Как пишется редьярд киплинг

Rudyard Kipling
Kipling in 1895
Born	Joseph Rudyard Kipling 30 December 1865 Malabar Hill, Bombay Presidency, British India
Died	18 January 1936 (aged 70) Fitzrovia, London, England
Resting place	Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey
Occupation	Short-story writer novelist poet journalist
Genre	Short story novel children’s literature poetry travel literature science fiction
Notable works	The Jungle Book Just So Stories Kim Captains Courageous «If—» «Gunga Din» «Mandalay» «The White Man’s Burden»
Notable awards	Nobel Prize in Literature 1907
Spouse	Caroline Starr Balestier ​ ​ (m. )​
Children	3, including Elsie and John
Parents	John Lockwood Kipling Alice MacDonald
Signature

Joseph Rudyard Kipling ( RUD-yərd; 30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936)^[1] was an English novelist, short-story writer, poet, and journalist. He was born in British India, which inspired much of his work.

Kipling’s works of fiction include the Jungle Book duology (The Jungle Book, 1894; The Second Jungle Book, 1895), Kim (1901), the Just So Stories (1902) and many short stories, including «The Man Who Would Be King» (1888).^[2] His poems include «Mandalay» (1890), «Gunga Din» (1890), «The Gods of the Copybook Headings» (1919), «The White Man’s Burden» (1899), and «If—» (1910). He is seen as an innovator in the art of the short story.^[3] His children’s books are classics; one critic noted «a versatile and luminous narrative gift».^[4][5]

Kipling in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was among the United Kingdom’s most popular writers.^[3] Henry James said «Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius, as distinct from fine intelligence, that I have ever known.»^[3] In 1907, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, as the first English-language writer to receive the prize, and at 41, its youngest recipient to date.^[6] He was also sounded out for the British Poet Laureateship and several times for a knighthood, but declined both.^[7] Following his death in 1936, his ashes were interred at Poets’ Corner, part of the South Transept of Westminster Abbey.

Kipling’s subsequent reputation has changed with the political and social climate of the age.^[8][9] The contrasting views of him continued for much of the 20th century.^[10][11] Literary critic Douglas Kerr wrote: «[Kipling] is still an author who can inspire passionate disagreement and his place in literary and cultural history is far from settled. But as the age of the European empires recedes, he is recognised as an incomparable, if controversial, interpreter of how empire was experienced. That, and an increasing recognition of his extraordinary narrative gifts, make him a force to be reckoned with.»^[12]

Childhood (1865–1882)[edit]

Rudyard Kipling was born on 30 December 1865 in Bombay, in the Bombay Presidency of British India, to Alice Kipling (born MacDonald) and John Lockwood Kipling.^[13] Alice (one of the four noted MacDonald sisters)^[14] was a vivacious woman,^[15] of whom Lord Dufferin would say, «Dullness and Mrs Kipling cannot exist in the same room.»^[3][16][17] John Lockwood Kipling, a sculptor and pottery designer, was the Principal and Professor of Architectural Sculpture at the newly founded Sir Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy School of Art in Bombay.^[15]

John Lockwood and Alice met in 1863 and courted at Rudyard Lake in Rudyard, Staffordshire, England. They married and moved to India in 1865 after John Lockwood had accepted the position as Professor at the School of Art.^[18] They had been so moved by the beauty of the Rudyard Lake area that they named their first child after it, Joseph Rudyard. Two of Alice’s sisters were married to artists: Georgiana to the painter Edward Burne-Jones, and her sister Agnes to Edward Poynter. A third sister, Louisa, was the mother of Kipling’s most prominent relative, his first cousin Stanley Baldwin, who was Conservative Prime Minister of the United Kingdom three times in the 1920s and 1930s.^[19]

Kipling’s birth home on the campus of the J.J. School of Art in Bombay was for many years used as the dean’s residence.^[20] Although a cottage bears a plaque noting it as his birth site, the original one may have been torn down and replaced decades ago.^[21] Some historians and conservationists take the view that the bungalow marks a site merely close to the home of Kipling’s birth, as it was built in 1882 – about 15 years after Kipling was born. Kipling seems to have said as much to the dean when visiting J. J. School in the 1930s.^[22]

Kipling wrote of Bombay:

Mother of Cities to me,
For I was born in her gate,
Between the palms and the sea,
Where the world-end steamers wait.^[23]

According to Bernice M. Murphy, «Kipling’s parents considered themselves ‘Anglo-Indians’ [a term used in the 19th century for people of British origin living in India] and so too would their son, though he spent the bulk of his life elsewhere. Complex issues of identity and national allegiance would become prominent in his fiction.»^[24]

Kipling referred to such conflicts. For example: «In the afternoon heats before we took our sleep, she (the Portuguese ayah, or nanny) or Meeta (the Hindu bearer, or male attendant) would tell us stories and Indian nursery songs all unforgotten, and we were sent into the dining-room after we had been dressed, with the caution ‘Speak English now to Papa and Mamma.’ So one spoke ‘English’, haltingly translated out of the vernacular idiom that one thought and dreamed in.»^[25]

Education in Britain[edit]

Kipling’s days of «strong light and darkness» in Bombay ended when he was five.^[25] As was the custom in British India, he and his three-year-old sister Alice («Trix») were taken to the United Kingdom – in their case to Southsea, Portsmouth – to live with a couple who boarded children of British nationals living abroad.^[26] For the next six years (from October 1871 to April 1877), the children lived with the couple – Captain Pryse Agar Holloway, once an officer in the merchant navy, and Sarah Holloway – at their house, Lorne Lodge, 4 Campbell Road, Southsea.^[27] Kipling referred to the place as «the House of Desolation».^[25]

In his autobiography published 65 years later, Kipling recalled the stay with horror, and wondered if the combination of cruelty and neglect that he experienced there at the hands of Mrs Holloway might not have hastened the onset of his literary life: «If you cross-examine a child of seven or eight on his day’s doings (specially when he wants to go to sleep) he will contradict himself very satisfactorily. If each contradiction be set down as a lie and retailed at breakfast, life is not easy. I have known a certain amount of bullying, but this was calculated torture – religious as well as scientific. Yet it made me give attention to the lies I soon found it necessary to tell: and this, I presume, is the foundation of literary effort.»^[25]

Trix fared better at Lorne Lodge; Mrs Holloway apparently hoped that Trix would eventually marry the Holloways’ son.^[28] The two Kipling children, however, had no relatives in England they could visit, except that they spent a month each Christmas with a maternal aunt Georgiana («Georgy») and her husband, Edward Burne-Jones, at their house, The Grange, in Fulham, London, which Kipling called «a paradise which I verily believe saved me».^[25]

In the spring of 1877, Alice returned from India and removed the children from Lorne Lodge. Kipling remembers «Often and often afterwards, the beloved Aunt would ask me why I had never told any one how I was being treated. Children tell little more than animals, for what comes to them they accept as eternally established. Also, badly-treated children have a clear notion of what they are likely to get if they betray the secrets of a prison-house before they are clear of it.»^[25]

Alice took the children during spring 1877 to Goldings Farm at Loughton, where a carefree summer and autumn was spent on the farm and adjoining Forest, some of the time with Stanley Baldwin. In January 1878, Kipling was admitted to the United Services College at Westward Ho!, Devon, a school recently founded to prepare boys for the army. It proved rough going for him at first, but later led to firm friendships and provided the setting for his schoolboy stories Stalky & Co. (1899).^[28] While there, Kipling met and fell in love with Florence Garrard, who was boarding with Trix at Southsea (to which Trix had returned). Florence became the model for Maisie in Kipling’s first novel, The Light That Failed (1891).^[28]

Return to India[edit]

Near the end of his schooling, it was decided that Kipling did not have the academic ability to get into Oxford University on a scholarship.^[28] His parents lacked the wherewithal to finance him,^[15] and so Kipling’s father obtained a job for him in Lahore, where the father served as Principal of the Mayo College of Art and Curator of the Lahore Museum. Kipling was to be assistant editor of a local newspaper, the Civil and Military Gazette.

He sailed for India on 20 September 1882 and arrived in Bombay on 18 October. He described the moment years later: «So, at sixteen years and nine months, but looking four or five years older, and adorned with real whiskers which the scandalised Mother abolished within one hour of beholding, I found myself at Bombay where I was born, moving among sights and smells that made me deliver in the vernacular sentences whose meaning I knew not. Other Indian-born boys have told me how the same thing happened to them.»^[25] This arrival changed Kipling, as he explains: «There were yet three or four days’ rail to Lahore, where my people lived. After these, my English years fell away, nor ever, I think, came back in full strength.»^[25]

Early adult life (1882–1914)[edit]

From 1883 to 1889, Kipling worked in British India for local newspapers such as the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore and The Pioneer in Allahabad.^[25]

The former, which was the newspaper Kipling was to call his «mistress and most true love»,^[25] appeared six days a week throughout the year, except for one-day breaks for Christmas and Easter. Stephen Wheeler, the editor, worked Kipling hard, but Kipling’s need to write was unstoppable. In 1886, he published his first collection of verse, Departmental Ditties. That year also brought a change of editors at the newspaper; Kay Robinson, the new editor, allowed more creative freedom and Kipling was asked to contribute short stories to the newspaper.^[4]

In an article printed in the Chums boys’ annual, an ex-colleague of Kipling’s stated that «he never knew such a fellow for ink – he simply revelled in it, filling up his pen viciously, and then throwing the contents all over the office, so that it was almost dangerous to approach him.»^[29] The anecdote continues: «In the hot weather when he (Kipling) wore only white trousers and a thin vest, he is said to have resembled a Dalmatian dog more than a human being, for he was spotted all over with ink in every direction.»

In the summer of 1883, Kipling visited Simla (today’s Shimla), a well-known hill station and the summer capital of British India. By then it was the practice for the Viceroy of India and government to move to Simla for six months, and the town became a «centre of power as well as pleasure».^[4] Kipling’s family became annual visitors to Simla, and Lockwood Kipling was asked to serve in Christ Church there. Rudyard Kipling returned to Simla for his annual leave each year from 1885 to 1888, and the town featured prominently in many stories he wrote for the Gazette.^[4] «My month’s leave at Simla, or whatever Hill Station my people went to, was pure joy – every golden hour counted. It began in heat and discomfort, by rail and road. It ended in the cool evening, with a wood fire in one’s bedroom, and next morn – thirty more of them ahead! – the early cup of tea, the Mother who brought it in, and the long talks of us all together again. One had leisure to work, too, at whatever play-work was in one’s head, and that was usually full.»^[25]

Back in Lahore, 39 of his stories appeared in the Gazette between November 1886 and June 1887. Kipling included most of them in Plain Tales from the Hills, his first prose collection, published in Calcutta in January 1888, a month after his 22nd birthday. Kipling’s time in Lahore, however, had come to an end. In November 1887, he was moved to the Gazette‘s larger sister newspaper, The Pioneer, in Allahabad in the United Provinces, where he worked as assistant editor and lived in Belvedere House from 1888 to 1889.^[30][31]

Kipling’s writing continued at a frenetic pace. In 1888, he published six collections of short stories: Soldiers Three, The Story of the Gadsbys, In Black and White, Under the Deodars, The Phantom Rickshaw, and Wee Willie Winkie. These contain a total of 41 stories, some quite long. In addition, as The Pioneer‘s special correspondent in the western region of Rajputana, he wrote many sketches that were later collected in Letters of Marque and published in From Sea to Sea and Other Sketches, Letters of Travel.^[4]

Kipling was discharged from The Pioneer in early 1889 after a dispute. By this time, he had been increasingly thinking of his future. He sold the rights to his six volumes of stories for £200 and a small royalty, and the Plain Tales for £50; in addition, he received six-months’ salary from The Pioneer, in lieu of notice.^[25]

Return to London[edit]

Kipling decided to use the money to move to London, the literary centre of the British Empire. On 9 March 1889, he left India, travelling first to San Francisco via Rangoon, Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan. Kipling was favourably impressed by Japan, calling its people and ways «gracious folk and fair manners».^[32] The Nobel Prize committee cited Kipling’s writing on the manners and customs of the Japanese when they awarded his Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907.^[33]

Kipling later wrote that he «had lost his heart» to a geisha whom he called O-Toyo, writing while in the United States during the same trip across the Pacific, «I had left the innocent East far behind…. Weeping softly for O-Toyo…. O-Toyo was a darling.»^[32] Kipling then travelled through the United States, writing articles for The Pioneer that were later published in From Sea to Sea and Other Sketches, Letters of Travel.^[34]

Starting his North American travels in San Francisco, Kipling went north to Portland, Oregon, then Seattle, Washington, up to Victoria and Vancouver, British Columbia, through Medicine Hat, Alberta, back into the US to Yellowstone National Park, down to Salt Lake City, then east to Omaha, Nebraska and on to Chicago, then to Beaver, Pennsylvania on the Ohio River to visit the Hill family. From there, he went to Chautauqua with Professor Hill, and later to Niagara Falls, Toronto, Washington, D.C., New York, and Boston.^[34]

In the course of this journey he met Mark Twain in Elmira, New York, and was deeply impressed. Kipling arrived unannounced at Twain’s home, and later wrote that as he rang the doorbell, «It occurred to me for the first time that Mark Twain might possibly have other engagements other than the entertainment of escaped lunatics from India, be they ever so full of admiration.»^[35]

As it was, Twain gladly welcomed Kipling and had a two-hour conversation with him on trends in Anglo-American literature and about what Twain was going to write in a sequel to Tom Sawyer, with Twain assuring Kipling that a sequel was coming, although he had not decided upon the ending: either Sawyer would be elected to Congress or he would be hanged.^[35] Twain also passed along the literary advice that an author should «get your facts first and then you can distort ’em as much as you please.»^[35] Twain, who rather liked Kipling, later wrote of their meeting: «Between us, we cover all knowledge; he covers all that can be known and I cover the rest.»^[35] Kipling then crossed the Atlantic to Liverpool in October 1889. He soon made his début in the London literary world, to great acclaim.^[3]

London[edit]

In London, Kipling had several stories accepted by magazines. He found a place to live for the next two years at Villiers Street, near Charing Cross (in a building subsequently named Kipling House):

Meantime, I had found me quarters in Villiers Street, Strand, which forty-six years ago was primitive and passionate in its habits and population. My rooms were small, not over-clean or well-kept, but from my desk I could look out of my window through the fanlight of Gatti’s Music-Hall entrance, across the street, almost on to its stage. The Charing Cross trains rumbled through my dreams on one side, the boom of the Strand on the other, while, before my windows, Father Thames under the Shot tower walked up and down with his traffic.^[36]

In the next two years, he published a novel, The Light That Failed, had a nervous breakdown, and met an American writer and publishing agent, Wolcott Balestier, with whom he collaborated on a novel, The Naulahka (a title which he uncharacteristically misspelt; see below).^[15] In 1891, as advised by his doctors, Kipling took another sea voyage, to South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and once again India.^[15] He cut short his plans to spend Christmas with his family in India when he heard of Balestier’s sudden death from typhoid fever and decided to return to London immediately. Before his return, he had used the telegram to propose to, and be accepted by, Wolcott’s sister, Caroline Starr Balestier (1862–1939), called «Carrie», whom he had met a year earlier, and with whom he had apparently been having an intermittent romance.^[15] Meanwhile, late in 1891, a collection of his short stories on the British in India, Life’s Handicap, was published in London.^[37]

On 18 January 1892, Carrie Balestier (aged 29) and Rudyard Kipling (aged 26) married in London, in the «thick of an influenza epidemic, when the undertakers had run out of black horses and the dead had to be content with brown ones.»^[25] The wedding was held at All Souls Church, Langham Place. Henry James gave away the bride.

United States[edit]

Kipling and his wife settled upon a honeymoon that took them first to the United States (including a stop at the Balestier family estate near Brattleboro, Vermont) and then to Japan.^[15] On arriving in Yokohama, they discovered that their bank, The New Oriental Banking Corporation, had failed. Taking this loss in their stride, they returned to the U.S., back to Vermont – Carrie by this time was pregnant with their first child – and rented a small cottage on a farm near Brattleboro for $10 a month.^[25] According to Kipling, «We furnished it with a simplicity that fore-ran the hire-purchase system. We bought, second or third hand, a huge, hot-air stove which we installed in the cellar. We cut generous holes in our thin floors for its eight-inch [20 cm] tin pipes (why we were not burned in our beds each week of the winter I never can understand) and we were extraordinarily and self-centredly content.»^[25]

In this house, which they called Bliss Cottage, their first child, Josephine, was born «in three-foot of snow on the night of 29th December, 1892. Her Mother’s birthday being the 31st and mine the 30th of the same month, we congratulated her on her sense of the fitness of things….»^[25]

It was also in this cottage that the first dawnings of The Jungle Books came to Kipling: «The workroom in the Bliss Cottage was seven feet by eight, and from December to April, the snow lay level with its window-sill. It chanced that I had written a tale about Indian Forestry work which included a boy who had been brought up by wolves. In the stillness, and suspense, of the winter of ’92 some memory of the Masonic Lions of my childhood’s magazine, and a phrase in Haggard’s Nada the Lily, combined with the echo of this tale. After blocking out the main idea in my head, the pen took charge, and I watched it begin to write stories about Mowgli and animals, which later grew into the two Jungle Books.»^[25]

With Josephine’s arrival, Bliss Cottage was felt to be congested, so eventually the couple bought land – 10 acres (4.0 ha) on a rocky hillside overlooking the Connecticut River – from Carrie’s brother Beatty Balestier and built their own house. Kipling named this Naulakha, in honour of Wolcott and of their collaboration, and this time the name was spelt correctly.^[15] From his early years in Lahore (1882–87), Kipling had become enamoured with the Mughal architecture,^[38] especially the Naulakha pavilion situated in Lahore Fort, which eventually inspired the title of his novel as well as the house.^[39] The house still stands on Kipling Road, three miles (4.8 km) north of Brattleboro in Dummerston, Vermont: a big, secluded, dark-green house, with shingled roof and sides, which Kipling called his «ship», and which brought him «sunshine and a mind at ease».^[15] His seclusion in Vermont, combined with his healthy «sane clean life», made Kipling both inventive and prolific.

