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Haggard, H Rider

Entry updated 21 April 2025. Tagged: Author.

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(1856-1925) UK civil servant, lawyer, agricultural expert and author. Haggard spent the years 1875-1881 in the Colonial Service in South Africa, where he gained much of the material for his fiction. On his return to the UK he read for the bar while at the same time beginning to produce novels and other work. With his third and fourth published novels,King Solomon's Mines (1885) and the even more successfulShe: A History of Adventure (2 October 1886-8 January 1887The Graphic; cut1886; full text1887), Haggard was catapulted into fame, and soon left the bar; he was knighted in 1912. These two novels of anthropological sf remain his most famous; they established a pattern he would follow for the rest of his career. That pattern – which seems central to the shaping of what much later became known asImperial Gothic – might also be described as a central model for Edgar RiceBurroughs and theScience-Fantasy subgenre whose popularity attended the latter's revival in the 1960s: it is a pattern in which realistic portraits of the contemporary world (in Haggard's case South Africa) are combined with backward-looking displacements (in his case invokingLost Worlds,Immortality andReincarnation) to give a general effect of deep nostalgia. Haggard was fascinated by ruins, ancient civilizations and primitive customs, attempting to use their resonances as a kind of radar to locate himself (and his readers) in the precarious and fragile late-imperialist world which had also fixed his imagination (seeRuins and Futurity). But it is clear that he felt that the vision of a purposeless universe revealed by the theory ofEvolution was essentially correct, and that (for instance) the British Empire was an arbitrary construct in the sands of time, not an hierarchy that revealed the fitting ascendancy of the West; in this, he is clearly distinct from near contemporaries like JohnBuchan or RudyardKipling. Works of his later years are perhaps carelessly read as rebarbatively defensive of the values that made it possible to create an empire.

An allied interest in thePseudoscience of Spiritualism link Haggard to such contemporaries as BulwerLytton and MarieCorelli, though in fact his central literary friendships were with AndrewLang andKipling (see above); but although he shared with the latter afin de siècle sense – which proved entirely accurate – that the British Empire was on the wane, he took this as an expression of the nature of the world, not as an affront to selfhood. His prose was sometimes overblown, but he was a gifted storyteller with a powerful imagination and the ability to create memorable heroic figures, like the Zulu Umslopogaas, whose early life is the subject of the remarkableNada the Lily (1892).

Umslopogaas appears also in Haggard's principal sequence, the novels about white hunterAllan Quatermain which gave Africa to the world as a great adventure and romantic haven in the mind's eye, and to which he added sequels and prequels throughout his career. The Checklist (see below) presents these titles in order of publication; the sequence is given here, however, in order of internal chronology, the dates in which they are set preceding the titles: 1835-1838Marie: An Episode in the Life of the Late Allan Quatermain (September 1911-February 1912Cassell's Magazine;1912); 1842-1869Allan's Wife (1887), which was incorporated intoAllan's Wife and Other Tales (coll1889; exp vtHunter Quatermain's Story: The Uncollected Adventures of Allan Quatermain2003); 1854-1856Child of Storm (1913); 1859Maiwa's Revenge; Or, the War of the Little Hand (July-August 1888Harper's New Monthly Magazine;1888), a short novel narrated much later by Quatermain in aClub Story frame; 1870The Holy Flower (December 1913-November 1914Windsor Magazine;1915; vtAllan and the Holy Flower1915); 1871Heu-Heu, or The Monster (March 1922-March 1923Hutchinson's Story Magazine;1924); 1872She and Allan (July 1919-March 1920Story Magazine as "She Meets Allan";1921); 1873The Treasure of the Lake (February-May 1926Hutchinson's Adventure-Story Magazine;1926); 1874The Ivory Child (2 January-1 May 1915Melbourne Argus;1916); 1879Finished (January-May 1917Adventure;1917); 1879 "Magepa the Buck" (Christmas 1912Pears' Annual) inSmith and the Pharaohs and Other Tales (coll1920); 1880King Solomon's Mines (1885); 1882The Ancient Allan (March-October 1919Cassell's Magazine;1920); 1883Allan and the Ice Gods: A Tale of Beginnings (1927; vtAllan Quatermain and the Ice Gods2003); 1884-1885Allan Quatermain: Being an Account of his Further Adventures and Discoveries in Company with Sir Henry Curtis, Bart., Commander John Good, R.N., and one Umslopogaas (January-August 1887Longman's Magazine;1887; vtAllan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold1999) [see Checklist for movie adaptation]. The precise period covered inA Tale of Three Lions (October-December 1887Atalanta;1887 chap US; rev as coll, vtAllan the Hunter; A Tale of Three Lions1898) was not determined.

