Adolescent Pornography and Imperialism in Haggard's King Solomon's Mines

Adolescent Pornography and Imperialism in Haggard's King Solomon's Mines WILLIAM J. SCHEICK University of Texas at Austin THE POPULARITY of H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines (1885) is beyond question. A glance at the copyright page of the Penguin printing of King Solomon's Mines reveals that this current edition, which is only one among several, has been reprinted almost annually for the last thirty years. In its own time, the book also sold remarkably well, achieving a sale of "hundreds of thousands" by 19 ll;1 and this longevity in the marketplace is particularly noteworthy given the major challenges to the doctrine of English imperialism that had surfaced during the Edwardian period.2 Although King Solomon's Mines was deliberately written as "a book for boys" after the model of Treasure Island and was in fact marketed as five-shilling juvenilia,3 it was dedicated by Haggard "to all the big and little boys who read it."4 Indeed, not only was this book read by children at home and in public schools, where it was sometimes used as a classroom textbook, but it was also read by adults at all levels of society,5 including significant writers such as Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad. For many of these Victorian and Edwardian readers, primarily male readers, the prevalent idea of Africa became the picture of the territory described in King Solomon's Mines,6 even though (as Haggard later confessed) his novel was "a work of pure imagination, for in [its] day very little was known of the region wherein its scenes were laid."7 For many of these readers, moreover, King Solomon's Mines became the model par excellence against which to measure other imperialist fiction. Even Conrad, who hated Haggard's work as "too horrible for words,"8 apparently consciously or unconsciously shaped features of Heart of Darkness (1902) in terms of Haggard's model for the imperialist romance.9 Just what accounts for the long-lived popularity of this book over the last one hundred years may finally elude us. Its eventuary plot of 19 ELT: VOLUME 34:1, 1991 adventure, its humor, and its plain narrative manner—each keeping the reader's attention directed away from racist and misogynist undertones —no doubt make the book as appealing today as it was earlier. Possibly, there is another feature of this romance that has likewise contributed significantly to its perennial success: that in King Solomon's Mines Haggard has apparently perpetrated a joke. This ruse is designed to appeal (possibly subliminally) to the prurient interests of the male readers he himself declared as his public. At the core of his novel is a joke that yokes male adolescent pornographic fantasies with the misogynist and imperialistic impulses of Haggard's imagined audience of "big and little boys." In exposing this jest at the heart of King Solomon's Mines, it is important to keep in mind Haggard's admission that he never liked fiction , but that he nevertheless wished for the sort of money he knew it could earn him. Such an attitude suggests a less than serious approach to his craft in this book, and pertinently Haggard also claimed that he wrote this "mere jeu d'esprit" in his leisure hours during about six weeks' time.10 By his own admission, then, Haggard saw his romance as a humorous trifle, a jeu undertaken for a frankly commercial purpose. Comedy and adventure would certainly appeal to the male audience he clearly had in mind, but even better in attaining this market would be the "playful" inclusion of sex in his book. After the publication of King Solomon's Mines, Haggard stated in a review of some recent fiction that "sexual passion is the most powerful lever with which to stir the mind of man, for it lies at the root of all human things."11 Sex was as much a seller of books in Haggard's day as it is in our own. In contrast to today, however, the sexual content of these works was much less blatant, much more covert and encoded in mass-marketed works.12 It is in this sense...