Thus Haggard is a literary phenomenon essential to any history of nineteenth-and twentieth-century British culture.
Born on 22 June 1856 at Bradenham, Norfolk, Rider Haggard was the son of William Haggard, a Norfolk squire, and his wife, Ella. Their eighth child, he was a sickly baby saved only by his mother's devotion. His early life conforms to a pattern familiar to readers of literary biography: nursed through infancy by a sensitive, artistic, and loving mother, he grew up under the contempt of his father, whose lack of imagination rendered his son incomprehensible to him. The father's obtuseness turned the boy more exclusively toward his mother, to whom he attributed his literary talent. She first aroused his interest in ancient Egypt, the spiritual center of his fiction.
Haggard's childhood memories seem to have been especially vivid, and certain images return in his fiction, some of them frequently. One of his childhood nurses somehow discovered the power of his imagination and used it to keep him quiet at night. After she had put him to bed, according to his daughter Lilias Rider Haggard, Rider's nurse opened a cupboard in the room, disclosing "a disreputable doll of particularly hideous aspect, with boot-button eyes, hair of black wool and a sinister leer on its painted face." She then committed the young Rider to the charge of "She-who-must-be-obeyed" and left him alone in the dark.
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