Making the Imperial Hero

Abstract

The English gentleman is a central figure in the romance throughout the nineteenth century. The pages of Marryat’s adventure romances for boys are littered with references to gentlemanly conduct: Mesty, in Mr. Midshipman Easy (1836)1 always refers to Jack Easy as ‘the young gentleman’, and Mr. Oxbelly, Jack’s second in command, who is himself ‘honest and manly’, believes that it is the first duty of every officer in the king’s navy ‘to show an example of courtesy and gentlemanly conduct in the execution of their duty’ (MME, 312). Haggard’s white heroes are all English gentlemen. At the opening of King Solomon’s Mines Allan Quatermain declares, ‘I was born a gentleman’, and in answer to his own question, ‘What is a gentleman?’ he responds, ‘a Royal Navy officer is’, by virtue of ‘God’s winds that wash their hearts and blow the bitterness out of their minds and make them what men ought to be’ (KSM, 4, 6–7). Indeed, Allan Quatermain is dedicated to Haggard’s son: I INSCRIBE THIS BOOK OF ADVENTURE TO MY SON ARTHUR JOHN RIDER HAGGARD IN THE HOPE THAT IN DAYS TO COME HE, AND MANY OTHER BOYS WHOM I SHALL NEVER KNOW, MAY IN THE ACTS AND THOUGHTS OF ALLAN QUATERMAIN AND HIS COMPANIONS, AS HEREIN RECORDED, FIND SOMETHING TO HELP HIM AND THEM TO REACH TO WHAT, WITH SIR HENRY CURTIS, I HOLD TO BE THE HIGHEST RANK WHERETO WE CAN ATTAIN— THE STATE AND DIGNITY OF ENGLISH GENTLEMEN2 Plate 3 clearly illustrates this ‘state and dignity’: Quatermain and company are pictured in the poses of upper-class English gentlemen smoking over an after-dinner glass of port in a sumptuous dining room. The starched high collars, dinner suits, and roaring log fire beneath an ornate mantelpiece all suggest English country gentlemen at ease with each other and their surroundings. In the frontispiece to that novel is a drawing of Quatermain purportedly from a ‘picture in the possession of George Curtis, Esq.’ (see plate 2) looking sad and dignified, sitting at his desk holding his pen, the epitome of the gentleman writer.3