In a mere four years he produced, along with the Jungle Books, a book of short stories (The Day’s Work), a novel (Captains Courageous), and a profusion of poetry, including the volume The Seven Seas. The collection of Barrack-Room Ballads was issued in March 1892, first published individually for the most part in 1890, and contained his poems «Mandalay» and «Gunga Din». He especially enjoyed writing the Jungle Books and also corresponding with many children who wrote to him about them.^[15]

Life in New England[edit]

The writing life in Naulakha was occasionally interrupted by visitors, including his father, who visited soon after his retirement in 1893,^[15] and the British writer Arthur Conan Doyle, who brought his golf clubs, stayed for two days, and gave Kipling an extended golf lesson.^[40][41] Kipling seemed to take to golf, occasionally practising with the local Congregational minister and even playing with red-painted balls when the ground was covered in snow.^[13][41] However, winter golf was «not altogether a success because there were no limits to a drive; the ball might skid two miles (3.2 km) down the long slope to Connecticut river.»^[13]

Kipling loved the outdoors,^[15] not least of whose marvels in Vermont was the turning of the leaves each fall. He described this moment in a letter: «A little maple began it, flaming blood-red of a sudden where he stood against the dark green of a pine-belt. Next morning there was an answering signal from the swamp where the sumacs grow. Three days later, the hill-sides as fast as the eye could range were afire, and the roads paved, with crimson and gold. Then a wet wind blew, and ruined all the uniforms of that gorgeous army; and the oaks, who had held themselves in reserve, buckled on their dull and bronzed cuirasses and stood it out stiffly to the last blown leaf, till nothing remained but pencil-shadings of bare boughs, and one could see into the most private heart of the woods.»^[42]

In February 1896, Elsie Kipling was born, the couple’s second daughter. By this time, according to several biographers, their marital relationship was no longer light-hearted and spontaneous.^[43] Although they would always remain loyal to each other, they seemed now to have fallen into set roles.^[15] In a letter to a friend who had become engaged around this time, the 30‑year‑old Kipling offered this sombre counsel: marriage principally taught «the tougher virtues – such as humility, restraint, order, and forethought.»^[44] Later in the same year, he temporarily taught at Bishop’s College School in Quebec, Canada.^[45]

The Kiplings loved life in Vermont and might have lived out their lives there, were it not for two incidents – one of global politics, the other of family discord. By the early 1890s, the United Kingdom and Venezuela were in a border dispute involving British Guiana. The U.S. had made several offers to arbitrate, but in 1895, the new American Secretary of State Richard Olney upped the ante by arguing for the American «right» to arbitrate on grounds of sovereignty on the continent (see the Olney interpretation as an extension of the Monroe Doctrine).^[15] This raised hackles in Britain, and the situation grew into a major Anglo-American crisis, with talk of war on both sides.

Although the crisis eased into greater United States–British co-operation, Kipling was bewildered by what he felt was persistent anti-British sentiment in the U.S., especially in the press.^[15] He wrote in a letter that it felt like being «aimed at with a decanter across a friendly dinner table.»^[44] By January 1896, he had decided^[13] to end his family’s «good wholesome life» in the U.S. and seek their fortunes elsewhere.

A family dispute became the final straw. For some time, relations between Carrie and her brother Beatty Balestier had been strained, owing to his drinking and insolvency. In May 1896, an inebriated Beatty encountered Kipling on the street and threatened him with physical harm.^[15] The incident led to Beatty’s eventual arrest, but in the subsequent hearing and the resulting publicity, Kipling’s privacy was destroyed, and he was left feeling miserable and exhausted. In July 1896, a week before the hearing was to resume, the Kiplings packed their belongings, left the United States and returned to England.^[13]

Devon[edit]

By September 1896, the Kiplings were in Torquay, Devon, on the south-western coast of England, in a hillside home overlooking the English Channel. Although Kipling did not much care for his new house, whose design, he claimed, left its occupants feeling dispirited and gloomy, he managed to remain productive and socially active.^[15]

Kipling was now a famous man, and in the previous two or three years had increasingly been making political pronouncements in his writings. The Kiplings had welcomed their first son, John, in August 1897. Kipling had begun work on two poems, «Recessional» (1897) and «The White Man’s Burden» (1899), which were to create controversy when published. Regarded by some as anthems for enlightened and duty-bound empire-building (capturing the mood of the Victorian era), the poems were seen by others as propaganda for brazen-faced imperialism and its attendant racial attitudes; still others saw irony in the poems and warnings of the perils of empire.^[15]

Take up the White Man’s burden—
Send forth the best ye breed—
Go, bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait, in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild—
Your new-caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.
—The White Man’s Burden^[46]

There was also foreboding in the poems, a sense that all could yet come to naught.^[47]

Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet.
Lest we forget – lest we forget!
—Recessional^[48]

A prolific writer during his time in Torquay, he also wrote Stalky & Co., a collection of school stories (born of his experience at the United Services College in Westward Ho!), whose juvenile protagonists display a know-it-all, cynical outlook on patriotism and authority. According to his family, Kipling enjoyed reading aloud stories from Stalky & Co. to them and often went into spasms of laughter over his own jokes.^[15]

Visits to South Africa[edit]

In early 1898, the Kiplings travelled to South Africa for their winter holiday, so beginning an annual tradition which (except the following year) would last until 1908. They would stay in «The Woolsack», a house on Cecil Rhodes’s estate at Groote Schuur (now a student residence for the University of Cape Town), within walking distance of Rhodes’ mansion.^[49]

With his new reputation as Poet of the Empire, Kipling was warmly received by some of the influential politicians of the Cape Colony, including Rhodes, Sir Alfred Milner, and Leander Starr Jameson. Kipling cultivated their friendship and came to admire the men and their politics. The period 1898–1910 was crucial in the history of South Africa and included the Second Boer War (1899–1902), the ensuing peace treaty, and the 1910 formation of the Union of South Africa. Back in England, Kipling wrote poetry in support of the British cause in the Boer War and on his next visit to South Africa in early 1900, became a correspondent for The Friend newspaper in Bloemfontein, which had been commandeered by Lord Roberts for British troops.^[50]

Although his journalistic stint was to last only two weeks, it was Kipling’s first work on a newspaper staff since he left The Pioneer in Allahabad more than ten years before.^[15] At The Friend, he made lifelong friendships with Perceval Landon, H. A. Gwynne, and others.^[51] He also wrote articles published more widely expressing his views on the conflict.^[52] Kipling penned an inscription for the Honoured Dead Memorial (Siege memorial) in Kimberley.

Sussex[edit]

In 1897, Kipling moved from Torquay to Rottingdean, near Brighton, East Sussex – first to North End House and then to the Elms.^[53] In 1902, Kipling bought Bateman’s, a house built in 1634 and located in rural Burwash.

Bateman’s was Kipling’s home from 1902 until his death in 1936.^[54] The house and its surrounding buildings, the mill and 33 acres (13 ha), were bought for £9,300. It had no bathroom, no running water upstairs and no electricity, but Kipling loved it: «Behold us, lawful owners of a grey stone lichened house – A.D. 1634 over the door – beamed, panelled, with old oak staircase, and all untouched and unfaked. It is a good and peaceable place. We have loved it ever since our first sight of it» (from a November 1902 letter).^[55][56]

In the non-fiction realm, he became involved in the debate over the British response to the rise in German naval power known as the Tirpitz Plan, to build a fleet to challenge the Royal Navy, publishing a series of articles in 1898 collected as A Fleet in Being. On a visit to the United States in 1899, Kipling and his daughter Josephine developed pneumonia, from which she eventually died.

In the wake of his daughter’s death, Kipling concentrated on collecting material for what became Just So Stories for Little Children, published in 1902, the year after Kim.^[57] The American art historian Janice Leoshko and the American literary scholar David Scott have argued that Kim disproves the claim by Edward Said that Kipling was a promoter of Orientalism, since Kipling – who was deeply interested in Buddhism – presented Tibetan Buddhism in a fairly sympathetic light and aspects of the novel appeared to reflect a Buddhist understanding of the universe.^[58][59] Kipling was offended by the German Emperor Wilhelm II’s Hun speech (Hunnenrede) in 1900, urging German troops being sent to China to crush the Boxer Rebellion to behave like «Huns» and take no prisoners.^[60]

In a 1902 poem, The Rowers, Kipling attacked the Kaiser as a threat to Britain and made the first use of the term «Hun» as an anti-German insult, using Wilhelm’s own words and the actions of German troops in China to portray Germans as essentially barbarian.^[60] In an interview with the French newspaper Le Figaro, the Francophile Kipling called Germany a menace and called for an Anglo-French alliance to stop it.^[60] In another letter at the same time, Kipling described the «unfrei peoples of Central Europe» as living in «the Middle Ages with machine guns».^[60]

Speculative fiction[edit]

Kipling wrote a number of speculative fiction short stories, including «The Army of a Dream», in which he sought to show a more efficient and responsible army than the hereditary bureaucracy of England at the time, and two science fiction stories: «With the Night Mail» (1905) and «As Easy As A.B.C.» (1912). Both were set in the 21st century in Kipling’s Aerial Board of Control universe. They read like modern hard science fiction,^[61] and introduced the literary technique known as indirect exposition, which would later become one of science fiction writer Robert Heinlein’s hallmarks. This technique is one that Kipling picked up in India, and used to solve the problem of his English readers not understanding much about Indian society when writing The Jungle Book.^[62]

Nobel laureate and beyond[edit]

In 1907, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, having been nominated in that year by Charles Oman, professor at the University of Oxford.^[63] The prize citation said it was «in consideration of the power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas and remarkable talent for narration which characterize the creations of this world-famous author.» Nobel prizes had been established in 1901 and Kipling was the first English-language recipient. At the award ceremony in Stockholm on 10 December 1907, the Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, Carl David af Wirsén, praised both Kipling and three centuries of English literature:

The Swedish Academy, in awarding the Nobel Prize in Literature this year to Rudyard Kipling, desires to pay a tribute of homage to the literature of England, so rich in manifold glories, and to the greatest genius in the realm of narrative that that country has produced in our times.^[64]

To «book-end» this achievement came the publication of two connected poetry and story collections: Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906), and Rewards and Fairies (1910). The latter contained the poem «If—». In a 1995 BBC opinion poll, it was voted the UK’s favourite poem.^[65] This exhortation to self-control and stoicism is arguably Kipling’s most famous poem.^[65]

Such was Kipling’s popularity that he was asked by his friend Max Aitken to intervene in the 1911 Canadian election on behalf of the Conservatives.^[66] In 1911, the major issue in Canada was a reciprocity treaty with the United States signed by the Liberal Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier and vigorously opposed by the Conservatives under Sir Robert Borden. On 7 September 1911, the Montreal Daily Star newspaper published a front-page appeal against the agreement by Kipling, who wrote: «It is her own soul that Canada risks today. Once that soul is pawned for any consideration, Canada must inevitably conform to the commercial, legal, financial, social, and ethical standards which will be imposed on her by the sheer admitted weight of the United States.»^[66] At the time, the Montreal Daily Star was Canada’s most read newspaper. Over the next week, Kipling’s appeal was reprinted in every English newspaper in Canada and is credited with helping to turn Canadian public opinion against the Liberal government.^[66]

Kipling sympathised with the anti-Home Rule stance of Irish Unionists, who opposed Irish autonomy. He was friends with Edward Carson, the Dublin-born leader of Ulster Unionism, who raised the Ulster Volunteers to prevent Home Rule in Ireland. Kipling wrote in a letter to a friend that Ireland was not a nation, and that before the English arrived in 1169, the Irish were a gang of cattle thieves living in savagery and killing each other while «writing dreary poems» about it all. In his view it was only British rule that allowed Ireland to advance.^[67] A visit to Ireland in 1911 confirmed Kipling’s prejudices. He wrote that the Irish countryside was beautiful, but spoiled by what he called the ugly homes of Irish farmers, with Kipling adding that God had made the Irish into poets having «deprived them of love of line or knowledge of colour.»^[68] In contrast, Kipling had nothing but praise for the «decent folk» of the Protestant minority and Unionist Ulster, free from the threat of «constant mob violence».^[68]

Kipling wrote the poem «Ulster» in 1912, reflecting his Unionist politics. Kipling often referred to the Irish Unionists as «our party».^[69] Kipling had no sympathy or understanding for Irish nationalism, seeing Home Rule as an act of treason by the government of the Liberal Prime Minister H. H. Asquith that would plunge Ireland into the Dark Ages and allow the Irish Catholic majority to oppress the Protestant minority.^[70] The scholar David Gilmour wrote that Kipling’s lack of understanding of Ireland could be seen in his attack on John Redmond – the Anglophile leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party who wanted Home Rule because he believed it was the best way of keeping the United Kingdom together – as a traitor working to break up the United Kingdom.^[71] Ulster was first publicly read at an Unionist rally in Belfast, where the largest Union Jack ever made was unfolded.^[71] Kipling admitted it was meant to strike a «hard blow» against the Asquith government’s Home Rule bill: «Rebellion, rapine, hate, Oppression, wrong and greed, Are loosed to rule our fate, By England’s act and deed.»^[68] Ulster generated much controversy with the Conservative MP Sir Mark Sykes – who as a Unionist was opposed to the Home Rule bill – condemning Ulster in The Morning Post as a «direct appeal to ignorance and a deliberate attempt to foster religious hate.»^[71]

Kipling was a staunch opponent of Bolshevism, a position which he shared with his friend Henry Rider Haggard. The two had bonded on Kipling’s arrival in London in 1889 largely due to their shared opinions, and remained lifelong friends.

Freemasonry[edit]

According to the English magazine Masonic Illustrated, Kipling became a Freemason in about 1885, before the usual minimum age of 21,^[72] being initiated into Hope and Perseverance Lodge No. 782 in Lahore. He later wrote to The Times, «I was Secretary for some years of the Lodge… which included Brethren of at least four creeds. I was entered [as an Apprentice] by a member from Brahmo Somaj, a Hindu, passed [to the degree of Fellow Craft] by a Mohammedan, and raised [to the degree of Master Mason] by an Englishman. Our Tyler was an Indian Jew.» Kipling received not only the three degrees of Craft Masonry but also the side degrees of Mark Master Mason and Royal Ark Mariner.^[73]

Kipling so loved his Masonic experience that he memorialised its ideals in his poem «The Mother Lodge»,^[72] and used the fraternity and its symbols as vital plot devices in his novella The Man Who Would Be King.^[74]

First World War (1914–1918)[edit]

At the beginning of the First World War, like many other writers, Kipling wrote pamphlets and poems enthusiastically supporting the UK war aims of restoring Belgium, after it had been occupied by Germany, together with generalised statements that Britain was standing up for the cause of good. In September 1914, Kipling was asked by the government to write propaganda, an offer that he accepted.^[75] Kipling’s pamphlets and stories were popular with the British people during the war, his major themes being to glorify the British military as the place for heroic men to be, while citing German atrocities against Belgian civilians and the stories of women brutalised by a horrific war unleashed by Germany, yet surviving and triumphing in spite of their suffering.^[75]

Kipling was enraged by reports of the Rape of Belgium together with the sinking of the RMS Lusitania in 1915, which he saw as a deeply inhumane act, which led him to see the war as a crusade for civilisation against barbarism.^[76] In a 1915 speech, Kipling declared, «There was no crime, no cruelty, no abomination that the mind of men can conceive of which the German has not perpetrated, is not perpetrating, and will not perpetrate if he is allowed to go on…. Today, there are only two divisions in the world… human beings and Germans.»^[76]

Alongside his passionate antipathy towards Germany, Kipling was privately deeply critical of how the war was being fought by the British Army, complaining as early as October 1914 that Germany should have been defeated by now, and something must be wrong with the British Army.^[77] Kipling, who was shocked by the heavy losses that the British Expeditionary Force had taken by the autumn of 1914, blamed the entire pre-war generation of British politicians who, he argued, had failed to learn the lessons of the Boer War. Thus thousands of British soldiers were now paying with their lives for their failure in the fields of France and Belgium.^[77]

Kipling had scorn for men who shirked duty in the First World War. In «The New Army in Training»^[78] (1915), Kipling concluded by saying:

This much we can realise, even though we are so close to it, the old safe instinct saves us from triumph and exultation. But what will be the position in years to come of the young man who has deliberately elected to outcaste himself from this all-embracing brotherhood? What of his family, and, above all, what of his descendants, when the books have been closed and the last balance struck of sacrifice and sorrow in every hamlet, village, parish, suburb, city, shire, district, province, and Dominion throughout the Empire?

In 1914, Kipling was one of 53 leading British authors – a number that included H. G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle and Thomas Hardy – who signed their names to the «Authors’ Declaration.» This manifesto declared that the German invasion of Belgium had been a brutal crime, and that Britain «could not without dishonour have refused to take part in the present war.»^[79]

Death of John Kipling[edit]

Kipling’s son John was killed in action at the Battle of Loos in September 1915, at age 18. John initially wanted to join the Royal Navy, but having had his application turned down after a failed medical examination due to poor eyesight, he opted to apply for military service as an army officer. Again, his eyesight was an issue during the medical examination. In fact, he tried twice to enlist, but was rejected. His father had been lifelong friends with Lord Roberts, former commander-in-chief of the British Army, and colonel of the Irish Guards, and at Rudyard’s request, John was accepted into the Irish Guards.^[75]

John Kipling was sent to Loos two days into the battle in a reinforcement contingent. He was last seen stumbling through the mud blindly, with a possible facial injury. A body identified as his was found in 1992, although that identification has been challenged.^[80][81][82] In 2015, the Commonwealth War Grave Commission confirmed that it had correctly identified the burial place of John Kipling;^[83] they record his date of death as 27 September 1915, and that he is buried at St Mary’s A.D.S. Cemetery, Haisnes.^[84]

After his son’s death, in a poem titled «Epitaphs of the War», Kipling wrote «If any question why we died / Tell them, because our fathers lied.» Critics have speculated that these words may express Kipling’s guilt over his role in arranging John’s commission.^[85] Professor Tracy Bilsing contends that the line refers to Kipling’s disgust that British leaders failed to learn the lessons of the Boer War, and were unprepared for the struggle with Germany in 1914, with the «lie» of the «fathers» being that the British Army was prepared for any war when it was not.^[75]

John’s death has been linked to Kipling’s 1916 poem «My Boy Jack», notably in the play My Boy Jack and its subsequent television adaptation, along with the documentary Rudyard Kipling: A Remembrance Tale. However, the poem was originally published at the head of a story about the Battle of Jutland and appears to refer to a death at sea; the «Jack» referred to may be to the boy VC Jack Cornwell, or perhaps a generic «Jack Tar».^[86] In the Kipling family, Jack was the name of the family dog, while John Kipling was always John, making the identification of the protagonist of «My Boy Jack» with John Kipling somewhat questionable. However, Kipling was indeed emotionally devastated by the death of his son. He is said to have assuaged his grief by reading the novels of Jane Austen aloud to his wife and daughter.^[87] During the war, he wrote a booklet The Fringes of the Fleet^[88] containing essays and poems on various nautical subjects of the war. Some of these were set to music by the English composer Edward Elgar.^[89]

Kipling became friends with a French soldier named Maurice Hammoneau, whose life had been saved in the First World War when his copy of Kim, which he had in his left breast pocket, stopped a bullet. Hammoneau presented Kipling with the book, with bullet still embedded, and his Croix de Guerre as a token of gratitude. They continued to correspond, and when Hammoneau had a son, Kipling insisted on returning the book and medal.^[90]

On 1 August 1918, the poem «The Old Volunteer» appeared under his name in The Times. The next day, he wrote to the newspaper to disclaim authorship and a correction appeared. Although The Times employed a private detective to investigate, the detective appears to have suspected Kipling himself of being the author, and the identity of the hoaxer was never established.^[91]

After the war (1918–1936)[edit]

Partly in response to John’s death, Kipling joined Sir Fabian Ware’s Imperial War Graves Commission (now the Commonwealth War Graves Commission), the group responsible for the garden-like British war graves that can be found to this day dotted along the former Western Front and the other places in the world where British Empire troops lie buried. His main contributions to the project were his selection of the biblical phrase, «Their Name Liveth For Evermore» (Ecclesiasticus 44.14, KJV), found on the Stones of Remembrance in larger war cemeteries, and his suggestion of the phrase «Known unto God» for the gravestones of unidentified servicemen. He also chose the inscription «The Glorious Dead» on the Cenotaph, Whitehall, London. Additionally, he wrote a two-volume history of the Irish Guards, his son’s regiment, published in 1923 and seen as one of the finest examples of regimental history.^[92]

Kipling’s short story «The Gardener» depicts visits to the war cemeteries, and the poem «The King’s Pilgrimage» (1922) a journey which King George V made, touring the cemeteries and memorials under construction by the Imperial War Graves Commission. With the increasing popularity of the automobile, Kipling became a motoring correspondent for the British press, writing enthusiastically of trips around England and abroad, though he was usually driven by a chauffeur.

