Return to England — Called to Bar — Wrote “Cetewayo and his White Neighbours” — Reception of the work — Why H. R. H. took to writing fiction — “Dawn” — J. Cordy Jeaffreson — Press notices encouraging but sales small at first — “The Witch’s Head” — Quiet life at Ditchingham — Letters from Shepstone — Life in London — Practice in Divorce Court.

On our return to England in the autumn of 1881 we went to stay at Bradenham for a while and rested after our African adventures. I do not remember anything that we did there, except that we were at the Sandringham ball. A note in my wife’s diary mentions that the Princess, afterwards Queen Alexandra, “looked lovely in pearl grey satin and was the prettiest woman in the room with the exception of Lady Lonsdale.”

Before Christmas we moved to a furnished house at Norwood. Here, having all my way still to make in the world, I set to work in earnest. First of all I entered myself at Lincoln’s Inn, but found to my disgust that before I could do so I was expected to pass an examination in Latin, English History and, I think, Arithmetic. My Latin I had practically forgotten, and my English History dates were somewhat to seek. I represented to the Benchers that, after having filled the office of Master of the High Court of the Transvaal, this entrance examination was perhaps superfluous, but they were obdurate on the matter. So I set to work and, with the assistance of a crammer, in a month learned more Latin than I had done all the time I was at school; indeed, at the end of a few weeks I could read Caesar fluently and Virgil not so ill. The end of it was that I passed the examination at the head of the batch who went up with me, or so I was given to understand.

Another thing that I did was to write my first book, “Cetewayo and his White Neighbours, or Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal and the Transvaal.” It contained about two hundred and fifty closely printed pages in the first of its editions, and represented a great amount of labour. I was determined that it should be accurate, and to ensure this I purchased all the Blue-books dealing with the period of which I was treating, and made precis of them, some of which I still possess.

But it is one thing for an unknown person to write a book of this character, and quite another for him to persuade anyone to publish it. I find among my papers a pencil draft of a letter which I sent to many publishers. It runs:

I write to inquire if you are inclined to undertake the publication of a short work I am now finishing. It is the result of some six years’ experience in South Africa in official and private capacities, and contains amongst other things a private history of the annexation of the Transvaal which, as I was on Sir T. Shepstone’s staff at the time, I am qualified to write.

The parts of the book, however, which would, I think, ensure the sale at the present moment, both here and in the Colonies, are the chapters dealing with the proposed grant of responsible government to Natal and the question of the reinstatement of Cetewayo. As you are no doubt aware, the ex-king will visit England very shortly, when I think an opportunely published work on the subject would find a ready sale.

The book is written in as interesting a style as I can command and would be published under my own name.

Awaiting the favour of a reply,

I am, etc.

Needless to say the reply always came, but notwithstanding the tempting bait of “the interesting style,” its character may be guessed. Nobody wished to have anything to do either with Cetewayo or his white neighbours.

At length I was faced with the alternative of putting the results of my labours into the fire or of paying for their production in book form. A letter from Trubner and Co., dated May 18, 1882, informs me that my MS. will make a volume of three hundred and twenty pages “like enclosed specimen,” and “if you will send us a cheque for the sum of 50 pounds sterling we will undertake to produce an edition of seven hundred and fifty copies.”

I sent the cheque, although at the time I could ill afford it, and in due course the work appeared. On the whole it was extremely well received by such papers as chose to review it seriously. Some of these notices I still possess, favourable and unfavourable. One from the Daily News, which comes under the latter category, dated August 23, 1882, is amusing to read today. It is written in the “high sarcastic” strain. Here is a sentence from it.

Mr. Haggard distrusts Cetewayo and is shocked at the notion of reinstating him on any terms. He is also shocked at the “retrocession of the Transvaal” and thinks we have not yet seen the end of the troubles in store for us, owing to our neglect to persevere in the work of exterminating the Boers, and so forth. These views have already been pretty fully set forth — so fully, in fact, that the necessity for a further exposition of them at this time does not seem very obvious. The freshest, and certainly the most amusing thing in Mr. Haggard’s book is his solemn warning that our policy, which he is pleased to stigmatise as “sentimental,” may end in alienating the affections of “the Colonists,” etc.

