King Solomon’s Mines. Henry Rider Haggard
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About the Author
Henry Rider Haggard was born into a large and well-to-do family in Norfolk, England. At the age of 19 he went to the Cape Colony, later to become South Africa. He lived on the African continent for seven years, having married and begun a family. He remained living in England from 1882 until his death in 1925.
Haggard’s writing career began as soon as he returned to Britain. He became a prolific novelist and never retired. His most famous novel is King Solomon’s Mines, published in 1885. He published a less well known sequel in 1887, titled Allan Quartermain. Haggard was naturally given to writing adventure type stories, of which he wrote over 70. Allan Quartermain featured in a number of other titles, including Allan and the Holy Flower (1915) and Allan and the Ice Gods, published posthumously in 1927.
Many of his stories are fables of one kind or another. This was indicative of the Victorian missionary mindset, which viewed native peoples as primitive and in need of salvation through indoctrination with Christianity and its moral and ethical precepts. In essence it was fundamental racism that established the notion that white Europeans were superior to other human types. This was largely because European civilizations had evolved markedly over centuries, while aboriginal populations around the world had largely remained in stasis. The result was that Europeans perceived them as living lifestyles that they themselves had left behind millennia ago.
Evidently Haggard’s own experiences in Africa had also shaped his views of the native peoples. They were either enemies to be attacked and killed or allies to be led and ordered in battle. The white man was always considered superior, whatever the situation. Haggard was, however, a humanist and showed some empathy for his non-European characters – more than many writers of his period, despite the Victorian stereotype.
Fundamentally, Haggard was a supreme story teller, as opposed to literary novelist, and he managed to maintain a high standard of ideas and prose across his 43-year career. It seems fair to say that he lived vicariously through writing his books as much as his readership did by reading them, always finding somewhere new to explore and seeking adventure through his characters.
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King Solomon’s Mines
In 1871, Henry Morton Stanley, a Welsh journalist, succeeded in locating the whereabouts of David Livingstone, a Scottish missionary and explorer who had been incommunicado in darkest Africa for some years, having been on a quest to find the source of the River Nile. At that time much of Africa was still uncharted and mysterious, giving rise to ideas that the deepest and darkest regions were somehow lost in time; primal and primitive.
It was against this backdrop that Henry Rider Haggard wrote his seminal novel King Solomon’s Mines (1885), which invented the literary genre now described as ‘lost world’. In 1912 Arthur Conan Doyle published a novel titled The Lost World, which is where the phrase describing the genre was coined. King Solomon’s Mines introduced the concept of there being isolated worlds within the wider world. As such they are closed systems that the central characters manage to enter and eventually exit to tell their story. As a literary devise the ‘lost world’ scenario has served very well ever since Rider Haggard conceived of it.
Rider Haggard was a well educated man and, in addition to his knowledge of Stanley and Livingstone, he also knew of the conquest of the Spanish conquistador, Hernán Cortés, who had taken control of the Aztec Empire in Mexico, 1519, with very few men by cultivating an impression of invincibility and playing on the Aztec’s superstitions and beliefs. It is in a similar vein that Rider Haggard’s central characters manage to avoid death at the hands of natives on their quest into the African interior.
Having survived various life threatening ordeals on their way, the party of explorers eventually arrives in a ‘lost valley’ called Kukuanaland, which is ruled over by a dictatorial king named Twala. The scenario is inadvertently portentous of despotic rulers that will come and go in the 20th century. A native, named Umbopa, is singled out for execution, but the central character, Allan Quartermain, manages to save his life. Umbopa then turns out to be Ignosi, the rightful heir to the throne of Kukuanaland. A civil war then ensues, in which Twala is killed, so that Ignosi becomes king.
Twala’s former advisor, Gagool, then leads the explorers to King Solomon’s Mines, which are caves within a mountain, containing a hoard of treasure. Gagool then triggers a mechanism to trap the party inside. Following several days of incarceration an escape route is found and the Europeans manage to free themselves, their pockets filled with treasures. They eventually find their way back to England as wealthy men.
In essence the story is one of triumph over self inflicted adversity, in the true spirit of the real life English explorer. The phrase ‘nothing ventured, nothing gained’ sums up the ethos by which such men, and occasionally women embarked on their epic journeys into the unknown. It struck a chord with the reader because it was a way of living vicariously. One could visit dangerous places in the mind, whilst sitting comfortably by the fire and it made little difference whether the story was fact or fiction, or somewhere in between.