Haggard (H. Rider) She.

A Romance of Marvel and Mystery
London, “Review of Reviews” Office, [1900].

The Masterpiece Library. 1. Edited by W. Stead. [bound in Hicklings’ Almanack Handbook of Norfolk 1896] 8vo. Original printed red wrappers.

Stead’s rare abridged edition of Haggard’s gothic lost kingdom narrative set in the African interior, here intriguingly bound at the end of Hicklings’ Norfolk Almanack for 1896. Stead was a pioneering investigative journalist and crusading newspaper editor, considered to be one of the most famous Englishmen to die in the sinking of the Titanic at the time. He launched the Masterpiece Library of Penny Popular Novels in 1893 and it eventually ran to about 100 novels. It was touted as ‘the most efficient agency that has yet been devised for making our best literature familiar to the mass of the nation.’ Punch dubbed the series “Penny Steadfuls”. The novels were abridged into 30,000 to 40,000 words from novels which were originally six or eight times as long. They were, however, hugely popular with the much enlarged reading public of the time. She for example sold 500,000 copies in Stead’s abridgement.