Here we see the party politics of the day at their best, or rather at their worst. The late Lord Carnarvon, who, it may be remembered, was Colonial Secretary during most of the years when I was intimately connected with South Africa, wrote to me:

“I am glad to find that my view as regards the Transvaal should be endorsed by one who had such good opportunities of judging as yourself”; and again:

Private.

Dear Mr. Haggard, — I am very much obliged to you for your extremely interesting book on Cetewayo. I have been so engaged with the accumulations of eight months’ business and with all the hundred and one questions which arise on our return to England that I have only been able to look at those parts which most closely interested me personally from their relation to events in which I was myself concerned; but I read these with great satisfaction. The English public was so deceived by misrepresentations of the annexation of the Transvaal that the real history was never understood; and the humiliating surrender of it was accepted in partial ignorance at least of the facts. A true statement of it is therefore very valuable, and I am grateful to anyone who has the courage to say what really did occur. It was as needless as it was discreditable; and though the unexpected discovery of gold is solving many difficulties, the unworthy nature of the cession has done great mischief to all time. I hope I may have the opportunity of talking about this to you.

Believe me,
Very faithfully yours,
Carnarvon.

I gladly quote an extract from a letter written by Sir Marshal Clarke from Basutoland, since it tempers my criticisms of Sir Hercules Robinson (Lord Rosmead), a gentleman of whom I have the most kindly personal recollections. He says, referring to this book:

I don’t think you have done quite justice to Sir Hercules Robinson. He appears to me to have been the right man for the place and for the time. He is not a very popular Governor, but his opinions carry great weight here as well as at home; he had a very difficult position at first — one of his principal difficulties arose from the impossibility of foreseeing how far his views would be supported at home — and while he appears to me to have acted with unswerving loyalty, his influence has done much to mitigate antipathies of races and to maintain our character for fair dealing with whites and blacks.

I also received letters from the late Lord Lytton, Lord Randolph Churchill, and others.

Except for any influence it may have had upon certain leading minds and organs of opinion, the book at this time proved a total failure. At this date (1883) an eager public had absorbed one hundred and fifty-four copies of the work. Say Messrs. Trubner:

You will no doubt consider the account a most unsatisfactory one, as we do, seeing that we are out of pocket to the extent of 82 pounds 15s., 5d. Against this, of course, we hold the 50 pounds advanced by you, but we fear that we are never likely to recover the balance, 32 pounds 15s. 5d.

As it happens, however, Messrs. Trubner did in the end recover their 32 pounds. When I became known through other works of a different character the edition sold out. Perhaps the public bought it thinking it was a novel; at any rate, I have come across a letter from a melancholy youth who made that mistake.

Since that time there have been other and cheaper editions, and in 1899, at the time of the Boer War, that part of the book that deals with the Transvaal was republished at one shilling and sold to the extent of some thirty thousand copies.

To this day there is a certain demand for the book. That it has already been extensively used by writers dealing with this epoch of African affairs in works of reference and elsewhere I have reason to know, although these have not always acknowledged the source of their information and judgments.

So it comes about that my only effort as an historian was not made in vain, although at first it seemed futile and fruitless enough. I may add that certain prophecies set down in its pages in 1882 have since that time been remarkably fulfilled.

If they [i.e. those who direct the destinies of the Empire] do not [take certain steps alluded to above] it is now quite within the bounds of possibility that they may one day have to face a fresh Transvaal rebellion, only on a ten times larger scale.

And again:

Unless they [i.e. South African problems] are treated with more honest intelligence, and on a more settled plan than it has hitherto been thought necessary to apply to them, the British taxpayer will find that he has by no means heard the last of that country and its wars.

Some twenty years after I wrote these words England did have to face a Transvaal war on a ten times larger scale, and the British taxpayer did hear that he was called upon to pay a bill of some three hundred millions sterling. Also about twenty thousand of our countrymen, among them a young nephew of my own, were summoned to lay down their lives on the African veld. Such was the cost to the Empire of the reversal of Sir Theophilus Shepstone’s policy in the interests of an English political party.