After the war, Kipling was sceptical of the Fourteen Points and the League of Nations, but had hopes that the United States would abandon isolationism and the post-war world be dominated by an Anglo-French-American alliance.^[93] He hoped the United States would take on a League of Nations mandate for Armenia as the best way of preventing isolationism, and hoped that Theodore Roosevelt, whom Kipling admired, would again become president.^[93] Kipling was saddened by Roosevelt’s death in 1919, believing him to be the only American politician capable of keeping the United States in the «game» of world politics.^[94]

Kipling was hostile towards communism, writing of the Bolshevik take-over in 1917 that one sixth of the world had «passed bodily out of civilization».^[95] In a 1918 poem, Kipling wrote of Soviet Russia that everything good in Russia had been destroyed by the Bolsheviks – all that was left was «the sound of weeping and the sight of burning fire, and the shadow of a people trampled into the mire.»^[95]

In 1920, Kipling co-founded the Liberty League^[96] with Haggard and Lord Sydenham. This short-lived enterprise focused on promoting classic liberal ideals as a response to the rising power of communist tendencies within Great Britain, or as Kipling put it, «to combat the advance of Bolshevism.»^[97][98]

In 1922, Kipling, having referred to the work of engineers in some of his poems, such as «The Sons of Martha», «Sappers», and «McAndrew’s Hymn»,^[99] and in other writings, including short-story anthologies such as The Day’s Work,^[100] was asked by a University of Toronto civil engineering professor, Herbert E. T. Haultain, for assistance in developing a dignified obligation and ceremony for graduating engineering students. Kipling was enthusiastic in his response and shortly produced both, formally titled «The Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer». Today, engineering graduates all across Canada are presented with an iron ring at a ceremony to remind them of their obligation to society.^[101][102] In 1922 Kipling became Lord Rector of St Andrews University in Scotland, a three-year position.

Kipling, as a Francophile, argued strongly for an Anglo-French alliance to uphold the peace, calling Britain and France in 1920 the «twin fortresses of European civilization».^[103] Similarly, Kipling repeatedly warned against revising the Treaty of Versailles in Germany’s favour, which he predicted would lead to a new world war.^[103] An admirer of Raymond Poincaré, Kipling was one of few British intellectuals who supported the French Occupation of the Ruhr in 1923, at a time when the British government and most public opinion was against the French position.^[104] In contrast to the popular British view of Poincaré as a cruel bully intent on impoverishing Germany with unreasonable reparations, Kipling argued that he was rightfully trying to preserve France as a great power in the face of an unfavourable situation.^[104] Kipling argued that even before 1914, Germany’s larger economy and higher birth rate had made that country stronger than France; with much of France devastated by war and the French suffering heavy losses meant that its low birth rate would give it trouble, while Germany was mostly undamaged and still with a higher birth rate. So he reasoned that the future would bring German domination if Versailles were revised in Germany’s favour, and it was madness for Britain to press France to do so.^[104]

In 1924, Kipling was opposed to the Labour government of Ramsay MacDonald as «Bolshevism without bullets». He believed that Labour was a communist front organisation, and «excited orders and instructions from Moscow» would expose Labour as such to the British people.^[105] Kipling’s views were on the right. Though he admired Benito Mussolini to some extent in the 1920s, he was against fascism, calling Oswald Mosley «a bounder and an arriviste«. By 1935, he was calling Mussolini a deranged and dangerous egomaniac and in 1933 wrote, «The Hitlerites are out for blood».^[106]

Despite his anti-communism, the first major translations of Kipling into Russian took place under Lenin’s rule in the early 1920s, and Kipling was popular with Russian readers in the interwar period. Many younger Russian poets and writers, such as Konstantin Simonov, were influenced by him.^[107] Kipling’s clarity of style, use of colloquial language and employment of rhythm and rhyme were seen as major innovations in poetry that appealed to many younger Russian poets.^[108]
Though it was obligatory for Soviet journals to begin translations of Kipling with an attack on him as a «fascist» and an «imperialist», such was Kipling’s popularity with Russian readers that his works were not banned in the Soviet Union until 1939, with the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.^[107] The ban was lifted in 1941 after Operation Barbarossa, when Britain become a Soviet ally, but imposed for good with the Cold War in 1946.^[109]

Many older editions of Rudyard Kipling’s books have a swastika printed on the cover, associated with a picture of an elephant carrying a lotus flower, reflecting the influence of Indian culture. Kipling’s use of the swastika was based on the Indian sun symbol conferring good luck and the Sanskrit word meaning «fortunate» or «well-being».^[110] He used the swastika symbol in both right and left-facing forms, and it was in general use by others at the time.^[111][112]

In a note to Edward Bok after the death of Lockwood Kipling in 1911, Rudyard said: «I am sending with this for your acceptance, as some little memory of my father to whom you were so kind, the original of one of the plaques that he used to make for me. I thought it being the Swastika would be appropriate for your Swastika. May it bring you even more good fortune.»^[110] Once the swastika had become widely associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, Kipling ordered that it should no longer adorn his books.^[110] Less than a year before his death, Kipling gave a speech (titled «An Undefended Island») to the Royal Society of St George on 6 May 1935, warning of the danger which Nazi Germany posed to Britain.^[113]

Kipling scripted the first Royal Christmas Message, delivered via the BBC’s Empire Service by George V in 1932.^[114][115] In 1934, he published a short story in The Strand Magazine, «Proofs of Holy Writ», postulating that William Shakespeare had helped to polish the prose of the King James Bible.^[116]

Death[edit]

Kipling kept writing until the early 1930s, but at a slower pace and with less success than before. On the night of 12 January 1936, he suffered a haemorrhage in his small intestine. He underwent surgery, but died at Middlesex Hospital in London less than a week later on 18 January 1936, at the age of 70, of a perforated duodenal ulcer.^{[117][118][119]} Kipling’s body was laid in state in the Fitzrovia Chapel, part of Middlesex Hospital, after his death, and is commemorated with a plaque near the altar. His death had previously been incorrectly announced in a magazine, to which he wrote, «I’ve just read that I am dead. Don’t forget to delete me from your list of subscribers.»^[120]

The pallbearers at the funeral included Kipling’s cousin, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, and the marble casket was covered by a Union Jack.^[121] Kipling was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium in north-west London, and his ashes interred at Poets’ Corner, part of the South Transept of Westminster Abbey, next to the graves of Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy.^[121] Kipling’s will was proven on 6 April, with his estate valued at £168,141 2s. 11d. (roughly equivalent to £12,154,269 in 2021^[122]).^[123]

Legacy[edit]

In 2002, Kipling’s Just So Stories featured on a series of UK postage stamps issued by the Royal Mail to mark the centenary of the publication of the book.^[124] In 2010, the International Astronomical Union approved the naming of a crater on the planet Mercury after Kipling – one of ten newly discovered impact craters observed by the MESSENGER spacecraft in 2008–2009.^[125] In 2012, an extinct species of crocodile, Goniopholis kiplingi, was named in his honour «in recognition for his enthusiasm for natural sciences.»^[126] More than 50 unpublished poems by Kipling, discovered by the American scholar Thomas Pinney, were released for the first time in March 2013.^[127]

Kipling’s writing has strongly influenced that of others. His stories for adults remain in print and have garnered high praise from writers as different as Poul Anderson, Jorge Luis Borges, and Randall Jarrell, who wrote: «After you have read Kipling’s fifty or seventy-five best stories you realize that few men have written this many stories of this much merit, and that very few have written more and better stories.»^[128]

His children’s stories remain popular and his Jungle Books made into several films. The first was made by producer Alexander Korda. Other films have been produced by The Walt Disney Company. A number of his poems were set to music by Percy Grainger. A series of short films based on some of his stories was broadcast by the BBC in 1964.^[129] Kipling’s work is still popular today.

The poet T. S. Eliot edited A Choice of Kipling’s Verse (1941) with an introductory essay.^[130] Eliot was aware of the complaints that had been levelled against Kipling and he dismissed them one by one: that Kipling is «a Tory» using his verse to transmit right wing political views, or «a journalist» pandering to popular taste; while Eliot writes: «I cannot find any justification for the charge that he held a doctrine of race superiority.»^[131] Eliot finds instead:

An immense gift for using words, an amazing curiosity and power of observation with his mind and with all his senses, the mask of the entertainer, and beyond that a queer gift of second sight, of transmitting messages from elsewhere, a gift so disconcerting when we are made aware of it that thenceforth we are never sure when it is not present: all this makes Kipling a writer impossible wholly to understand and quite impossible to belittle.

— T. S. Eliot^[132]

Of Kipling’s verse, such as his Barrack-Room Ballads, Eliot writes «of a number of poets who have written great poetry, only… a very few whom I should call great verse writers. And unless I am mistaken, Kipling’s position in this class is not only high, but unique.»^[133]

In response to Eliot, George Orwell wrote a long consideration of Kipling’s work for Horizon in 1942, noting that although as a «jingo imperialist» Kipling was «morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting», his work had many qualities which ensured that while «every enlightened person has despised him… nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there.»:

One reason for Kipling’s power [was] his sense of responsibility, which made it possible for him to have a world-view, even though it happened to be a false one. Although he had no direct connexion with any political party, Kipling was a Conservative, a thing that does not exist nowadays. Those who now call themselves Conservatives are either Liberals, Fascists or the accomplices of Fascists. He identified himself with the ruling power and not with the opposition. In a gifted writer this seems to us strange and even disgusting, but it did have the advantage of giving Kipling a certain grip on reality. The ruling power is always faced with the question, ‘In such and such circumstances, what would you do?‘, whereas the opposition is not obliged to take responsibility or make any real decisions. Where it is a permanent and pensioned opposition, as in England, the quality of its thought deteriorates accordingly. Moreover, anyone who starts out with a pessimistic, reactionary view of life tends to be justified by events, for Utopia never arrives and ‘the gods of the copybook headings’, as Kipling himself put it, always return. Kipling sold out to the British governing class, not financially but emotionally. This warped his political judgement, for the British ruling class were not what he imagined, and it led him into abysses of folly and snobbery, but he gained a corresponding advantage from having at least tried to imagine what action and responsibility are like. It is a great thing in his favour that he is not witty, not ‘daring’, has no wish to épater les bourgeois. He dealt largely in platitudes, and since we live in a world of platitudes, much of what he said sticks. Even his worst follies seem less shallow and less irritating than the ‘enlightened’ utterances of the same period, such as Wilde’s epigrams or the collection of cracker-mottoes at the end of Man and Superman.

— George Orwell^[134]

In 1939, the poet W. H. Auden celebrated Kipling in a similarly ambiguous way in his elegy for William Butler Yeats. Auden deleted this section from more recent editions of his poems.

Time, that is intolerant
Of the brave and innocent,
And indifferent in a week
To a beautiful physique,

Worships language, and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honours at his feet.

Time, that with this strange excuse,
Pardons Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.^[135]

The poet Alison Brackenbury writes «Kipling is poetry’s Dickens, an outsider and journalist with an unrivalled ear for sound and speech.»^[136]

The English folk singer Peter Bellamy was a lover of Kipling’s poetry, much of which he believed to have been influenced by English traditional folk forms. He recorded several albums of Kipling’s verse set to traditional airs, or to tunes of his own composition written in traditional style.^[137] However, in the case of the bawdy folk song, «The Bastard King of England», which is commonly credited to Kipling, it is believed that the song is actually misattributed.^[138]

Kipling often is quoted in discussions of contemporary British political and social issues. In 1911, Kipling wrote the poem «The Reeds of Runnymede» that celebrated the Magna Carta, and summoned up a vision of the «stubborn Englishry» determined to defend their rights. In 1996, the following verses of the poem were quoted by former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher warning against the encroachment of the European Union on national sovereignty:

At Runnymede, at Runnymede,
Oh, hear the reeds at Runnymede:
‘You musn’t sell, delay, deny,
A freeman’s right or liberty.
It wakes the stubborn Englishry,
We saw ’em roused at Runnymede!

… And still when Mob or Monarch lays
Too rude a hand on English ways,
The whisper wakes, the shudder plays,
Across the reeds at Runnymede.
And Thames, that knows the mood of kings,
And crowds and priests and suchlike things,
Rolls deep and dreadful as he brings
Their warning down from Runnymede!^[139]

Political singer-songwriter Billy Bragg, who attempts to build a left-wing English nationalism in contrast with the more common right-wing English nationalism, has attempted to ‘reclaim’ Kipling for an inclusive sense of Englishness.^[140] Kipling’s enduring relevance has been noted in the United States, as it has become involved in Afghanistan and other areas about which he wrote.^{[141][142][143]}

Links with camping and scouting[edit]

In 1903, Kipling gave permission to Elizabeth Ford Holt to borrow themes from the Jungle Books to establish Camp Mowglis, a summer camp for boys on the shores of Newfound Lake in New Hampshire. Throughout their lives, Kipling and his wife Carrie maintained an active interest in Camp Mowglis, which still continues the traditions that Kipling inspired. Buildings at Mowglis have names such as Akela, Toomai, Baloo, and Panther. The campers are referred to as «the Pack», from the youngest «Cubs» to the oldest living in «Den».^[144]

Kipling’s links with the Scouting movements were also strong. Robert Baden-Powell, founder of Scouting, used many themes from Jungle Book stories and Kim in setting up his junior Wolf Cubs. These ties still exist, such as the popularity of «Kim’s Game». The movement is named after Mowgli’s adopted wolf family, and adult helpers of Wolf Cub (now Cub Scout) Packs take names from The Jungle Book, especially the adult leader called Akela after the leader of the Seeonee wolf pack.^[145]

Kipling’s Burwash home[edit]

After the death of Kipling’s wife in 1939, his house, Bateman’s in Burwash, East Sussex, where he had lived from 1902 until 1936, was bequeathed to the National Trust. It is now a public museum dedicated to the author. Elsie Bambridge, his only child who lived to maturity, died childless in 1976, and bequeathed her copyrights to the National Trust, which in turn donated them to the University of Sussex to ensure better public access.^[147]

Novelist and poet Sir Kingsley Amis wrote a poem, «Kipling at Bateman’s», after visiting Burwash (where Amis’s father lived briefly in the 1960s) as part of a BBC television series on writers and their houses.^[148]

In 2003, actor Ralph Fiennes read excerpts from Kipling’s works from the study in Bateman’s, including The Jungle Book, Something of Myself, Kim, and The Just So Stories, and poems, including «If …» and «My Boy Jack», for a CD published by the National Trust.^[149][150]

Reputation in India[edit]

In modern-day India, whence he drew much of his material, Kipling’s reputation remains controversial, especially among modern nationalists and some post-colonial critics. It has long been alleged that Rudyard Kipling was a prominent supporter of Colonel Reginald Dyer, who was responsible for the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar (in the province of Punjab), and that Kipling called Dyer «the man who saved India» and initiated collections for the latter’s homecoming prize.^[151] Kim Wagner, senior lecturer in British Imperial History at Queen Mary University of London, says that while Kipling did make a £10 donation, he never made that remark.^[152] Similarly, author Derek Sayer states that Dyer was «widely lauded as the saviour of Punjab», that Kipling had no part in organizing The Morning Post fund, and that Kipling only sent £10, making the laconic observation: «He did his duty, as he saw it.»^[153] Subhash Chopra also writes in his book Kipling Sahib – the Raj Patriot that the benefit fund was started by The Morning Post newspaper, not by Kipling.^[154] The Economic Times attributes the phrase «The Man Who Saved India» along with the Dyer benefit fund to The Morning Post as well.^[155]

Many contemporary Indian intellectuals such as Ashis Nandy have a nuanced view of Kipling’s legacy. Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India, often described Kipling’s novel Kim as one of his favourite books.^[156][157]

G. V. Desani, an Indian writer of fiction, had a more negative opinion of Kipling. He alludes to Kipling in his novel All About H. Hatterr:

I happen to pick up R. Kipling’s autobiographical Kim.
Therein, this self-appointed whiteman’s burden-bearing sherpa feller’s stated how, in the Orient, blokes hit the road and think nothing of walking a thousand miles in search of something.

Indian writer Khushwant Singh wrote in 2001 that he considers Kipling’s «If—» «the essence of the message of The Gita in English»,^[158] referring to the Bhagavad Gita, an ancient Indian scripture. Indian writer R. K. Narayan said «Kipling, the supposed expert writer on India, showed a better understanding of the mind of the animals in the jungle than of the men in an Indian home or the marketplace.»^[159] The Indian politician and writer Sashi Tharoor commented «Kipling, that flatulent voice of Victorian imperialism, would wax eloquent on the noble duty to bring law to those without it».^[160]

In November 2007, it was announced that Kipling’s birth home in the campus of the J. J. School of Art in Bombay would be turned into a museum celebrating the author and his works.^[161]

Art[edit]

Though best known as an author, Kipling was also an accomplished artist. Influenced by Aubrey Beardsley, Kipling produced many illustrations for his stories, e.g. Just So Stories, 1919.^[162]

Screen portrayals[edit]

• Reginald Sheffield portrayed Kipling in Gunga Din (1939).
• Paul Scardon portrayed Kipling in The Adventures of Mark Twain (1944).
• Christopher Plummer portrayed Kipling in The Man Who Would Be King (1975).
• David Haig portrayed Kipling in My Boy Jack (2007).
• David Watson portrayed Kipling in The Time Tunnel S1 E14 «Night of the Long Knives», (1966)^[163]

Bibliography[edit]

Kipling’s bibliography includes fiction (including novels and short stories), non-fiction, and poetry. Several of his works were collaborations.

