The long-standing friendship between Andrew Lang 1 and Henry Rider Haggard (1856-1925) 2 is surely one of the most intriguing literary relationships of the Victorian era. 3 Lang was a pre-eminent literary critic and his support for Haggard's earliest popular romances, such as King Solomon's mines (1885) and She (1887) , helped to establish them as leading models of the new genre of imperial adventure fiction. 4 Lang and Haggard co-authored The world's desire (1890) 5 and the ideas of Lang, who

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... as also a brilliant Classics scholar, can be seen in many of Haggard's works. There are some significant similarities between the two men: both were approximate contemporaries who lived through the most aggressive phase of British imperialism, both were highly successfully writers who earned their living by their pens, both wrote prolifically and fluently on a wide 1