King Solomon’s Mines
by H. Rider Haggard
***
So here I am,
clickety-clacking away at a story about lost tribes that I could swear had
never been done before when I realize—I’m channeling H. Rider Haggard!
That’s right, the Victorian writer whose 1885 breakout novel, King Solomon’s Mines, singlehandedly created the “Lost Civilization” genre of adventure fiction.
At least I’m in good company.
Haggard’s most famous fictions, King
Solomon’s Mines and 1887’s She: A
History of Adventure, have been
influencing writers from Rudyard Kipling to Edgar Rice Burroughs to James
Hilton and Michael Crichton, as well as giving rise to a slew of movie
adaptations and knockoffs. (Indiana Jones, anyone?)
It’s not that the concept of
recovering civilizations believed to be lost hadn’t been knocking around the
world for a while. Probably Plato no sooner wrote his myth of lost Atlantis
than people started to wonder about the possibility of Atlantean survivors.
Medieval Europeans dreamed of discovering Prester John’s lost kingdom. The
whole lost civilization mythos got an unexpected blast of reality when Spanish
conquistadors stumbled across the amazing New World kingdoms of the Aztecs and
Incas, and the remains of the still more ancient Mayan civilization. Beyond
every horizon lay the possibility of cultures older, wiser and wealthier than even
the most ardent dreamers could imagine.
Still, fast forward a few
centuries, and as the blank spaces on the map were filled in, hopes of finding
such lost civilizations ebbed. That is, until the younger son of a country barrister, after failing the army entrance exam,
finally managed to get a job as secretary to the governor of Britain’s Natal
colony in South Africa.
Although Henry Rider
Haggard’s stay in Africa lasted only four years, they were years that changed
his life, and with it, the lives of countless readers and dreamers after him.
It was the down to earth vividness of his African experiences, the language of
hunters and farmers, the sounds and sights and scents of ox-drawn wagons and
lions and elephants described by such apparently down to earth narrators as King Solomon’s Mines’ Allan Quartermain
that made his fantastic dreams of lost treasure and lost civilizations come
alive.
But that was still in the
future when Haggard returned to England. He married and returned briefly to
Africa with his wife before settling back in England to study law and dabble in
writing fiction.
He had a couple of not very
successful (and now little-read) novels under his belt in the early 1880’s when
one of his brothers bet him he couldn’t write anything as exciting (or
successful) as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure
Island. (Or in another version, Henry Rider was the one who bet his brother
that he could write something better.)
The result, written in six
weeks (or possibly sixteen weeks—the mythologizing had already begun), was at
first rejected by baffled publishers. But when once published, it became 1885’s
best seller. And adventure stories have never been the same since.
Although Haggard dedicated
the story to “all the big and little boys who read it”, girls have always liked
it too. Out of copyright, it’s readily available online, although I’m
currently get reacquainted with it, after an initial reading decades ago,
through the Barnes & Noble Classics edition from the Dallas Public Library
and available at Amazon. I recommend reading the original before
checking out the numerous movie versions, including the 1937 version whose
poster illustrates this post.
(Next Friday, plot,
characters and controversies in H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines.)
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