See also[edit]

• Kipling Trail
• List of Nobel laureates in Literature
• HMS Birkenhead (1845) – ship mentioned in one of Kipling’s poems

References[edit]

Cited sources[edit]

• Eliot, T.S. (1941). A Choice of Kipling’s Verse, made by T. S. Eliot with an essay on Rudyard Kipling. Faber and Faber.^{[ISBN missing]}
• Gilmour, David (2003). The long recessional: the imperial life of Rudyard Kipling. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 978-1466830004.
• Hodgson, Katherine (October 1998). «The Poetry of Rudyard Kipling in Soviet Russia». The Modern Language Review. 93 (4): 1058–1071. doi:10.2307/3736277. JSTOR 3736277.
• Scott, David (June 2011). «Kipling, the Orient, and Orientals: ‘Orientalism’ Reoriented?». Journal of World History. 22 (2): 299–328 [315]. doi:10.1353/jwh.2011.0036. JSTOR 23011713. S2CID 143705079.

Further reading[edit]

Biography and criticism

• Allen, Charles (2007). Kipling Sahib: India and the Making of Rudyard Kipling, Abacus. ISBN 978-0-349-11685-3
• Bauer, Helen Pike (1994). Rudyard Kipling: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne
• Birkenhead, Lord (Frederick Smith, 2nd Earl of Birkenhead) (1978). Rudyard Kipling. Worthing: Littlehampton Book Services Ltd. ISBN 978-0-297-77535-5
• Carrington, Charles (1955). Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Work. London: Macmillan & Co.
• Croft-Cooke, Rupert (1948). Rudyard Kipling (London: Home & Van Thal Ltd.)
• David, C. (2007). Rudyard Kipling: a critical study, New Delhi: Anmol. ISBN 81-261-3101-2
• Dillingham, William B (2005). Rudyard Kipling: Hell and Heroism New York: Palgrave Macmillan^{[ISBN missing]}
• Gilbert, Elliot L. ed. (1965). Kipling and the Critics (New York: New York University Press)
• Gilmour, David (2003). The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 0-374-52896-9
• Green, Roger Lancelyn, ed. (1971). Kipling: the Critical Heritage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
• Gross, John, ed. (1972). Rudyard Kipling: the Man, his Work and his World. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson
• Harris, Brian (2014). The Surprising Mr Kipling: An anthology and reassessment of the poetry of Rudyard Kipling. CreateSpace. ISBN 978-1-4942-2194-2
• Harris, Brian (2015). The Two Sided Man. CreateSpace. ISBN 1508712328.
• Kemp, Sandra (1988). Kipling’s Hidden Narratives Oxford: Blackwell
• Lycett, Andrew (1999). Rudyard Kipling. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ISBN 0-297-81907-0
• Lycett, Andrew (ed.) (2010). Kipling Abroad, I. B. Tauris. ISBN 978-1-84885-072-9
• Mallett, Phillip (2003). Rudyard Kipling: A Literary Life Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan
• Montefiore, Jan (ed.) (2013). In Time’s Eye: Essays on Rudyard Kipling. Manchester: Manchester University Press
• Narita, Tatsushi (2011). T. S. Eliot and his Youth as ‘A Literary Columbus’. Nagoya: Kougaku Shuppan
• Nicolson, Adam (2001). Carrie Kipling 1862–1939 : The Hated Wife. Faber & Faber, London. ISBN 0-571-20835-5
• Ricketts, Harry (2001). Rudyard Kipling: A Life. New York: Da Capo Press ISBN 0-7867-0830-1
• Rooney, Caroline, and Kaori Nagai, eds. (2011). Kipling and Beyond: Patriotism, Globalisation, and Postcolonialism. Palgrave Macmillan; 214 pp.; scholarly essays on Kipling’s «boy heroes of empire», Kipling and C.L.R. James, and Kipling and the new American empire, etc.
• Rutherford, Andrew, ed. (1964). Kipling’s Mind and Art. Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd
• Sergeant, David (2013). Kipling’s Art of Fiction 1884–1901 Oxford: Oxford University Press
• Martin Seymour-Smith (1990). Rudyard Kipling,^{[ISBN missing]}
• Shippey, Tom, «Rudyard Kipling», in: Cahier Calin: Makers of the Middle Ages. Essays in Honor of William Calin, ed. Richard Utz and Elizabeth Emery (Kalamazoo, MI: Studies in Medievalism, 2011), pp. 21–23.
• Tompkins, J.M.S. (1959). The Art of Rudyard Kipling. London: Methuen online edition
• Walsh, Sue (2010). Kipling’s Children’s Literature: Language, Identity, and Constructions of Childhood Farnham: Ashgate
• Wilson, Angus (1978). The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Works New York: The Viking Press. ISBN 0-670-67701-9

External links[edit]

• The Kipling Society website
• Rudyard Kipling on Nobelprize.org
• Rudyard Kipling Archived 21 June 2020 at the Wayback Machine at the Encyclopedia of Fantasy
• Rudyard Kipling at the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
• Rudyard Kipling recordings at the Discography of American Historical Recordings.

Works

• Works by Rudyard Kipling in eBook form at Standard Ebooks
• Works by Rudyard Kipling at Project Gutenberg
• Rudyard Kipling at Global Grey Ebooks
• List of works at the Works Catalogues of Laureates of the Nobel Prize for Literature
• Works by or about Rudyard Kipling at Internet Archive
• Works by Rudyard Kipling at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Works by Rudyard Kipling (not public domain in US, so not available on Wikisource)

Resources

• Rudyard Kipling Papers and other Kipling related collections Archived 22 November 2021 at the Wayback Machine at The Keep, University of Sussex
• The Rudyard Kipling Collection maintained by Marlboro College.
• The Rudyard Kipling Poems by Poemist.
• Rudyard Kipling: The Books I Leave Behind exhibition, related podcast, and digital images maintained by the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University
• Rudyard Kipling at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• The Rudyard Kipling Collections From the Rare Book and Special Collections Division at the Library of Congress
• Archival material at Leeds University Library
• Newspaper clippings about Rudyard Kipling in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW
• A. P. Watt & Son records relating to Rudyard Kipling. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Academic offices
Preceded by Sir J. M. Barrie	Rector of the University of St Andrews 1922–1925	Succeeded by Fridtjof Nansen

Rudyard Kipling
Kipling in 1895
Born	Joseph Rudyard Kipling 30 December 1865 Malabar Hill, Bombay Presidency, British India
Died	18 January 1936 (aged 70) Fitzrovia, London, England
Resting place	Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey
Occupation	Short-story writer novelist poet journalist
Genre	Short story novel children’s literature poetry travel literature science fiction
Notable works	The Jungle Book Just So Stories Kim Captains Courageous «If—» «Gunga Din» «Mandalay» «The White Man’s Burden»
Notable awards	Nobel Prize in Literature 1907
Spouse	Caroline Starr Balestier ​ ​ (m. )​
Children	3, including Elsie and John
Parents	John Lockwood Kipling Alice MacDonald
Signature

Joseph Rudyard Kipling ( RUD-yərd; 30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936)^[1] was an English novelist, short-story writer, poet, and journalist. He was born in British India, which inspired much of his work.

Kipling’s works of fiction include the Jungle Book duology (The Jungle Book, 1894; The Second Jungle Book, 1895), Kim (1901), the Just So Stories (1902) and many short stories, including «The Man Who Would Be King» (1888).^[2] His poems include «Mandalay» (1890), «Gunga Din» (1890), «The Gods of the Copybook Headings» (1919), «The White Man’s Burden» (1899), and «If—» (1910). He is seen as an innovator in the art of the short story.^[3] His children’s books are classics; one critic noted «a versatile and luminous narrative gift».^[4][5]

Kipling in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was among the United Kingdom’s most popular writers.^[3] Henry James said «Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius, as distinct from fine intelligence, that I have ever known.»^[3] In 1907, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, as the first English-language writer to receive the prize, and at 41, its youngest recipient to date.^[6] He was also sounded out for the British Poet Laureateship and several times for a knighthood, but declined both.^[7] Following his death in 1936, his ashes were interred at Poets’ Corner, part of the South Transept of Westminster Abbey.

Kipling’s subsequent reputation has changed with the political and social climate of the age.^[8][9] The contrasting views of him continued for much of the 20th century.^[10][11] Literary critic Douglas Kerr wrote: «[Kipling] is still an author who can inspire passionate disagreement and his place in literary and cultural history is far from settled. But as the age of the European empires recedes, he is recognised as an incomparable, if controversial, interpreter of how empire was experienced. That, and an increasing recognition of his extraordinary narrative gifts, make him a force to be reckoned with.»^[12]

Childhood (1865–1882)[edit]

Rudyard Kipling was born on 30 December 1865 in Bombay, in the Bombay Presidency of British India, to Alice Kipling (born MacDonald) and John Lockwood Kipling.^[13] Alice (one of the four noted MacDonald sisters)^[14] was a vivacious woman,^[15] of whom Lord Dufferin would say, «Dullness and Mrs Kipling cannot exist in the same room.»^[3][16][17] John Lockwood Kipling, a sculptor and pottery designer, was the Principal and Professor of Architectural Sculpture at the newly founded Sir Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy School of Art in Bombay.^[15]

John Lockwood and Alice met in 1863 and courted at Rudyard Lake in Rudyard, Staffordshire, England. They married and moved to India in 1865 after John Lockwood had accepted the position as Professor at the School of Art.^[18] They had been so moved by the beauty of the Rudyard Lake area that they named their first child after it, Joseph Rudyard. Two of Alice’s sisters were married to artists: Georgiana to the painter Edward Burne-Jones, and her sister Agnes to Edward Poynter. A third sister, Louisa, was the mother of Kipling’s most prominent relative, his first cousin Stanley Baldwin, who was Conservative Prime Minister of the United Kingdom three times in the 1920s and 1930s.^[19]

Kipling’s birth home on the campus of the J.J. School of Art in Bombay was for many years used as the dean’s residence.^[20] Although a cottage bears a plaque noting it as his birth site, the original one may have been torn down and replaced decades ago.^[21] Some historians and conservationists take the view that the bungalow marks a site merely close to the home of Kipling’s birth, as it was built in 1882 – about 15 years after Kipling was born. Kipling seems to have said as much to the dean when visiting J. J. School in the 1930s.^[22]

Kipling wrote of Bombay:

Mother of Cities to me,
For I was born in her gate,
Between the palms and the sea,
Where the world-end steamers wait.^[23]

According to Bernice M. Murphy, «Kipling’s parents considered themselves ‘Anglo-Indians’ [a term used in the 19th century for people of British origin living in India] and so too would their son, though he spent the bulk of his life elsewhere. Complex issues of identity and national allegiance would become prominent in his fiction.»^[24]

Kipling referred to such conflicts. For example: «In the afternoon heats before we took our sleep, she (the Portuguese ayah, or nanny) or Meeta (the Hindu bearer, or male attendant) would tell us stories and Indian nursery songs all unforgotten, and we were sent into the dining-room after we had been dressed, with the caution ‘Speak English now to Papa and Mamma.’ So one spoke ‘English’, haltingly translated out of the vernacular idiom that one thought and dreamed in.»^[25]

Education in Britain[edit]

Kipling’s days of «strong light and darkness» in Bombay ended when he was five.^[25] As was the custom in British India, he and his three-year-old sister Alice («Trix») were taken to the United Kingdom – in their case to Southsea, Portsmouth – to live with a couple who boarded children of British nationals living abroad.^[26] For the next six years (from October 1871 to April 1877), the children lived with the couple – Captain Pryse Agar Holloway, once an officer in the merchant navy, and Sarah Holloway – at their house, Lorne Lodge, 4 Campbell Road, Southsea.^[27] Kipling referred to the place as «the House of Desolation».^[25]

In his autobiography published 65 years later, Kipling recalled the stay with horror, and wondered if the combination of cruelty and neglect that he experienced there at the hands of Mrs Holloway might not have hastened the onset of his literary life: «If you cross-examine a child of seven or eight on his day’s doings (specially when he wants to go to sleep) he will contradict himself very satisfactorily. If each contradiction be set down as a lie and retailed at breakfast, life is not easy. I have known a certain amount of bullying, but this was calculated torture – religious as well as scientific. Yet it made me give attention to the lies I soon found it necessary to tell: and this, I presume, is the foundation of literary effort.»^[25]

Trix fared better at Lorne Lodge; Mrs Holloway apparently hoped that Trix would eventually marry the Holloways’ son.^[28] The two Kipling children, however, had no relatives in England they could visit, except that they spent a month each Christmas with a maternal aunt Georgiana («Georgy») and her husband, Edward Burne-Jones, at their house, The Grange, in Fulham, London, which Kipling called «a paradise which I verily believe saved me».^[25]

In the spring of 1877, Alice returned from India and removed the children from Lorne Lodge. Kipling remembers «Often and often afterwards, the beloved Aunt would ask me why I had never told any one how I was being treated. Children tell little more than animals, for what comes to them they accept as eternally established. Also, badly-treated children have a clear notion of what they are likely to get if they betray the secrets of a prison-house before they are clear of it.»^[25]

Alice took the children during spring 1877 to Goldings Farm at Loughton, where a carefree summer and autumn was spent on the farm and adjoining Forest, some of the time with Stanley Baldwin. In January 1878, Kipling was admitted to the United Services College at Westward Ho!, Devon, a school recently founded to prepare boys for the army. It proved rough going for him at first, but later led to firm friendships and provided the setting for his schoolboy stories Stalky & Co. (1899).^[28] While there, Kipling met and fell in love with Florence Garrard, who was boarding with Trix at Southsea (to which Trix had returned). Florence became the model for Maisie in Kipling’s first novel, The Light That Failed (1891).^[28]

Return to India[edit]

Near the end of his schooling, it was decided that Kipling did not have the academic ability to get into Oxford University on a scholarship.^[28] His parents lacked the wherewithal to finance him,^[15] and so Kipling’s father obtained a job for him in Lahore, where the father served as Principal of the Mayo College of Art and Curator of the Lahore Museum. Kipling was to be assistant editor of a local newspaper, the Civil and Military Gazette.

He sailed for India on 20 September 1882 and arrived in Bombay on 18 October. He described the moment years later: «So, at sixteen years and nine months, but looking four or five years older, and adorned with real whiskers which the scandalised Mother abolished within one hour of beholding, I found myself at Bombay where I was born, moving among sights and smells that made me deliver in the vernacular sentences whose meaning I knew not. Other Indian-born boys have told me how the same thing happened to them.»^[25] This arrival changed Kipling, as he explains: «There were yet three or four days’ rail to Lahore, where my people lived. After these, my English years fell away, nor ever, I think, came back in full strength.»^[25]

Early adult life (1882–1914)[edit]

From 1883 to 1889, Kipling worked in British India for local newspapers such as the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore and The Pioneer in Allahabad.^[25]

The former, which was the newspaper Kipling was to call his «mistress and most true love»,^[25] appeared six days a week throughout the year, except for one-day breaks for Christmas and Easter. Stephen Wheeler, the editor, worked Kipling hard, but Kipling’s need to write was unstoppable. In 1886, he published his first collection of verse, Departmental Ditties. That year also brought a change of editors at the newspaper; Kay Robinson, the new editor, allowed more creative freedom and Kipling was asked to contribute short stories to the newspaper.^[4]

In an article printed in the Chums boys’ annual, an ex-colleague of Kipling’s stated that «he never knew such a fellow for ink – he simply revelled in it, filling up his pen viciously, and then throwing the contents all over the office, so that it was almost dangerous to approach him.»^[29] The anecdote continues: «In the hot weather when he (Kipling) wore only white trousers and a thin vest, he is said to have resembled a Dalmatian dog more than a human being, for he was spotted all over with ink in every direction.»

In the summer of 1883, Kipling visited Simla (today’s Shimla), a well-known hill station and the summer capital of British India. By then it was the practice for the Viceroy of India and government to move to Simla for six months, and the town became a «centre of power as well as pleasure».^[4] Kipling’s family became annual visitors to Simla, and Lockwood Kipling was asked to serve in Christ Church there. Rudyard Kipling returned to Simla for his annual leave each year from 1885 to 1888, and the town featured prominently in many stories he wrote for the Gazette.^[4] «My month’s leave at Simla, or whatever Hill Station my people went to, was pure joy – every golden hour counted. It began in heat and discomfort, by rail and road. It ended in the cool evening, with a wood fire in one’s bedroom, and next morn – thirty more of them ahead! – the early cup of tea, the Mother who brought it in, and the long talks of us all together again. One had leisure to work, too, at whatever play-work was in one’s head, and that was usually full.»^[25]

Back in Lahore, 39 of his stories appeared in the Gazette between November 1886 and June 1887. Kipling included most of them in Plain Tales from the Hills, his first prose collection, published in Calcutta in January 1888, a month after his 22nd birthday. Kipling’s time in Lahore, however, had come to an end. In November 1887, he was moved to the Gazette‘s larger sister newspaper, The Pioneer, in Allahabad in the United Provinces, where he worked as assistant editor and lived in Belvedere House from 1888 to 1889.^[30][31]

Kipling’s writing continued at a frenetic pace. In 1888, he published six collections of short stories: Soldiers Three, The Story of the Gadsbys, In Black and White, Under the Deodars, The Phantom Rickshaw, and Wee Willie Winkie. These contain a total of 41 stories, some quite long. In addition, as The Pioneer‘s special correspondent in the western region of Rajputana, he wrote many sketches that were later collected in Letters of Marque and published in From Sea to Sea and Other Sketches, Letters of Travel.^[4]

Kipling was discharged from The Pioneer in early 1889 after a dispute. By this time, he had been increasingly thinking of his future. He sold the rights to his six volumes of stories for £200 and a small royalty, and the Plain Tales for £50; in addition, he received six-months’ salary from The Pioneer, in lieu of notice.^[25]

Return to London[edit]

Kipling decided to use the money to move to London, the literary centre of the British Empire. On 9 March 1889, he left India, travelling first to San Francisco via Rangoon, Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan. Kipling was favourably impressed by Japan, calling its people and ways «gracious folk and fair manners».^[32] The Nobel Prize committee cited Kipling’s writing on the manners and customs of the Japanese when they awarded his Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907.^[33]

Kipling later wrote that he «had lost his heart» to a geisha whom he called O-Toyo, writing while in the United States during the same trip across the Pacific, «I had left the innocent East far behind…. Weeping softly for O-Toyo…. O-Toyo was a darling.»^[32] Kipling then travelled through the United States, writing articles for The Pioneer that were later published in From Sea to Sea and Other Sketches, Letters of Travel.^[34]

Starting his North American travels in San Francisco, Kipling went north to Portland, Oregon, then Seattle, Washington, up to Victoria and Vancouver, British Columbia, through Medicine Hat, Alberta, back into the US to Yellowstone National Park, down to Salt Lake City, then east to Omaha, Nebraska and on to Chicago, then to Beaver, Pennsylvania on the Ohio River to visit the Hill family. From there, he went to Chautauqua with Professor Hill, and later to Niagara Falls, Toronto, Washington, D.C., New York, and Boston.^[34]

In the course of this journey he met Mark Twain in Elmira, New York, and was deeply impressed. Kipling arrived unannounced at Twain’s home, and later wrote that as he rang the doorbell, «It occurred to me for the first time that Mark Twain might possibly have other engagements other than the entertainment of escaped lunatics from India, be they ever so full of admiration.»^[35]

As it was, Twain gladly welcomed Kipling and had a two-hour conversation with him on trends in Anglo-American literature and about what Twain was going to write in a sequel to Tom Sawyer, with Twain assuring Kipling that a sequel was coming, although he had not decided upon the ending: either Sawyer would be elected to Congress or he would be hanged.^[35] Twain also passed along the literary advice that an author should «get your facts first and then you can distort ’em as much as you please.»^[35] Twain, who rather liked Kipling, later wrote of their meeting: «Between us, we cover all knowledge; he covers all that can be known and I cover the rest.»^[35] Kipling then crossed the Atlantic to Liverpool in October 1889. He soon made his début in the London literary world, to great acclaim.^[3]

London[edit]

In London, Kipling had several stories accepted by magazines. He found a place to live for the next two years at Villiers Street, near Charing Cross (in a building subsequently named Kipling House):

Meantime, I had found me quarters in Villiers Street, Strand, which forty-six years ago was primitive and passionate in its habits and population. My rooms were small, not over-clean or well-kept, but from my desk I could look out of my window through the fanlight of Gatti’s Music-Hall entrance, across the street, almost on to its stage. The Charing Cross trains rumbled through my dreams on one side, the boom of the Strand on the other, while, before my windows, Father Thames under the Shot tower walked up and down with his traffic.^[36]

In the next two years, he published a novel, The Light That Failed, had a nervous breakdown, and met an American writer and publishing agent, Wolcott Balestier, with whom he collaborated on a novel, The Naulahka (a title which he uncharacteristically misspelt; see below).^[15] In 1891, as advised by his doctors, Kipling took another sea voyage, to South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and once again India.^[15] He cut short his plans to spend Christmas with his family in India when he heard of Balestier’s sudden death from typhoid fever and decided to return to London immediately. Before his return, he had used the telegram to propose to, and be accepted by, Wolcott’s sister, Caroline Starr Balestier (1862–1939), called «Carrie», whom he had met a year earlier, and with whom he had apparently been having an intermittent romance.^[15] Meanwhile, late in 1891, a collection of his short stories on the British in India, Life’s Handicap, was published in London.^[37]

On 18 January 1892, Carrie Balestier (aged 29) and Rudyard Kipling (aged 26) married in London, in the «thick of an influenza epidemic, when the undertakers had run out of black horses and the dead had to be content with brown ones.»^[25] The wedding was held at All Souls Church, Langham Place. Henry James gave away the bride.

