by Dennis Butts
A groan of terror rose from the onlookers. Some stood petrified with fear, others threw themselves upon their knees and cried out. As for the king, he sat still and turned pale beneath his dusky skin.
The chiefs are persuaded by this stupendous event to accept Umbopa as the lawful king of the Kukuanas, and Twala is overthrown. It is one of the most memorable episodes in the whole history of adventure literature.
First published in September 1885, King Solomon’s Mines was an immediate success. The Athenaeum magazine called it ‘one of the best books for boys – old or young – which we remember to have read.’ Frequently reprinted, it sold 31,000 copies during its first twelve months, and in America thirteen different editions appeared before the year was out. But in July 1886, the same Athenaeum which earlier had praised the novel so enthusiastically now published a devastating article entitled ‘Fact and Fiction’ by a contributor named only by the initials B.B.M. The article coolly pointed out that Rider Haggard’s description of the sun’s eclipse was completely wrong. It was both inaccurate in its account of the duration of the eclipse, and also in its belief that such an eclipse would be clearly observable in both Britain and Africa at the same time!
Rider Haggard was forced to re-write, and he did so very quickly. He abandoned his account of an eclipse of the sun, and replaced it with an account of the eclipse of the moon from the 1887 edition and all subsequent editions of the novel. Thus Captain Good’s almanack was revised to read: ‘4 June, total eclipse of the moon commences at 8.15 Greenwich time, visible in Teneriffe, South Africa, &c.’ Rider Haggard also adjusts all his other references to the sun’s eclipse appropriately, and so it is that readers today are thrilled by the mystery of the moon – no longer the sun:
Everything grew still as death. Slowly and in the midst of this most solemn silence the minutes sped away, and while they sped the full moon passed deeper and deeper into the shadow of the earth, as the inky segments of its circle slid in awful majesty across the lunar craters. The great pale orb seemed to draw near and to grow in size. She turned a coppery hue, then that portion of her surface which was unobscured as yet grew grey and ashen, and at length, as totality approached, her mountains and her plains were to be seen glowing luridly through a crimson gloom.
Rider Haggard soon had to make other revisions. Allan Quatermain, his sequel to King Solomon’s Mines, was rapidly written in the summer of 1885, three months after Rider Haggard had finished the previous book. This was shortly after his older brother Jack had returned to England from his post as Vice-Consul in Lamu, full of tales of adventure in East Africa. The story of Allan Quatermain’s new quest is to discover, with his old companions, whether the rumours of a great white race living north of Mount Kenia are true. The tale proceeds rapidly. Quatermain, Curtis and Good, soon commission a remarkable Zulu, Umslopogaas, to guide them, and experience a series of exciting adventures: fighting a fierce battle with Masai warriors, undergoing a terrifying subterranean journey, and discovering a lost civilisation, before they are finally engulfed in a ferocious civil war.
The story first appeared in serial form in the monthly Longman’s Magazine between January and August 1887, with three chapters appearing in each number of the periodical. Although there were no serious blunders in Allan Quatermain to compare with the inaccurate account of the sun’s eclipse in King Solomon’s Mines, when the story was prepared for first publication in book form, Rider Haggard took the opportunity to revise the text fairly extensively, making around two hundred alterations for the final version. Many of these changes are very slight: where Rider Haggard simply tidies up his punctuation, or tries to be more accurate, for example changing ‘twenty paces’ to ‘ten fathoms’ in a description of the distance from a submerged arch on the lake-journey. Rider Haggard also used the opportunity of revising the story for book publication to remove some anachronistic-sounding banalities, such as when Sir Henry Curtis dismisses Queen Sorais’s romantic but regal advances with the less than stately ‘You are putting us both in an awkward position.’ (In the revised version Sir Henry now says, ‘Oh, Sorais, I pray thee speak not thus for this thing cannot be. I am betrothed to thy sister . . . ’) Rider Haggard also eliminates a few passages which on later reflection seemed to appear unsuccessful, such as his elaborate attempt to explain the Zu-Vendi alphabet.
