Geoffrey Clarke

‘The Lingering Clasp of the Hand’: Literary Collaborations 1885 – 1905

ISBN: 9781466077249

Acknowledgements

 When this project began there were milestones already in place erected by Stephen Heath, Wayne Koestenbaum, Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick and Rebecca Stott.  Yet these edifices pointed to the need to produce, and the need for further elucidation on, an innovative theory of male bonding in relation to literary representation.  These writings invited my own collaborative endeavours with them, and thus I became an uncontracted fellow worker to take further forward the criticism connecting important research by sexual historians and sexual theorists with literary discourse.

 The research on Haggard was largely undertaken at the Norfolk Record Office in Norwich, and that on related work was engaged in at the Senate House Library of the University of London, the Brynmor Jones Library at Hull, and the Library of the University of Southern California at San Diego.  I should like to thank the staff of those institutions for their co-operation, help and advice. 

 I would also like to thank Andrew Noble, David Jarrett, Owen Knowles, Dr Catherine Wynne, Dr Brian Rigby and Mark Landon, who confounds all stereotypes.

Contents

 Introduction    ‘The Lingering Clasp of the Hand’: Literary Collaborations in Late-Victorian Adventure Romance.                                                                  4

Part 1               ‘King Romance is Come Indeed!’ The Fictive, Imperialist, and Homosocial World of the Adventure Romance of Masculine Adventure.          31

Part 2               ‘The Athenaeum (Golly What a Club)’: Clubland Friendship: Male Desire and its Literary Expression in a Homosocial Adventure Romance.  90

Part 3               ‘Faire Objections c’est Collaborer’.  Further Literary Bondings. Haggard and Kipling, Kipling and Walcott Balestier, James and Stevenson, Stevenson and Henley, Conrad and Ford, and Stevenson and Osbourne.                                                                                                                                                  150

Conclusion       ‘Two Hearts that Beat as One.’                                                                                                                                                                      219

Bibliography                                                                                                                                                                                                                         239

‘The Lingering Clasp of the Hand’: Literary Collaborations  1885 – 1905'


Introduction

The aim of this book is to define the nature of literary collaboration by authors in the mediation and production of the novel of masculine action in the period 1880-1905.  Collaboration in texts is a very interesting problematic that becomes more marked in the late-Victorian period.  I have analysed the nature and motivation on which various literary collaborations rested, looking at the issue of sexuality within the texts and at the disputes that arose and the rivalries that existed within the male bonded community.  The book explores the anxieties and suppressions that characterise such collaborative male ventures, and undertakes research into constructions of masculinity and gender differentiation.  It engages critically with ways in which masculinity, in the late-Victorian period and subsequently, has been accepted as a matter of fact and "given"; and, in terms of theory, the book is tied to, and attempts to extend recent work in gender and cultural studies. 

     Some of the sources I have used for this study have been Double Talk by Wayne Koestenbaum, and both Epistemology of the Closet and Tendencies by Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick.  I have also been significantly influenced in this project by Heath’s “Psychopathia Sexualis”, by William A. Cohen’s Sex Secrets, and The Poetics of Gender by Nancy K. Miller.  Their work on literary collaboration has been influential in forwarding scholarship on queer theory, not least by allowing for new ways of looking at masculinities and femininities, and ways in which these altered in the late-Victorian period.

     I have approached my work in three ways, looking at three essential themes — literary collaboration, Empire and sex.  Firstly, I examine literary collaboration in many of its manifestations because it is different from other more conventional ways of producing texts.  There exist some key novels including Haggard’s She, King Solomon’s Mines and The World’s Desire arising from the collaboration of authors.  I look at the nature of collaboration and male bonding within the text of the novel, pointing to the homoeroticism that is often contained within the stories.  I demonstrate an interest in the nature of collaboration and male bonding within the discourse I examine.  This leads to issues of homosociality which I deal with in some detail.   

    Secondly, I analyse the impact of Empire and consider the ways in which it is reflected in the novels of masculine adventure, exerting, as it did, a remarkable influence upon British youth.  I particularly challenge the notion that Empire was a benign institution, as has been suggested by some recent commentators.  I will argue that Empire provided the geographical scope and possibility for adventure and often influenced the successful works featured in this survey.  

    Lastly, I highlight sex and show that there are a number of texts that deal with the matter in particularly interesting hidden, unconscious ways that are suggestive and erotic and often point to the homosociality of the writers.  There appears to be an unspoken homoeroticism underlying much of the literary discourse that I deconstruct, which may have arisen from either commercial or theoretical literary concerns.  These texts include She, on which Haggard collaborated with Lang, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and the joint work by R. L. Stevenson and his stepson Lloyd Osbourne, The Ebb Tide.

     In terms of methodology, I have employed traditional literary criticism allied with qualitative approaches to research, such as family letters, portraits on canvas, evidence from correspondence between authors, handwriting in the original texts, period plate photographs, correspondence between the present author and living and erstwhile members of the Haggard family, previously unknown correspondence between Ford and his publisher, and evidence from ring-giving between Haggard and Lang taken from period plate photographs of the time.

     Where it has been possible, I have attempted to relate the success or otherwise. of the original texts to the production, reception and distribution of similar novels of the period. In many cases, I have analysed the sales figures of the various editions of the works showing, for example, how King Solomon’s Mines and Kipling’s Barrack Room Ballads’s production figures grew in strength over time. 

