King Solomon's Mines (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Online Free Page B

been something close to the impact on later generations of nude photographs of African women in National Geographic magazines. Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “In the Waiting Room” describes a young girl sitting in a dentist’s office circa 1918, waiting for her Aunt, who is being treated. She looks at the photographs in a National Geographic magazine: “black, naked women with necks / wound round and round with wire / like the necks of light bulbs. / Their breasts were horrifying.” Likewise, Haggard’s young readers, boys and girls both, were confronted by unexpected references to the unadorned female body in King Solomon’s Mines.

Critical Reaction
    King Solomon’s Mines was an impressive popular success, with more than 30,000 copies sold in Britain in its first year of publication, 1885. Among its enthusiastic readers were the future American president Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919), Britain’s prime minister William Ewart Gladstone (1809-1898), and a precocious English eleven-year-old, Winston Churchill (1874-1965). King Solomon’s Mines also received generally glowing reviews. The poet and scholar Andrew Lang ( 1844-1912) in the Saturday Review praised Haggard’s “very remarkable and uncommon powers of invention and the gift of ‘vision’.” Lang separated Haggard from the “hack book-makers for boys” who wrote books based on other books they had read, instead of real-life experience. However, the London Church Quarterly Review dissented, complaining about the narrative, which “trembles on the verge of sensuality” and contains “indiscriminate and individual slaughter, whole corpses and dismembered limbs, skulls and bones, duels and suicide, torture and treachery, witchcraft and madness.”
    Some reviews of the American edition of the book, which appeared in 1886, were even more equivocal. The Dial, while appreciating the excitement of the tale, complained about the “crudeness of many of Mr. Haggard’s sentences.” A Boston publication, Literary World, even made a punning reference to the novelist’s name: “The book reeks with brutality and suffering, and enough to make the reader as haggard as its author.” Affectionate joshing and parodies by Haggard’s friends and readers appeared as a sign of the book’s striking novelty. The minor nineteenth-century poet James Kenneth Stephen (1859-1892) penned “To R. K.” some humorous doggerel that was published in the Cambridge Review and later collected in his Lapsus Calami (Cambridge: Macmillan and Bowes, 1891):
    When mankind shall be delivered
From the clash of magazines,
And the inkstand shall be shivered
Into countless smithereens:
When there stands a muzzled stripling,
Mute, beside a muzzled bore:
When the Rudyards cease from kipling
And the Haggards Ride no more.
    Rudyard Kipling himself, a friend to both Haggard and Andrew Lang, also penned a humorous verse in 1889 in homage to them. As reprinted in The Letters of Rudyard Kipling (Vol. 1, 1872-1889, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990), Kipling’s verse, written in the style of the American western author Bret Harte (1836-1902), conjured up the notion of a lecture tour that Haggard and Lang might one day make to the United States:
    I reside at Table Mountain and my name is Truthful James
I am not versed in lecturin’ or other sinful games.
You will please refrain from shooting while my simple lyre I twang
To the tale of Mister Haggard and his partner Mister Lang....
In the ears of Mister Haggard whom they hailed as Mister Lang
The societies of Boston ethnologically sang
And they spoke of creature-legends, and of totem, myth, and sign
And the stricter laws of Metre—Mister Haggard answered ‘Nem.’
    Sir Henry Chartres Biron (1863-1940) wrote a more ambitious, book-length parody, King Solomon’s Wives; or, The Phantom Mines, under the pseudonym Hyder Ragged (London: Vizetelly and Company, 1887). The Hyder Ragged parody describes a trip across a desert and an encounter with King