King Solomon's Mines (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Free

Oxford University Press, 2004, p. xi). Baden-Powell’s book, so expressly intended (and entitled) for boys, was also devoured by Victorian girls. Haggard’s dedication probably did not scare off girl readers of his day either. Nor should it make today’s reader jump to conclusions about the book’s audience and intent. Haggard admitted he wrote King Solomon’s Mines in direct competition with a recent bestseller, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, also a book ostensibly for boys but one that has always been read by girls—and adults of both sexes.
    Prefiguring Edgar Rice Burrough’s Tarzan books and other popular literature, King Solomon’s Mines is genuinely involved with Africa, however consciously Haggard mythicizes the subject matter. This is only to be expected in an author for whom Africa was a subject of lasting preoccupation. Born in West Bradenham Hall, Norfolk, England, in 1856, the son of a country squire, Henry Rider Haggard was seen as unpromising by his family. When young Henry failed to get an army commission, he was sent off to Natal, South Africa, in 1875 as secretary to the governor of Britain’s Natal colony. His career advanced, and in 1877 he transferred jobs, to work for the special commissioner. The following year he became master and registrar of the High Court in the Transvaal. His six years in Africa would provide inspiration for the rest of his writing life.
    His friend Andrew Lang would later write that Haggard had “found himself” by writing King Solomon’s Mines. One might add that Haggard found himself even before, by going to Africa, which transformed a rather muddled civil servant into a decisive and productive Victorian writer. This metamorphosis is akin to the change experienced by another Victorian novelist, Anthony Trollope (1815-1882), after Trollope landed a job as post-office inspector in Ireland, which awakened his own latent talents.
    Haggard was deeply involved with public service, and published many books of history and advocacy, most of which are unread today. He never took his adventure stories as seriously as his nonfiction books, such as Cetywayo and His White Neighbours; Or, Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal (London: Trübner and Company, 1882); The Last Boer War (London: Kegan Paul and Company, 1899); and A History of the Transvaal, ( New York: New Amsterdam Book Company, 1900). Obsessed with the fate of poor rural communities, he published studies like A Farmer’s Year: Being His Commonplace Book for 1898 (London: Longmans and Company, 1899; The Poor and the Land: Being a Report on the Salvation Army Colonies in the United States and at Hadleigh, England, with Scheme of National Land Settlement, and an Introduction (London, New York: Longmans, Green, 1905); Rural Denmark and Its Lessons (London, New York: Longmans, Green, 1911); Regeneration: Being an Account of the Social Work of the Salvation Army in Great Britain (London: Longmans, Green, 1910); and Rural England: Being an Account of Agricultural and Social Researches Carried Out in the Years 1901 & 1902 (London, New York: Longmans, Green, 1902). Haggard also wrote extensively about World War I: A Call to Arms to the Men of East Anglia (London: R. Clay,1914), and The After-War Settlement and Employment of Ex-Servicemen in the Oversea Dominions (London: Published for the Royal Colonial Institute by the Saint Catherine Press, 1916).
    Although few fans of Haggard’s novels today have read these hard-to-find nonfiction texts, Haggard himself felt they represented his highest achievements. Unlike Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who valued his own eccentric writings on spiritualism over his immortal Sherlock Holmes stories, Haggard may have been at least partly right in his evaluation of his own work. The myths so abundant in King Solomon’s Mines and She are bolstered by factual material, hard-won life experience of the kind detailed in Haggard’s books about history, agriculture,