     In terms of social history, the book refers, where necessary or appropriate, to late-Victorian values, ideals, and the suppressions and repressions that some researchers tend to think of as symptomatic of the era.  These include the system of primogeniture that passed wealth, land and the perpetual inheritance of titles to the first born in an aristocratic family, leading to our present system of unelected peers.

      Masculinities and femininities in the period are looked at, and a comprehensive literature review is undertaken on the subject.  Obviously it is difficult to relate such issues specifically to the time in question because, from our present-day perspective, we have vastly altered ideas on gender and queer studies.

Literary Collaboration.

She.

On making a close analysis of Haggard and Lang’s She. I discovered an interesting focus on the emotional side of male bonding that seemed to reflect the author’s collaborative activity with the critic, Lang.  In the novel Ludwig Holly, Leo Vincey and Job take part in strongly male–orientated adventures that glorify the exclusive realm of bachelorhood, the ‘brother officer’ and male bonding.  When the editor of She receives the manuscript of Ludwig Holly’s account of how his ward Leo Holly came to be the descendant of the ancient priest Kallikrates, he makes the comment “To me the story seems to bear the stamp of truth upon its face”.[1]  This extract underlines the theories about the presentation of reality upon which the adventure romance was based and which contributed to its financial success in the 1880s.

      The relationships in Haggard’s She, in my view, reflect mutual adolescent admiration.  In one scene in particular the interaction between Leo and Holly generates a greater sexual compulsion due to the intensity of their companionship.  In this scene as Leo and Holly escape from danger (the homoeroticism / homosociality is always fraught with danger) each must help the other jump across a yawning chasm: “The rest was easy; in two or three more seconds I was up, and we lay panting side by side, trembling like leaves...”[2]  The extract portrays unusual intimacy in an era renowned for its prudery and repressions written in a clubland where the authors collaborated together.

     As Leo and Holly escape from a scenario of cremation in Chapter 25 of the novel they enter a rosy coloured womb-like cave where the next adventure is to be pursued, suggesting that they are within the power of female dominance.  As they pass through the cave, in an act of rebirth, they enter into another female symbol — that of an inverted cone — providing further suggestions of the feminisation of terrain in the romance of masculine adventure..[3]

 Collaboration and homosexuality – the double bind.

 In She, Holly and Leo, although foster uncle and nephew, share a notable devotion and intimacy.  Haggard and Lang and Stevenson and Osbourne also formed strong male ties that can be seen reflected in the adventure romances that they produced together.  The texts upon which they collaborated demonstrate an interest in male bonding.  Male bonding was a major theme in the culture of the nineteenth century reflected throughout the romance literature.  Some commentators make allegations of homosexuality against collaborating partners.  Male bonding needn’t necessarily have involved homosexuality, yet such friendships among writers and artists had existed for generations in the fields of art, literature, drama, music and sculpture.  For example, the romantic Norwegian painter Frederick Gude (1825–1903) collaborated with the genre painter, Adolf Tidemand in Germany on several oil paintings.  The Swedish born engineer, Billy Klüver, proposed the dynamic and mutual participation of the engineer and the artist in the creation of the artwork, believing that the engineer needed the collaboration of the artist.[4]  In the world of music, the collaboration between the librettist, W. S. Gilbert and the musical composer, Sir Arthur Sullivan in the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company (1875–1982) led to the production of some delightful light operas.[5]  Collaboration together in artistic and literary work remained a legitimate and quite natural outcome of the bonds that cemented together the relationships of the authors in this survey.

     I am inclined to agree with Koestenbaum’s interpretation suggesting that when Rider Haggard dedicated She to Andrew Lang its emphasis on male bonds could be considered as “a reflection of the author’s collegial affection for the dedicatee.”[6]  As an appropriate, approved form of male endeavour, bonding has continued to perform the role of socially acceptable male activity for writers working in collaboration together.  Why the issue of sexuality should be raised so frequently and forcefully in such literary collaboration at all is a question of some concern to me because, although collaboration may have been a dying cultural trend, the opprobrium and blame attached to male bonding seem to arise from the feeling that collaborative works are sexually tainted and unnatural.

     It was argued by Jerome K. Jerome,[7]  J. K. Stephen[8]  and others that the texts resulting from collaboration between men in the eighteen eighties and nineties somehow contained secrets intimating homosexuality.  The homosexual relationships were often at that time ambiguous, their adherents frequently being unwilling in those unenlightened times to admit to being homosexual.  Writers worked together sometimes producing texts that appeared to take on a disguised form in which homosexuality appears as the subject of much of the discourse.  This tendency is noted by others, besides the present commentator, including Koestenbaum and William A. Cohen.  The homosexual references were often veiled in euphemism, cross-gender references, and the double entendres that are the stuff of British comedy.  There existed in-crowd allusions of which only the participants would be fully aware.  Yet whether the intention was to titillate or merely to amuse in a public school type humour way is unclear.  Bawdy passages are not uncommon in English literature from Chaucer onwards, and may be quite endemic in the English literary psyche.

     By collaboration I mean joint activity in artistic and literary, as well as in the cultural, religious, sporting, diplomatic and military fields in which men took part in writing, drama, clubs, sports and wars.  The texts that I discuss show that when men wrote books together they were taking part in a form of homosocial activity, if not necessarily expressing homosexual desire.  I shall argue in this book that male literary collaboration did lead to the production of a homosocial fiction exemplified in stories such as She, Ayesha, Allan Quatermain and other bonded ventures where men were virile and women were marginalised and compliant. 

