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Henry Rider Haggard

Henry Rider Haggard
Born June 22, 1856(1856-06-22)
Bradenham, NorfolkDied May 14, 1925(aged 68)
LondonOccupationNovelist, scholar NationalityBritishWriting period 19th & 20th century GenresAdventure, Fantasy, Fables, Romance, Science Fiction, History Subjects Africa Influences
Robert Louis Stevenson ; Rudyard Kipling
Influenced
Edgar Rice Burroughs, C.S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, Carl Jung, Joseph Conrad
Official websitehttp://www.riderhaggardsociety.org.uk
Biography Portal

Sir Henry Rider Haggard KBE (June 22, 1856 – May 14, 1925), was a prolific writer of adventure novels set in exotic locations, predominantly Africa. He was also involved in agricultural reform around the British Empire. His stories, situated at the lighter end of Victorian literature, continue to be popular and influential to this day.

Contents

Biography

Henry Rider Haggard was born at Bradenham, Norfolk, to Sir William Meybohm Rider Haggard, a barrister, and Ella Doveton, an author and poet. He was the eighth of ten children. He was initially sent to Garsington Rectory in Oxfordshire to study under Reverend H. J. Graham, but unlike his older brothers who graduated from various public schools, he ended up attending Ipswich Grammar School.[1] This was because his father, who perhaps regarded him as somebody who was not going to amount to much, could no longer afford to maintain his expensive private education. After failing his army entrance exam he was sent to a private crammer in London to prepare for the entrance exam for the British Foreign Office,[1] for which he never sat.

Instead, Haggard's father sent him[citation needed] to what is now South Africa, in an unpaid position as assistant to the secretary to Lieutenant-Governor of the Colony of Natal. It was in this role that Haggard was present in Pretoria for the official announcement of the British annexation of the Boer Republic of the Transvaal. Indeed, Haggard raised the Union flag and read out much of the proclamation following the loss of voice of the official originally entrusted with the duty.[2]

At about that time, Haggard fell in love with Mary Elizabeth "Lilly" Jackson, whom he intended to marry once he obtained paid employment in Africa. In 1878 he became Registrar of the High Court in the Transvaal, and wrote to his father informing him that he intended to return to England and marry her. His father forbade it until Haggard had made a career for himself, and by 1879 Jackson had married Frank Archer, a well-to-do banker. When Haggard eventually returned to England, he married a friend of his sister, Mariana Louisa Margitson, and the couple travelled to Africa together. They had a son named Jock (who died of measles at age 10) and three daughters, Angela, Dorothy and Lilias. Lilias became an author, edited The Rabbit Skin Cap, and wrote a biography of her father entitled The Cloak That I Left.

Moving back to England in 1882, the couple settled in Ditchingham, Norfolk, Louisa's ancestral home. Later they lived in Kessingland and had connections with the church in Bungay, Suffolk. Haggard turned to the study of law and was called to the bar in 1884. His practice of law was somewhat desultory, and much of his time was taken up by the writing of novels, which he saw as being more profitable. Heavily influenced by the larger-than-life adventurers he met in Colonial Africa (most notably Frederick Selous and Frederick Russell Burnham), the great mineral wealth discovered in Africa, and the ruins of ancient lost civilizations in Africa, such as Great Zimbabwe, Haggard created his Allan Quatermain adventures.[3][4] Three of his books, The Wizard (1896), Elissa; the doom of Zimbabwe (1899), and Black Heart and White Heart; a Zulu idyll (1900), are dedicated to Burnham's daughter, Nada, the first white child born in Bulawayo; she had been named after Haggard's 1892 book Nada the Lily.[5]

Years later,[citation needed] when Haggard was a successful novelist, he was contacted by his former love, Lilly Archer, née Jackson. She had been deserted by her husband, who had embezzled funds entrusted to him and fled, bankrupt, to Africa. Lilly was penniless, and so Haggard installed her and her sons in a house and saw to the children's education. Lilly eventually followed her husband to Africa, where he infected her with syphilis before dying of it himself. Lilly returned to England in late 1907, where Haggard again supported her until her death on 22 April, 1909. These details were not generally known until the publication of Haggard's 1983 biography by D. S. Higgins.

