a devastating effect on the farming industry because men were leaving the farms to work in more congenial jobs in towns and cities. He apologises for his “earnestness” over this problem because he felt that the flight of people from the land would be the ruin of England. He claims in his Conclusion that, if advancing civilisation required the movement away from the land, “then it is of a truth that broad road that leads to the destruction of advanced peoples.”[21]

Haggard has fame and renown for his work with Norfolk coast erosion. He did not know where coast began or where "the outrageous flowing surges of the sea”[22] would leave the shoreline. For centuries the East Anglian coast had been sometimes inundated, sometimes deposited with sand, shale and gravel causing a great ebb and flow of cliff and beach erosion, revival or restoration. Houses, churches, lighthouses and huts toppled into the sea on a regular basis; land returned to beach and cliff. He had, as we saw, retained Kessingland Grange near Lowestoft, and, to prevent the incursion of the sea and the winds, had sloped the cliff faces, using marram grass to concretise the sand, with the result that the height of the cliff below the Grange increased. Riding back and forth from Lowestoft by cycle[23], Haggard collected much information about the condition of agriculture, coastline, farm and field.

Haggard was by general inclination, heredity and opinion a conservative in politics. He had opposed the protection of imports in earlier life and upheld socialist farming principles at the same time as supporting the increase of landholding by small farmers, tenants and smallholders on the vast expanse of land available in England. He had no truck with the Bolshevism arising in Russia which was threatening the lives of the imperial family there, even joining the Anti-Bolshevik League in London. He felt that it would involve a lot of his time but, "if only I can manage to live somehow, I would not grudge that if thereby I could help my country in this hour of its peril." 12 April 1922

He went on to the hustings in East Norfolk and heard catcalls and booing for the first time at close hand. There were even scuffles between his supporters and left leaning demonstrators and activists at meetings and around the orators' platform at Stalham. His carriage was almost turned over and the horses were distraught where they landed in the ditch. Lord Wodehouse and a worker named only as Saul were summonsed to appear on 20 July for a ‘common assault’.[i] Being of a nervous temperament, this would have been deeply troubling to him. At the election that was held in the Eastern Division of Norfolk in the summer of 1895, he came very close to victory, losing in the ballot by only one hundred and ninety-eight votes.

Commissioned to produce a report on the Salvation Army Colonies in the United States, Rider Haggard produced in 1905, at the age of 49, The Poor and the Land, Being a Report on the Salvation Army Colonies in the United States and at Hadleigh, England, with Scheme of National Land Settlement.[24] Settlements were established at Fort Romie, Fort Amity, and Fort Herrick in Ohio. A number of objections to the scheme could be raised he says in the Introduction, being that the people recruited would become “Salvationists” and that it would take too many people out of England. Enterprisingly, he counters both arguments with a confident statement in favour of State supported loans, which would encourage the project. They took 360 square miles of land to cultivate, and there was also work for the cure of “inebriates”. The land selected turned out to be inadequate in places, and as a result the Salvation Army had to pay tens of thousands of pounds for remedial drainage work. A profit was turned in most cases, and many of the settlers were successful in terms of their financial probity.

Returning from Denmark in October 1910, and sitting in the great study in Ditchingham House (his bulldog Caesar at his side) with the winter approaching, it was time to complete the research for Rural Denmark and Its Lessons. It appears similar to A Farmers Year with its names and occupations of the farmers and smallholders of the Danish agricultural industry. His interest in coast erosion was aroused also by the land reclamation on the River Skalsaa in Jutland.

It notes the varied and subtle differences between Danish and English farming methods and, for such a dry subject, is an absorbing document due to the intensive description and subjective writing that brings, as usual, the romance writer’s work to life in a stimulating and refreshing way. From cathedrals and churches to agricultural colleges and schools, from milk suppliers to pig farms, from rats and mice to sterilised meat, and fresh fish, it covers the range of Danish farming activities.

In his researches around Norfolk, Haggard garnered ideas for a story full of local character, colour and interest. Kipling became involved in the mediation over the plot lines for his new adventure story, Red Eve [1911]. Thirsting to return to the writing of romances, Haggard produces Ayesha, The Way of the Spirit, Benita, Fair Margaret, The Ghost Kings, and The Yellow God.