United States[edit]

Kipling and his wife settled upon a honeymoon that took them first to the United States (including a stop at the Balestier family estate near Brattleboro, Vermont) and then to Japan.^[15] On arriving in Yokohama, they discovered that their bank, The New Oriental Banking Corporation, had failed. Taking this loss in their stride, they returned to the U.S., back to Vermont – Carrie by this time was pregnant with their first child – and rented a small cottage on a farm near Brattleboro for $10 a month.^[25] According to Kipling, «We furnished it with a simplicity that fore-ran the hire-purchase system. We bought, second or third hand, a huge, hot-air stove which we installed in the cellar. We cut generous holes in our thin floors for its eight-inch [20 cm] tin pipes (why we were not burned in our beds each week of the winter I never can understand) and we were extraordinarily and self-centredly content.»^[25]

In this house, which they called Bliss Cottage, their first child, Josephine, was born «in three-foot of snow on the night of 29th December, 1892. Her Mother’s birthday being the 31st and mine the 30th of the same month, we congratulated her on her sense of the fitness of things….»^[25]

It was also in this cottage that the first dawnings of The Jungle Books came to Kipling: «The workroom in the Bliss Cottage was seven feet by eight, and from December to April, the snow lay level with its window-sill. It chanced that I had written a tale about Indian Forestry work which included a boy who had been brought up by wolves. In the stillness, and suspense, of the winter of ’92 some memory of the Masonic Lions of my childhood’s magazine, and a phrase in Haggard’s Nada the Lily, combined with the echo of this tale. After blocking out the main idea in my head, the pen took charge, and I watched it begin to write stories about Mowgli and animals, which later grew into the two Jungle Books.»^[25]

With Josephine’s arrival, Bliss Cottage was felt to be congested, so eventually the couple bought land – 10 acres (4.0 ha) on a rocky hillside overlooking the Connecticut River – from Carrie’s brother Beatty Balestier and built their own house. Kipling named this Naulakha, in honour of Wolcott and of their collaboration, and this time the name was spelt correctly.^[15] From his early years in Lahore (1882–87), Kipling had become enamoured with the Mughal architecture,^[38] especially the Naulakha pavilion situated in Lahore Fort, which eventually inspired the title of his novel as well as the house.^[39] The house still stands on Kipling Road, three miles (4.8 km) north of Brattleboro in Dummerston, Vermont: a big, secluded, dark-green house, with shingled roof and sides, which Kipling called his «ship», and which brought him «sunshine and a mind at ease».^[15] His seclusion in Vermont, combined with his healthy «sane clean life», made Kipling both inventive and prolific.

In a mere four years he produced, along with the Jungle Books, a book of short stories (The Day’s Work), a novel (Captains Courageous), and a profusion of poetry, including the volume The Seven Seas. The collection of Barrack-Room Ballads was issued in March 1892, first published individually for the most part in 1890, and contained his poems «Mandalay» and «Gunga Din». He especially enjoyed writing the Jungle Books and also corresponding with many children who wrote to him about them.^[15]

Life in New England[edit]

The writing life in Naulakha was occasionally interrupted by visitors, including his father, who visited soon after his retirement in 1893,^[15] and the British writer Arthur Conan Doyle, who brought his golf clubs, stayed for two days, and gave Kipling an extended golf lesson.^[40][41] Kipling seemed to take to golf, occasionally practising with the local Congregational minister and even playing with red-painted balls when the ground was covered in snow.^[13][41] However, winter golf was «not altogether a success because there were no limits to a drive; the ball might skid two miles (3.2 km) down the long slope to Connecticut river.»^[13]

Kipling loved the outdoors,^[15] not least of whose marvels in Vermont was the turning of the leaves each fall. He described this moment in a letter: «A little maple began it, flaming blood-red of a sudden where he stood against the dark green of a pine-belt. Next morning there was an answering signal from the swamp where the sumacs grow. Three days later, the hill-sides as fast as the eye could range were afire, and the roads paved, with crimson and gold. Then a wet wind blew, and ruined all the uniforms of that gorgeous army; and the oaks, who had held themselves in reserve, buckled on their dull and bronzed cuirasses and stood it out stiffly to the last blown leaf, till nothing remained but pencil-shadings of bare boughs, and one could see into the most private heart of the woods.»^[42]

In February 1896, Elsie Kipling was born, the couple’s second daughter. By this time, according to several biographers, their marital relationship was no longer light-hearted and spontaneous.^[43] Although they would always remain loyal to each other, they seemed now to have fallen into set roles.^[15] In a letter to a friend who had become engaged around this time, the 30‑year‑old Kipling offered this sombre counsel: marriage principally taught «the tougher virtues – such as humility, restraint, order, and forethought.»^[44] Later in the same year, he temporarily taught at Bishop’s College School in Quebec, Canada.^[45]

The Kiplings loved life in Vermont and might have lived out their lives there, were it not for two incidents – one of global politics, the other of family discord. By the early 1890s, the United Kingdom and Venezuela were in a border dispute involving British Guiana. The U.S. had made several offers to arbitrate, but in 1895, the new American Secretary of State Richard Olney upped the ante by arguing for the American «right» to arbitrate on grounds of sovereignty on the continent (see the Olney interpretation as an extension of the Monroe Doctrine).^[15] This raised hackles in Britain, and the situation grew into a major Anglo-American crisis, with talk of war on both sides.

Although the crisis eased into greater United States–British co-operation, Kipling was bewildered by what he felt was persistent anti-British sentiment in the U.S., especially in the press.^[15] He wrote in a letter that it felt like being «aimed at with a decanter across a friendly dinner table.»^[44] By January 1896, he had decided^[13] to end his family’s «good wholesome life» in the U.S. and seek their fortunes elsewhere.

A family dispute became the final straw. For some time, relations between Carrie and her brother Beatty Balestier had been strained, owing to his drinking and insolvency. In May 1896, an inebriated Beatty encountered Kipling on the street and threatened him with physical harm.^[15] The incident led to Beatty’s eventual arrest, but in the subsequent hearing and the resulting publicity, Kipling’s privacy was destroyed, and he was left feeling miserable and exhausted. In July 1896, a week before the hearing was to resume, the Kiplings packed their belongings, left the United States and returned to England.^[13]

Devon[edit]

By September 1896, the Kiplings were in Torquay, Devon, on the south-western coast of England, in a hillside home overlooking the English Channel. Although Kipling did not much care for his new house, whose design, he claimed, left its occupants feeling dispirited and gloomy, he managed to remain productive and socially active.^[15]

Kipling was now a famous man, and in the previous two or three years had increasingly been making political pronouncements in his writings. The Kiplings had welcomed their first son, John, in August 1897. Kipling had begun work on two poems, «Recessional» (1897) and «The White Man’s Burden» (1899), which were to create controversy when published. Regarded by some as anthems for enlightened and duty-bound empire-building (capturing the mood of the Victorian era), the poems were seen by others as propaganda for brazen-faced imperialism and its attendant racial attitudes; still others saw irony in the poems and warnings of the perils of empire.^[15]

Take up the White Man’s burden—
Send forth the best ye breed—
Go, bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait, in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild—
Your new-caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.
—The White Man’s Burden^[46]

There was also foreboding in the poems, a sense that all could yet come to naught.^[47]

Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet.
Lest we forget – lest we forget!
—Recessional^[48]

A prolific writer during his time in Torquay, he also wrote Stalky & Co., a collection of school stories (born of his experience at the United Services College in Westward Ho!), whose juvenile protagonists display a know-it-all, cynical outlook on patriotism and authority. According to his family, Kipling enjoyed reading aloud stories from Stalky & Co. to them and often went into spasms of laughter over his own jokes.^[15]

Visits to South Africa[edit]

In early 1898, the Kiplings travelled to South Africa for their winter holiday, so beginning an annual tradition which (except the following year) would last until 1908. They would stay in «The Woolsack», a house on Cecil Rhodes’s estate at Groote Schuur (now a student residence for the University of Cape Town), within walking distance of Rhodes’ mansion.^[49]

With his new reputation as Poet of the Empire, Kipling was warmly received by some of the influential politicians of the Cape Colony, including Rhodes, Sir Alfred Milner, and Leander Starr Jameson. Kipling cultivated their friendship and came to admire the men and their politics. The period 1898–1910 was crucial in the history of South Africa and included the Second Boer War (1899–1902), the ensuing peace treaty, and the 1910 formation of the Union of South Africa. Back in England, Kipling wrote poetry in support of the British cause in the Boer War and on his next visit to South Africa in early 1900, became a correspondent for The Friend newspaper in Bloemfontein, which had been commandeered by Lord Roberts for British troops.^[50]

Although his journalistic stint was to last only two weeks, it was Kipling’s first work on a newspaper staff since he left The Pioneer in Allahabad more than ten years before.^[15] At The Friend, he made lifelong friendships with Perceval Landon, H. A. Gwynne, and others.^[51] He also wrote articles published more widely expressing his views on the conflict.^[52] Kipling penned an inscription for the Honoured Dead Memorial (Siege memorial) in Kimberley.

Sussex[edit]

In 1897, Kipling moved from Torquay to Rottingdean, near Brighton, East Sussex – first to North End House and then to the Elms.^[53] In 1902, Kipling bought Bateman’s, a house built in 1634 and located in rural Burwash.

Bateman’s was Kipling’s home from 1902 until his death in 1936.^[54] The house and its surrounding buildings, the mill and 33 acres (13 ha), were bought for £9,300. It had no bathroom, no running water upstairs and no electricity, but Kipling loved it: «Behold us, lawful owners of a grey stone lichened house – A.D. 1634 over the door – beamed, panelled, with old oak staircase, and all untouched and unfaked. It is a good and peaceable place. We have loved it ever since our first sight of it» (from a November 1902 letter).^[55][56]

In the non-fiction realm, he became involved in the debate over the British response to the rise in German naval power known as the Tirpitz Plan, to build a fleet to challenge the Royal Navy, publishing a series of articles in 1898 collected as A Fleet in Being. On a visit to the United States in 1899, Kipling and his daughter Josephine developed pneumonia, from which she eventually died.

In the wake of his daughter’s death, Kipling concentrated on collecting material for what became Just So Stories for Little Children, published in 1902, the year after Kim.^[57] The American art historian Janice Leoshko and the American literary scholar David Scott have argued that Kim disproves the claim by Edward Said that Kipling was a promoter of Orientalism, since Kipling – who was deeply interested in Buddhism – presented Tibetan Buddhism in a fairly sympathetic light and aspects of the novel appeared to reflect a Buddhist understanding of the universe.^[58][59] Kipling was offended by the German Emperor Wilhelm II’s Hun speech (Hunnenrede) in 1900, urging German troops being sent to China to crush the Boxer Rebellion to behave like «Huns» and take no prisoners.^[60]

In a 1902 poem, The Rowers, Kipling attacked the Kaiser as a threat to Britain and made the first use of the term «Hun» as an anti-German insult, using Wilhelm’s own words and the actions of German troops in China to portray Germans as essentially barbarian.^[60] In an interview with the French newspaper Le Figaro, the Francophile Kipling called Germany a menace and called for an Anglo-French alliance to stop it.^[60] In another letter at the same time, Kipling described the «unfrei peoples of Central Europe» as living in «the Middle Ages with machine guns».^[60]

Speculative fiction[edit]

Kipling wrote a number of speculative fiction short stories, including «The Army of a Dream», in which he sought to show a more efficient and responsible army than the hereditary bureaucracy of England at the time, and two science fiction stories: «With the Night Mail» (1905) and «As Easy As A.B.C.» (1912). Both were set in the 21st century in Kipling’s Aerial Board of Control universe. They read like modern hard science fiction,^[61] and introduced the literary technique known as indirect exposition, which would later become one of science fiction writer Robert Heinlein’s hallmarks. This technique is one that Kipling picked up in India, and used to solve the problem of his English readers not understanding much about Indian society when writing The Jungle Book.^[62]

Nobel laureate and beyond[edit]

In 1907, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, having been nominated in that year by Charles Oman, professor at the University of Oxford.^[63] The prize citation said it was «in consideration of the power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas and remarkable talent for narration which characterize the creations of this world-famous author.» Nobel prizes had been established in 1901 and Kipling was the first English-language recipient. At the award ceremony in Stockholm on 10 December 1907, the Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, Carl David af Wirsén, praised both Kipling and three centuries of English literature:

The Swedish Academy, in awarding the Nobel Prize in Literature this year to Rudyard Kipling, desires to pay a tribute of homage to the literature of England, so rich in manifold glories, and to the greatest genius in the realm of narrative that that country has produced in our times.^[64]

To «book-end» this achievement came the publication of two connected poetry and story collections: Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906), and Rewards and Fairies (1910). The latter contained the poem «If—». In a 1995 BBC opinion poll, it was voted the UK’s favourite poem.^[65] This exhortation to self-control and stoicism is arguably Kipling’s most famous poem.^[65]

Such was Kipling’s popularity that he was asked by his friend Max Aitken to intervene in the 1911 Canadian election on behalf of the Conservatives.^[66] In 1911, the major issue in Canada was a reciprocity treaty with the United States signed by the Liberal Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier and vigorously opposed by the Conservatives under Sir Robert Borden. On 7 September 1911, the Montreal Daily Star newspaper published a front-page appeal against the agreement by Kipling, who wrote: «It is her own soul that Canada risks today. Once that soul is pawned for any consideration, Canada must inevitably conform to the commercial, legal, financial, social, and ethical standards which will be imposed on her by the sheer admitted weight of the United States.»^[66] At the time, the Montreal Daily Star was Canada’s most read newspaper. Over the next week, Kipling’s appeal was reprinted in every English newspaper in Canada and is credited with helping to turn Canadian public opinion against the Liberal government.^[66]

Kipling sympathised with the anti-Home Rule stance of Irish Unionists, who opposed Irish autonomy. He was friends with Edward Carson, the Dublin-born leader of Ulster Unionism, who raised the Ulster Volunteers to prevent Home Rule in Ireland. Kipling wrote in a letter to a friend that Ireland was not a nation, and that before the English arrived in 1169, the Irish were a gang of cattle thieves living in savagery and killing each other while «writing dreary poems» about it all. In his view it was only British rule that allowed Ireland to advance.^[67] A visit to Ireland in 1911 confirmed Kipling’s prejudices. He wrote that the Irish countryside was beautiful, but spoiled by what he called the ugly homes of Irish farmers, with Kipling adding that God had made the Irish into poets having «deprived them of love of line or knowledge of colour.»^[68] In contrast, Kipling had nothing but praise for the «decent folk» of the Protestant minority and Unionist Ulster, free from the threat of «constant mob violence».^[68]

Kipling wrote the poem «Ulster» in 1912, reflecting his Unionist politics. Kipling often referred to the Irish Unionists as «our party».^[69] Kipling had no sympathy or understanding for Irish nationalism, seeing Home Rule as an act of treason by the government of the Liberal Prime Minister H. H. Asquith that would plunge Ireland into the Dark Ages and allow the Irish Catholic majority to oppress the Protestant minority.^[70] The scholar David Gilmour wrote that Kipling’s lack of understanding of Ireland could be seen in his attack on John Redmond – the Anglophile leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party who wanted Home Rule because he believed it was the best way of keeping the United Kingdom together – as a traitor working to break up the United Kingdom.^[71] Ulster was first publicly read at an Unionist rally in Belfast, where the largest Union Jack ever made was unfolded.^[71] Kipling admitted it was meant to strike a «hard blow» against the Asquith government’s Home Rule bill: «Rebellion, rapine, hate, Oppression, wrong and greed, Are loosed to rule our fate, By England’s act and deed.»^[68] Ulster generated much controversy with the Conservative MP Sir Mark Sykes – who as a Unionist was opposed to the Home Rule bill – condemning Ulster in The Morning Post as a «direct appeal to ignorance and a deliberate attempt to foster religious hate.»^[71]

Kipling was a staunch opponent of Bolshevism, a position which he shared with his friend Henry Rider Haggard. The two had bonded on Kipling’s arrival in London in 1889 largely due to their shared opinions, and remained lifelong friends.