      I will argue that the friendships of the authors were often more than just a quotidian working practice, but I will also argue that their common centre was not a genitally homosexual one, but a "homosocial" one.[9]  The word "homosocial" is a neologism, or a coinage, sometimes employed in history and the social sciences.  It obviously makes an analogy with "homosexual", but the word “homosocial” is just as obviously meant to be distinguished in meaning from this latter term. 

      I apply the term "homosocial" to designate the bondings and pairings that arose in the period.  An analogy can be made, then, between homosociality as referring to groups in society who adhere through their association together in a community of congruent ideas and interests, and when referring to groups of two men who pair together for the purposes of bonding in a shared relationship exclusive of others.  Homosociality emphasises the masculinity and the social nature of their joint or indivisible male endeavours, without implying that those who conformed to such descriptions belonged to a sub culture or a gay group operating separately from mainstream society.  The word "homosocial", arising from the work of Gayle Rubin[10]  in the 1980s, can be usefully applied to the nature of the identity of the duos and pairings, as well as the extended groupings that I look at in this book.  The homosocial world of literary collaboration was one in which males worked together to socialise with each other in an intensively masculine atmosphere from which women were totally excluded, making the homosocial an entirely male preserve.

      Homosociality elides into homosexuality when practice supersedes desire.[11]  The essential difference between homosociality and homosexuality is that homosociality can be seen as being an acceptable, approved aspect of male collaboration — as we see exemplified in the male bondings of Haggard and Lang and Stevenson and Osbourne — whereas in the case of homosexuality it can mean involvement in same-sex sexual activity including genital contact, as in the alleged case of Kipling and Balestier [see Part 2].

     Masculinities in the late-Victorian period were certainly not “given” but were constructions resulting from social forces.  What was considered by society to be right or wrong, proper or improper and why behaviour was controlled by social custom are issues that need some investigation.  Masculinities and femininities had been constructed over centuries and differed from one country to another, but it is unclear why masculinities were the way they appeared in the late-Victorian age.  The Victorian period was characterised by being patriarchal, as seen in the treatment accorded to servants and working people and to some junior family members.  Primogeniture — a system of passing land, wealth and the inheritance of titles to the first-born in an aristocratic family — had put influential families in positions of power, and had continued the class-based system of education and society of which these writers were a product.  The masculinities that we see portrayed in the adventure romance, such as in the self confident, masculinist clubland adventurers like Alan Quatermain, were the results of a system and were the products of an age that produced the Pax Britannica and the triumphalism exhibited by the male in so many aspects of life.

      If men engage in male bonding, a prejudiced and quite intemperate judgment about their homosexuality may be made by some.  Such judgment arises somewhat illogically, for ‘love’ between men (without sexual connotations) was quite common, not only in late-Victorian England but also in the Greek city states, in Rome and America, to mention just a few places.  Plato, Spenser and Whitman are examples of writers for whom male love was platonic rather than physical.[12]  Platonic discourses deal with the traditional questions of the relation between the beloved boy and the master, showing how love differs between body and soul. [13]  In Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender a definition of the difference between love of a man’s soul or ‘being’ is made, as opposed to “disorderly love”[14]  between men.  Walt Whitman, defending his position on homosexuality in a reply to Symonds about “the calamus part” of his work, explores the difference between manly genital homosexuality and the idea of male coquetry.[15]

     The issue of gender and fraught concerns of gender stereotyping were becoming increasingly prominent in the period.  As Elaine Showalter has pointed out, a redefinition was made of the terms surrounding homosexuality and feminism at that time, and new interpretations of masculinities and femininities were formulated:

 The 1880s and 1890s, in the words of the novelist George Gissing, were decades of “sexual anarchy”, when all the laws that governed behaviour seemed to be breaking down.  During this period both the words “feminism” and “homosexuality” first came into use, as New Woman and the male aesthetes redefined the meanings of femininity and masculinity...”[16]

 Studies of “the New Woman” related to aspects of domesticity identify changes in women’s lives in the period.[17]  Gender identity was undergoing extensive change in the 1880s, particularly in the area of constructions of femininities and how these constructs were changing.[18]

 Looking deeper into the complexities of She, I discovered that Haggard and Lang had collaborated over The World’s Desire.  In my view, the sexually heightened imagery in the text suggests homoeroticism, as exemplified in falling drops of blood which Koestenbaum has suggested as being symbolic of menstruation.[19]  Haggard and Lang use imagery of this nature throughout the work, making an allegorical reference to sexual matters.

The Literary Debate.

In what became at the time a most hard fought debate, Haggard, Stevenson and others discussed the nature and composition of the adventure romance.  In writing the collaboratively written South Seas adventure The Beach of Falesa, Stevenson recognised that incident and action were important in the adventure romance.  In a September 1891 letter to Sidney Colvin[20]  he points out that what is important in the adventure story is the need to provide realistic details:

 There is a vast deal of fact in the story, and some pretty good comedy.  It is the first realistic South Sea story; I mean with real South Sea character and details of life.[21]

 Stevenson had expounded his views on the writing of adventure romances within a series of articles including “A Gossip on Romance” in 1882.[22]   Rather than debate whether changes in popular fashions in fiction had affected the reception or longstanding success of texts like Gulliver’s Travels or Clarissa, he stressed the need for the basic power of incident and action that make up a good story, as I discuss at more length later.  Stevenson, as well as Haggard and Lang, disliked romantic fiction written with women in mind because it arguably misrepresented life.  The adventure romance on the other hand, according to the theories of Stevenson and Lang, was to present men in real terms with tales of action-filled adventure that omitted girls and women and concentrated on manly adventures in far-flung settings.  This accounts for the fact that Treasure Island contains no, or only a few, women characters.  Stevenson prizes the heroism displayed in many Western European stories that detail the exploits of men; such novels have become part of the body of literature extolling male supremacism and assertion.  The characterisations, formulated by males in collaboration marginalised women in enduring and enthralling adventures.  The concept of maleness upon which the stories were based nevertheless goes against the rather womanly terms ‘gossip’ and ‘romance’ that entitle his paper. 