Whilst we were at Norwood a little incident occurred which resulted in my becoming a writer of fiction. At the church which my wife and I attended we saw sitting near us one Sunday a singularly beautiful and pure-faced young lady. Afterwards we agreed that this semi-divine creature — on whom to the best of my knowledge I have never set eyes again from that day to this — ought to become the heroine of a novel. So then and there we took paper, and each of us began to write the said novel. I think that after she had completed two or three folio sheets my wife ceased from her fictional labours. But, growing interested, I continued mine, which resulted in the story called “Dawn.”

Years afterwards, in 1894 indeed, on the occasion of the issue of one of the numerous editions of that tale, I inserted the following little dedication:

AFTER MANY YEARS

I dedicate this my first story
to

That Unknown Lady,

once seen, but unforgotten, the
mould and model of Angela,
the magic of whose face turned my mind
to the making of books.

Here I may as well tell the history of this book. Some of it, or rather of the first draft of it, I think I wrote at Norwood. Towards Christmas of 1882 my wife and I made up our minds to return to this house at Ditchingham, which was standing empty and furnished, while I pursued my studies at the Bar. Hither we came accordingly a little while before the birth of my eldest daughter. She was named Angela after the heroine of my novel, which shows that at this time it must either have been written or well advanced.

There appear to be three drafts of this work, the first of which (incomplete) is named “Angela,” after the heroine; the second, five hundred and fifty-four closely written foolscap sheets long(!), estimated, I observe, upon the title-page to print into about a thousand pages, called “There Remaineth a Rest”; and the third, bound MS. (unnamed), four hundred and ninety-three foolscap sheets. The history of them is briefly as follows. With pain and labour I wrote the work — five hundred and fifty-four foolscap sheets do take some labour in the actual matter of calligraphy, without considering the mental effort. Then I sent the result to sundry publishers — who they were I entirely forget. Evidently, however, Smith and Elder must have been one of them, as is shown by the allusion to James Payn in a letter from the late Mr. Cordy Jeaffreson, which I shall presently quote.

These publishers, or their readers, had no great opinion of “Angela” or “There Remaineth a Rest,” by whichever title it was then called. After these rebuffs most people would have put that mighty mass of manuscript into the fire or an upstairs cupboard. But I must have been a persistent young man thirty years or so ago, and I did not take this course. On the contrary, I consulted Mr. Trubner, with whom I had become personally acquainted since the publication of “Cetewayo and his White Neighbours.” Indeed he and I struck up some kind of a friendship, as is shown by the fact that he gave me his photograph in a little olive-wood frame, which photograph has stood on a shelf in my room from that day to this. It is a clever old face which is pictured there, and he was a clever old man. He used to tell me anecdotes in his queer, half-German talk about the literary celebrities of bygone days, and I remember that his description of George Eliot was extremely epigrammatic and amusing. This, however, I will not repeat. He was good enough to take some interest in the story, and to suggest that it should be sent to the late Mr. Cordy Jeaffreson for his opinion. This was done, and on April 27, 1883, Jeaffreson sent me his opinion, which is so thorough and able that I will quote from it, merely omitting his detailed criticism of the work.

24 Carlton Road, Maida Vale, N.W.:
April 27, 1883.

Dear Sir, — I have read your story deliberately and read it with considerable interest, which would of course have been greater had I read it in type.

Payn was not wrong. Your opening chapters have a superabundance of action, and several highly dramatic positions, but they lack dramatic interest, i.e. the interest that comes from an exhibition of the influence of character upon character. Novels being what they are just now, it is small praise to say that Angela’s love-story is better than two-thirds of the stories that are published. I could say much more in its favour. Still I urge you not to publish it in its present rude form. Indeed, the story has caused me to take so much interest in its writer that I could almost entreat you not to publish it.

I take it you are a young man. You are certainly a novice in literature: and like most beginners in the really difficult art of novel-writing you have plied your pen under the notion that novels are dashed off. Inferior novels are so written, but you have the making of a good novelist in you, if you are seriously bent on being one. It would therefore be ill for you in several ways to make your debut with a tale that would do you injustice. I don’t counsel you to try again with new materials. I advise you to make your present essay, what it might be made, a work of art and a really good performance.

