. Baden-Powell, who was considered a hero of the siege of Mafeking in 1900 during the Boer War in Africa (1899-1902) and who made a project of the Scouts in part as an exercise in maintaining the Empire and building solid masculinist imperialists spreading British civilization hegemony from the ranks of the working-class chaps recruited for scouting, has been described and fairly universally acknowledged as a repressed homosexual.
These dynamics are all part of the cultural background in which Haggard, Kipling, and Burroughs were writing. MacDonald's likening of the preservation and advancement of the empire to the frontier is also instructive, since the action of these novelists' adventure stories is principally situated away from the civilized environment of high Victorian/Edwardian England. It is in the setting of the frontier, indeed, that the relationships between the male characters and the behavior of the adolescent boys in particular achieves homosocial resonance.
The earliest-published of these texts were Haggard's King Solomon's Mines (1886) and She (1887). The action of each is located chiefly in a remote part of undiscovered Africa, what could be called the frontier of empire. It is perhaps helpful to know that Haggard's professional career began in South Africa and that he was involved with various imperial commissions and study groups concerning Britain's interests in Africa for many years. By and large, the issue of imperialism and British entitlements is collapsed into the action of King Solomon's Mines as the Englishman's due. What is more pertinent to the present research is that Haggard himself appears to have deliberately targeted the novel to an audience of young boys. The narrator/hero of the book is Allen Quartermain, and the text begins with the conceit of a mature Quartermain (age 55; Haggard was 30 when the book was published) who from his comfortable home in Natal is recalling his late adventure of ex...