Freemasonry[edit]

According to the English magazine Masonic Illustrated, Kipling became a Freemason in about 1885, before the usual minimum age of 21,^[72] being initiated into Hope and Perseverance Lodge No. 782 in Lahore. He later wrote to The Times, «I was Secretary for some years of the Lodge… which included Brethren of at least four creeds. I was entered [as an Apprentice] by a member from Brahmo Somaj, a Hindu, passed [to the degree of Fellow Craft] by a Mohammedan, and raised [to the degree of Master Mason] by an Englishman. Our Tyler was an Indian Jew.» Kipling received not only the three degrees of Craft Masonry but also the side degrees of Mark Master Mason and Royal Ark Mariner.^[73]

Kipling so loved his Masonic experience that he memorialised its ideals in his poem «The Mother Lodge»,^[72] and used the fraternity and its symbols as vital plot devices in his novella The Man Who Would Be King.^[74]

First World War (1914–1918)[edit]

At the beginning of the First World War, like many other writers, Kipling wrote pamphlets and poems enthusiastically supporting the UK war aims of restoring Belgium, after it had been occupied by Germany, together with generalised statements that Britain was standing up for the cause of good. In September 1914, Kipling was asked by the government to write propaganda, an offer that he accepted.^[75] Kipling’s pamphlets and stories were popular with the British people during the war, his major themes being to glorify the British military as the place for heroic men to be, while citing German atrocities against Belgian civilians and the stories of women brutalised by a horrific war unleashed by Germany, yet surviving and triumphing in spite of their suffering.^[75]

Kipling was enraged by reports of the Rape of Belgium together with the sinking of the RMS Lusitania in 1915, which he saw as a deeply inhumane act, which led him to see the war as a crusade for civilisation against barbarism.^[76] In a 1915 speech, Kipling declared, «There was no crime, no cruelty, no abomination that the mind of men can conceive of which the German has not perpetrated, is not perpetrating, and will not perpetrate if he is allowed to go on…. Today, there are only two divisions in the world… human beings and Germans.»^[76]

Alongside his passionate antipathy towards Germany, Kipling was privately deeply critical of how the war was being fought by the British Army, complaining as early as October 1914 that Germany should have been defeated by now, and something must be wrong with the British Army.^[77] Kipling, who was shocked by the heavy losses that the British Expeditionary Force had taken by the autumn of 1914, blamed the entire pre-war generation of British politicians who, he argued, had failed to learn the lessons of the Boer War. Thus thousands of British soldiers were now paying with their lives for their failure in the fields of France and Belgium.^[77]

Kipling had scorn for men who shirked duty in the First World War. In «The New Army in Training»^[78] (1915), Kipling concluded by saying:

This much we can realise, even though we are so close to it, the old safe instinct saves us from triumph and exultation. But what will be the position in years to come of the young man who has deliberately elected to outcaste himself from this all-embracing brotherhood? What of his family, and, above all, what of his descendants, when the books have been closed and the last balance struck of sacrifice and sorrow in every hamlet, village, parish, suburb, city, shire, district, province, and Dominion throughout the Empire?

In 1914, Kipling was one of 53 leading British authors – a number that included H. G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle and Thomas Hardy – who signed their names to the «Authors’ Declaration.» This manifesto declared that the German invasion of Belgium had been a brutal crime, and that Britain «could not without dishonour have refused to take part in the present war.»^[79]

Death of John Kipling[edit]

Kipling’s son John was killed in action at the Battle of Loos in September 1915, at age 18. John initially wanted to join the Royal Navy, but having had his application turned down after a failed medical examination due to poor eyesight, he opted to apply for military service as an army officer. Again, his eyesight was an issue during the medical examination. In fact, he tried twice to enlist, but was rejected. His father had been lifelong friends with Lord Roberts, former commander-in-chief of the British Army, and colonel of the Irish Guards, and at Rudyard’s request, John was accepted into the Irish Guards.^[75]

John Kipling was sent to Loos two days into the battle in a reinforcement contingent. He was last seen stumbling through the mud blindly, with a possible facial injury. A body identified as his was found in 1992, although that identification has been challenged.^[80][81][82] In 2015, the Commonwealth War Grave Commission confirmed that it had correctly identified the burial place of John Kipling;^[83] they record his date of death as 27 September 1915, and that he is buried at St Mary’s A.D.S. Cemetery, Haisnes.^[84]

After his son’s death, in a poem titled «Epitaphs of the War», Kipling wrote «If any question why we died / Tell them, because our fathers lied.» Critics have speculated that these words may express Kipling’s guilt over his role in arranging John’s commission.^[85] Professor Tracy Bilsing contends that the line refers to Kipling’s disgust that British leaders failed to learn the lessons of the Boer War, and were unprepared for the struggle with Germany in 1914, with the «lie» of the «fathers» being that the British Army was prepared for any war when it was not.^[75]

John’s death has been linked to Kipling’s 1916 poem «My Boy Jack», notably in the play My Boy Jack and its subsequent television adaptation, along with the documentary Rudyard Kipling: A Remembrance Tale. However, the poem was originally published at the head of a story about the Battle of Jutland and appears to refer to a death at sea; the «Jack» referred to may be to the boy VC Jack Cornwell, or perhaps a generic «Jack Tar».^[86] In the Kipling family, Jack was the name of the family dog, while John Kipling was always John, making the identification of the protagonist of «My Boy Jack» with John Kipling somewhat questionable. However, Kipling was indeed emotionally devastated by the death of his son. He is said to have assuaged his grief by reading the novels of Jane Austen aloud to his wife and daughter.^[87] During the war, he wrote a booklet The Fringes of the Fleet^[88] containing essays and poems on various nautical subjects of the war. Some of these were set to music by the English composer Edward Elgar.^[89]

Kipling became friends with a French soldier named Maurice Hammoneau, whose life had been saved in the First World War when his copy of Kim, which he had in his left breast pocket, stopped a bullet. Hammoneau presented Kipling with the book, with bullet still embedded, and his Croix de Guerre as a token of gratitude. They continued to correspond, and when Hammoneau had a son, Kipling insisted on returning the book and medal.^[90]

On 1 August 1918, the poem «The Old Volunteer» appeared under his name in The Times. The next day, he wrote to the newspaper to disclaim authorship and a correction appeared. Although The Times employed a private detective to investigate, the detective appears to have suspected Kipling himself of being the author, and the identity of the hoaxer was never established.^[91]

After the war (1918–1936)[edit]

Partly in response to John’s death, Kipling joined Sir Fabian Ware’s Imperial War Graves Commission (now the Commonwealth War Graves Commission), the group responsible for the garden-like British war graves that can be found to this day dotted along the former Western Front and the other places in the world where British Empire troops lie buried. His main contributions to the project were his selection of the biblical phrase, «Their Name Liveth For Evermore» (Ecclesiasticus 44.14, KJV), found on the Stones of Remembrance in larger war cemeteries, and his suggestion of the phrase «Known unto God» for the gravestones of unidentified servicemen. He also chose the inscription «The Glorious Dead» on the Cenotaph, Whitehall, London. Additionally, he wrote a two-volume history of the Irish Guards, his son’s regiment, published in 1923 and seen as one of the finest examples of regimental history.^[92]

Kipling’s short story «The Gardener» depicts visits to the war cemeteries, and the poem «The King’s Pilgrimage» (1922) a journey which King George V made, touring the cemeteries and memorials under construction by the Imperial War Graves Commission. With the increasing popularity of the automobile, Kipling became a motoring correspondent for the British press, writing enthusiastically of trips around England and abroad, though he was usually driven by a chauffeur.

After the war, Kipling was sceptical of the Fourteen Points and the League of Nations, but had hopes that the United States would abandon isolationism and the post-war world be dominated by an Anglo-French-American alliance.^[93] He hoped the United States would take on a League of Nations mandate for Armenia as the best way of preventing isolationism, and hoped that Theodore Roosevelt, whom Kipling admired, would again become president.^[93] Kipling was saddened by Roosevelt’s death in 1919, believing him to be the only American politician capable of keeping the United States in the «game» of world politics.^[94]

Kipling was hostile towards communism, writing of the Bolshevik take-over in 1917 that one sixth of the world had «passed bodily out of civilization».^[95] In a 1918 poem, Kipling wrote of Soviet Russia that everything good in Russia had been destroyed by the Bolsheviks – all that was left was «the sound of weeping and the sight of burning fire, and the shadow of a people trampled into the mire.»^[95]

In 1920, Kipling co-founded the Liberty League^[96] with Haggard and Lord Sydenham. This short-lived enterprise focused on promoting classic liberal ideals as a response to the rising power of communist tendencies within Great Britain, or as Kipling put it, «to combat the advance of Bolshevism.»^[97][98]

In 1922, Kipling, having referred to the work of engineers in some of his poems, such as «The Sons of Martha», «Sappers», and «McAndrew’s Hymn»,^[99] and in other writings, including short-story anthologies such as The Day’s Work,^[100] was asked by a University of Toronto civil engineering professor, Herbert E. T. Haultain, for assistance in developing a dignified obligation and ceremony for graduating engineering students. Kipling was enthusiastic in his response and shortly produced both, formally titled «The Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer». Today, engineering graduates all across Canada are presented with an iron ring at a ceremony to remind them of their obligation to society.^[101][102] In 1922 Kipling became Lord Rector of St Andrews University in Scotland, a three-year position.

Kipling, as a Francophile, argued strongly for an Anglo-French alliance to uphold the peace, calling Britain and France in 1920 the «twin fortresses of European civilization».^[103] Similarly, Kipling repeatedly warned against revising the Treaty of Versailles in Germany’s favour, which he predicted would lead to a new world war.^[103] An admirer of Raymond Poincaré, Kipling was one of few British intellectuals who supported the French Occupation of the Ruhr in 1923, at a time when the British government and most public opinion was against the French position.^[104] In contrast to the popular British view of Poincaré as a cruel bully intent on impoverishing Germany with unreasonable reparations, Kipling argued that he was rightfully trying to preserve France as a great power in the face of an unfavourable situation.^[104] Kipling argued that even before 1914, Germany’s larger economy and higher birth rate had made that country stronger than France; with much of France devastated by war and the French suffering heavy losses meant that its low birth rate would give it trouble, while Germany was mostly undamaged and still with a higher birth rate. So he reasoned that the future would bring German domination if Versailles were revised in Germany’s favour, and it was madness for Britain to press France to do so.^[104]

In 1924, Kipling was opposed to the Labour government of Ramsay MacDonald as «Bolshevism without bullets». He believed that Labour was a communist front organisation, and «excited orders and instructions from Moscow» would expose Labour as such to the British people.^[105] Kipling’s views were on the right. Though he admired Benito Mussolini to some extent in the 1920s, he was against fascism, calling Oswald Mosley «a bounder and an arriviste«. By 1935, he was calling Mussolini a deranged and dangerous egomaniac and in 1933 wrote, «The Hitlerites are out for blood».^[106]

Despite his anti-communism, the first major translations of Kipling into Russian took place under Lenin’s rule in the early 1920s, and Kipling was popular with Russian readers in the interwar period. Many younger Russian poets and writers, such as Konstantin Simonov, were influenced by him.^[107] Kipling’s clarity of style, use of colloquial language and employment of rhythm and rhyme were seen as major innovations in poetry that appealed to many younger Russian poets.^[108]
Though it was obligatory for Soviet journals to begin translations of Kipling with an attack on him as a «fascist» and an «imperialist», such was Kipling’s popularity with Russian readers that his works were not banned in the Soviet Union until 1939, with the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.^[107] The ban was lifted in 1941 after Operation Barbarossa, when Britain become a Soviet ally, but imposed for good with the Cold War in 1946.^[109]

Many older editions of Rudyard Kipling’s books have a swastika printed on the cover, associated with a picture of an elephant carrying a lotus flower, reflecting the influence of Indian culture. Kipling’s use of the swastika was based on the Indian sun symbol conferring good luck and the Sanskrit word meaning «fortunate» or «well-being».^[110] He used the swastika symbol in both right and left-facing forms, and it was in general use by others at the time.^[111][112]

In a note to Edward Bok after the death of Lockwood Kipling in 1911, Rudyard said: «I am sending with this for your acceptance, as some little memory of my father to whom you were so kind, the original of one of the plaques that he used to make for me. I thought it being the Swastika would be appropriate for your Swastika. May it bring you even more good fortune.»^[110] Once the swastika had become widely associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, Kipling ordered that it should no longer adorn his books.^[110] Less than a year before his death, Kipling gave a speech (titled «An Undefended Island») to the Royal Society of St George on 6 May 1935, warning of the danger which Nazi Germany posed to Britain.^[113]

Kipling scripted the first Royal Christmas Message, delivered via the BBC’s Empire Service by George V in 1932.^[114][115] In 1934, he published a short story in The Strand Magazine, «Proofs of Holy Writ», postulating that William Shakespeare had helped to polish the prose of the King James Bible.^[116]

Death[edit]

Kipling kept writing until the early 1930s, but at a slower pace and with less success than before. On the night of 12 January 1936, he suffered a haemorrhage in his small intestine. He underwent surgery, but died at Middlesex Hospital in London less than a week later on 18 January 1936, at the age of 70, of a perforated duodenal ulcer.^{[117][118][119]} Kipling’s body was laid in state in the Fitzrovia Chapel, part of Middlesex Hospital, after his death, and is commemorated with a plaque near the altar. His death had previously been incorrectly announced in a magazine, to which he wrote, «I’ve just read that I am dead. Don’t forget to delete me from your list of subscribers.»^[120]

The pallbearers at the funeral included Kipling’s cousin, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, and the marble casket was covered by a Union Jack.^[121] Kipling was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium in north-west London, and his ashes interred at Poets’ Corner, part of the South Transept of Westminster Abbey, next to the graves of Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy.^[121] Kipling’s will was proven on 6 April, with his estate valued at £168,141 2s. 11d. (roughly equivalent to £12,154,269 in 2021^[122]).^[123]

Legacy[edit]

In 2002, Kipling’s Just So Stories featured on a series of UK postage stamps issued by the Royal Mail to mark the centenary of the publication of the book.^[124] In 2010, the International Astronomical Union approved the naming of a crater on the planet Mercury after Kipling – one of ten newly discovered impact craters observed by the MESSENGER spacecraft in 2008–2009.^[125] In 2012, an extinct species of crocodile, Goniopholis kiplingi, was named in his honour «in recognition for his enthusiasm for natural sciences.»^[126] More than 50 unpublished poems by Kipling, discovered by the American scholar Thomas Pinney, were released for the first time in March 2013.^[127]

Kipling’s writing has strongly influenced that of others. His stories for adults remain in print and have garnered high praise from writers as different as Poul Anderson, Jorge Luis Borges, and Randall Jarrell, who wrote: «After you have read Kipling’s fifty or seventy-five best stories you realize that few men have written this many stories of this much merit, and that very few have written more and better stories.»^[128]

His children’s stories remain popular and his Jungle Books made into several films. The first was made by producer Alexander Korda. Other films have been produced by The Walt Disney Company. A number of his poems were set to music by Percy Grainger. A series of short films based on some of his stories was broadcast by the BBC in 1964.^[129] Kipling’s work is still popular today.

The poet T. S. Eliot edited A Choice of Kipling’s Verse (1941) with an introductory essay.^[130] Eliot was aware of the complaints that had been levelled against Kipling and he dismissed them one by one: that Kipling is «a Tory» using his verse to transmit right wing political views, or «a journalist» pandering to popular taste; while Eliot writes: «I cannot find any justification for the charge that he held a doctrine of race superiority.»^[131] Eliot finds instead:

An immense gift for using words, an amazing curiosity and power of observation with his mind and with all his senses, the mask of the entertainer, and beyond that a queer gift of second sight, of transmitting messages from elsewhere, a gift so disconcerting when we are made aware of it that thenceforth we are never sure when it is not present: all this makes Kipling a writer impossible wholly to understand and quite impossible to belittle.

— T. S. Eliot^[132]

Of Kipling’s verse, such as his Barrack-Room Ballads, Eliot writes «of a number of poets who have written great poetry, only… a very few whom I should call great verse writers. And unless I am mistaken, Kipling’s position in this class is not only high, but unique.»^[133]

In response to Eliot, George Orwell wrote a long consideration of Kipling’s work for Horizon in 1942, noting that although as a «jingo imperialist» Kipling was «morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting», his work had many qualities which ensured that while «every enlightened person has despised him… nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there.»:

One reason for Kipling’s power [was] his sense of responsibility, which made it possible for him to have a world-view, even though it happened to be a false one. Although he had no direct connexion with any political party, Kipling was a Conservative, a thing that does not exist nowadays. Those who now call themselves Conservatives are either Liberals, Fascists or the accomplices of Fascists. He identified himself with the ruling power and not with the opposition. In a gifted writer this seems to us strange and even disgusting, but it did have the advantage of giving Kipling a certain grip on reality. The ruling power is always faced with the question, ‘In such and such circumstances, what would you do?‘, whereas the opposition is not obliged to take responsibility or make any real decisions. Where it is a permanent and pensioned opposition, as in England, the quality of its thought deteriorates accordingly. Moreover, anyone who starts out with a pessimistic, reactionary view of life tends to be justified by events, for Utopia never arrives and ‘the gods of the copybook headings’, as Kipling himself put it, always return. Kipling sold out to the British governing class, not financially but emotionally. This warped his political judgement, for the British ruling class were not what he imagined, and it led him into abysses of folly and snobbery, but he gained a corresponding advantage from having at least tried to imagine what action and responsibility are like. It is a great thing in his favour that he is not witty, not ‘daring’, has no wish to épater les bourgeois. He dealt largely in platitudes, and since we live in a world of platitudes, much of what he said sticks. Even his worst follies seem less shallow and less irritating than the ‘enlightened’ utterances of the same period, such as Wilde’s epigrams or the collection of cracker-mottoes at the end of Man and Superman.

— George Orwell^[134]

In 1939, the poet W. H. Auden celebrated Kipling in a similarly ambiguous way in his elegy for William Butler Yeats. Auden deleted this section from more recent editions of his poems.

Time, that is intolerant
Of the brave and innocent,
And indifferent in a week
To a beautiful physique,

Worships language, and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honours at his feet.

Time, that with this strange excuse,
Pardons Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.^[135]

The poet Alison Brackenbury writes «Kipling is poetry’s Dickens, an outsider and journalist with an unrivalled ear for sound and speech.»^[136]

The English folk singer Peter Bellamy was a lover of Kipling’s poetry, much of which he believed to have been influenced by English traditional folk forms. He recorded several albums of Kipling’s verse set to traditional airs, or to tunes of his own composition written in traditional style.^[137] However, in the case of the bawdy folk song, «The Bastard King of England», which is commonly credited to Kipling, it is believed that the song is actually misattributed.^[138]

Kipling often is quoted in discussions of contemporary British political and social issues. In 1911, Kipling wrote the poem «The Reeds of Runnymede» that celebrated the Magna Carta, and summoned up a vision of the «stubborn Englishry» determined to defend their rights. In 1996, the following verses of the poem were quoted by former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher warning against the encroachment of the European Union on national sovereignty:

At Runnymede, at Runnymede,
Oh, hear the reeds at Runnymede:
‘You musn’t sell, delay, deny,
A freeman’s right or liberty.
It wakes the stubborn Englishry,
We saw ’em roused at Runnymede!

