Colonel Quaritch V.C.: A Tale of Country Life by H. Rider Haggard

Christopher Hilliard writes that “Late Victorian sensation fiction, the work of Mary Braddon, Wilkie Collins […] and their heirs worked for Tillotson because of the breadth of its appeal.” (2009, p.656), leading one to speculate whether H. Rider Haggard, the famous author of imperial, colonial themes, may have turned his hand to a sensation style of writing to fit in better with Tillotson’s expectations. She had been serialised in the Graphic magazine (1886-7), perhaps being considered too imperially colonial for the tastes of the wider readership of Tillotson’s Bolton Weekly Journal, as the North of England king of the serial story (just as Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) had been deemed too salacious for publication). Hilliard goes on to say that, unlike many other media groups of the era who aimed at specific gender or class audiences, Tillotson preferred to direct his gaze toward the broader church of mass appeal, and this required, for instance, “careful management of the role of imperial settings in its fiction” (Hilliard, 2009, p.656). Perhaps then, the Haggard of the African adventure tale, with its heroes representative of colonial imperialism, tailored a narrative to fall more in line with the expectations of his prospective promoter. When we consider the abundance of critical responses are in  “publications beginning in the late 1980s [that] highlight the complicated and often ambivalent nature of Haggard’s relationship with imperial discourse” (Hultgren, 2011, p.645), it is clear that the topic most associated with this author does not have an overt connection with Colonel Quaritch V.C.: A Tale of English Country Life. At the same time, we must acknowledge that many of the central features of sensation fiction: murder and blackmail, do indeed appear in this novel. Its breadth of appeal can be judged by the fact that newspapers, from Toronto to Dublin to Sheffield and beyond, were waxing lyrical about the standard of writing Haggard produced in this novel.