     The writing of the romance of masculine adventure and quest was an attempt by male writers to create a fictional space, which would engage fully with what they considered as reality and masculine strength.  The romance of adventure connects itself with the moment and particularly with the colonial narrative.  Realism focuses on moral imperatives, while romance gives prominence to action-filled adventure.[23]  It concentrates on action and adventure most often in a foreign locale.  The fiction of adventure romance frequently involves allegory through the use of covert references, situations and plots in which masculinity in some of its more extreme forms is manifested.

      The male hero is paramount in the adventure romance.  As the article entitled “About Fiction”[24]  by Haggard suggests, he wished to produce a strongly masculinist fiction that drew upon a specifically masculine not just male group of readers.  Haggard’s protagonist, Alan Quatermain, commences his narrative with the avowal that he is the silent, strong hero who abjures book learning: “I am more accustomed to handle a rifle than a pen, and cannot make any pretence to the grand literary flights and flourishes which I see in novels...”  Quatermain has no literary pretensions, he knows the Old Testament, the Ingoldsby Legends and sometimes likes “to read a novel”, yet adventure and not literature is his forte.[25]  

      The adventure romance sprang from an era wherein complex issues of paternalism, patriarchy and homophobia abounded.  Paternalist attitudes continued to dominate the late nineteenth century, discriminating against and marginalising homosexual groups.  The frightening and quite illiberal practice of homophobia limited the activities of writers moving and working in the period.  As Craig Owens has suggested[26]   homophobia "is not primarily an instrument for oppressing a sexual minority", but it could be a construction for controlling the complete range of relations between men including power, control and authority, both familial and societal.  Seen from our current perspective, established homophobic practices at that time appeared unchanging, uncaring and discriminatory, and, as Michael Mason has recently pointed out,[27]  it is the sexual moralism of the Victorians which is the cause of our sense of antagonism towards the constraints upon sexual activity which they applied.  We tend to consider the Victorians as the exponents of a high moral purpose and apply the term “Victorian” to those in their day that took superior attitudes towards sexual morality.[28]   The repressive actions like those restricting displays of male-male emotion that we think of when we use the term ‘the Victorians’ form the basis of most of the taboos and repressions that we recognise as emanating from the 1880s and 90s.    

Homophobia involved a repression of the feminine experiences in men and also had close links with misogyny, as, indeed, Sedgwick points out when she cautions that

While male homosexuality does not correlate in a trans-historical way with political attitudes toward women, homophobia directed at men by men always travels with a retinue of gynephobia (sic) and antifeminism.[29]

This extract implies that there exists a package of sentiments and emotions surrounding homophobia that include negative feelings toward women as well as towards men and is frequently seen in the corpus I examine.  Yet how the homophobic imperative impacted on male friendships is difficult to assess, but it is clear that it had a dampening effect on the expression of male-male affection in the period, as John Tosh and others have pointed out.[30]  It can be seen, for example, when Andrew Lang found himself incapable of accepting that Stevenson should be seen dressed in a slightly camp manner in Bond Street in the presence of a government official.  It would have been impossible for a journalist of Lang’s standing to acknowledge Stevenson dressed in what he (Lang) considered to be an outrageously homosexual fashion, yet Stevenson was clothed in nothing more outré than a sailor hat and velvet jacket.  Furthermore, Lang considered that it would have been impossible to meet Stevenson in the street in such garb, but this did not rule out a private meeting.  It is interesting, too, that dress should have borne such an importance amongst friends in those times.

The adventure romance reinforced ideas of patriarchy and homophobia.  Seen from the present day perspective, homophobia entailed a frighteningly illiberal and discriminatory system.  It accounts for the anti-gay patriarchal repression so current in the 1880s when, reacting to the internal sexual crises of domestic Britain in a homophobic manner, the Labouchere Amendment of 1885 made even private homosexual acts illegal:

We know nothing of what may be valuable social forces or factors of character, or of what may be the relation of physical things to things spiritual; but when you speak of a sexual element being present in this kind of love, we can quite understand that; and that is just what we mean to suppress.  That sexual aspect is nothing but gross indecency, any form of which by our Act of 1885 we make criminal.[31]

It was in the light of this act that representations of masculinities and femininities were formed in the late-Victorian period and may explain why homosexual feelings came into conflict with law.

     Critics might contend that, until the time of the Wilde trial, a concept of homosexuality did not really exist in any event, even among those sexually attracted to their own sex; there were homosexual acts, but because of the lack of an evident discourse, it is difficult to know, until Wilde, what this meant, even to the individual involved.[32]

    These writers were a group of powerful, influential men who identified themselves as a specific intellectual circle with shared interests and attitudes.  Their work was part of a sharing of ideas among a “virtual” club with a community of ideas, and depended on the spirit of co-operation.  The manful and man-centred romances that they promoted, with Empire offering varied settings for adventures and quests, emphasised the headiness of male adventure.  With a love of African vistas, pampas, plains, jungles, countryside and open spaces on the edge of darkness, the male adventure romance was an outlet for boys' imaginations.  For boys starved by life in the Victorian cities, the adventure romance was a counterpoint to the public school, the City, the civil service, and urban life.  

