H. Rider Haggard

English writer

• Born: June 22, 1856
• Birthplace: Wood Farm, West Bradenham, Norfolk, England
• Died: May 14, 1925
• Place of death: London, England

Haggard is remembered primarily as a writer of adventure stories set in exotic African locales. His most famous stories, King Solomon’s Mines and She, explore human nature and Victorian taboos while transporting readers into realms far removed from Western civilization.

Early Life

The son of a Norfolk landowner, Sir Henry Rider Haggard was born on the family’s estate and spent most of his early years in Norfolk and London. As a child, he was a dreamy, imaginative boy who did not do well in school, perhaps taking after his mother, Ella Doveton Haggard, a quiet woman who wrote poetry. His hot-tempered father, William Haggard, had a low opinion of him and instead of sending him to university, as he had done his older sons, arranged for him to go to South Africa as an assistant to Sir Henry Bulwer, the lieutenant governor of Great Britain’s Natal colony.

During the 1870’s, South Africa was the site of conflicts among the native Zulu people, British colonists, and Afrikaner settlers—who were known to the British as Boers (Dutch for farmers). Haggard was only nineteen years old when he arrived in South Africa in August, 1875, and found himself caught up in the conflicts. In May, 1877, he personally helped raise the British flag in the Transvaal, an Afrikaner republic after it was annexed by the British. Later that same year, he became an official of the high court of the Transvaal Colony, in which capacity he accompanied the high court judge around the territory. The two men slept in a wagon, and Haggard’s duties included shooting and cooking game for their meals.

After returning to England in 1879, Haggard met and married Louisa Margitson, a friend of one of his sisters, with whom he had four children, but with whom he never felt truly close. The woman he was actually in love with had rejected him and married someone else while he was in Africa. In 1880, Haggard and his new bride returned to South Africa, where Haggard intended to take up ostrich farming near the border between Natal and the Transvaal. However, continuing strife between Afrikaners of the occupied Afrikaner republics and the British made the area unsafe. The following year, Haggard decided to go back to England once more, this time to pursue a career as a lawyer.

Life’s Work

Bored by the law, Haggard devoted his spare time while studying for the bar to writing. He had already written some articles while in Africa, including “A Zulu War Dance,” which appeared in Gentleman’s Magazine in July, 1877. He next wrote a book-length account of the political situation in South Africa, Cetywayo and His White Neighbours (1882). This book earned some respectful reviews, but it did not sell well, and Haggard decided to turn his hand to fiction. The result was Dawn (1884), a complicated novel about romantic intrigue and property disputes, which he followed up with The Witch’s Head (1885), a semiautobiographical novel about a love triangle.

Neither of Haggard’s first novels was successful with the public, although reviewers did praise the African sections of The Witch’s Head. Haggard was contemplating giving up on his writing career and concentrating on the law when Treasure Island (1883), the recently published adventure story by Robert Louis Stevenson, came to his attention. The success of Stevenson’s novel inspired Haggard to write an adventure story himself, and in 1885 he published King Solomon’s Mines , a tale of three Englishmen seeking a fabled treasure in an uncharted region of Southern Africa.

Advertised as the most amazing book ever written, King Solomon’s Mines was a huge success with both the public and reviewers, who praised its imagination and excitement. Haggard followed this success with Allan Quatermain (1887), a sequel to King Solomon’s Mines, and She (1887), a story of a two-thousand-year-old white goddess ruling over an African tribe. She was even more successful than King Solomon’s Mines with the general public, but some reviewers criticized its prose style and even accused Haggard of plagiarism. Haggard did not endear himself with reviewers when he published an article on fiction in 1887 in which he condemned most of the novels being published and said that only his style of adventure writing had merit.

Haggard wrote more adventure stories over the succeeding decades, including Cleopatra (1889), a tale of Egypt’s famous queen; Eric Brighteyes (1891), a saga set in Iceland; and Nada the Lily (1892), a tale set among South Arica’s Zulu people. In his later years, the quality of his stories declined, his readership decreased, and reviewers began to dismiss him as third-rate.

In these later years, Haggard turned his attention to political matters. He ran unsuccessfully as a Conservative Party candidate for Parliament in 1895. He also became an advocate for agricultural reform and several books on the topic, including Rural England (1902). He also became involved in several government commissions, including one established in 1906 to investigate coastal erosion and forests and another established in 1912 on the status of the British dominions, which included Canada, Australia, and South Africa.