The two most interesting examples of Rider Haggard’s revisions to Allan Quatermain occur in his treatment of the comic French cook Alphonse, and when he makes some modest attempts to reduce the amount of violence in the novel.
The adventurers meet Alphonse when they reach Dr Mackenzie’s Mission Station, and discover that their food is being prepared by a French chef who is on the run from the police for having committed a crime passionel in his native France. From the moment of his first appearance, the descriptions of Alphonse never deviate from the stereotype of a vain, comic and cowardly Frenchman. He is, we are told, ‘A dapper little man . . . with shoes made of tanned hide, and remarkable for a bustling air and most enormous mustachios, shaped into an upward curve, and coming to the point for all the world like a pair of buffalo-horns.’ Alphonse boasts about his courage, but proves to be timorous; he speaks ludicrous English, is nearly always hysterical in manner, and though completely untrustworthy in any crisis is always vociferous in defence of his craven behaviour afterwards. But Rider Haggard came to realise that his initial depiction of Alphonse was so exaggerated and caricatured as to become tedious and offensive. He reduced some of his disparaging references to the Frenchman, as well as cutting out some of his more cowardly outbursts, such as when Alphonse prays that it will not matter if his companions are drowned provided that he is saved. Rider Haggard even eliminates Alphonse’s self-glorifying introduction of himself, when the adventurers first meet him:
‘Great!’ replied the little Frenchman sadly. [He is always ‘little’ compared to the heroic stature of the Anglo-Saxon adventurers.] ‘I am already great, I embody the genius of France. Yes, I – with my straw hat and my little cane, I am “la France.” But will my greatness be recognised? That is the question!’
As well as being criticised for his careless writing, Rider Haggard also came to be attacked for what was felt to be the excessive amount of violence in his books. In the British Weekly in August 1887, for example, the youthful J.M. Barrie satirised Allan Quatermain for depicting the deaths of ‘not less than 50,000’ human beings, while in January 1888 the Church Quarterly Review expressed similar concerns about violence in no fewer than five of his novels. Even Rider Haggard’s friend and admirer, Andrew Lang, suggested, after reading an early version of Allan Quatermain, that ‘perhaps it would be well to mop up a little blood.’
When he revised the magazine version of the story, Rider Haggard certainly made some attempts to tone down the violence in the novel. When the hand of a Masai warrior, severed by the stroke of an axe, sinks into the river, for instance, the book version of the story omits the magazine’s observation that ‘I saw a young crocodile seize it as it was slowly sinking.’ Later Rider Haggard spares us some of the details of Alphonse’s murder of his girlfriend’s lover – ‘How could I tell that his head was like an egg-shell? But his skull was thin. The crutch went through it.’ He also omits the gruesome description of a native servant being drowned in a volcanic river – ‘He had been a black man, now he was a livid white, for the boiling water had scalded off nearly all his outer skin.’ He even decided to leave out his approving portrait of the bloodthirsty Christian missionary Mackenzie as he defends the mission against the attack by the Masai:
It really was a sight to see that good but angular man go in – coat-tails, broad-brimmed hat, carving-knife and all. They say that nobody is so bitter as an apostate, so, on the same principle, for fighting purposes at a pinch commend to me a man of peace. At any rate, Mackenzie’s play with the carving-knife was something beautiful, though I fear that the Society of Friends would not have approved of this way of ‘convertin
g the heathen.’
Although Rider Haggard was criticised for the presence of violence and many deaths in his stories, and although he tried to tone down some of the details, his stubbornness prevented him from excising these elements too drastically, for he knew that they were an essential part of his tragic view of life.
