The Graphic She: Text and Image in Rider Haggard's Imperial Romance

Abstract

By disregarding the relation between Victorian literature and its illustrations, literary research has largely failed to explain what the experience of reading fiction in the nineteenth century was like. The original version of Rider Haggard's She, which was published in instalments in the illustrated weekly The Graphic in 1886/87, is a prominent example of this academic neglect. This article highlights the complexity of text-image-relations in Haggard's imperial romance by examining two levels of interaction between word and image: the interaction of the written text and its illustrations within the frame of the novel as well as the dialogue the illustrated novel has with other materials in the journal it is embedded in. On both levels, the authentication of the fictional story is seen as a primary function of the images. The publication of this fantastic adventure novel within a plethora of imperial images did, however, not only influence the perception of the literary text, it also contributed to an understanding of the British Empire as fantasy. The fact that images, through their affective dimension, powerfully influence people's opinions and mentalities is particularly important for gauging the "political" impact of Victorian colonial literature.

A vaccination romance: Rider Haggard’s Dr. Therne (1898) in the vaccination debate

“…14 Recent work on Haggard has examined the essential role of illustration and serialisation in reading Haggard in the nineteenth century, with Kate Holterhoff creating an entire online digital archive of the hundreds of illustrations which accompanied Haggard's serialised novels. 15 Furthermore, although literary critics and scholars have probed Haggard's writings in relation to psychoanalysis, anthropology and Darwinian evolution, those that touch on medicine have remained unplumbed. 16 While Dr. Therne gets passing mention in most books and articles that attend to its author (one authoritative biography, reviewing Haggard's oeuvre, refers to his forty-seven adventure novels, twelve novels of contemporary life and a singular 'propagandist novel' 17 ), the book is not the subject of any single monograph, chapter or scholarly article.…”