Sir Henry Rider Haggard (1856 - 1925) was one of the most succesful adventure story writers of the late nineteenth and first quarter of the twentieth century. He is credited as being the founder of the Lost World literary genre, and I suppose today he’d be classified as a writer of popular or commercial fiction. He certainly belongs to the breed of author who writes to make his way and earn his keep rather than one who sees profit as beneath them and seeks only to attain literary greatness. However, Rider Haggard wrote skilfully without obfuscation and possessed an ability to make his readers picture the setting he wished to communicate to them clearly. He spent a few years as a young man in southern Africa and this appears to have furnished him with ample material for his subsequent literary career. He was quite prolific, and appears to have produced at least one book a year (often more) over the span of his writing career.
My maternal grandfather, born in 1891, and a lifelong avid reader, had a large selection of Rider Haggard’s novels on his bookshelves. He loved a thrilling tale, and I daresay as a youngster he would have adored the hugely exciting ‘King Solomon’s Mines’ with its boys’ own adventure story. The book’s description of a vast civil war battle between Haggard’s invented Kukuanas (clearly modelled with some respect on the Zulu culture) with the corpses of many thousands of their courageous warriors littering a plain stained red with their blood is still very affecting, and somehow, sadly presaged for me the terrible slaughter my grandfather and his generation would meet and know all too well as young men on the Western Front. A fact about Rider Haggard that I find of particular personal interest is that he spent his winters in Hastings. In 1917 he bought the North Lodge on Maze Hill, St Leonards-on-Sea, and apparently used the room sited just above its archway for writing until 1923. I think I’d have to put this location forward on a list of most coveted workrooms, although I confess that I haven’t seen inside. He was chums with fellow author Rudyard Kipling, another East Sussex resident who lived in the village of Burwash at a house called Batemans. Kipling also had a pretty nice writing room - one that I have seen, as Batemans is a National Trust property and is definitely worth visiting.
King Solomon’s Mines is a well written, highly thrilling adventure. However, the modern reader has to take into consideration when it was written before approaching it. Rider Haggard was a conservative Victorian and held Imperialist ideals consistent with the times in which he lived - views that most of us, I am pleased to say, find utterly repellent today. Most modern readers will I imagine also be horrified, as I was, when they read the chapter where the book’s narrator and main protagonist Alan Quatermain leads his white companions and their native bearers on an elephant hunt - the ensuing slaughter of ‘the brutes’ is quite shocking, and clearly shows the terrible disregard for the natural world prevalent amongst Europeans as they settled new territories. Having said this, and if you are able to get beyond these lamentable truths and see the book within its time frame and take along with it a large pinch of salt, then it is, I think, a very good read and a wholly ripping yarn.
Rider Haggard’s novel ‘She’ is reckoned to be one of the most widely read books ever written, and fifty years ago was estimated to have sold over eighty million copies. It has been translated into numerous languages and made into several film versions. I recall getting a little hot under the collar myself when as a lad I saw Ursula Andress in the titular role. Like King Solomon’s Mines it is difficult for the modern reader to encounter views that are now considered to be quite unequivocally racist. The European world powers at the end of the nineteenth century were obsessed by the fearful idea of racial degeneration; Rider Haggard may have been influenced by this concept after witnessing the ruins of ‘Great Zimbabwe’ which were explored and excavated in the 1870s; they may have been, at least in part, responsible for the ancient lost city in She and his imagined native Armahagger people who live amongst the ruins and have, it must be said, very little to recommend themselves (incidentally, the white ruled Rhodesian Government for many years put political pressure on archaeologists to deny that such a city as ‘Great Zimbabwe’ could have been built by any black races). The book also touched on the rapidly changing role of women in the industrialised world. It was a hugely influential book in its day; its female protagonist Ayesha - the She of the title - has been cited as a female prototype in the works of Freud and Jung; the White Queen, Jadis, in C.S Lewis’s Narnia books owes a debt to her; as too does the character of Shelob in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Like King Solomon’s Mines it is without any shadow of doubt a very good example of the lost world literary genre, however its often racist and Imperialist ideals are sometimes quite unpalateable - and any modern reader has to bear this fact in mind before proceeding.
King Solomon’s Mines is a well written, highly thrilling adventure. However, the modern reader has to take into consideration when it was written before approaching it. Rider Haggard was a conservative Victorian and held Imperialist ideals consistent with the times in which he lived - views that most of us, I am pleased to say, find utterly repellent today. Most modern readers will I imagine also be horrified, as I was, when they read the chapter where the book’s narrator and main protagonist Alan Quatermain leads his white companions and their native bearers on an elephant hunt - the ensuing slaughter of ‘the brutes’ is quite shocking, and clearly shows the terrible disregard for the natural world prevalent amongst Europeans as they settled new territories. Having said this, and if you are able to get beyond these lamentable truths and see the book within its time frame and take along with it a large pinch of salt, then it is, I think, a very good read and a wholly ripping yarn.
Rider Haggard’s novel ‘She’ is reckoned to be one of the most widely read books ever written, and fifty years ago was estimated to have sold over eighty million copies. It has been translated into numerous languages and made into several film versions. I recall getting a little hot under the collar myself when as a lad I saw Ursula Andress in the titular role. Like King Solomon’s Mines it is difficult for the modern reader to encounter views that are now considered to be quite unequivocally racist. The European world powers at the end of the nineteenth century were obsessed by the fearful idea of racial degeneration; Rider Haggard may have been influenced by this concept after witnessing the ruins of ‘Great Zimbabwe’ which were explored and excavated in the 1870s; they may have been, at least in part, responsible for the ancient lost city in She and his imagined native Armahagger people who live amongst the ruins and have, it must be said, very little to recommend themselves (incidentally, the white ruled Rhodesian Government for many years put political pressure on archaeologists to deny that such a city as ‘Great Zimbabwe’ could have been built by any black races). The book also touched on the rapidly changing role of women in the industrialised world. It was a hugely influential book in its day; its female protagonist Ayesha - the She of the title - has been cited as a female prototype in the works of Freud and Jung; the White Queen, Jadis, in C.S Lewis’s Narnia books owes a debt to her; as too does the character of Shelob in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Like King Solomon’s Mines it is without any shadow of doubt a very good example of the lost world literary genre, however its often racist and Imperialist ideals are sometimes quite unpalateable - and any modern reader has to bear this fact in mind before proceeding.
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