Rider Haggard grew up in the post-Darwinian climate of opinion. The publication of The Origin of Species in 1859 seemed to many people to challenge Christian beliefs and to reveal a world in which the fittest to survive were not necessarily the noblest or the best. At home, Rider Haggard, the son of a country squire passionately devoted to the land, saw his pessimism confirmed by the collapse of English agriculture in the last decades of the nineteenth century, when thousands left the land. As a colonial administrator in Africa from 1875-1881 he witnessed the disintegration of tribal life, particularly that of the Zulus, and this confirmed his views of human transience. The ruined cities Allan Quatermain sees on the East African coast, at the beginning of the quest for the white race, speak not only of an African glory that has gone, but of a European decline in the future:
Gone! Quite gone! the way that everything must go. Like the nobles and the ladies who lived within their gates, these cities have had their day, and now they are as Babylon and Nineveh, and as London and Paris will one day be. Nothing may endure. That is the inexorable law.
If he made changes, he was only prepared to go so far, for in his vivid adventure stories he had found a wonderfully dramatic way to articulate his sense of human tragedy and transience. More than that, when confronted by situations which it was impossible to understand properly or to do anything about, Rider Haggard offers a remarkable picture of heroic stoicism in the face of tragedy. When traitors storm the Queen’s palace at the end of Allan Quatermain, Umslopogaas heroically defends the main stairway with his great battle-axe against overwhelming Zu-Vendi hordes, and goes to a certain death. Supremely defiant, dying, but undefeated, he remains Rider Haggard’s most powerful symbol of man’s struggle against the night.
‘How Umslopogaas held the stair’
In Dylan Thomas’s words:
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
8. How Did Bevis Grow Ten Years in Fifty-Eight Days?
Richard Jefferies, Bevis (1888)
Richard Jefferies’s Bevis: the Story of a Boy, is what is now known as a ‘crossover book’. It began as a ‘three-decker’ novel written for adults about childhood, but within ten years had been trimmed from 52 to 40 chapters (possibly by G.A. Henty) and had become a favourite with children. It was now for childhood – and it manages to pack into a single narrative, ostensibly set in a single summer, a complete childhood. Bevis, in the opening chapter (probably the best part of the book) is a self-willed child of perhaps eight years old: fifty-eight days later (Jefferies was nothing if not meticulous in his time-keeping) he is a teenager, tough, weathered and skilled (if still self-willed). The double time scheme is an interesting trick, (also found, for example, in Othello) and it says a great deal about how certain kinds of children’s authors regard childhood as a timeless, seamless entity.
Like Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy to the history of the novel, Bevis is seminal in the history of children’s literature; it was enormously influential, but is now little read by adults or children (even, one suspects, when it is free to download on Kindle). However, there the resemblance ends: Tristram Shandy was experimental and revolutionary, trying, with a lot of humour, to find out how the new literary form, the novel, might possibly work. Jefferies, however, was faced with a form (the ‘three-decker novel’) that had rather lost its way. Towards the end of the nineteenth century he managed, with almost unerring lack of taste, to incorporate all the worst elements of the contemporary novel into his book. He was – and even his most devoted fans must surely agree – no novelist: indeed, in terms of style and coherence he was a very bad novelist, a writer quite capable (as in Amaryllis at the Fair) of abandoning the plot after the second line for a page of garrulous and often embarrassing personal opinions. Worse, as in his one intended children’s book, Wood Magic (1881), he often could not decide who he was writing for. The young Bevis in that book may be realistically spoiled, but the myth-making is politically driven and sits uncomfortably beside a sentimental sub-plot (a magpie steals an engagement ring). And that doesn’t take into account Jefferies’s penchant for splendidly gloomy aphorisms; notably ‘a man soon tires of swimming, but the water never tires of waiting to drown him’.
Fortunately, Jefferies was also an incredibly knowledgeable and inspired countryman who still has a special and respected place in English country writing: in this field he is elegant and peerless. The Gamekeeper at Home (1878) or Wild Life in a Southern County (1879) demonstrate literary mastery, and are by turns practical and lyrical; and many of his short pieces can stand confidently in any literary company. Take the description of the garret that opens The Amateur Poacher (1879) with its evocation of boyhood fears. There is a terrifying stuffed fox that,
mounted guard over the old flintlock that was so powerful a magnet to us in those days. Though to go up there alone was no slight trial of moral courage after listening to the horrible tales of the carters in the stable, or the old women who used to sit under the hedge in the shade, on an armful of hay, munching their crusts at luncheon time.
