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The book represents a detailed consideration of the development of the theme of the sexual imperative primarily through the prism of ten of Haggard's novels, a largely unexplored area of his fiction, but also in certain of his contemporary romances. The book fills an important gap in Haggard scholarship which has traditionally tended to focus upon his early romances and to centre on their political and psychological resonances, and to contribute to wider current debates on Victorian and turn of the century literature. It explores the relationship between Haggard's fictional rendition of this theme and aspects of his personal history and it proposes that his preoccupation with it constitutes in significant part an outworking of deeply personal sexual and emotional issues. The book relates Haggard's fiction to the literary and social context in which he wrote. It contends that although his treatment of this theme is not nearly as adventurous as that of some of his literary contemporaries his repeated consideration of what he regarded as the most important human driver lends his fiction a strength and integrity which has not been fully recognised

Immortality has been an enduring human desire, and certainly one that British novelists in the late century engaged with. H. Rider Haggard was one such novelist, and in his sensational She: A History of Adventure he raises the possibility of transcending human conceptions of time through the titular Ayesha, whose existence represents both an existential threat to the British way of life and a seductive fantasy. Although initially illegible to the explorers who encounter her, through her bodily destruction Ayesha, and the scale of time that she stands for in the text, becomes legible, dissolving the fantasy.

In this exciting re-reading of the classic work of Haggard and Kipling, Gail Ching-Liang Low examines the representational dynamics of colonizer versus colonized. Exploring the interface between the native 'other' as a reflection and as a point of address, the author asserts that this 'other' is a mirror reflecting the image of the colonizer - a 'cultural cross-dressing'. Employing psychoanalysis, anthropology and postcolonial theory, Low analyzes the way in which fantasy and fabulation are caught up in networks of desire and power. White Skins/Black Masks is a fascinating entry into the current debate of post-colonial theory.

This essay argues that H. Rider Haggard's early and most successful imperial romances, King Solomon's Mines (1885) and She (1886–87), can best be understood in relation to the contemporaneous discourse of international law. Reading the novels alongside the reports of Travers Twiss, the British jurist who gave legal form to the colonial exploits of King Leopold II of Belgium, the essay finds the imperial romance bidding for the juridically expansive plans of the new imperialism. Both novels thus discard the conventional divisions of imperial thought—the binaries between metropole and colony, self and other—insisting instead on universalist visions of order.

This article considers the links between land reform and emigration through the figure of Henry Rider Haggard and argues that these two issues were deeply intertwined within British politics. Land reform in Britain is often considered as a domestic issue, but imperial campaigners often presented this in terms of the British empire. Haggard campaigned for twenty years for a greater living link to the land in Britain and the empire and believed that this link had profound effects upon English patriotism, character, and health. The imperial frontier had a spirit that improved English character, an idea that Haggard developed in the 1870s and is evident in much of his fiction. Imperial emigration was presented as a patriotic act that aided imperial defence in Australia from Chinese expansion and in South Africa from indigenous opposition. Population was the only way to bolster and defend the empire. Considering his books, speeches, newspaper reviews, and his work for the Royal Colonial Institute, this article argues that British politics and the land between 1900 and 1920 should be considered in an imperial frame. Existing work has neglected the imperial aspect of land reform, and how it was presented by emigration societies, which many imperialists considered an obvious way of dealing with unemployment and increasing urbanization whilst bolstering Greater Britain.

Henry Rider Haggard, the famed author of adventure romances, wrote the novel Dr. Therne (1898) in response to weakening compulsory smallpox vaccination laws, thus entering one of the most heated debates of the late nineteenth century. With Dr. Therne, Haggard aimed to intervene in the lives of the many working-class anti-vaccinationists who, from the 1850s onwards, mobilised to evade what they perceived as a gross – and targeted – extension of state power at the expense of individual rights. Recovering the novel, which has not yet received scholarly attention from historians of medicine, reveals the way fiction was called upon to change minds during a crucial period of Victorian medicine, one that witnessed a climactic shift in public health intervention. This article will examine the reception of Dr. Therne in various print media – middle-class London papers, medical journals and working-class, anti-vaccinationist publications – to consider some new dynamics of the debate which the disagreement over Haggard’s polemic exposes, including the perceived power of fiction (when properly priced and distributed) to change minds, and the contested role of the evangelical press. Additionally, a discussion of the different iterations of Dr. Therne, and a look at an exceptional anti-vaccinationist response in the form of a competing novel, illustrates that pro- and anti-vaccinationists alike contributed to a moment in late Victorian society when the role of fiction was considered a worthy contender in a debate ostensibly about fact.

In the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, several writers voiced their apprehensions about the state of the British Empire and the dangers they thought it faced by making comparisons between Britain and the Phoenician city of Tyre and the greatest of Tyre’s colonies, Carthage. This paper compares Rider Haggard’s use of this analogy in his novel Elissa or the Doom of Zimbabwe with other writers of his time who compared Britain to the Phoenicians. Haggard emerges as deeper, more wide-ranging and sophisticated in his use of the ‘Phoenician analogy’ than other writers who employed it.

Livingstone Online is a digital museum and library that provides a global audience with public access to the vast written and visual legacies of David Livingstone (1813–1873), the British Victorian explorer of Africa. The site’s manuscripts span Livingstone’s adult life, ranging from family correspondence written in the 1830s to the field diaries of the 1870s composed in the Congo Basin. Additional illustrations, photographs, and other materials encompass nearly two centuries of relevant historical and contemporary sources. Over the course of Livingstone Online’s fifteen-year development, the project has made significant contributions to scholarly conversations and public knowledge about British imperial history and African history, and has become a leader in the field in developing best practices for the digitization and digital publication of manuscript material and images from the ‘global south’. In February 2020 three members of the project team gathered online to discuss the site’s latest edition — Livingstone’s Missionary Travels Manuscript (1857) — and the wider development of Livingstone Online as a nineteenth-century digital humanities project over the last decade and a half. Adrian Wisnicki (University of Nebraska-Lincoln) is the director of Livingstone Online; Kate Simpson (University of Glasgow) is an Associate Project Scholar who has contributed to each of the site’s critical editions; and Justin Livingstone (Queen’s University Belfast) is the joint director (with Wisnicki) of Livingstone’s Missionary Travels Manuscript (1857).

This article examines Henry Rider Haggard's novel Mr. Meeson's Will in the context of Victorian discourses concerning fashion and progress. I argue that the practice of fashionable tattooing in Victorian England engendered a crisis regarding the cultural meaning of tattoos. No longer marking only sailors, criminals, or colonial subjects, tattoos also graced the bodies of the fashionable elite. Read in this light, Haggard's novel challenges the limits of an imperial power predicated on clear demarcations between civilized and savage practices. By instead situating Augusta's ink within colonial women's tattooing practices, I understand the tattoo as illegible to dominant narratives of cultural legitimacy, highlighting its challenge to imperial definitions of civilization.