H. Rider Haggard on the Imperial Frontier: The Political And Literary Contexts of His African Romances

306 Pages·2006·16.15 MB·English

by  Gerald Monsman

H. Rider Haggard

H. Rider Haggard
on the Imperial Frontier:
The Political and Literary Contexts
of His African Romances
GERALD MONSMAN
g ELT Press
UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT GREENSBORO
ELT Press English Department PO Box 26170
University of North Carolina Greensboro, NC 27402–6170
e–mail: [email protected]
NUMBER TWENTY–ONE : 1880–1920 BRITISH AUTHORS SERIES
ELT Press © 2006
All Rights Reserved
Acid–Free Paper ∞
ISBN 0–944318–21–5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2005938753
Front Cover Map Of Africa, Showing Its Most Recent Discoveries (1867)
Constructed & Engraved by W. Williams, Philadelphia
Back Cover H. Rider Haggard (c. 1890)
The Norfolk Record Office
TYPOGRAPHY & DESIGN
Display Type: Galliard
Text Type: New Century Schoolbook
TEXT
Designed by Robert Langenfeld
COVER
Designed by Michelle Coppedge
Printer : Thomson–Shore, Inc. Dexter, Michigan
In Memoriam
Diana DeKryger-Monsman

CONTENTS
g
Acknowledgments viii–ix
Introduction 1–12
ONE
Empire and Colony 13–40
TWO
Heretic in Disguise 41–71
THREE
Diamonds and Deities: The Spoils of Imperialism 72–101
FOUR
Zululand: Native Auto/Biography 102–130
FIVE
From the Cape to the Zambezi: Boer and British 131–162
SIX
From Zululand to the Far Interior: Natives and Missionaries 163–190
SEVEN
Romances of the Lakes Region: Tales of Terror and the Occult 191–224
EIGHT
In Concluding: “‘I Have Spoken,’ as the Zulus Say” 225–236
Notes 237–267
Appendix: Bertram Mitford: Profile of a Contrarian 268–288
Index 289–294
vii
g ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For his unstinting advice and support, grateful acknowledgment is
made to Dr. Robert Langenfeld, my ELT Press editor at the Univer-
sity of North Carolina, Greensboro, and to his hawk-eyed proofreader,
designer, and editorial assistant, Michelle Coppedge. Two of my essays
in English Literature in Transition are here particularly integral to
chapters three and four: “Of Diamonds and Deities: Social Anthropol-
ogy in H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines,” 43.3 (2000), 280–
97, and “H. Rider Haggard’s Nada the Lily: A Triumph of Translation,”
47.4 (2004), 371–97. Pertaining to the appendix on Bertram Mitford, I
wish to thank the Manuscripts Department, Wilson Library, the Uni-
versity of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, for permission to publish from
the A. P. Watt and Company Records #11036, General Manuscripts.
Individuals who have helped me along on this intellectual explora-
tion are many. In the United States, I thank Frieda Rosenberg, Head
of Serials Cataloging, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill; and
Rives Nicholson in the School of Information and Library Science, Uni-
versity of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
In England, I thank Brian Stringer; Fiona Mitford; Dennis Savage,
to whom I apologize for not showing up because I underestimated the
slowness of the Tube; Wendy Sterry, Archive Specialist, Norfolk Heri-
tage Centre; Liz Evans; Father David Goddard; and Madeleine Beard.
In Africa, I thank Dennis Pretorius; Dr. Keith Tankard; Sharon Warr,
who substantiated for me the impenetrability of the Colonial Office
files; and several cherished academic friends from KwaZulu-Natal,
who though wishing to remain unnamed nevertheless are the enliven-
ers of my convictions and comprehension.
Finally, and more particularly, I am pleased to thank my colleague
at the University of Arizona, Roger Bowen, who formally endorsed this
sabbatical enterprise to the Powers in high places.
The ideas here advanced arise from an ongoing investigation into the
narrative patterns of the nineteenth century’s struggle to interpret the
good and decipher the diabolic in human affairs. Recontextualized in
this current analysis by new arguments and their surrounding appli-
cations, diverse elements hark back to widely assorted drafts maturing
viii
among my papers, as well as to my study of colonial allegory in the Vic-
torian Review, 18:2 (1992), 49–62. For permission to draw upon those
last-named insights, I thank the Victorian Studies Association of West-
ern Canada.
During this career-long undertaking, I have been supported in one
project or another by the American Council of Learned Societies, the
John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the American Philosophi-
cal Society.
However, I dedicate this capstone study to my first guide and abece-
dary, Diana DeKryger-Monsman, who through songs when I was a child
taught me enough Dutch so that fortuitously I could muddle through
Afrikaans in later years. “Dena” was taken out of school after the
eighth grade to work in the “pickle fields” (i.e., cucumbers) and at Ger-
ber’s canning factory. She escaped field and factory, compressed high
school into a year and a half, married happily, and took her Bachelor of
Science degree at Johns Hopkins. When that ancient queen of all the
sciences, “divine philosophy,” beckoned, she took a Ph.D. with Arthur
Lovejoy as supervisor. She then returned to The Hopkins to take an
M.A. in yet another department, which led to her writing and produc-
ing, in the early days of television, live plays for WBAL. If the birth of
her only child did not quite derail her career, said son has it on good
authority that for her the event eclipsed the simultaneous appearance
in the Philosophical Review, 49 (1940), 324–45, of her first essay on
Josiah Royce’s conception of the self. Well into her 80s she still gravi-
tated toward any nearby university like iron to a magnet. And from the
first she never doubted I would publish—and always took it for granted
that I would publish boldly.
Gerald Monsman
Sierra de Santa Catarina
3 March 2006
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