The great cavernous place was full of shadows in the brightest summer day; for the light came only through the chinks in the shutters. These were flush with the floor and bolted firmly. The silence was intense, it being so near the roof and so far away from the inhabited parts of the house. Yet there were sometimes strange acoustical effects – as when there came a low tapping at the shutters, enough to make your heart stand still. There was then nothing for it but to dash through the doorway into the empty cheese-room adjoining, which was better lighted . . .
This is the spirit of Bevis at its best, the recollections of boyhood which recreate the feelings of childhood for all readers. And, if that were not enough, Jefferies is one of the rarest of literary phenomena, the English mystic, whose The Story of My Heart (1887) remains a classic of its pantheistic kind. Here is the reflective Jefferies at the seaside:
There alone, I went down to the sea. I stood where the foam came to my feet, and looked out over the sunlit waters. The great earth bearing the richness of the harvest, and its hills golden with corn, was at my back; its strength and firmness under me. The great sun shone above, the wide sea was before me, the wind came sweet and strong from the waves. The life of the earth and the sea, the glow of the sun filled me; I touched the surge with my hand, I lifted my face to the sun, I opened my lips to the wind, I prayed aloud in the roar of the waves – my soul was strong as the sea and prayed with the sea’s might.
This might seem a long way from childhood, but the combination of Jefferies’s two strengths, evocation of childhood and mysticism, have echoed through mainstream children’s books for nearly a century. Kenneth Grahame affectionately mocked the style of mystic writing; similar passages in his Pagan Papers (1893) end with the mystically and spiritually elevated ‘loafer’ coming down to earth and going for a beer; but he incorporated it wholeheartedly into another highly influential book, The Wind in the Willows (1906). From then on, until the neo-realists of the 1970s, the ideal atmosphere of the children’s book was rural, concerned with simple and healthy pastimes, children unencumbered by adults, and protective of an idealised childhood. Male authors and characters tended to dominate the market. From Rudyard Kipling through Arthur Ransome, the camping-and-tramping books of the 1930s and 1940s by writers such as M.E. Atkinson and David Severn, through the rural-idyllic settings of Enid Blyton’s improbable adventure stories and the romantic craftsmen’s-countryside of Alan Garner, and even residually in the dreams of the urban-dy
sfunctional families of Jacqueline Wilson, children’s books have tried to preserve an ideal of childhood.
And it may well have begun with Bevis, in which the ideal of childhood is so strong that it becomes enfolded into a single fifty-eight-day narrative. which reflects the zeitgeist of Victorian Britain and its concerns with childhood innocence, sexuality, freedom and revolution.
The opening chapter is a small masterpiece, a pitch-perfect view of the egocentric small boy, who tries to make a raft from a packing-case:
One morning a large wooden case was brought to the farmhouse, and Bevis, impatient to see what was in it, ran for the hard chisel and the hammer, and would not consent to put off the work of undoing it for a moment . . . It was dragged from the house into one of the sheds for him, and he fetched the hammer and his own special little hatchet for his first idea was to split up the boards. Deal splits so easily, it is a pleasure to feel the fibres part, but upon consideration he thought it might do for the roof of a hut, if he could fix it on four stakes, one at each corner . . .
Away he went with his hatchet to the withy-bed by the brook . . . to cut some stakes . . . He flew at once to attack a little fir, and struck it with the hatchet: the first blow cut through the bark . . . but the second did not produce anything like so much effect . . . Bevis hit it a fourth time, not at all pleased that the fir would not cut more easily, and then, fancying he saw something floating down the stream, dropped his hatchet and went to the edge to see . . .