     Social and economic factors had a profound influence upon the membership in different classes of society in late-Victorian England.  The separation of the different classes was much in evidence, particularly in the army, as Kipling shows in his portrayals of Danny Deever, Tommy and others.[33]  The public schools for the upper class, established initially to provide an all embracing social system, promised an introduction to membership of the clubs of Piccadilly, Whitehall and St. James’s, and then on into the officer class of the army and navy.  Yet the other classes enjoyed less travel and movement and, except through marriage or clandestine affairs, could not make the journey to the wealth and privilege as exemplified in these stories.

     In the period there was less mass production of fiction and reading of books than is common nowadays, as publication and circulation figures of the time when compared with today’s figures illustrate.  In the twenty-first century, books and publications are sold in their many hundreds of thousands.[34]  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.  Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines was an immediate success and sold 31,000 copies in its first year.  The size of the readership of popular/adventure fiction in the early 1890s 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.[35]  Sales amounted to a total of 500,000.[36]   The issue of King Solomon's Mines reached a sales figure of 100,000, and the sales of Kipling's collection Barrack Room Ballads (1890) reached nearly 200,000 by 1918.[37]  Yet these figures are relatively small for children’s fiction by the modern standards of sales figures that reach even millions of copies.

Homoerotic fiction

The emotions within the adventure romance focussed on boys.  In a fiction engaged in a rhetoric of male assertion and paternalism, romantic masculinity was a key feature of the romance of masculine adventure.  In a form in which pairs of writers such as Haggard and Lang, Haggard and Kipling, Stevenson and Henley, and Stevenson and Osbourne worked together, there was a disparity between the events they depicted in the adventure stories and the chummy friendships that were being mediated in their imaginations.  The passions behind these collaborative, and, possibly, homoerotic bondings were the stimulus for the works featured in this book.  At the same time an imperial literary imperative lies behind much of their work, for it was at the heart of British patriarchy that Haggard, Kipling, Stevenson and Lang propounded the fictional ethic of the adventure romance; and it was in clubland that the romance novels of action and quest were written and the place where the homosocial bonds were formed.

     It is a feature of collaboration that it contains an element of risk or adventure[38]   in that two authors writing together form a framework for writing their narrative, with a result that is not seen when writers write alone.  The very fact of collaboration by two men implies an interest in male bonding, and it was not, I think, for any other interests, apart from the commercial ones, that they collaborated.  Their collaboration results in a third force arising from the dual personalities of the writers.  What, then, dictates the urge to write together, it may be asked?  Haggard and Kipling writing in Kipling’s study in Batemans alone for whole hours together forming the plot and narrative structure of Red Eve (1911) suggests in itself some kind of special activity, partly adventure, partly warm camaraderie, and in an ideal sense the lofty pursuit of writing rather than, say, conversation. 

      The romance and quest stories themselves, written in collaboration, and suspect in terms of social customs, or at least curious to some, were a matter of concern to late-Victorians because of their covert expressions of violence and sexuality.  Erotic references were not presented overtly as such but tended to point to eroticism, or at least informed the texts with a kind of schoolboy scatology.  The stories were susceptible to censure by literary critics of the period.  Haggard's reference in his solo work, King Solomon's Mines (1885), to the dimensions of Sheba's breasts[39]  raised questions about the erotic content of adventure fiction: “these mountains standing thus, like the pillars of a gigantic gateway, are shaped exactly like a woman’s breasts.”[40]  

      In creating their worlds through combined writing, these authors went through a process of change.  The practice of patriarchy and masculinity was under increasing pressure from modernising forces and technological change, and writing teams such as Lang and Haggard, Kipling and Haggard, and later, Conrad and Ford were developing new gender roles that challenged conventional constructions of masculinities, but classical images of patriarchy remained entrenched.  In its clubby ethos the bonding ethic may have been compatible with the homophobic proscriptions of the imperialist age, but, again, it may have been an expression of the homosocial imperative.  Not that the writers were denied access to power, they were not, but they were artists who were both attempting to subvert, and at the same time to define, both in their relations and in their texts, notions of masculinity in an age which was repressive and classically patriarchal — one in which many sexual stereotypes, constrictions and taboos both shaped and circumscribed their lives.

The Adventure Romance and Empire.

The reasons for these romances often being set in Africa in such great numbers are not entirely clear.  The attraction of Africa may have arisen from its unknown character, and certainly these writers were attracted by what they saw as the deep sensuality of African women.  Conrad portrays the erotic figure of a woman at the river bank in Heart of Darkness, which is the most insistent example of heterosexuality in the corpus.  Haggard sexualises dark Africa as female body in the same way, portraying penetration as he does.[41]  Empire and visions of Empire were a stimulus to adventure romance, based on notions of hyper masculinity in an adventure genre that submitted to imperial concerns, or that fed upon the rise of colonialism in Britain.  The adventure novel was from the 1880s an increasingly commercialised form raising money for writers and publishers alike, and a writer such as Lang turned from journalism and essay writing to collaboration with the established author Haggard to produce adventure fiction.[42]  The intention was not entirely to do so in order to make money, but the impetus for such activity was a combination of commercial and aesthetic reasons, such as Lang’s theories about what constituted the nature of the adventure romance and his call for more adventure in the stories.  It owed as much to the tradition of the romance form, including new theories of its nature and composition, as to new journalistic techniques and money-making opportunities. 

