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Rider Haggard and the Lost Empire
1st edn. 8vo. Original gilt lettered blue cloth (Fine), dustwrapper (Fine in protective cover, not price clipped). Pp. xiii + 263, illus with b&w plates (no inscriptions).
Hardcover
First published March 1, 1994
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About the author
Tom Pocock
45 books4 followersTom Pocock was the author of 18 books (and editor of two more), mostly biographies but including two about his experiences as a newspaper war correspondent.
Born in London in 1925 - the son of the novelist and educationist Guy Pocock - he was educated at Westminster School and Cheltenham College, joining the Royal Navy in 1943. He was at sea during the invasion of Normandy and, having suffered from ill-health, returned to civilian life and in 1945 became a war correspondent at the age of 19, the youngest of the Second World War.
After four years wth the Hulton Press current affairs magazine group, he moved to the Daily Mail as feature-writer and then Naval Correspondent, becoming Naval Correspondent of The Times in 1952. In 1956, he was a foreign corresponent and special writer for the Daily Express and from 1959 was on the staff of the Evening Standard,as feature writer,Defence Correspondent and war correspondent. For the last decade of his time on the Standard he was Travel Editor.
He wrote his first book, NELSON AND HIS WORLD in 1967 on his return from reporting the violence in Aden and his interest in Nelson has continued. Indeed, eight of his books are about the admiral and his contemporaries; his HORATIO NELSON was runner-up for the Whitbread Biography Award of 1987.
Tom Pocock has contributed to many magazines and appeared on television documentaries about Nelson and the subject of another of his biographies,the novelist and imperialist Sir Rider Haggard.
Born in London in 1925 - the son of the novelist and educationist Guy Pocock - he was educated at Westminster School and Cheltenham College, joining the Royal Navy in 1943. He was at sea during the invasion of Normandy and, having suffered from ill-health, returned to civilian life and in 1945 became a war correspondent at the age of 19, the youngest of the Second World War.
After four years wth the Hulton Press current affairs magazine group, he moved to the Daily Mail as feature-writer and then Naval Correspondent, becoming Naval Correspondent of The Times in 1952. In 1956, he was a foreign corresponent and special writer for the Daily Express and from 1959 was on the staff of the Evening Standard,as feature writer,Defence Correspondent and war correspondent. For the last decade of his time on the Standard he was Travel Editor.
He wrote his first book, NELSON AND HIS WORLD in 1967 on his return from reporting the violence in Aden and his interest in Nelson has continued. Indeed, eight of his books are about the admiral and his contemporaries; his HORATIO NELSON was runner-up for the Whitbread Biography Award of 1987.
Tom Pocock has contributed to many magazines and appeared on television documentaries about Nelson and the subject of another of his biographies,the novelist and imperialist Sir Rider Haggard.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 20, 2020
This book has a strange elegiac tone about it, in that it is discussing someone who had a great deal of what might conventionally be considered as success but which felt like a failure to him because he did not succeed when it came to the wishes and ambitions of his heart. The lost empire spoken of by the author is quite grand in nature, and it includes the fall of the British Empire as well as the lost empire of the imagination of the subject, who had some strong goals about how it was that the English people were to be revitalized through the increase of agricultural work and land ownership in England (as well as in the empire as a whole), something which has not happened to any appreciable degree in the century or so since Haggard died a prematurely old and exhausted man in the 1920's. The author has done a good job in writing a biography about a person whose life is remembered for only a small section of his massively prolific writing efforts, and in showing how it was that a man who was a laughingstock in his time nevertheless remains relevant today.
This book is about 250 pages long and it is divided into fourteen chapters that take a conventional chronological view of the subject's life from his family background (1) and early childhood to his young adulthood of adventure in South Africa (2), his struggles to find a place for himself given his lack of education and somewhat ordinary-seeming abilities (3, 4), and some early lack of success in love and relationships. The author talks about the vivid imagination and the political setbacks that led Haggard to refuse political ambitions even as he sought to support the Salvation Army as well as various causes near and dear to his heart as a Norfolk agriculturalist. Frequent travels, some of them done with political goals on the part of the ruling Conservatives to keep him from making their election campaign more difficult, are interspersed with various personal sorrows and struggles and some appallingly bad health. The author explores how it is that Haggard felt old and used up at least by the time that World War I began and he was unable to find an active place, and the last few years of his life appear to have been increasingly unhappy ones as he feels himself being passed by by the world around him. Death seems almost like a mercy and a release.