Haggard was heavily involved in reforming agriculture and was a member of many commissions on land use and related affairs, work that involved several trips to the Colonies and Dominions. He was made a Knight Bachelor in 1912 and a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1919. He stood unsuccessfully for parliament as a candidate for the Conservative Party in the 1895 summer election, losing by only 198 votes.

Writing career

Haggard is most famous as the author of the novels King Solomon's Mines and its sequel Allan Quatermain, and She and its sequel Ayesha, all swashbuckling adventure novels set in the context of the Scramble for Africa. He is also remembered for the epic Viking romance, Eric Brighteyes.

While his novels portray many of the stereotypes associated with colonialism, they are unusual for the degree of sympathy with which he often treats the native populations. Africans often serve heroic roles in his novels, although the protagonists are typically, though not invariably, European. A notable example is Ignosi, the rightful king of Kukuanaland, in King Solomon's Mines. Having developed an intense mutual friendship with the three Englishmen who help him reclaim his throne, he accepts their advice and abolishes witch-hunts and arbitrary capital punishment.

Haggard also wrote about agricultural and social issues reform, in part inspired by his experiences in Africa, but also based on what he saw in Europe. At the end of his life he was a staunch opponent of Bolshevikism, a position he shared with his friend Rudyard Kipling. The two has bonded upon Kipling's arrival at London in 1889 largely on the strength of their shared opinions, and the two remained lifelong friends.

Reputation and legacy

Haggard's stories are still widely read today. Ayesha, the female protagonist of She, has been cited as a prototype by psychoanalysts as different as Sigmund Freud (in The Interpretation of Dreams) and Carl Jung. Her epithet "She Who Must Be Obeyed" is used by British author John Mortimer in his Rumpole of the Bailey series as the private name the lead character, a barrister with some skill in court, uses for his wife, Hilda, before whom he trembles at home. Haggard's Lost World genre influenced the popular American writer Edgar Rice Burroughs.[citation needed] Allan Quatermain, the hero of King Solomon's Mines and its sequel Allan Quatermain, has influenced the American film character Indiana Jones, featured in the films Raiders of the Lost Ark, Temple of Doom and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.[citation needed] Quatermain has gained recent popularity thanks to being a main character in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Haggard was praised in 1965 by Roger Lancelyn Green, one of the Oxford Inklings, as a writer of a consistently high level of "literary skill or sheer imaginative power" and a co-originator with Robert Louis Stevenson of the Age of the Story Tellers[6].

Chronology of works

Publication dates unknown

Allan Quatermain series

Ayesha series

See also

References

  1. ^ a b Butts, Dennis; H. Rider Haggard [2006]. "Introduction and Chronology", in Dennis Butts: King Solomon's Mines. Oxford University Press, vii-xxviii. 
  2. ^ Pakenham, T. (1992) The Scramble for Africa: White Man's Conquest of the Dark Continent from 1876-1912, Avon Books, New York. ISBN-10 0380719991.
  3. ^ Mandiringana, E.; T. J. Stapleton (1998). "The Literary Legacy of Frederick Courteney Selous". History in Africa 25: 199-218. doi:10.2307/3172188. 
  4. ^ Pearson, Edmund Lester. Theodore Roosevelt, Chapter XI: The Lion Hunter (HTML). Humanities Web. Retrieved on 2006-12-18.
  5. ^ Haggard, H. Rider [1926]. The Days of My Life Volume II (txt). Retrieved on 2006-12-17. 
  6. ^ from the introduction to the 1965 Everyman's Library edition of the one-volume The Prisoner of Zenda and Rupert of Hentzau by Anthony Hope

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: H. Rider Haggard Wikisource has original works written by or about: Henry Rider Haggard PersondataNAME Haggard, Henry Rider ALTERNATIVE NAMES Haggard, Rider SHORT DESCRIPTION English novelist, scholar DATE OF BIRTH June 22, 1856PLACE OF BIRTH Norfolk, EnglandDATE OF DEATH May 14, 1925PLACE OF DEATH
Categories: H. Rider Haggard | 1856 births | 1925 deaths | English novelists | Fabulists | Legion of Frontiersmen members | Knights Commander of the Order of the British Empire | Old IpswichiansHidden categories: All articles with unsourced statements | Articles with unsourced statements since January 2008

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