The collaboration with Kipling continued over the plot construcction of Red Eve, for on visits to each other's houses and by corresspondence they worked on the construction of the novel. In a letter of 1909 from his mature period he asks: "Now let's have Murgh put in going order?" On one side of the Bateman's stationery can be seen an annotation from Haggard which confirms their collaboration, "Bateman's / Kipling's idea of Murgh, 5. 10. 08." It is certain that Kipling helped, at least, in the creation of the character, Murgh. Playing with names for Murgh through Murth, Murg and Morg appears as a ghoulish pastime for the two writers who start with the idea of "Death" and end, by route of the morgue, in Murgh, the name eventually chosen. [1]

The setting of the story is Dunwich where the largest sea port was situated until it was overcome by the sea. Disaster struck the town in 1347 when a tremendous storm swept away 400 houses and eight churches. Noyan-sur-Sarthe is situated in the Pays-de-la-Loire region of France and is a small river-side town on the banks of the Loire. Haggard had also researched into the locations of Avignon and Venice, showing good command of local detail.

Two young local characters in Norfolk, Hugh de Cressi and Red Eve, so called because she wears a red cloak, escape from an arranged marriage with a French lord and wealthy landowner, Sir Edmund Acour. Eve learns that he is a traitor to the King, and she is afraid that he may overthrow the crown of England. In the ensuing fight, Hugh kills his assistant, John of Clavering, and the couple escape to a nearby Presbytery of the Knights Templar. Requesting marriage after the bloody conflict, they are refused: “Be married to the sister with blood on your hands… and she one of the greatest heiresses in East Anglia?”: never! Again; echoes of the Haggard family life, where Louisa supplanted another lover in Haggard’s matrimonial plans, as she was more richly endowed, and he from a family of ten children. Haggard was depressed at the time of writing, and it is not fanciful to attribute the sickness of Eve and the results of the Black Death to the problem of Lilly.

Red Eve is a love story between Eve and Hugh with a malicious French noble as their rival in affection. Hugh is enjoined to tell the King in Westminster, and he proceeds to inform the court of the treachery. He receives a pardon for the killing and straightaway goes to Avignon to meet the Pope to resolve the issue of the marriage, and find Sir Edmund Acour.

The Battle of Crecy in 1346 is featured as a plot marker for scenes of struggle and war. Hugh forgives a dying Frenchman, spares a Jewish woman from the stake under the Inquisition, which results in her saving Hugh. Murgh, the Avenger oversees his travels across Europe in the shadow of the Black Death, and his return to Dunwich, as he manages the plot lines that Kipling has created. Returned to Suffolk, Hugh and Red Eve are reunited, Acour is encountered again and disposed of, and the two protagonists are united in matrimony by the faithful priest, Sir Andrew.

“Yes, there by the graveside, over the body of the dead Acour, there in the red light of the morning, amidst the lonely snows, was celebrated the strangest marriage the world has ever seen. In nature's church it was celebrated, with the grim, grey Archer for a clerk, and Death's own fearful minister for congregation.”[2]

Presiding over the whole story is Murgh the avenger of Death, whose fierce and awesome countenance pervades the tale; a grim and fabulous, medieval style potboiler on a grand canvas carved from the pens of two specialist romance writers.

The story was published by Hodder and Stoughton in an edition of 13,500 copies in 1911. It was serialised in the Red Book Magazine in 7 issues from December, 1910 to March 1911 with illustrations by Paul Hardy, including three or four illustrations throughout the text of a modern kind, produced from glass plates by up-to-date technical methods.[1]

Footnotes

[1] Rider Haggard, The Days of My Life, Chapter 18.

[2] Rider Haggard, The Days of My Life, Chapter 18.

[3] Rider Haggard, A Farmer’s Year Being the Commonplace Book for 1898. (London: Longmans Green, 1899).

[4] Haggard, A Farmer’s Year, 142.

[5] Haggard, A Farmer’s Year, appendix.

[6] Haggard, A Farmer’s Year, 407.

[7] Haggard, A Farmer’s Year, 47.

[8] Adrian Bell, Men and the Fields (London:1939).

[9] New York Times, Saturday Book Reviews and Magazine The Times Literary Criticism, 1968. 361.

[10] Haggard, A Farmer’s Year, 55.

[11] Haggard, A Farmer’s Year, 7

[12] Rider Haggard, The Days of My Life, Chapter 18.

[13] Haggard, A Farmer’s Year, 106.