      In these romance adventures the darkness of the African continent is underscored, as in Heart of Darkness in which a terrible, primitive vision of Africa is presented.  The wilderness is described as “impenetrable”.  The meaning of the story of the novel — that it is “too dark” to tell, too grim, too perverse to be able to recount — is unavailable because of its “unspeakable”, “intolerable”, “inexplicable” nature.  At a time when missionaries to Africa like Wilberforce and Livingstone had attempted to convert darkness to ‘Light’, many young readers were impressed by missionary activity.  Ideas of Empire acted as a spur to the imperial explorer. 

     An analysis of literary collaboration that resulted in the romance of masculine adventure has to take account of the varied and complex chronicle of events that was imperial fiction.  The vital and integrative aspect of Empire is one in which collaboration features, having work and endeavour as its epicentre.  The authors who collaborated may have done so as a service to Empire or, indeed, their work may have been influenced by the progress and outcome of supremacist activity.  What has been argued as one of colonialism’s concerns — integration — would have required assistance from both coloniser and colonised, black man and white man.  The missionaries who departed to Africa, like Leo and Holly, might have had as justification the idea that they were abroad to preach “Christ and Him English”.  The attempt to civilise or europeanise was made with a moral or evangelising, Christian fervour.  It was accompanied by a rhetoric combining proselytising and spiritual endeavour.  This was perhaps the first stage of colonial activity, to be followed in its wake by economic exploitation. 

     Colonialism was a complicated series of events — a grand enterprise that defies efforts at a universal explanation for its origin, continuation and decline.  There exist a number of theories about its inception and growth that have been recorded in detail by Wolfgang J. Mommsen.[43]  Among these theories are the economic and trading theories and myths about the geographical spread of Empire, along with the idea that “the sun never sets upon the British Empire”.  The theory that presents Empire as a civilising mission has been regularly championed, but there has been a growing recognition by critics and historians such as Fanon,[44]  Young[45]  and Rodney[46]  that Empire was a crude process of the exploitation of human and natural resources disguised as economic development.  Interpretations of Spain’s role in Empire have also undergone recent revision, arguing that the destruction of the Inca and Aztec civilisations was the work of pitiless, self-interested traders and mercenaries who used the Spanish royal family as a front for their ambitions.[47]  

Expansionism was thought to be a continuing process that was termed by a contemporary commentator as “a Good Thing”,[48]  but that was an interpretation put upon Empire by nineteenth century propagandists to extol the advantages of Empire to a doubting public at home.  Of course, Empire could be viewed as a noble self-sacrificing project, but the claim by Christianising missionaries that the Empire had a redemptive or improving mission sheds a hypocritical light on their motives in view of the venality of imperialism.  Empire was not, in my opinion, a benevolent movement, as some present-day critics like Niall Ferguson would argue, for the harmful results of slavery, oppression and exploitation continued for many years after the decline of Empire.  British colonies depended to a large degree upon slavery and the slave owners were in a position to amass wealth and to build the finest of houses both at home and in their plantations wherever they operated.  As Joan Anim-Addo has suggested “the enriched slaving merchants used their profits to buy land and titles, symbols of status and power.”[49]  However, the failure of Empire may well have resulted from the inherent faults, inequalities and undemocratic principles contained within it, and, certainly, its decline can be attributed to financial difficulties after 1945.

     The colonising activity was, for many, part of bringing the ‘Light’ to the darkness of the African continent that the Victorian hymnist extolled: “Can we whose souls are lighted / With wisdom from on high / Can we to men benighted / The lamp of life deny?”[50]  It was said to have been undertaken in the spirit of England bringing to the world the message of its own confident self-assurance, and supposedly stemmed from the desire to save the Indian, African, South Seas or aboriginal inhabitant from depredation through superior wisdom, technology, advanced industrial processes, institutions for the preparation of youths and boys, and, arguably, through the romance of masculine adventure.

      It was possible in the period 1880 – 1900 to consider the barbarian eastern hordes that G. A. Henty and others speak of as totally other, beyond the pale of civilisation and incapable of reform, whilst the Indian, African and to some extent the Native American, and the Australian and New Zealand aborigines were subject to missionary attempts to civilise and modernise them.  There existed other ideas of eastern civilisation, in which Haggard was particularly interested, for he emphasised the ancient history of Egypt and Mesopotamia underlining their deep cultural and rich heritage.

     As a result of the colonial process a system of “othering”[51]  took place.  I believe that to include othering here is relevant to my arguments because it was a process that allowed the boy reader to engage in a supremacist attitude to the races and peoples portrayed in the adventure romance.  Othering remains a theory of racial difference whereby minorities and ethnic groups are seen by Westerners as conforming to the stereotypes of colonialism.  In this way, they represent given ideas of inadequacy and inequality.  The option of becoming a complete ‘Other’ has been imposed upon minority groups, and they are considered as outside and apart from white men.[52]  Othering can also mean an idea constituting what Robert Young has termed “the reduction of a person to a ‘nobody’ to the position of ‘other’”.[53]  Black people are portrayed as different and not quite as human as everybody else, and to draw on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, as being involved in mysticism and frenzied and satanic practices. 