You have written it with your left hand without strenuous pains; you must rewrite it with your right hand, throwing all your force into it. If you produce it in its present crude state you will do so only to regret in a few weeks you did not burn it. If you rewrite it slowly with your right hand — suppressing much, expanding much, making every chapter a picture by itself, and polishing up every sentence so that each page bears testimony to the power of its producer — the story will be the beginning of such a literary career as I conceive you to be desirous of running. Get the better of the common notion that novels may be dashed off — by remembering how often Lord Lytton rewrote “Pelham,” thinking over every part of it, now compressing and now expanding the narrative, before he ventured to give it to the world. Go to the Charles Dickens rooms in the S. Kensington Museum and observe the erasures, the insertions, the amendments of every paragraph of his writing . . . .

Here follows a long and able criticism of the story.

Having read your MS. I have packed it and will do anything you like with it — with the exception of sending it to a publisher in its present state. You will succeed in literary enterprise if it will be your ambition to do so.

Your story disposes me to think you have that ambition. It also causes me to hope that I may make the author’s acquaintance. If you call on me when you are in town I shall be delighted to ask your pardon for writing to you with such unmannerly frankness and self-sufficiency.

Believe me to be, my dear sir,
Yours very sincerely,
John Cordy Jeaffreson.

What an extraordinarily kind heart must have been that of Mr. Jeaffreson! He was a very busy man, producing as he did works of fiction and of biography, in addition to his antiquarian labours that involved the deciphering of thousands of old documents, by means of all which toil he earned a moderate income. Yet he found time on behalf of an individual totally unknown to him, or to anybody else in this country, to labour through several hundred not too legible sheets of manuscript, and to write a masterly criticism of their contents. Moreover, for all this trouble he refused to accept any reward. Certainly it has been my fortune to make acquaintance with much malice in the world, but on the other hand I have met with signal kindness at the hands of those engaged in literary pursuits, and of such kindnesses I can recall no more striking example than this act of Mr. Jeaffreson, of whom I shall always entertain the most affectionate memory.

Well, I took his advice. From a tiny note on the first page of the manuscript it would seem that I began to rewrite “Dawn” or “Angela,” as it was then called, on May 15, 1883, and finished the last of the four hundred and ninety-three foolscap sheets on September 5th of the same year. That is, in just under four months, in addition to my legal studies and other occupations and the time taken in attending in London to eat my dinners at Lincoln’s Inn, I wrote nearly two hundred thousand words. Nowadays the average length of a novel may be put at seventy-five thousand words, or even less, though mine are longer. But in the early eighties, when stories were brought out in three volumes and readers had more patience than at present, it was otherwise. I toiled at that book morning, noon, and night, with the result that at length my eyesight gave out, and I was obliged to finish the writing of it in a darkened room.

Still I did finish it notwithstanding the pain in my eyes, and then went to London to see an oculist. To my relief he told me I was not going blind as I feared, but that the trouble came from the brain which was overworked. He ordered me complete rest and change, during which I was not to read anything. So we went for a month to Switzerland, where we took lodgings. The only occupation that I had there was to walk, or, when this was not feasible, like a child to throw a ball against the wall of the room and see how often I could catch it on the rebound. However, the treatment proved effective.

The book being finished, or nearly finished, and the heroine, Angela, rescued from the untimely death to which she was consigned in the first version and happily married to her lover, once more I sought the assistance of Cordy Jeaffreson, who gave me a letter introducing me to Mr. Arthur Blackett of the firm of Messrs. Hurst and Blackett. It runs:

Dear Blackett, — Some months since I read the MS. of a novel of which the bearer of these presents, Mr. Rider Haggard of Ditchingham House, Bungay, is looking for a publisher. Mr. Haggard having distinguished himself in another field of literature, I was not surprised to find his first essay in prose fiction a thing of no ordinary power. It was a tale of character, pathos, incident, and new ground: so good that had it been less I should have advised him to publish it as it came to me. The goodness of the story, however, made me urge him to rewrite it, so that every chapter should be in harmony with its best and strongest parts. He has acted on my advice, and if the result of his renewed labour answers my anticipation, he ha............