[14] Haggard, The Days of My Life, Introduction Written 1911.

[15] Haggard, The Days of My Life, Introduction Written 1911

[16] John Field,, “Exporting ‘People of British Stock’” – Training and Emigration Policy in inter-war Britain” Institute of Education, University of Stirling, Annual SCUTREA Conference 4- 8 July 2010 University of Warwick. Available Online www.stir.academia.edu/John Field/Papers/613854/Exporting_people_of_British_stock_training_and_emigration_policy_in_interwar_Britain Accessed 25.06.2012.

[17] Haggard, Rural England (London: Longmans Green, 1902).

[19] See Michael Wood, The Story of England, BBC, Available. Online. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00tw231 Accessed 26. 06. 2012.

[20] Haggard, Rural England, 539.

[21] Haggard, Rural England, 575.

[22] Rider Haggard, Introduction to Red Eve. "the outrageous flowing surges of the sea" (I quote the jurists of centuries ago)”.

[23] Haggard, A Farmer’s Year, 477.,

[24] Introduction. Rider Haggard, The Poor and the Land, Being a Report on the Salvation Army Colonies in the United States and at Hadleigh, England, with Scheme of National Land Settlement (London: Longmans, 1905).

Haggard, Rural Denmark and Its Lessons (London:Longmans, 1911).

1] Rider Haggard, Red Eve (Leipzig : Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1911).

[2] Haggard, Red Eve, Chapter 19.

[1] D S Whatmore, H Rider Haggard A Bibliography (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987).

i] Haggard, Rural England (London: Longmans Green, 1902).

[iii] 19 February, 1916. D.S. Higgins, (ed.) The Private Diaries of Sir H. Rider Haggard (New York: Stein and Day, 1980) 52.

[iv] 3 April, 1916. D.S. Higgins, (ed.) The Private Diaries of Sir H. Rider Haggard 57.

[v] 1 July 1916. D.S. Higgins, (ed.) The Private Diaries of Sir H. Rider Haggard 69.

[vi] 3 August, 1916. D.S. Higgins, (ed.) The Private Diaries of Sir H. Rider Haggard 76.

[vii] 27 March 1917. D.S. Higgins, (ed.) The Private Diaries of Sir H. Rider Haggard 100.

[viii] Rider Haggard, Mary of Marion Isle (London: Hutchinson, 1929) Chapter 3.

Chapter 7

Conclusion

Haggard thought that “within a very short period of a man’s decease”[i] there would be no one interested in his books and papers. How wrong he was, for constant visits by many researchers to the Norfolk Registry Office to look at his MSS and to Norwich Museum to see his Egyptian artifacts, added by the antiquarian value of his editions in the thousands of pounds, and the extraordinary success of King Solomon's Mines, not counting the 83 million copies of She have confounded his pessimistic opinion. King Solomon's Mines appeared on the reading list for the present writer's GCE (sic) examinations in 1955 along with Buchan's The Forty Nine Steps and Prester John. His name is recorded on mountains and glaciers in Canada and plains in Australia, as well as in his home town of Bungay. His reputation, like that of Conrad, Kipling and others, is refreshed and retained by the existence of Appreciation Societies in the UK, Australia, Canada and elsewhere. His romances have entertained and thrilled readers for generation after generation.

Yet, as a squire and landowner, and ultimately as a wealthy writer, he was able to live the life of the intellect on a rural farm and to enjoy for most of his life a farmer’s daily existence, with visits to his flat in London and journeys abroad, and to combine his novel writing in his daily routines.

The ability to see into the recesses of Man’s soul, to find a vision of infinity and to weave it throughout his romances, along with the amazingly torrid output of text in the highest imaginative vein possible, are his greatest legacy.

His philosophy of life is beautifully set out in Moon of Israel where he opines on death:

"Death, O prince, is, I think, but a single step in the pylon stair which leads at last to the dizzy height whence we see the face of God and hear his voice tell us what and why we are.”

A not completely difficult philosophy, but expressed and shaped in unparalleled and amazingly expressive terms.

Haggard could not understand why critics like J M Barrie[i] did not rate him as highly as Stevenson, James, Conrad, his great friend Kipling or even Falkner, the author of Moonfleet,[ii] but, in my estimation, he stands as firmly in the pantheon of imaginative literature as any of his contemporaries. His characterisations are spotlessly wrought, his plots are firm and solid, his grasp of human understanding and of man’s place in the firmament is superior to a roll call of any other living writer, and I include Dickens in my sweep.