     The notion of the other mirrors colonialism in the way in which it sets up races and groups for economic, cultural and political domination.[54]  Othering is the inexorable plot of racism according to Robert Young.[55]  There has to be some ‘other’ for colonialism to operate, he contends.  There exists “no master without slave, no economic-political power without exploitation, no dominant class without cattle ‘under the yoke’, no Frenchman without wogs, no Nazis without Jews, no property without exclusion — an exclusion that has its limits and is part of the dialectic.”[56]  The exploitation of subject nations did not accurately reflect ‘a global burden’ that Kipling had warned of in his poem written for white men of the United States, nor did it “Match the master – work you’ve done / England, my own?” that Kipling extols in his poem for boys of the Empire.[57]

Collaboration and Sexuality.

 Why authors should have collaborated at all is an issue of some concern.  Collaboration between authors as disparate as Wordsworth and Coleridge, Marx and Engels and Fletcher and Beaumont was a manifestation of the enervation of their artistry, as Koestenbaum has also argued, suggesting that “the ambitions of …collaborators concealed impoverished aesthetic means”.[58]  Authors, as we will see in the James story entitled “Collaboration”, have left behind their respective arts and taken up an activity rather less demanding, hence the suggestion made by James that collaboration results from enervation.  If artistic impulses are dried up, turning to another for help is the solution, and to collaborate with another on a literary endeavour could presuppose for some that the author needs help and assistance to complete his work.

     Throughout the 1880s and 1890s there are continual suggestions made by J. K. Stephen, Jerome K. Jerome and others that joint work was somehow tainted with the suggestion of homosexuality.  They thought that by 1893 sexual implications had gathered around literary collaboration.  Just as collaboration on the political level was considered immoral, joint work at the social, interactive and personal levels was considered to be sexual.  Perhaps it was also the implications of homosexuality that could be made about male collaboration that made it seem distasteful.  Indeed, Robert Louis Stevenson feared as much when he said of his collaborator, Lloyd Osbourne: “Perhaps as we approach the foul time of life, young folk become necessary?  ‘Tis a problem.  We know what form this craving wears in certain cases…Thus perhaps my present (and crescent) infatuation for the youth, Lloyd.”[59]  Much of what occurs in the collaborative process, besides the admiration for the other writer’s artistic abilities, is a kind of “infatuation” with the other collaborator, involving objections and quarrels, and even sometimes resulting in litigation.  The collaborations were not just a working arrangement but were evidence that their relationship rested on a mutual fellow-feeling based on a bonding passion.

      Collaboration in literary affairs concealed enervated artistic means, James suggests.  The activity of collaborative writing as a blameless and elevated sort of energy could mask ideas and preferences which the authors held but which they were unable or unwilling, due to some taboo, to indulge in.  Perhaps it is a form of sublimation of greater energies, specifically sexual ones.  The reason they engaged, in an age of some leisure, in writing in a team in this way is worth consideration.  It may not have been only for social or economic reasons, but the idea that two minds thought as one, each the shadow of the other, cannot be discounted.

     For, as Stevenson noted about his relationship with Osbourne, it might also be asked why there is a sexual energy involved in collaboration, and why sexuality, either heterosexuality or homosexuality, should be an element at all in work with a double signature.  Sexuality was discrete, hidden and condemned, but why it was nevertheless present and often reflected in the literary corpus is a moot point.  The answers to these questions will help to explain the motivations and aspirations of writers who strove to find new patterns of male behaviour.  It is central to our understanding of how writers like Haggard and Lang, Haggard and Kipling, Ford and Conrad, as well as Stevenson and Osbourne met and bonded together sometimes producing fiction of an erotic kind that tended to reflect the joint personality of the authors and their sexuality in the texts themselves.  The discourse I examine, while not being totally conformist, was actually breaking new ground.  As scholarship by Sedgwick, Cohen and others about the terms surrounding same–sex sex has convincingly argued, expressions adopted by writers who were interested in pursuing this terminology were deliberately circulated “non-literally” through evasions, euphemisms, slang, metaphors, and so on.

     The collaboration between writers intensified around 1883.  Later on, Haggard collaborated with Kipling, who had returned from a career in newspaper editing and story writing in India, while Stevenson, from Edinburgh, began a long series of collaborations with the journal editor Henley of the North Briton, and with Osbourne.  Haggard and Lang, and Stevenson started to promote new forms of adventure novels which, written in collaboration, bowed to the service of Empire, and fulfilled the needs of a newly constituted reading public in a more commercially orientated form. 

 The Rise of the Adventure Romance.

 When romance and adventure were still thought of as worthy of serious attention by both writers and critics in books, newspapers, journals, periodicals and reviews, the collaboratively written adventure romance created for itself a niche in the minds of the public.  In order to satisfy a demand from this newly voracious reading public, an adventure romance literature re-emerged in the late 1870s and 80s.  Created by the rising standards of education, and constituted because of the increased expectations of leisure and wealth, with new markets being formed to meet that demand, the adventure romance appealed to the new mass of readers released into literacy by the 1870 Education Act.  The clamour came also, in the main, out of the middle and university classes for novels of masculine adventure and adventure romance.[60]  New, vibrant media were being established, partly due to the abolition of the stamp tax and the duties on paper encouraging the development of the presses, and the incorporation of the circulating libraries of which Mudie's was at the forefront in the 1860s.[61]   These trends were chiefly the result of the significant expansion of market-forces, and authors' and publishers' bodies were also generated by these same pressures.  There existed trade and scientific journals, technical works, sheet music, illustrations, popular issues of boys' fiction, advertisement-supported magazines and, during the period, an increase took place in the market share for adventure romance. 

