Rider Haggard: His Extraordinary Life and Colonial Work

There is no excuse needed for basing this biography of Sir Henry Rider Haggard on the personal account of his literary life given in his own words in his autobiography, The Days of My Life. There can be no truer biography than that given by the first hand witness, the author himself. Of course, in my book, I have used memories provided by other family members, friends and colleagues to supplement his very full, subjective life story. In terms of the methodology in this biography, I have employed traditional literary criticism allied with qualitative approaches to research, such as family letters, portraits on canvas, evidence from correspondence between Haggard and other authors, handwriting in the original texts to discern authorship, sampling, observation, period plate photographs, realia, correspondence with the present author, and in depth interviews with, living and erstwhile members of the Haggard family. Rather than make this biography a chronological survey of the life and work of Henry Rider Haggard, I have arranged the study thematically. In this regard, a general sweep of his career rolls over Norfolk, the Natal, Egypt, Iceland, Mexico, Canada, the United States and so on. It is not to be expected that publications or events in Rider Haggard’s life will be in date order, but will cover geographical themes. As a committed and lifelong Socialist, I cannot always find an affinity with Haggard’s weltanschauung, but his brilliant imagination and scope of spiritual understanding, are elements of his life and writing with which I can empathise. There is, of course, a danger in looking at Haggard’s literary work from a 21st century perspective in that what may have been acceptable and respectably considered attitudes and behaviour in the late nineteenth–century would not be viewed in the same light by the present writer now. We must not exchange our prejudices with a past time. It would be like asking Rider Haggard why he killed elephants. Things have changed, but it does not mean that events of a hundred years ago should have been any different than they were. Postmodernism tends to assume totalitarian ownership of former times and people. For example, Haggard and his contemporaries’ arguments on the nature of the Zulus may be considered quite differently today. So, too, would be his and his contemporaries’ attitudes to politics, race, religion, social structures, animal and human rights and sexual orientation. But this will be essentially a favourable biography because of his extraordinary talent, his brilliant imagination and fantastic literary output. I cannot rise to the argument in some quarters that a highly critical work on Haggard is necessary. I shall leave that to Wendy Katz, Sydney Higgins and Lindy Streibel, and wait to receive the judgment of posterity. Haggard was a man of his time, with great sophistication and empathy towards other human beings; a state builder and nationalist, and should not always be judged by contemporary postmodern, protofeminist standards of outlook and viewpoint, unknown to the late-Victorians.