Rider Haggard and the Lost Empire: A Biography. - book reviews

Contemporary Review, Nov, 1993 by Molly Mortimer

King Solomon's Mines, Kim, Treavure Island - three beloved classics at the heart of English literature. Yet each of their authors would have preferred to be remembered for more adult pre-occupations; especially Rider Haggard. His valued and solid expertise on English Agriculture, seen in Rural England 1902, stood no chance against the fascination of Umslopagaas and She. Haggard spent only six years in South Africa but it dominated his whole life and imagination. He was fortunate as a minor colonial servant to see the last of old Africa in the 1870s. He saw the great Zulu nation, for which he had considerable admiration, still unconquered, decimate the British at Isandhlwana, yet terrorised by an ancient witch doctor. At the end of his life (he died in 1925), he saw Egypt and the Tutankhamon discoveries. Indeed, one of his most original stories, 'Moon of Israel', re-writes 'Exodus' from the Egyptian point of view.

Rider Raggard never regarded his writing as more than an amusing and lucrative pastime; he saw himself as farmer and statesman. Like his friend Kipling, he was a passionate imperialist and saw the future in terms of a global British Empire, peopled by emigrating Anglo-Saxons: a dream too late for the thousands lost in the mud of the Somme. But in 1912, newly knighted and appointed to a Royal Commission to visit and study the Dominions as suggested by the 1911 Imperial Conference, his was not yet a lost dream. Even in the early twenties, it was reasonable to see the future in terms of the self-governing Dominions, as the sonorous Statute of Westminster put it. He might even have envisaged some kind of British dominated Commonwealth, but to the mewling birth of the League of Nations, Haggard paid no attention at all.

Tom Pocock, an experienced biographer and journalist, has written a sympathetic study based on largely unexplored papers. Years of self-denigration have made it hard for current writers to appreciate the British Empire. Tom Pocock avoids many psychological pitfalls. Rider Haggard's stories are shot through with sadness for his lost love Lily. A word from his second best, and seemingly long suffering wife, might have rounded off a new picture of a nearly great man.