Chapter 3
The Online Publication
By Geoffrey Clarke.
In 1887, at the age of thirty, Rider Haggard travelled to Egypt, visiting the tombs of the ancient Egyptians, and marveling at the sarcophaguses on display and the artifacts to be viewed in the Boulak museum. As his daughter, Lilias recounts:
“Rode to the tombs of the Kings, and saw those of Seti, Rameses III, and Amenhotep II, all lit with electricity. A wonderful and weird place this Valley of the Kings, with its rugged, naked cliffs, shattered by sun and time.”[1] –
He saw the burial tombs of the ancient kings and queens of Egypt and inspected the mummies of the Pharaohs. He travelled far and wide to visit the excavations that were being made in order to transfer the bodies of the dead to the Museum at Cairo where the naked skeletons were mummified. .Jess was published and She was “fairly launched”,[2] so Haggard was able to take a holiday and absorb sufficient local information to write his Egyptian romance Cleopatra.
With Jess published Haggard was able to justify the expenditure because he was ‘fascinated’ with Egypt.[3] Jess remains a rather spanking tale, showing remarkable similarity in the characterisation of John Niel to the Haggards — the Ostrich farmer taking passage to the Cape, member of the officer class, the allowance from a relative of a thousand pounds, and, of course, the girl, Jess Croft, her beautiful sister, Bessie, and the ‘broken’ engagement, reminding us of Lillith Jackson.[4]
Besides the romantic heroine, another woman appears in the Haggard novel. She remains in the background during the early part of the work, coming to the fore as a force only towards the end, when the hero has lost the heroine and realises, on the rebound, that he may have to accept a less than perfect match. She emerges as a young lady who truly loves him, is a good manager and companion and might not be so unsuitable after all. The hero marries her and the couple live in perpetual contentment thereafter. It was, indeed, conventional in the Victorian novel for a hero to settle down with an ordinary fair-haired girl from England after having previous amatory adventures in places far away from home.
In Haggard's The Witch's Head (1885) the most pointed failure of the hero, Ernest Kershaw, to win his first love, Eva Ceswick, is such a feature of the tale. Ernest's acceptance of a more practical relationship with the woman who manages the keys and accounts at Dun's Ness, called Dorothy Jones, which is a rather uninteresting name after Eva Ceswick, seems to suggest Haggard's own personal life at Ditchingham House.[5] Though Dorothy is a second choice and though Ernest knows he can never love her in the way he once did Eva, he looks forward to a quiet life of contentment as a gentleman-farmer in the aura of domestication of the period.
Through the diligent research of Sydney Higgins, we have been able to establish that Haggard’s first love was a woman named Mary Elizabeth [‘Lillth’] Archer (nee Jackson). In his autobiography, Haggard confessed that he had had a first meeting with 'a very beautiful young lady a few years older than myself'. They had met at a dinner dance at Richmond and, at the end of the dinner party, he esc<