The fair-minded reader is likely to come to a book like this with some awareness of at least a few of the subject's works, most notably She, King Solomon's Mines, and Allan Quartermain, the three books of the author that have remained in print since they were written in the late 1800's. That said, most readers of this book will be unaware of the way that the author had ambitions far beyond writing romance novels, and was a proud if somewhat unconventional imperialist and a close friend of Rudyard Kipling, with whom he shared an appreciation of the benefits of the white man's burden and a great deal of popular appeal during the course of his life and the sorrows of losing only sons and not feeling as respected by the literary and cultural establishment as they would have liked. The author shows how it is that Haggard used travel as a means of inspiring his creativity and also providing him with something to do to keep his novels' sales from being hurt by overproduction, which became an increasing problem as Haggard's novels became increasingly less popular with time and he developed other interests that took him away from his writing, which he relied upon to provide his living.
June 24, 2023
Most people will know Rider Haggard only as the writer of She. She, that unforgettable story of youth, death immortality and undying love, and She will I think always be the achievement for which Rider Haggard will be principally remembered. Speaking for myself, She belongs to the select group of forty or so novels which obsessed and obsess me throughout my life. But Rider Haggard, at lest according to Pocock's biography, believed that a more important aspect of his life and even a greater achievement, was to contribute to reforms and changes which would ensure the survival of the British empire. This surpised me very much; Pocock's biography offers many surprises to those who only know Haggard as the author of She.
Rider Haggard was very much a man of his time, very much a late Victorian and Edwardian champion of the British empire, a man who strongly believed in the civilizing virtues of empire but one who nevertheless did not accept truths as “given”, nor did he suffer platitudes lightly. He believed in the one Christian god yet could not accept that those of other religions were either “ignorant” or underdeveloped” or “heretical”. There is arguably a cultural relativism to Haggard's brand of imperialism which looks forward to modern revisionist critiques of colonialism. As a man of his time Haggard was also convinced of the imperative of defeating the Boers in South Africa (from this biography we learn that he admired the Zulus more than he did the Boers and he deplored the Boer quest for total separation (apartheid) of white settler and African.
Many of Haggard's prognoses of forthcoming world developments were on the nail: he warned that Germany would be set on a path of revenge after the defeat of 1918 and the demands for reparations on the grounds of sole responsibility for war as laid down in the Treaty of Versailles; he foretold China's rise to world power status and the threat that the rise of Asia posed to the dreams of some kind of British or white imperium. Although he wrote a huge number of novels, mostly adventure stories in Africa involving buried kingdoms, lost civilizations, barbaric customs, even demonic rites (one recalls HP Lovecraft: one wonders-did Lovecraft read Rider Haggard adventures?) and was in his time as now mostly known as a novelist, he wanted to be thought of as a social and economic reformer. He was irritated when journalists would show more interest in his plans for a new novel than in any practical mission to create a resettlement plan for the empty colonies or to further agricultural reform. (Haggard believed very much in agricultural self sufficiency based on supporting small family farms. One can well imagine what he would have thought of modern agricultural policies such as the CAP!)
Haggard was keen to populate the empty spaces of the dominions, notably Canada and Australia, with British settlers. He did not use the expression but his dream seemed to be the creation of a white commonwealth of British nations. It was not to be, although the Ottawa agreement on trade and tariffs of 1932, signed seven years after his death, was a modest first step in that direction, and may have owed something to Haggard's strivings and not inconsiderable influence (he had personal access to many prime ministers of the British empire and was a close friend of the American president, Theodor Roosevelt). The events of the Second World War and the subsequent rise of the United States and the creation of a European tariff union heralded the end of dreams of a rejuvenated British empire. The dominions drifted ever further from the British motherland and Britain itself joined the European economic “common market” in 1971, a step which simply confirmed on paper the factually long existent demise of empire, an act comparable in its symbolic weight to the abdication of the last Roman Emperor in 476.