Not all these books could be described asScience Fantasy, but all project that sense of desiderium – the longing for that which may never have existed, but which now seems poignantly lost – that lies at the heart of true science fantasy; and those titles written late in Haggard's career – likeThe Ancient Allan, a tale of love-death set in Egypt – confusedly adhere to outmoded political values (see above), while at the same time they express their author's potent (but submerged) sexuality in venues so remote that a suppressed libidinousness can become, occasionally, almost explicit. ButAllan and the Ice Gods, which generally conforms to this description, interestingly sees Quatermain thrown back in time by means of aDrug where he inhabits the body of a paleolithic man through a process ofIdentity Transfer (see alsoPrehistoric SF); his attempts toUplift his new people force upon him an awareness of the decrepitude of modern civilization, and he desists.

It is, however, in theAyesha sequence that Haggard's Victorian libido found easiest release from the chains of the present. The sequence comprisesShe: A History of Adventure (2 October 1886-8 January 1887The Graphic; cut1886; full text1887; cut W TStead, vtShe: A Romance of Marvel and Mystery1896; rev vtThe Annotated She1991 US [see Checklist for full title and comment] ed Norman Etherington);Ayesha: The Return of She (December 1904-October 1905Windsor Magazine;1905; vtThe Return of She: Ayesha1967) which, though it is not aClub Story, takes the form of a manuscript conveyed through and sanctioned by a frame narrative;She and Allan, which provides a link with theQuatermain series; andWisdom's Daughter: The Life and Love Story of She-Who-Must-be-Obeyed (March 1922-March 1923Hutchinson's Story Magazine;1923). Haggard created here, in theImmortal and subversive Ayesha, what has come to seem an abiding emblem of that longing for "primitive" transcendence that typically marks the end of eras; but her lamia-like sexual power over men, which is presented as being parasitic upon the male principle, typically exemplifies Late Victorian male wrestling with issues ofSex and race; her sudden ageing in the first volume of the sequence (later volumes dally inconsequentially with her earlier life) has an effect both tragic and petty (seeApes as Human).The World's Desire (April-December 1890New Review;1890), with AndrewLang, a pendant to the main series, is in part aFantastic Voyage tale which carries Odysseus into new adventures, during which he discovers that Helen of Troy and Ayesha are one.

A knotted eroticism also infusesWhen the World Shook: Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley, and Arbuthnot (November 1918-April 1919The Quiver;1919), a novel plotted in part byKipling (who later helped Haggard withAllan and the Ice Gods): after being shipwrecked on a mysterious PacificIsland, the three eponymous Victorians find a suddenly exposed cavern full of modernAirships, and two humans who have been inSuspended Animation for 250,000 years. The high priest of what may have beenAtlantis (seeLost Race) had used his abnormal scientific achievements to shake the Earth by means of an underground gyroscope, which causes the first Flood; taken on a tour of the world, he is now so distressed byWorld War One that he plans to activate the gyroscope again, in order to eliminateHomo sapiens from the planet we have sullied. Thwarted, he causes the cavern to sink again, with him, to an unknown fateUnder the Sea.

Haggard can seem both heated and evasive to modern readers, but read in context he is a figure of very considerable power, an exemplar of his times, a stirrer in deep waters. [DP/JC]

see also:Anthropology;Dime-Novel SF;History of SF;Origin of Man;Pulp;Radio (USA);Series.

Sir Henry Rider Haggard

born West Bradenham, Norfolk: 22 June 1856

died London: 14 May 1925

works

This listing excludes posthumous omnibuses after 1930. Where US edition precedes UK by less than a month, we follow the flag and cite the UK edition.

series

Allan Quatermain

Ayesha

individual titles (selected)

about the author

links

previous versions of this entry



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