Amber · Youth, adventure, character
1856–1925
Most alive as a writer when a line across a map opened into country not yet crossed.
Colonial official in Natal and the Transvaal, barrister, farmer and romancer: in 1885 Haggard answered the challenge of Treasure Island with an African adventure — and gave the lost-world story its lasting form.
AMBER
A faded map, copied from the hand of a dying traveller, marks a road northward across country from which no man is known to have returned. When Sir Henry Curtis asks Allan Quatermain to guide an expedition in search of a lost brother, the old hunter agrees; with Captain Good and the enigmatic Umbopa they go north — through thirst, battle, kingship, witchcraft and the fatal seduction of buried wealth.
Explore the edition →Life & context
Henry Rider Haggard was born at Bradenham Hall in Norfolk on 22 June 1856, the eighth child of a large country family. At nineteen he was sent to Natal on the staff of Sir Henry Bulwer, and in 1877 he accompanied Sir Theophilus Shepstone’s mission into the Transvaal at the time of the British annexation. He later served as Master and Registrar of the High Court there.
He returned to England, entered Lincoln’s Inn and was called to the Bar in January 1885. The law never became his true country.
Haggard later recalled that a notice of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island prompted him to attempt an adventure of his own; a later memoir supplied the famous wager with his brother. What can be said securely is that Stevenson supplied the challenge, and that Haggard wrote under the pressure of emulation rather than the shelter of an established reputation.
He remembered the writing as taking “about six weeks”, done in the evenings while his days belonged to the Temple; his notebooks place the drafting over roughly sixteen weeks, from January to 21 April 1885. She and Allan Quatermain followed within two years.
At Ditchingham in Norfolk Haggard became a practical farmer. A Farmer’s Year and the two volumes of Rural England grew from that life, and led him into public service on land settlement and on the Royal Commission on Coast Erosion and Afforestation. He was knighted in 1912.
He died in London on 14 May 1925; his ashes were buried at St Mary’s, Ditchingham. By then Allan Quatermain had long escaped his maker and entered the common stock of adventure.