Anyone either interested in the Victorian and Edwardian age, in the aspirations of empire, or in the remarkable personality of the creator of She, will not be disappointed by Pocock's biography. However, the biography lacks the passionate engagement so characteristic of Haggard himself. Pocock is balanced and fair, but singularly lacks what DH Lawrence called “the sense of wonder” a sense which permeated Haggard's life, love, commitments and all he undertook The blurb to this edition includes the statement about Haggard: “His imagination was held by the reality of the British Empire and its future rather than the lost civilizations of his literary fantasies.” That might have been written by Pocock himself (perhaps it was, the blurb it is not attributed) and herein lies the failing of this highly readable biography, it fails to connect between the nostalgia, fantasy and yearning of Rider Haggard, in his politics and in his fiction, it fails to understand the connection between the fantasy of lost civilizations in Haggard's fiction and the imperial utopia which he yearned to realise in the real practical world. That task, I mean the task of apprehending the relation between the conjuring of lost civilizations in the mind's eye and the yearning for the creation or recreation of civilizations in practical reality, the making of the connect between nostalgia and yearning, that is a task which Pocock leaves to the reader.
Rider Haggard was very much a man of his time, very much a late Victorian and Edwardian champion of the British empire, a man who strongly believed in the civilizing virtues of empire but one who nevertheless did not accept truths as “given”, nor did he suffer platitudes lightly. He believed in the one Christian god yet could not accept that those of other religions were either “ignorant” or underdeveloped” or “heretical”. There is arguably a cultural relativism to Haggard's brand of imperialism which looks forward to modern revisionist critiques of colonialism. As a man of his time Haggard was also convinced of the imperative of defeating the Boers in South Africa (from this biography we learn that he admired the Zulus more than he did the Boers and he deplored the Boer quest for total separation (apartheid) of white settler and African.
Many of Haggard's prognoses of forthcoming world developments were on the nail: he warned that Germany would be set on a path of revenge after the defeat of 1918 and the demands for reparations on the grounds of sole responsibility for war as laid down in the Treaty of Versailles; he foretold China's rise to world power status and the threat that the rise of Asia posed to the dreams of some kind of British or white imperium. Although he wrote a huge number of novels, mostly adventure stories in Africa involving buried kingdoms, lost civilizations, barbaric customs, even demonic rites (one recalls HP Lovecraft: one wonders-did Lovecraft read Rider Haggard adventures?) and was in his time as now mostly known as a novelist, he wanted to be thought of as a social and economic reformer. He was irritated when journalists would show more interest in his plans for a new novel than in any practical mission to create a resettlement plan for the empty colonies or to further agricultural reform. (Haggard believed very much in agricultural self sufficiency based on supporting small family farms. One can well imagine what he would have thought of modern agricultural policies such as the CAP!)
Haggard was keen to populate the empty spaces of the dominions, notably Canada and Australia, with British settlers. He did not use the expression but his dream seemed to be the creation of a white commonwealth of British nations. It was not to be, although the Ottawa agreement on trade and tariffs of 1932, signed seven years after his death, was a modest first step in that direction, and may have owed something to Haggard's strivings and not inconsiderable influence (he had personal access to many prime ministers of the British empire and was a close friend of the American president, Theodor Roosevelt). The events of the Second World War and the subsequent rise of the United States and the creation of a European tariff union heralded the end of dreams of a rejuvenated British empire. The dominions drifted ever further from the British motherland and Britain itself joined the European economic “common market” in 1971, a step which simply confirmed on paper the factually long existent demise of empire, an act comparable in its symbolic weight to the abdication of the last Roman Emperor in 476.
Anyone either interested in the Victorian and Edwardian age, in the aspirations of empire, or in the remarkable personality of the creator of She, will not be disappointed by Pocock's biography. However, the biography lacks the passionate engagement so characteristic of Haggard himself. Pocock is balanced and fair, but singularly lacks what DH Lawrence called “the sense of wonder” a sense which permeated Haggard's life, love, commitments and all he undertook The blurb to this edition includes the statement about Haggard: “His imagination was held by the reality of the British Empire and its future rather than the lost civilizations of his literary fantasies.” That might have been written by Pocock himself (perhaps it was, the blurb it is not attributed) and herein lies the failing of this highly readable biography, it fails to connect between the nostalgia, fantasy and yearning of Rider Haggard, in his politics and in his fiction, it fails to understand the connection between the fantasy of lost civilizations in Haggard's fiction and the imperial utopia which he yearned to realise in the real practical world. That task, I mean the task of apprehending the relation between the conjuring of lost civilizations in the mind's eye and the yearning for the creation or recreation of civilizations in practical reality, the making of the connect between nostalgia and yearning, that is a task which Pocock leaves to the reader.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews