The Imperial Souvenir: Things and Masculinities in H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines and Allan Quatermain

This essay focuses on Haggard’s construction of an ideal of imperial masculinity through the combination of the qualities of the gentleman with those of the barbarian. The discussion follows both Chrisman (2003) and Deane (2008) in attending to the relationship between the ideological structures of metropole and colony. This article, however, situates Haggard’s masculinist ideology in relation to the wider cultural poetics of late-Victorian material culture, particularly as manifested in the imperial souvenir – a complicated category of thing that comprises artefacts, hunting trophies, and human relics.