‘King Solomon’s Mines’ pioneered the ‘lost world’ genre in Britain.
The British public had been reading about recent discoveries, in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings, in Assyria, at Schliemann’s Troy, and the lost empire of Greater Zimbabwe. Haggard’s novel was the first in English to exploit the mystique and romance surrounding these discoveries and to invent a fictional lost civilisation for dramatic purposes (Jules Verne’s Journey To The Centre of the Earth, 1864, has a claim to priority for Continental literature).
Countless others have followed suit: Kipling soon after in The Man Who Would be King (1888), H.G. Wells with In The Country of The Blind (1904), Arthur Conan Doyle’s Lost World in 1912 and the first of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Caspak series, The Land That Time Forgot, in 1918.
Doyle’s book introduced the idea of dinosaurs surviving in a freak enclave, a meme which has had a healthy career in popular culture up to and including Jurassic Park (1993) its imaginatively-title sequel, The Lost World (1997) and Peter Jackson’s fabulously preposterous King Kong (2005).
I suppose the Lost World is itself a subset of a larger genre which is the New World, where the narrator is introduced to an entirely new culture and slowly learns their customs. Almost every travel book could be included in this, from Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) on through Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726). What distinguishes Lost World romances from these earlier fables is the earlier ones are nearly all moralistic or satirical in intent. They have a point, an aim or design on the reader. The Lost World romances exist purely to entertain.
The Lost World genre was at its most popular during the era of High Imperialism, 1870 to 1914. Though it continued to thrive thereafter (James Hilton’s Lost Horizon, which introduced the phrase ‘Shangri-La’ was published as late as 1933 ), it was negatively affected by the thoroughness with which discoverers and cartographers were filling in the gaps on the world map.
As the gaps on the maps of this world were filled in, some of the teenage energy of the genre was redirected into the burgeoning genre of science fiction. Here the borders were infinite, and the trope of a small band of explorers arriving on a new world to be shown its customs could be recycled ad infinitum, from H.G. Wells’s First Men In The Moon (1901) to Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (2012).
The obvious question is: Is any of this for grown-ups? Or for the grown-up part of our minds? Probably not. They are for the teenager in all of us, and probably teenage boys more than girls. None of the main works in the genre are by women writers, partly because the tales are designed to move from one perilous situation to another, in which the immature male mind can fantasise about danger and rescue, success against the odds. The continual need to prove their physical prowess doesn’t seem to occur to women as much as men.
Related links
- Gulliver’s Travels (1726)
- Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1867)
- King Solomon’s Mines (1885)
- The Man Who Would be King (1888)
- The Lost World (1912)
- In The Country of The Blind (1904)
- The Land That Time Forgot (1918)
Books & Boots 