Utopia & Dystopia in Weird Tales-Part Six

Burroughs & Haggard

Edgar Rice Burroughs was born in Chicago on September 1, 1875, into an old and well-connected family in America. His father was a businessman and during the Civil War a brevet major in the Union Army. Burroughs the younger was related to at least seven signers of the Declaration of Independence, including John Adams. His two greatest literary creations, Lord Greystoke, better known as Tarzan of the Apes, and Captain John Carter, Warlord of Mars, were aristocrats of an old English or Southern type. If in reading all of this and more you were to conclude that Burroughs and his family were conservative, you would be right. His conservatism will come into play a little later in this series.

Although he grew up to be a man of action--he was actually beforehand a boy of action--Burroughs liked to read in his youth, and he possessed a vivid imagination. In that way and probably many others, he differed from his father. "My father was always very stern and military in our relationship," he wrote. "He used to tell me with increasing frequentness--until I was thirty-six--that I would always be a failure, and until I was thirty-six he was right." (1)

I'm not sure that there is a comprehensive record of what Burroughs read as a child or young man. We know that he read Roman mythology as well as The Jungle Books of Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), for he admitted to being inspired or influenced--at least at some level--by those two sources in his creation of Tarzan. It's less certain that he read the works of H. Rider Haggard (1856-1925). I wonder, though, how could he not have? Haggard was one of the most popular and widely read authors of the nineteenth century. His novel She: A History of Adventure (1887) impressed, even astonished, reviewers and critics. It has never gone out of print and has sold in excess of 83 million copies since its initial publication. So did Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of Lost Worlds on both Earth and Mars, read H. Rider Haggard, the great popularizer of that genre, or not?

In his biography The Big Swingers (1967), Robert W. Fenton made a case based on circumstantial evidence that Burroughs was indeed influenced by Haggard, particularly by She. (p. 62n) Haggard was a source of inspiration for Kipling. We know that much, for Kipling acknowledged in his autobiography, Something of Myself (1937), that he had read and remembered Haggard's Nada the Lily (1892) before beginning his own Jungle Books (1894). So, first came Nada the Lily, then The Jungle Books, and finally, maybe, the creation of Tarzan. But is that a direct and irrefutable line of descent?

Robert W. Fenton made his case, but he wasn't the only one. Richard A. Lupoff did it, too, in Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure (revised edition, 1968). The late Mr. Lupoff even included a family tree showing some of Tarzan's possible ancestors, and these include Nada the Lily. He went further in his speculations, though, in the process making another strong circumstantial case that Burroughs was influenced by Haggard. Both Fenton and Lupoff drew parallels between Haggard's She and two of Burroughs' Tarzan adventures, The Return of Tarzan (1913) and Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar (1916, 1918). (2) But neither was able to pull off a Perry Mason-like revelation in the courtroom of his own well-researched pages.

In 1975, Irwin Porges published a hefty tome called Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Man Who Created Tarzan. (3) His book is heavy on primary sources. In the preface is a photograph of Porges in a Raiders of the Lost Ark-like warehouse in Tarzana, packed to the ceiling with file boxes from Burroughs' long life and career. So you read for a while and then there it is, on page 130: in a letter to The Bristol Times (of Bristol, England), dated February 13, 1931, Burroughs wrote: "To Mr. Kipling as to Mr. Haggard I owe a debt of gratitude for having stimulated my youthful imagination and this I gladly acknowledge," adding, "but Mr. Wells I have never read and consequently his stories of Mars could not have influenced me in any way."

Interesting. My two-fold thesis is holding up. On one side are Utopia, Lost Worlds fantasy, H. Rider Haggard, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. On the other are Dystopia, science fiction, H.G. Wells, and myriad writers who came after him, including, perhaps, H.P. Lovecraft. The parts that don't seem to fit yet are also twofold: Utopia as an expression of a conservative worldview, and, conversely, Dystopia as an expression of progressivism. I might have those parts figured out, though, so stay tuned.

Anyway, there's one more thing to consider in regards to Burroughs and Haggard. She: A History of Adventure was published in book form in the United States in 1887, I think in June. (4) That summer, She was serialized in American newspapers. Towards the end of summer, on September 1, 1887, Edgar Rice Burroughs turned twelve years old. We think of twelve as the the Golden Age of Science Fiction, but before it was that, it must have been a Golden Age of Adventure, too. We can imagine a young Burroughs reading She, perhaps as he lay abed at night, thrilling at the adventure and romance of it and dreaming that he might have such adventures, too--that he might even one day himself become a writer.

To be continued . . . 

Notes
(1) Quoted in The Big Swingers: A Biography by Robert W. Fenton (1967), p. 11.
(2) See Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure by Richard A. Lupoff (New York: Ace Books, revised edition, 1968), pp. 225-229, 300-301.
(3) For more on Irwin Porges and his family, see my article "Who Was Arthur Pendragon?" from January 25, 2019, here.
(4) On May 28, 1887, the Chicago Tribune announced the publication of She for the following month. Burroughs was still living in Chicago at the time, with his parents. On July 3, 1890, when he was fourteen, his father shipped him off to his brothers' ranch in Idaho so that he might avoid getting caught up in an epidemic.

Here and below are a few illustrations of H. Rider Haggard's She that you might not have seen before. First, the cover of a British edition published by Hodder. I don't know the year or the artist. (Note the similarity between this cover and the cover of Les Baxter's movie-score album for Barbarian, here.)

Here's a comic book version from 1950 with cover art by Henry Carl Kiefer (1890-1957).

Here's another version for children, published by the Arthur Westbrook Company of Cleveland, Ohio. I don't know the year, but by the style of the art, I would guess this was pre-World War II, perhaps from the 1920s or '30s. I don't know the name of the artist here, either.

This is the cover for the Pyramid paperback edition of 1966. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database doesn't give an artist's name, but it kind of looks like the work of Bob Abbett (1926-2015).

Finally, another edition published by Hodder, this one from 1971 with a title character I assume made to look like Ursula Andress, star of the 1965 film version. Again, there isn't any credit given for the artist. I mentioned phallic imagery the other day. Here is an example of what you might call its vulvic counterpart.

Original text and captions copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley