Conclusion
It may be appropriate to consider what pressures or concerns led to the issues which are identified in this study of the masculine novel of adventure and the romance. There can be little doubt that, due to the repression and excessive respectability of the times men, looking over the shoulder of boys, took refuge in innocent romantic and homosocial pastimes such as the reading of romances. That they did so derived largely from the prudery and hypocrisy of the period.
The writers of the period took part in a homosocial genre which was an aberration from the established pattern which was not, as we have attempted to show "new" but was rather an old form in disguise. Based on notions of romance derived largely from Scott, they took part collaboratively in a heated form of writing which was profoundly un-Scottian. Scott, we remembered, was a precursor of a highly romanticised and sublime view of Scotland as a historical place with notions of myth and legend coming down from Greek times. The arcadian places he described and the highly "romantic" view of Scotland he portrayed were concepts of which Lang, in particular was inordinately fond.
But there was in this boys’ literature, and in the intense make- believe of the boys’ organisations, a rejection of the moralising so prevalent in the times, which was largely evidence of a double standard in morality. The presence of boys, and the absence of women, reflected a desire to reduce the significance of the participation of adults in such adventure stories. Their emotional focusing on boys, and on empire, is a feature of the homosocial fiction of adventure and quest, in a genre engaged in the rhetoric of chauvinism, patemalism and supremacism with its romantic assertions of chivalry and masculinity, which we particularly emphasise.
The Games People Play today are the games boys played of yesterday. When H Rider Haggard came along with ''King Solomon's Mines'' it must have burst on the scene like a bombshell. The effect of the novel on the public, with flyers and posters out on the streets to advertise it must have been tremendous, and the social and financial success which their authors achieved was unparalleled in literature. The passions arising from a basic tension in the romance genre between romance and realism clouded the central issue in a debate, aspiring as it did, to higher aims and values; a debate which was marked by a heated element which we attempted to show was a screen for the bondings and collaborations behind the literary activities as a key symptom of the genre of imperial fiction. Such bondings were formed largely at the gentlemen’s club, coffee houses, tea rooms and meeting places in the drawing rooms of the fashionable people of the period. The study gave an insight into the secret circles provided by membership of an elite group of writers who wrote and travelled together, and then set up a clubland at the hearth of British patriarchy, to which to return.
Sir Henry Curtis’s perilous journey to the hinterland of Kikuanaland in South East Africa in search of the lost diamond horde of King Solomon’s fabled treasure chamber hidden in a ruined mine beyond the Kulukawe river and over Solomon‘s mountains must have excited the imaginations of boys whose minds were, arguably, constrained by the excessive respectability and overwhelming domesticity of life at home. Although shocking to Victorian sensibilities, some of these stories did examine the psychological dimensions of repression and alienation, in particular the island stories with their sense of remoteness, convictdom and the exploration of expatriation and the sense of banishment felt by many adventurers.
The idea of a lost civilisation in ''She'' with a matriarchical and mysterious queen as a glue to a civilisation had, as we attempted to show, a profound effect upon the genre. But the myth of the fatal woman in literature was not new. She is Hardy’s Tess, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and from another period "La Belle Dame Sans Merci." She is perhaps closer to Flaubert in Salambo than to the cardboard cut-out heroines of Haggard's adventure novels or to the characters in the books for boys which we studied, with whom she is often catalogued.
The escapism which Haggard demonstrates in his largely mythical and imaginative work was, arguably, related to his personal frustration with society’s increasing attachment to the contemporary advances in weaponry, ballistics and improved military technology and techniques. But the enactment of heroism in the context of the time of mass production of weapons of destruction was a worrying feature of the romance form. As a colonialist writer, his experience in S E Africa was distinguished by a love of Zulu lore and myth, and in novels like ''She'', ''Nada the Lilly'' and ''Child of Storm'' he described in some detail Zulu society and ways of life, his pose of cultural relativism not, however, preventing him from making allegations of all kinds of lawlessness, backwardness, moral terpitude, and so on. The conditions which applied in the late Victorian and early Edwardian periods apply even more forcefully in these days. The very barbarity of the romance ''King Solomon's Mines'' with its witchcraft, magic symbolism and such "modern" inventions as false teeth and monocles could lead to a revival of interest in this book today, when violence and nationalism rampant are increasing and tales of adventure and quest appear very tame indeed in comparison with certain of the fare on display in the bookshops.