Romance or Reportage? Henry Rider Haggard and the Pall Mall Gazette

Abstract

Henry Rider Haggard is best known for his astonishing output of popular novels. Between 1884 and his death in 1925, he produced 59 novels and romances. King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and She (1887) have remained in print almost continuously from first publication to the present day. Haggard’s career spanned the period of the New Journalism and the New Imperialism: his first published work appeared in 1877 and he continued to write until the end of his life. He was associated with a remarkable number of leading figures of empire; Rudyard Kipling was a close friend and Robert Baden-Powell, celebrated hero of the Boer War and founder of the boy scout movement, a correspondent. Haggard’s political contacts were various and in later life he served on numerous official committees, many with interests in imperial policy.¹ The American President Theodore Roosevelt was another man with whom Haggard felt himself in sympathy, and he dedicated the 1917 romance Finished to him. In a letter to Haggard, Roosevelt — the only genuinely imperialist president of the United States — lamented the paucity of United States citizens with whom he felt the same degree of mutual understanding.² Roosevelt implied that Haggard’s whole career, including his romance writing, was a service to the cause of British imperialism: ‘what you did on the staff of Sir.