… And still when Mob or Monarch lays
Too rude a hand on English ways,
The whisper wakes, the shudder plays,
Across the reeds at Runnymede.
And Thames, that knows the mood of kings,
And crowds and priests and suchlike things,
Rolls deep and dreadful as he brings
Their warning down from Runnymede!^[139]

Political singer-songwriter Billy Bragg, who attempts to build a left-wing English nationalism in contrast with the more common right-wing English nationalism, has attempted to ‘reclaim’ Kipling for an inclusive sense of Englishness.^[140] Kipling’s enduring relevance has been noted in the United States, as it has become involved in Afghanistan and other areas about which he wrote.^{[141][142][143]}

Links with camping and scouting[edit]

In 1903, Kipling gave permission to Elizabeth Ford Holt to borrow themes from the Jungle Books to establish Camp Mowglis, a summer camp for boys on the shores of Newfound Lake in New Hampshire. Throughout their lives, Kipling and his wife Carrie maintained an active interest in Camp Mowglis, which still continues the traditions that Kipling inspired. Buildings at Mowglis have names such as Akela, Toomai, Baloo, and Panther. The campers are referred to as «the Pack», from the youngest «Cubs» to the oldest living in «Den».^[144]

Kipling’s links with the Scouting movements were also strong. Robert Baden-Powell, founder of Scouting, used many themes from Jungle Book stories and Kim in setting up his junior Wolf Cubs. These ties still exist, such as the popularity of «Kim’s Game». The movement is named after Mowgli’s adopted wolf family, and adult helpers of Wolf Cub (now Cub Scout) Packs take names from The Jungle Book, especially the adult leader called Akela after the leader of the Seeonee wolf pack.^[145]

Kipling’s Burwash home[edit]

After the death of Kipling’s wife in 1939, his house, Bateman’s in Burwash, East Sussex, where he had lived from 1902 until 1936, was bequeathed to the National Trust. It is now a public museum dedicated to the author. Elsie Bambridge, his only child who lived to maturity, died childless in 1976, and bequeathed her copyrights to the National Trust, which in turn donated them to the University of Sussex to ensure better public access.^[147]

Novelist and poet Sir Kingsley Amis wrote a poem, «Kipling at Bateman’s», after visiting Burwash (where Amis’s father lived briefly in the 1960s) as part of a BBC television series on writers and their houses.^[148]

In 2003, actor Ralph Fiennes read excerpts from Kipling’s works from the study in Bateman’s, including The Jungle Book, Something of Myself, Kim, and The Just So Stories, and poems, including «If …» and «My Boy Jack», for a CD published by the National Trust.^[149][150]

Reputation in India[edit]

In modern-day India, whence he drew much of his material, Kipling’s reputation remains controversial, especially among modern nationalists and some post-colonial critics. It has long been alleged that Rudyard Kipling was a prominent supporter of Colonel Reginald Dyer, who was responsible for the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar (in the province of Punjab), and that Kipling called Dyer «the man who saved India» and initiated collections for the latter’s homecoming prize.^[151] Kim Wagner, senior lecturer in British Imperial History at Queen Mary University of London, says that while Kipling did make a £10 donation, he never made that remark.^[152] Similarly, author Derek Sayer states that Dyer was «widely lauded as the saviour of Punjab», that Kipling had no part in organizing The Morning Post fund, and that Kipling only sent £10, making the laconic observation: «He did his duty, as he saw it.»^[153] Subhash Chopra also writes in his book Kipling Sahib – the Raj Patriot that the benefit fund was started by The Morning Post newspaper, not by Kipling.^[154] The Economic Times attributes the phrase «The Man Who Saved India» along with the Dyer benefit fund to The Morning Post as well.^[155]

Many contemporary Indian intellectuals such as Ashis Nandy have a nuanced view of Kipling’s legacy. Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India, often described Kipling’s novel Kim as one of his favourite books.^[156][157]

G. V. Desani, an Indian writer of fiction, had a more negative opinion of Kipling. He alludes to Kipling in his novel All About H. Hatterr:

I happen to pick up R. Kipling’s autobiographical Kim.
Therein, this self-appointed whiteman’s burden-bearing sherpa feller’s stated how, in the Orient, blokes hit the road and think nothing of walking a thousand miles in search of something.

Indian writer Khushwant Singh wrote in 2001 that he considers Kipling’s «If—» «the essence of the message of The Gita in English»,^[158] referring to the Bhagavad Gita, an ancient Indian scripture. Indian writer R. K. Narayan said «Kipling, the supposed expert writer on India, showed a better understanding of the mind of the animals in the jungle than of the men in an Indian home or the marketplace.»^[159] The Indian politician and writer Sashi Tharoor commented «Kipling, that flatulent voice of Victorian imperialism, would wax eloquent on the noble duty to bring law to those without it».^[160]

In November 2007, it was announced that Kipling’s birth home in the campus of the J. J. School of Art in Bombay would be turned into a museum celebrating the author and his works.^[161]

Art[edit]

Though best known as an author, Kipling was also an accomplished artist. Influenced by Aubrey Beardsley, Kipling produced many illustrations for his stories, e.g. Just So Stories, 1919.^[162]

Screen portrayals[edit]

• Reginald Sheffield portrayed Kipling in Gunga Din (1939).
• Paul Scardon portrayed Kipling in The Adventures of Mark Twain (1944).
• Christopher Plummer portrayed Kipling in The Man Who Would Be King (1975).
• David Haig portrayed Kipling in My Boy Jack (2007).
• David Watson portrayed Kipling in The Time Tunnel S1 E14 «Night of the Long Knives», (1966)^[163]

Bibliography[edit]

Kipling’s bibliography includes fiction (including novels and short stories), non-fiction, and poetry. Several of his works were collaborations.

See also[edit]

• Kipling Trail
• List of Nobel laureates in Literature
• HMS Birkenhead (1845) – ship mentioned in one of Kipling’s poems

References[edit]

Cited sources[edit]

• Eliot, T.S. (1941). A Choice of Kipling’s Verse, made by T. S. Eliot with an essay on Rudyard Kipling. Faber and Faber.^{[ISBN missing]}
• Gilmour, David (2003). The long recessional: the imperial life of Rudyard Kipling. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 978-1466830004.
• Hodgson, Katherine (October 1998). «The Poetry of Rudyard Kipling in Soviet Russia». The Modern Language Review. 93 (4): 1058–1071. doi:10.2307/3736277. JSTOR 3736277.
• Scott, David (June 2011). «Kipling, the Orient, and Orientals: ‘Orientalism’ Reoriented?». Journal of World History. 22 (2): 299–328 [315]. doi:10.1353/jwh.2011.0036. JSTOR 23011713. S2CID 143705079.

Further reading[edit]

Biography and criticism

• Allen, Charles (2007). Kipling Sahib: India and the Making of Rudyard Kipling, Abacus. ISBN 978-0-349-11685-3
• Bauer, Helen Pike (1994). Rudyard Kipling: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne
• Birkenhead, Lord (Frederick Smith, 2nd Earl of Birkenhead) (1978). Rudyard Kipling. Worthing: Littlehampton Book Services Ltd. ISBN 978-0-297-77535-5
• Carrington, Charles (1955). Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Work. London: Macmillan & Co.
• Croft-Cooke, Rupert (1948). Rudyard Kipling (London: Home & Van Thal Ltd.)
• David, C. (2007). Rudyard Kipling: a critical study, New Delhi: Anmol. ISBN 81-261-3101-2
• Dillingham, William B (2005). Rudyard Kipling: Hell and Heroism New York: Palgrave Macmillan^{[ISBN missing]}
• Gilbert, Elliot L. ed. (1965). Kipling and the Critics (New York: New York University Press)
• Gilmour, David (2003). The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 0-374-52896-9
• Green, Roger Lancelyn, ed. (1971). Kipling: the Critical Heritage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
• Gross, John, ed. (1972). Rudyard Kipling: the Man, his Work and his World. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson
• Harris, Brian (2014). The Surprising Mr Kipling: An anthology and reassessment of the poetry of Rudyard Kipling. CreateSpace. ISBN 978-1-4942-2194-2
• Harris, Brian (2015). The Two Sided Man. CreateSpace. ISBN 1508712328.
• Kemp, Sandra (1988). Kipling’s Hidden Narratives Oxford: Blackwell
• Lycett, Andrew (1999). Rudyard Kipling. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ISBN 0-297-81907-0
• Lycett, Andrew (ed.) (2010). Kipling Abroad, I. B. Tauris. ISBN 978-1-84885-072-9
• Mallett, Phillip (2003). Rudyard Kipling: A Literary Life Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan
• Montefiore, Jan (ed.) (2013). In Time’s Eye: Essays on Rudyard Kipling. Manchester: Manchester University Press
• Narita, Tatsushi (2011). T. S. Eliot and his Youth as ‘A Literary Columbus’. Nagoya: Kougaku Shuppan
• Nicolson, Adam (2001). Carrie Kipling 1862–1939 : The Hated Wife. Faber & Faber, London. ISBN 0-571-20835-5
• Ricketts, Harry (2001). Rudyard Kipling: A Life. New York: Da Capo Press ISBN 0-7867-0830-1
• Rooney, Caroline, and Kaori Nagai, eds. (2011). Kipling and Beyond: Patriotism, Globalisation, and Postcolonialism. Palgrave Macmillan; 214 pp.; scholarly essays on Kipling’s «boy heroes of empire», Kipling and C.L.R. James, and Kipling and the new American empire, etc.
• Rutherford, Andrew, ed. (1964). Kipling’s Mind and Art. Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd
• Sergeant, David (2013). Kipling’s Art of Fiction 1884–1901 Oxford: Oxford University Press
• Martin Seymour-Smith (1990). Rudyard Kipling,^{[ISBN missing]}
• Shippey, Tom, «Rudyard Kipling», in: Cahier Calin: Makers of the Middle Ages. Essays in Honor of William Calin, ed. Richard Utz and Elizabeth Emery (Kalamazoo, MI: Studies in Medievalism, 2011), pp. 21–23.
• Tompkins, J.M.S. (1959). The Art of Rudyard Kipling. London: Methuen online edition
• Walsh, Sue (2010). Kipling’s Children’s Literature: Language, Identity, and Constructions of Childhood Farnham: Ashgate
• Wilson, Angus (1978). The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Works New York: The Viking Press. ISBN 0-670-67701-9

External links[edit]

• The Kipling Society website
• Rudyard Kipling on Nobelprize.org
• Rudyard Kipling Archived 21 June 2020 at the Wayback Machine at the Encyclopedia of Fantasy
• Rudyard Kipling at the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
• Rudyard Kipling recordings at the Discography of American Historical Recordings.

Works

• Works by Rudyard Kipling in eBook form at Standard Ebooks
• Works by Rudyard Kipling at Project Gutenberg
• Rudyard Kipling at Global Grey Ebooks
• List of works at the Works Catalogues of Laureates of the Nobel Prize for Literature
• Works by or about Rudyard Kipling at Internet Archive
• Works by Rudyard Kipling at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Works by Rudyard Kipling (not public domain in US, so not available on Wikisource)

Resources

• Rudyard Kipling Papers and other Kipling related collections Archived 22 November 2021 at the Wayback Machine at The Keep, University of Sussex
• The Rudyard Kipling Collection maintained by Marlboro College.
• The Rudyard Kipling Poems by Poemist.
• Rudyard Kipling: The Books I Leave Behind exhibition, related podcast, and digital images maintained by the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University
• Rudyard Kipling at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• The Rudyard Kipling Collections From the Rare Book and Special Collections Division at the Library of Congress
• Archival material at Leeds University Library
• Newspaper clippings about Rudyard Kipling in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW
• A. P. Watt & Son records relating to Rudyard Kipling. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Academic offices
Preceded by Sir J. M. Barrie	Rector of the University of St Andrews 1922–1925	Succeeded by Fridtjof Nansen

Запрос «Киплинг» перенаправляется сюда; см. также другие значения.

Джо́зеф Ре́дьярд Ки́плинг (англ. Joseph Rudyard Kipling — /ˈrʌdjərd ˈkɪplɪŋ/; 30 декабря 1865, Бомбей — 18 января 1936, Лондон) — английский писатель, поэт, журналист и путешественник.

Художественные произведения Киплинга включают «Книгу джунглей», «Ким», а также множество рассказов, в том числе «Человек, который будет королём^[en]»^[4]. Среди его стихов: «Мандалай^[en]» (1890), «Гунга Дин^[en]» (1890), «Боги заголовков тетрадей^[en]» (1919), «Бремя белого человека» (1899) и «Если…» (1910). В 1907 году Киплинг становится первым англичанином, получившим Нобелевскую премию по литературе, а также самым молодым нобелевским лауреатом по литературе за всю историю премии. В этом же году он удостаивается наград от университетов Парижа, Страсбурга, Афин и Торонто; удостоен также почётных степеней Оксфордского, Кембриджского, Эдинбургского и Даремского университетов.

Биография

Детство

Редьярд Киплинг родился в Бомбее, в Британской Индии, в семье профессора местной школы искусств Джона Локвуда Киплинга и Алисы (Макдональд) Киплинг. Имя Редьярд он получил, как полагают, в честь английского озера Редьярд, где познакомились родители. Ранние годы, полные экзотических видов и звуков Индии, были очень счастливыми для будущего писателя. Но в возрасте 5 лет Киплинга вместе с его 3-летней сестрой отправили в пансион в Англию — в Саутси (англ. Southsea, Портсмут)^[5]. Следующие шесть лет — с октября 1871 по апрель 1877 — Киплинг жил в частном пансионе Лорне Лодж (Кэмпбелл-Роуд, 4), который содержала супружеская пара Прайса Э. Холлоуэя (англ. Pryse Agar Holloway), бывшего капитана торгового флота, и Сары Холлоуэй^[6]. Они плохо обращались с мальчиком, нередко наказывали. Такое отношение так сильно повлияло на него, что до конца жизни он страдал от бессонницы. Этому периоду жизни писателя посвящен рассказ «Мэ-э, паршивая овца».

В 12 лет родители устраивают его в частное Девонское училище, чтобы он смог потом поступить в престижную военную академию. Позже о годах, проведённых в училище, Киплинг напишет автобиографическое произведение «Сталки и компания». Директором училища был Кормелл Прайс, друг отца Редьярда. Именно он стал поощрять любовь мальчика к литературе. Близорукость не позволила Киплингу избрать военную карьеру, а дипломов для поступления в другие университеты училище не давало. Под впечатлением от рассказов, написанных сыном в училище, отец находит ему работу журналиста в редакции «Гражданской и военной газеты» (Civil and Military Gazette), выходившей в Лахоре (Британская Индия, ныне Пакистан). Он отплыл в Индию 20 сентября 1882 года и прибыл в Бомбей 18 октября. Интересы молодого автора выбивались за пределы замкнутой англо-индийской аристократии. Так Ч. Карингтон отмечал, что юный газетчик был известен тем, что знал о жизни простолюдинов в Лахоре больше, чем полиция, и серьёзно изучал самое «дно»^[7].

Я бродил до рассвета по всевозможным случайным заведениям: рюмочным, игорным притонам и курильням опиума, которые совсем не таинственны и загадочны; я наблюдал за уличными танцами и кукольными представлениями^[8].

В 1882 году, когда Киплинг начал свою работу, главным редактором был Стивен Уиллер, недолюбливавший смелый стиль молодого корреспондента. В 1886 Уиллер вернулся в Англию,^[9] его место занял Кей Робинсон. Новый редактор дал больше творческой свободы, и Киплингу разрешили публиковать свои маленькие новеллы в CMG. С ноября 1886 по июнь 1887 в газете были выпущены 28 рассказов из цикла «Обычные сказки с холмов»^[en].

Вскоре Киплингу предложили работу в газете The Pioneer^[en] в Аллахабаде. Он ушел из The Civil and Military Gazette в 1887 году.

В бытность корреспондентом аллахабадской газеты «Пионер» (Pioneer), с которой он заключил контракт на написание путевых очерков, популярность его произведений стремительно увеличивается, в 1888 и 1889 годах издаются 6 книг с его рассказами, которые принесли ему признание.

В 1889 году он совершает долгое путешествие. 9 марта он покидает Индию, сперва посещает Бирму (в частности Рангун и Моламьяйн), Сингапур, Гонконг, Японию, после чего пересекает Тихий океан, и прибывает в Сан-Франциско. Дальнейшее его путешествие идёт через Портленд (Орегон), Сиэтл, Викторию, Ванкувер, Медисин-Хат, Йеллоустонский национальный парк, Солт-Лейк-Сити, Омаху, Чикаго, Бивер (Пенсильвания), Шатокуа, Ниагарский водопад, Торонто, округ Колумбия, Нью-Йорк, Бостон. В ходе этого путешествия он познакомился с Марком Твеном в городе Элмайра, штат Нью-Йорк. Твен с радостью принял Киплинга и провел с ним двухчасовую беседу о тенденциях в англо-американской литературе^[10]. В октябре того же года Киплинг пересекает Атлантический океан, прибывает в Ливерпуль и наконец в Лондон. Его начинают называть литературным наследником Чарльза Диккенса. В 1890 году выходит его первый роман «Свет погас» (The Light That Failed).

Карьера писателя

В Лондоне Киплинг знакомится с молодым американским издателем Уолкоттом Бейлстиром, они вместе работают над повестью «Наулахка» (The Naulahka). В 1892 году Бейлстир умирает от тифа, и вскоре после этого Киплинг женится на его сестре Каролине. Во время медового месяца банк, в котором у Киплинга были сбережения, обанкротился. Денег у четы осталось лишь на то, чтобы добраться до Вермонта (США), где жили родственники Бейлстир. Следующие четыре года они проживают здесь.

В это время писатель вновь начинает писать для детей; в 1894—1895 годах выходят знаменитые «Книга джунглей» (The Jungle Book) и «Вторая книга джунглей» (The Second Jungle Book). Опубликованы также стихотворные сборники «Семь морей» (The Seven Seas) и «Белые тезисы» (The white thesis). Скоро рождаются двое детей: Джозефина и Элси. После ссоры со своим шурином Киплинг с женой в 1896 году возвращаются в Англию. В 1897 году выходит повесть «Отважные мореплаватели» (Captains Courageous). В 1899 году, во время визита в США, от воспаления лёгких умирает его старшая дочь Джозефина, что стало огромным ударом для писателя.

В начале 1898 года чета Киплингов отправляется в Капскую колонию на зимние каникулы, положив начало ежегодной традиции, которая (за исключением следующего года) продлится до 1908 года. Киплинг был тепло принят некоторыми влиятельными политиками, в частности Сесилом Родсом, символом британского империализма. Благосклонно отнёсся к Бурской войне, писал стихи в поддержку армии. В Африке он начинает подбирать материал для новой детской книги, которая выходит в 1902 году под названием Just So Stories (в русском переводе — «Просто сказки»). В 1903 году выходит роман «Ким» (Kim), который считается одним из лучших романов писателя.