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.[62]  Taken together with a great rise in the technology of the times when improvements were being made in all sorts of areas,[63]  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[64]  and on the other, a mass population in tune with these commercial changes, were now creating literary markets.[65]

     It was these impetuses which created a reading public for which authors were ready to write both alone and in collaboration with another writer.  I argue that adventure fiction was written to counter a loss of confidence, which men felt in an atmosphere of increasing anxiety, resulting in the events around the Boer War at the turn of the century when extreme anxiety was exhibited by British men before the ‘Relief of Mafeking’.  It was thought by some, including Haggard and Lang, that art and literary culture had descended into a state that was debilitated, weak, and effete.  Lang confirms as much when, in a poem in which he claims that “King Romance was wounded deep”, nineteenth century literature is seen as exhausted and incapacitated.[66]

      There exists in this period of the 1880s a domestication of men when patriarchal figures began to spend increasing amounts of time with their families and strove to take part in domestic arrangements for servants, household management and the nursing of children, which had not previously been within their province.  Fathers began to emerge as companions and teachers to older children and began to take their children on holiday trips and outings by railway and road, going for walks with them and teaching them skills especially in the area of outdoor activities, cycling and football.

    In the next part, as well as the presentation of original, unpublished manuscripts, and revelations about Lang’s relationship with  Haggard, I conduct a detailed and striking analysis of the handwriting in the draft manuscripts, achieved by conducting a detailed analysis of the handwriting in the holograph manuscripts.  I will then survey the characteristics of the masculine adventure and quest romance, looking at literary collaboration between late-Victorian male writers, and my position is that homosociality was at the root of much of the discourse.  Collaboration in this context entails the working together of writers to produce commercially viable productions that sometimes feature yet suppress homosociality and eroticism, or at least engage in bawdy public schoolboy humour.  I will analyse and illustrate male bonding which, in contemporary society, is an entirely acceptable process, but appeared as a new tendency in the culture of the nineteenth century, and also look at the opprobrium and disdain incurred by such bonding at that time.  I try to draw a distinction between the terms homosexual and homosocial, since the former appellation ‘accuses’ men of genitally involved sexual activity, while the latter name simply records action as being in the realm of social interactivity, non sexual intercourse, and ultimately male collaboration.

     In Part 2 I show how I have conducted correspondence with the living descendants of the authors to establish whether they could provide evidence of the domestication of family life, with particular reference to their relatives.  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, Haggard, treated his family with close affection and that his (apparently harsh) comments to his grandson about not being able to tie up his shoelaces and not knowing the Lord’s Prayer were “all said with a kindly glint in his eye”.[67]  

      Indeed, Commander Cheyne remembered his grandfather with affection: "...I have always had and still have a tremendous affection and admiration for him."[68]   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.  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" Haggard by his father [see below], countered by saying that his grandfather did not “follow this course of action upon me.”[69]  The end result confirms ideas that late-Victorian patriarchs were equally as caring as are modern-day parents and grand parents.  Such recollections need to be treated with some caution, but they add to our wealth of knowledge on the issues.

     Looking at girls’ magazines of the time, such as the annual edition of the Girl’s Own Paper,[70]  many articles were published of a domestic nature — instructions for knitting, embroidery, dressmaking and practical homemaking.  Issues of the magazine offered articles on craft, crochet, flower arrangement, collecting and gifts.[71]  Domesticity was the aim of many young girls and women in the late-Victorian period, as exemplified in the pages of the magazine [see below].  It was the editor's intention that the magazine would appeal to servants as well as young middle class girls, and this adds weight to the argument that domesticity was an aspect of the life of all classes of people. 

       It is documented by Elizabeth Roberts[72]  and others that the working class engaged in domestic practices in their homes.  The work of Davidoff and Hall on James Luckock (1761-1835) draws attention to the importance of domesticity as the main purpose of men's worldly pursuits, and as being central to their conception of masculinity.  John Tosh has argued, looking at the family lives of the upper class Archbishop Edward and his wife Mary Benson, that there is evidence of an increasing tendency towards domesticity, although an Archbishop is not a very representative figure.[73]  References to Leslie Stephen, the staunchly middle class and literary figure who is reported to have been considered by his daughters exacting and sentimental,[74]  have confirmed his interest in the nursing of children, the domestic arrangements for servants, and the methods of shopping.  It may seem to be a contradiction that such apparently critical views are taken by descendants, but it was not unusual for late-Victorian parents in grand bourgeois homes like Haggard’s and Stephen’s to appear demanding and to engage in exasperating behaviour.  Despite this, Leonard Woolf has confirmed that “the actual relations between the human beings living in these large households and between the several households related by blood or friendship were, on the whole, in my remembrance extraordinarily human and humane.”[75]

     It is clear that a perception of the late-Victorians as being harsh and unyielding towards their families is not necessarily an accurate one.  This concern leads me on to an examination of further pertinent issues in the book.  I will cover in detail among others, Haggard and Lang’s erotic writing in The World’s Desire, look at Kipling and Balestier’s troubled relationship that produced The Naulakha, examine Stephenson and Osbourne’s joint work on The Ebb Tide and, moving into the twentieth century, undertake a reading of Conrad and Ford’s Romance started in 1898.

     As I have indicated, my study of writers who collaborated incorporates a close analysis of the nature and motives of the bonding on which the collaborations rested, revealing the homosociality behind them.  I provide an innovative theory of male bonding in certain leading nineteenth century literary works, revealing through close analysis of the primary sources, the use of unpublished material, and detailed study of the handwriting in the drafts of early texts, which writer was responsible for specific passages, and how this was achieved.

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