In 1905, Haggard visited the United States to investigate the Salvation Army’s labor communities and wrote a book, The Poor and the Land , during that same year recommending resettlement of the urban poor on farm land in the colonies. After World War I, he became involved in the anti-Bolshevik Liberty League. He was knighted in 1912.

On May 14, 1925, Haggard died in a London nursing home of complications following an operation, after he had been ill for several months. He had written his autobiography, The Days of My Life , in 1911, but it was not published until the year after his death.

Significance

Haggard achieved his greatest success as the writer of adventure stories, a genre sometimes considered less serious than novels of social realism or character studies. However, he was greatly admired both by later serious authors, such as D. H. Lawrence and Graham Greene, and by social scientists such as the two founders of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.

Freud and Jung were both fascinated by Haggard’s novel She, which they saw as presenting a picture of the eternal feminine archetype. For Jung, Haggard’s work also revealed the deeper workings of the human psyche, the dark and savage powers lurking beneath the veneer of civilization. Haggard himself had his famous character, Allan Quatermain, say that Europeans were nineteen parts savage and only one part civilized. Interestingly, Haggard does not seem to condemn the savage parts of human beings; his books seem rather to celebrate the savagery, to show Europeans being liberated by escaping from the restraints of civilization, something that may have appealed to his readers in civilized England and that may appeal still to those who feel constrained by the modern world.

Haggard also was able to explore issues usually taboo in the Victorian period, from the varieties of sexual attraction through the hostility that lurks beneath politeness to the fate of the soul after death. He also created several memorable characters, most notably the central character of She, the beautiful but diabolical Ayesha, also known as “She Who Must Be Obeyed.” Others included Gagool, the terrifying witch in King Solomon’s Mines, and Allan Quatermain, the rough and grizzled hunter who narrates King Solomon’s Mines and appears in seventeen other stories and novels by Haggard.

Haggard’s work also influenced later writers of adventure and fantasy stories. Edgar Rice Burroughs, the creator of Tarzan, cited Haggard’s work as one of his inspirations, and commentators have seen Haggard’s influence in such works as J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (1955) and in the film King Kong (1933). King Solomon’s Mines itself has also been filmed a number of times.

Haggard’s Books

Novels

1884

• Dawn

1885

• The Witch’s Head

1885

• King Solomon’s Mines

1887

• She

1887

• Allan Quatermain

1887

• Jess

1888

• Colonel Quarich, V. C.

1889

• Cleopatra

1890

• The World’s Desire (with Andre Lang)

1890

• Beatrice

1891

• Eric Brighteyes

1892

• Nada the Lily

1893

• Montezuma’s Daughter

1894

• Hear of the World

1905

• Ayesha

Nonfiction

1882

• Cetywayo and His White Neighbours

1902

• Rural England

1905

• The Poor and the Land

1926

• The Days of My Life

Bibliography

Chrisman, Laura. Rereading the Imperial Romance: British Imperialism and South African Resistance in Haggard, Schreiner, and Plaatje. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 2000. This study sees Haggard as carrying out an imperial ideological project and focuses on the economic significance of King Solomon’s Mines. The text may be difficult to understand for those not familiar with postmodernist vocabulary.

Cohen, Morton. Rider Haggard: His Life and Works. London: Hutchinson, 1960. Solid biographical study marred by a negative attitude toward Haggard’s writings.

Ellis, Peter Berresford. H. Rider Haggard: A Voice from the Infinite. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978. Competent retelling of the biographical story. Includes illustrations and a detailed bibliography.

Etherington, Norman. Rider Haggard. Boston: Twayne, 1984. Provides insightful analysis of Haggard’s writings. Also provides a useful biographical sketch, a chronology, and an annotated bibliography.

Fraser, Robert. Victorian Quest Romance: Stevenson, Haggard, Kipling, and Conan Doyle. Plymouth, England: Northcote House, 1998. Analyzes King Solomon’s Mines and She. Warns against easy condemnations of Haggard as racist or imperialist.

Higgins, D. S. Rider Haggard: The Great Storyteller. London: Cassell, 1981. Detailed biographical study adding new information, though not always explaining where the new information is from. Includes illustrations, a bibliography, and a useful list of Haggard’s writings.

Katz, Wendy R. Rider Haggard and the Fiction of Empire: A Critical Study of British Imperial Fiction. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Offers interesting insights into Haggard’s works, but they are overshadowed by an extended attempt to prove that Haggard was an imperialist and a racist.

Low, Gail Ching-Liang. White Skins/Black Masks: Representation and Colonialism. New York: Routledge, 1996. Postmodernist analysis of Haggard’s works, focusing on the exclusivity of the European male bonding that he portrays.