ABSTRACT
Rider Haggard dedicated his story of African adventure Allan Quatermain to his son with the words:
In the hope that in days to come he and many other boys, whom I shall never know, may in the acts and thoughts of Allan Quatermain and his companions, find something to help him and them to reach … the highest rank whereto we can attain – the state and dignity of an English gentleman. 2
In fact, Quatermain was not the perfect exemplar of the late Victorian gentleman. He lacked the honours and titles of the period ‘blood’, the public-school and Oxbridge athletic hero of the late nineteenth century. Furthermore, since the spread of the public schools to the ‘Celtic Fringe’ the concept of the gentleman sportsman was a British ideal, if only as a means to imperial employment. Jeffrey Richards is of the view, and he is unquestionably correct, that the gentleman ‘is a species not just endangered but verging on the point of extinction’. His values have passed out of fashion: his behaviour is an object of derision. The ideology he exemplified is therefore a virtually defunct ideology, a fit subject for historians. 3