Haggard repeated many myths that he researched in his wide travels. He had learned from Shepstone many of the stories of the Zulus, and even on his return to South Africa in the 1920s picked up more information, such as the Zulu national anthem, for his romances. Frederick Jackson, Lilth's brother, was also a valid source, for in his travels in Borneo in the far east he had learned many accounts of mythical tales which he passed on to Haggard. His visit to Egypt with Lillias furnished him with material, and Humphrey Carter's excavations provided much of the materials and artifacts, such as the rings and the scaraboeus with the words ‘Suten se Ra’ that he constantly used. He obtained the additional Greek material for King Solomon's Mines from a local professor of his acquaintance and received some help with the hieroglyphics at the beginning of the tale. Haggard researched Egyptian history, and in his visits to Cairo museum to look at the mummies, obtained much relevant information about prehistoric Egypt from the time of the great pharaohs. His Icelandic myths were well researched, too, and with Kipling's help was able to create the Norse myths of Wi the Hunter and his adventures in a mythical Ice Land

Except for a few novels written for financial necessity, the consistency of Haggard’s output is extraordinary, writing up to three thousand words a day with an imaginative flair and enthusiasm that rarely waned, except in his times of depression. Haggard was, of course aided in his writing by his sister in law Aggie and Louie’s input, although not recorded in those days, was powerfully supportive and also Miss Hector as a secretary taking Haggard’s dictation was a considerable help, travel companion and amanuensis to him.

In writing this biography, I saw Haggard as a diffident man at times and a humble one; there appears to be no evidence of aggression, arrogance or willfulness. As Sydney Higgins has pointed out, Haggard in an “exceptionally honest letter reveals [both] the private modesty he presented to friends and relatives throughout his life...” And also there is his exaltation over his literary success to be considered, where Haggard earned the staggering sum for the time of six hundred and seventy five pounds for 25,000 copies of King Solomon's Mines sold in 1886. By 1888 he earned triumphantly over ten thousand pounds, a sum never achieved by any writer of quality up to that time. Recognising this success, even a young Winston Churchill wrote to him telling Haggard what a good story was Alan Quatermain and asking him to please send another one.[i] His aunt, a Hagagrd family friend had sent him a copy.

I have to take issue with Professor Higgins over his suggestions of Haggard as a sexual philanderer. He offers no evidence apart from a sketchy reference to a letter from Frederick Jackson, and he himself reports that Lady Louie Haggard was part of the efforts to help Lily Archer and her sons with education, support and money and in no way shows proof of any sexual peccadilloes on Haggard's part. Gossiping rumours abound, but there is no fact. Attacking a famous imaginative writer for assisting a close friend of the family (Frederick Jackson, Lily's brother, was a close friend of the Haggard brothers also[i], is not a balanced view, considering that Louie attended Lillith's funeral with Haggard after supporting her and the children for a number of years after their return from Africa

Writing to Louie, Haggard realised that his marriage to Louie had not been very complete, yet he owned that she had been a kindlly and a dear wife to him throughout their years together:.

"I do not think I had any business to marry you when I did – it was pulling you down in the world. However, I think that I have now attained, in name if not in fortune, such a position you would not have been likely to exceed if I had not met you, and for that I am very thankful. I dare say that you think me a queer chap for writing like this, more especially as you have always been so gentle and considerate about things, but the matter taken in addition to my other weaknesses and failings, has always pressed upon me, though it is only now, after all these years, when I have fought and to some extent won the day, that I can speak of it."

His descendents in current culture are undoubtedly Terry Pratchett and the Sci Fi writers. Brian W Aldiss maintains that Haggard is a writer of Science Fiction, counting Alan and the Ice Gods, and When the World Shook as both representative of the genre, and pointing to She as a masterpiece of the lost race genre. He writes:

"Haggard knew wherof he spoke, and the best of his novels like She and Alan Quatermain, still have vigour, even if their punctilious mores have dated."

Indeed, the manners and customs of the late-Victorians are out of date, but a return to old fashioned values may well be the way out of the financial, moral, aggressively militaristic and political morass in which we find ourselves today.

REFERENCES

[i] 10 Sept 1914.D S Higgins The Private Diaries of Sir H. Rider Haggard (New York Stein and Day, 1980). 114.