Rider Haggard the Divorce Lawyer?

While reading for the bar in England in the early 1880s, H. Rider Haggard started writing novels (imitating one of his brothers who'd done the same as family entertainment). He published Dawn (1884) and The Witch's Head (1885), made a total of £50 on the both of them (historian Thomas Pocock dismisses these early Haggardian domestic fictions as "potboilers"), and upon these financial failures, returned perhaps more eagerly to the study of the law. Prior to hitting the scene as "King Romance" with the publication of King Solomon's Mines (1885) and She (1887), Haggard was preparing for a career in the newly consolidated Probate, Divorce and Admiralty Division of the High Court. During this period, he also did some reporting on probate and divorce cases. He mentions a "celebrated" divorce case in his 1882 history Cetywayo & His White Neighbor. The Probate and Divorce Courts also figure in Beatrice and more prominently in Mr. Meeson's Will. For this Vic-geek, it's an interesting mental parlor game to imagine Haggard as a divorce lawyer. Make it anachronistic, and have Haggard help George Henry Lewes divorce his wife and make an honest woman of George Eliot! The biographers all claim he was preoccupied with his first love, "Lily," that he may have had an (emotional?) affair with an Agnes Someone, and that he was rather dissatisfied with his wife Louie--the mother of, among other children, daughters Lilias and Agnes... ahem. I wonder if Haggard was as preoccupied with divorce as he was with disinheritance (a common theme in his domestic fictions)?

In other news, I found this amusingly acrid review by Harold Collins of Peter Ellis' 1980 biography of Haggard in Research in African Literatures. Collins is charmingly obnoxious on how Ellis reinvents much of what Morton Norton Cohen had to say in his 1961 bio. Then Collins gives us this pronouncement on the eternally debated question of Haggard's literary immortality (involving Haggard's alleged choice of popularity over artistry, pace Cohen):

Some recent rereading of Haggard suggests that it would not be too severe to conceive of Haggard as a TV scriptwriter before his time--fertile in imagination, able to pop out piquant situations at will but unable or unwilling to get rid of inconsistencies, implausibilities, incongruities, vulgarities, and other such literary dross. Read, for instance, the scene in Nada the Lily, in which the drugged baby hidden in the witch doctor's medicine bag is almost discovered by its bloodthirsty father who wants it killed. It's vrai Haggard.

Er, Rider Haggard as scriptwriter for Lost? Dexter? Weeds? Yeah, I can see it.