Chapter1
Natal
When Henry Rider Haggard first appeared in public portrayed on canvas by John Pettie in 1889, his picture displayed in the National Portrait Gallery showed an eager looking young man in impeccably starched collar and neatly tied cravat. “Here I am. I have arrived”, it seemed to say. His family background was patrician, landed and wealthy and, as the youngest son of Squire William Meybohm Rider Haggard [1817 – 1893] of Bradenham Hall, Norfolk, he was not expected to inherit his father’s title and land and, thus, had to carve his ownway in the world.
His somewhat upward stare in the portrait seems to suggest something of the visionary, one who wished to look ahead at the future with a view to making his fame and fortune elsewhere, perhaps not in England. It was not one of hisfavourite portraits, for Haggard preferred one painted in later life, by Maurice William Greiffenhagen (1920) according to his descendants,[i] except that he thought it made him appear ‘wrinkled’.
Maurice William Greiffenhagen (1920) © National Portrait Gallery. London, Great Britain. “These drawings come sketches for the portrait of Sir Rider Haggard painted by my husband in 1920 and they now belong to J. E. Scott Beatrice Greiffenhagen 1936“
Rider Haggard could not roll his ‘r’s so one speculates whether his pronunciation of words like ‘very’ or ‘Greiffenhagen’ would not have sounded like ‘vewy’ or ‘Gweiffenhagen’. A look at Rider Haggard’s handwriting, too, in the manuscripts suggests on examination that he was impeccably tidy, methodical and upright. His bold, copperplate writing iin black ink on thick parchment paper taken out from a ledger suggests frugal economy and a mind that was organised, dedicated to detail and conscious of the effect it might have on others.
Sometimes using oblique shaped nibs, and at others a fine point nib, his penmanship varies between the flowing and the stilted, the clear and the unfocussed. Never a deleter and reviser like Dickens or Conrad, he usually wrote straight from the heart without hesitations, and where additions were needed he slotted them in between the two lines of written text.
© Strand Magazine. Available. Online. http://archive.org/stream/StrandMagazine13/Strand13#page/n9/mode/2up Accessed 13. 09. 2012
Graphologists would be interested in Haggard’s writing style – gripping the pen between the index and second finger and the thumb, [i], rather than holding it lightly between the thumb and the first finger, as is more usual. It may suggest that Haggard’s writing emanated from a deeper cortex of the brain, and that the neural impulses from his cerebrum were of a more active nature by using this me