В этом же году он покупает загородный дом в графстве Сассекс (Англия), где остаётся до конца жизни. Здесь он пишет свои знаменитые книги «Пак с Холмов» (Puck of Pook’s Hill) и «Награды и феи» (Rewards and Fairies) — сказки Старой Англии, объединённые рассказчиком — эльфом Паком, взятым из пьес Шекспира. Одновременно с литературной деятельностью Киплинг начинает активную политическую деятельность. Он пишет о грозящей войне с Германией, выступает в поддержку консерваторов, против феминизма и ирландского движения за независимость.

Время Первой мировой войны

Литературная деятельность становится всё менее насыщенной. Ещё одним ударом для писателя стала гибель сына Джона в Первую мировую войну в 1915 году. Он погиб во время битвы при Лоосе 27 сентября 1915 года, находясь в составе батальона ирландских гвардейцев. Тело Джона Киплинга так и не было обнаружено^[11]. Киплинг, вместе с женой работавший в военное время в Красном Кресте, потратил 4 года, пытаясь выяснить, что же случилось с сыном: у него все время теплилась надежда, что, возможно, сын попал в немецкий плен. В июне 1919 года, потеряв все надежды, Киплинг в письме военному командованию признал, что его сын скорее всего погиб. В одной из «Эпитафий войны» (1919) он написал: «Если кто-то спросит, почему мы погибли, Ответьте им, потому что наши отцы лгали нам»^[12].

Об истории гибели сына Киплинга британские кинематографисты в 2007 году сняли телевизионный фильм «Мой мальчик Джек» (режиссёр Брайан Кирк, в главных ролях — Дэвид Хэйг и Дэниел Рэдклифф).

После войны

После войны Редьярд Киплинг становится членом Комиссии по военным захоронениям, взявшей на себя ответственность за сохранность английских военных захоронений по всему миру. Именно им была выбрана библейская фраза «Их имена будут жить вечно» на обелисках памяти^[13].

Во время Гражданской войны в России крайне негативно отзывался о большевиках, считал, что они уничтожают всё хорошее, что есть в России, что 1/6 часть света оказалась оторванной от цивилизации. Несмотря на антикоммунизм, его книги активно переводились и печатались при Ленине и Сталине, пользовались большой популярностью среди советских читателей в межвоенный период, в частности писатель Константин Симонов находился под впечатлением от его творчества^[14].

Во время одной поездки в 1922 году по Франции он знакомится с английским королём Георгом V, с которым потом завязывается большая дружба. Будучи настоящим галломаном, Киплинг решительно выступал за англо-французский союз, был одним из немногих англичан, которые поддержали в Рурском конфликте Францию, в то время как британское правительство и бо́льшая часть английской общественности были против.

В 1922 году Редьярд Киплинг по просьбе канадского профессора Герберта Холтейна написал текст клятвы для ритуала посвящения в Инженеры. С 1922 года по 1925 год Киплинг занимал должность ректора Сент-Эндрюсского университета. Продолжал свою литературную деятельность до начала 1930-х годов, хотя успех сопутствовал ему всё меньше и меньше. Хотя в 1920-х годах он в какой-то степени приветствовал Муссолини, в 1930-х годах он решительно осудил фашизм, называя Мосли хвастуном и карьеристом, а Муссолини сумасшедшим и опасным эгоистом. С приходом к власти в Германии Гитлера Киплинг убрал с обложек своих книг свой логотип, разработанный его отцом на основе знака индийского торговца и представлявший собой свастику с головой слона, держащего в хоботе цветок лотоса^[15]. С 1915 года писатель страдал от гастрита, который впоследствии оказался язвой. Редьярд Киплинг умер от прободения язвы 18 января 1936 года в Лондоне^[16], на 2 дня раньше Георга V. Тело Киплинга было кремировано в крематории Голдерс-Грин, прах захоронен в Уголке поэтов в Вестминстерском аббатстве рядом с могилами Чарльза Диккенса и Томаса Харди^[17].

В масонстве

По данным английского журнала «Масонские иллюстрации», Киплинг стал масоном примерно в 1885 году, за 6 месяцев до обычного минимального возраста (21 год)^[18]. Он был инициирован в ложе «Надежда и настойчивость» № 782, которая находилась в Лахоре. Позже он написал в лондонской «Таймс»:

Я был секретарём ложи несколько лет…, в которую вошли братья, по крайней мере, четырёх вероисповеданий. Я был введён [в ученики] членом Брахмо Сомадж, индусом, повышен [в степень подмастерья] мусульманином, и возведён [в степень мастера] англичанином. Наш привратник был индийским евреем.

Киплинг так любил свой масонский опыт, что запечатлел его в качестве своих идеалов в стихотворении «Материнская ложа»^[18].

Также он был членом французской ложи «Строители совершенного города» № 12, в Сан-Омер^[19][20].

Список произведений

Переводы на русский

Сказки серии «Just so stories» впервые были изданы на русском языке уже в 1903 году и неоднократно переиздавались в оригинальных^{[прояснить]} переводах 11 раз, в том числе 4 раза до 1918 года и 7 раз после 1989 года^[21]

Первый сборник стихов Киплинга на русском вышел в 1922 году в переводе Ады Оношкович-Яцыны.

Экранизации произведений

Игровое кино

• «Крошка Вилли Винки» (Wee Willie Winkie) — реж. Джон Форд (США, 1937)
• Маленький погонщик слонов (Elephant Boy) — реж. Роберт Флаэрти, Золтан Корда (Великобритания, 1942)
• «Отважные капитаны» (Captains Courageous) — реж. Виктор Флеминг (США, 1937)
• «Ганга Дин» (Gunga Din) — реж. Джордж Стивенс (США, 1939)
• Книга джунглей (Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book) реж. Золтан Корда(США, Великобритания, 1942)
• «Ким» (Kim) — реж. Виктор Сэвилл (США, 1950)
• «Человек, который хотел быть королём» (The Man Who Would Be King) — реж. Джон Хьюстон (США-Великобритания, 1975)
• «Рикки-Тикки-Тави» — реж. Александр Згуриди (СССР—Индия, 1975)
• «Ким^[en]» (Kim) (телефильм) — реж. Джон Дейвис (Великобритания, 1984)
• «Книга джунглей» (The Jungle Book) — реж. Стивен Соммерс (США, 1994)
• Книга джунглей: история Маугли (The Jungle Book: Mowgli’s Story) — реж. Ник Марк (США, 1998)
• «Книга джунглей» (The Jungle Book) — реж. Джон Фавро (США, 2016)

Зарубежная мультипликация

• Книга джунглей (мультфильм) (The Jungle Book) — реж. Wolfgang Reitherman «Walt Disney Productions» (США, 1967)
• Белый морской котик (мультфильм) (The White Seal) — реж. Чак Джонс (США, 1975)
• Рикки-Тикки-Тави (мультфильм) (Rikki-Tikki-Tavi) — реж. Чак Джонс (США, 1975)
• Братья Маугли (мультфильм) (Mowgli’s Brothers) — реж. Чак Джонс (США, 1976)
• Книга джунглей (аниме-сериал, 52 серии) (ジャングルブック　少年モーグリ Jungle Book: Shounen Mowgli) — реж. Фумио Курокава (Япония (TV Tokyo) 1989—1990)

Советская мультипликация

1. 1936 — Слонёнок — чёрно-белый
2. 1936 — Отважный моряк — чёрно-белый
3. 1938 — Почему у носорога шкура в складках — чёрно-белый
4. 1965 — Рикки-тикки-тави
5. 1967 — Слонёнок
6. 1967—1971 — Маугли
7. 1968 — Кот, который гулял сам по себе
8. 1981 — Ёжик плюс черепаха
9. 1984 — Как было написано первое письмо
10. 1988 — Кошка, которая гуляла сама по себе

Влияние

• Название сборника Just-so stories (1902) (в русском переводе получившего название «Просто сказки») было превращено в ироничную характеристику ненаучного теоретического обоснования Just-so story^{[en][источник не указан 2413 дней]} (Дословно: Просто-так истории^{[источник не указан 2413 дней]}) в англоязычной академической публицистике.
• В сериале «Гримм» (6.04) Редьярд Киплинг упоминается как один из Гриммов.

Примечания

Литература

• Ливергант А. Я. Киплинг. — М.: Молодая гвардия, 2011. — 307 с. — (Жизнь замечательных людей: серия биографий / Осн. в 1890 г. Ф. Павленковым и продолжена в 1933 г. М. Горьким. Малая серия; выпуск 12).
• Falls, Cyril. Rudyard Kipling: a critical study. M. Kennerley, 1915. (англ.)

Ссылки

• Редьярд Киплинг в библиотеке Максима Мошкова
• Сказки Киплинга Редьярда Джозефа
• Книги Киплинга в оригинале
• Киплинг Редьярд — о творчестве писателя
• Киплинг Редьярд — более 250 стихотворений на русском
• The Kipling Society
• «Kipling’s Choice» by Geert Spillebeen, 2007. ISBN 978-0-618-80035-3.
• «My boy Jack?» The Search for Kipling’s Only Son by Tonie and Valmai Holt, 2008. ISBN 978-1-84415-704-4.
• Переводы стихотворений Редьярда Киплинга на русский язык

Эта страница в последний раз была отредактирована 28 февраля 2023 в 19:49.

Как только страница обновилась в Википедии она обновляется в Вики 2.
Обычно почти сразу, изредка в течении часа.

Редьярд Киплинг — биография

---

Редьярд Киплинг – известный писатель, поэт, новеллист. Автор произведения «Книга Джунглей», которая и принесла ему мировую славу. Первый из англичан, кто получил Нобелевскую премию

«Мы с тобой одной крови…» — так говорил самый известный персонаж, придуманный известным британским писателем Редьярдом Киплингом. Для него это не просто слова, литератор-гуманист свято верил, что все в этом мире должны жить в любви и согласии. Сюжеты его произведений переносят читателей в суровый быт и экзотику колоний с могучей природой, зачастую жестокой к слабым, которым чтобы выжить, нужно приложить все физические и духовные силы.

Киплинга часто звали человеком-хамелеоном. Так уж сложилась его судьба – на грани между двумя мирами. Он был белым, но родился в Индии, в нем видели надежду семьи, но мальчик рос брошенным ребенком, он был сказочником, прославлявшим британский империализм.

Детство

Родился Джозеф Редьярд Киплинг (полное имя писателя) 30 декабря 1865 года в индийском городе Бомбее. Мальчика назвали в честь одного из индийских озер, где когда-то состоялось знакомство его родителей. Отец – Джон Локвуд Киплинг, профессор местной школы искусств. Мама – Алиса (Макдональд) Киплинг, автор очерков, которые печатали местные СМИ. Раннее детство Редьярда прошли среди экзотических индийских пейзажей. Мальчик рос в дружной любящей семье, был абсолютно счастлив. Его воспитывала няня-португалка и домашние слуги индусы, которые ласково звали его Ридди. Все баловали хорошенького мальчишку, абсолютно не наказывали за шалости.

С раннего детства Редьярд слушал на ночь сказки слуг на индийском языке, поэтому говорить на нем стал раньше, чем на английском.  Родители строго наказали ему общаться в течение дня чисто по-английски. В такие моменты Киплинг быстро перестраивал в уме местные наречия и обращался к родным так, как они хотели.

Но вскоре в его биографии наступили большие перемены. Мальчику было всего пять лет, а его сестре три, и, несмотря на столь юный возраст, родители отправили малышей на учебу в Англию. Все дети англоиндийских семей должны были учиться на родине, чтобы получить достойное воспитание и избавиться от индийского акцента. Однако родители мальчика ошиблись с выбором места обучения своих детей.

На протяжении следующих шести лет домом для Киплинга стал частный пансион. Это были не самые лучшие годы в его жизни, владельцы учебного заведения не жаловали мальчика, достаточно часто наказывали его. Особенно Киплинг страдал от воспитательницы, которая ограничивала его во всем, запугивала и позволяла себе даже рукоприкладство. Детские стрессы не прошли для писателя бесследно, всю свою жизнь он страдал бессонницей.

Через два года после начала обучения, мама приехала проведать сына и дочь. Она пришла в ужас от состояния Редьярда, нервные потрясения привели его к катастрофической потере зрения, он чуть было не ослеп. Алиса привезла детей домой, в Индию, однако дома мальчик прожил немного.

В будущем Редьярд должен был стать курсантом престижной военной академии, и для того, чтобы поступить, двенадцатилетнего мальчишку отправляют на учебу в Девонское училище «Вествард-Хо». Директором этого учебного заведения был Кормелл Прайс, давнишний друг отца Редьярда. Он первым заметил, что мальчик интересуется литературой, и всячески поощрял это увлечение.

В училище приветствовалось насилие и муштра. Киплинг страдал не только от невежественных учителей, но и от учеников, зачастую примитивных и грубых подростков. В свои 12 лет Редьярд не отличался высоким ростом, к тому же ходил в очках, что стало еще одной причиной для издевательств над ним. Годы, проведенные в «Вествард-Хо» оказались сложным периодом в его биографии, но никак не повлияли на становление его личности. Будущий писатель пробыл там пять лет, сумел притерпеться и привыкнуть к достаточно грубым розыгрышам.

Юноша сумел поверить, что уроки подчинения необходимы, и благодаря этому ему удалось сохранить уважение к себе, как к личности. Жестокость воспитания теперь казалась Киплингу целесообразной, он понял, что существует некий закон, состоящий из разрешений и запретов. Пребывание в этом учебном  заведении стало решающим в формировании принципов и взглядов писателя, впрочем, как и идеалов, и личности в целом.

Плохое зрение не позволило Редьярду продолжать карьеру военного. Он так и не доучился в «Вествард-Хо», ушел без диплома об образовании. Документа, дающего право на поступление в Кембридж или Оксфорд, у Киплинга не было, поэтому вопрос о дальнейшем образовании закрылся сам по себе.

К тому времени молодой человек уже начал писать небольшие рассказы. Его первым читателем стал отец, который и помог ему найти работу в редакции издания «Гражданская и военная газета» в Лахоре. Спустя некоторое время Редьярд стал членом масонской ложи, и это сыграло огромную роль на формирование его мировосприятия. Киплинг нашел там все, что казалось ему самым важным в жизни – обряды, дух, полное подчинение законам.

Творчество

Киплинг понял, что нашел свое призвание, и оно в литературе. Он пишет «Школьную лирику»,  в стиле поэтов того времени. Спустя три года Редьярд издал сборник «Отзвуки», который уже написан в совершенно другом стиле. Он пародировал именитых поэтов, подчеркивал искусственность и условность их манер.

К концу 1882-го Киплинг вернулся домой и устроился работать в газету на должность журналиста. Свободные часы писатель посвящал творческой работе, писал стихи, рассказы, которые печатал в том же издании. Он работал журналистом на протяжении семи лет, объездил всю страну, увидел противоречия в жизни народа, тесное переплетение массового невежества и высокой духовности. Благодаря репортерскому ремеслу, развивалась природная общительность и наблюдательность Редьярда.

Киплинг быстро научился писать короткие рассказы, всех поражала его ранняя писательская плодовитость и зрелость. Перед созданием каждого произведения, Редьярд ставил себе жесткое правило – уложиться в 1200 слов. Его лучшие произведения потом вышли в сборнике под названием «Простые рассказы с гор». Многие рассказы так называемого «индийского» периода вышли из печати небольшими томиками с мягкой обложкой.

Редактор газеты, выходящей в Аллахабаде, предложил писателю поработать над серией очерков о жизни людей в разных странах. Восторгу Киплинга не было предела, он с удовольствием отправился в Америку и Азию. Редьярд получил массу впечатлений от прикосновения к непохожим культурам, которые нашли свое отражение на страницах шести его книг. Литературный мир принял Киплинга с восторгом, критики писали хвалебные отзывы о самобытности и оригинальности его произведений.

После Англии писатель побывал в Китае, Японии, Бирме, Северной Америке. Имя Киплинга стало известным в его родной Индии, потом он прославился на весь мир. Нагруженный впечатлениями от поездок, писатель возвращается в Лондон, и начинает воплощать их в своих новых произведениях.

Рассказы Киплинга разлетались быстрее, чем горячие пирожки, он трудится над развитием индийской тематики. Яркость впечатлений подогревалась значительным расстоянием между домом и самим писателем. Кроме творческой деятельности, Киплинг принимает самое активное участие в литературной жизни Лондона. Критикам пришлось по душе произведение Редьярда «Библиотека Индейской железной дороги», а вот следующий роман – «Свет погас», не удостоился хвалебных отзывов.

Популярность Киплинга можно сравнить только с известностью всеобщего любимца Чарльза Диккенса. Успех молодому литератору гарантировали мера и характер его новаторских идей. Писатель появился в литературном мире как раз тогда, когда он требовал перемен, новых идей и интересных героев.

Редьярд сделал своими героями простых людей, оказавшихся в экстремальных условиях, способных пролить свет на саму сущность человека, глубину его души. В те времена, когда царило всеобщее уныние и апатия, Киплинг пел гимн труду, восхвалял героизм повседневного созидания.

Литературный язык и стиль поэтического слова Киплинга поражали своим демократизмом. В этом и заключалась художественная революция. На страницах его произведений была отражена неприкрашенная жизнь, мир, во всем его многообразии и естестве.

Спустя некоторое время Киплинг принялся писать детские рассказы. Критикам понравились труды писателя, и он становится все более популярным во всем мире. В 1907-м Редьярд Киплинг был награжден Нобелевской премией по литературе, и стал не только самым молодым из претендентов на эту награду, но и первым в мире англичанином, удостоенным ее. Киплинг присутствовал на церемонии вручения премии, но традиционную торжественную речь так и не произнес. Через некоторое время его творческая активность начала снижаться.

Личная жизнь

По приезде в Лондон, Киплинг встретил молодого издателя Уолкотта Бейлсира, ставшего ему другом. Они вместе работали над созданием повести «Наулаха». После смерти приятеля в 1892 году от тифа, Редьярд делает предложение руки и сердца его родной сестре Каролине. Девушка отвечает согласием, и они женятся. Личная жизнь писателя окрасилась новыми чувствами, он счастлив. Молодые люди отправились в свадебное путешествие, и как раз во время медового месяца Редьярд лишился всех своих сбережений. Дело в том, что он вложил их в банк, который обанкротился. Супруги оказались без средств, сумели «наскрести» только на то, чтобы добраться до Вермонта, к родственникам новобрачной.

Первые годы их семейной жизни прошли в небольшом съемном жилье. Жена подарила писателю дочку Джозефину, и оказалось, что для троих помещение слишком тесное. Киплинги покупают землю, строят на ней дом и обустраиваются на новом месте. Рождение второй дочери прошло уже в новом доме. В этом доме семейство прожило четыре счастливых года, пока Редьярд не поссорился с шурином.

Скандал привел к тому, что в 1896-м Киплинг забрал семью и уехал обратно в Англию. Там и родился единственный сын писателя – Джон. Редьярд очень любил своих детей, от его сказок веет душевным теплом, они были созданы именно для них.

Однако далеко не все в жизни Киплинга складывалось хорошо. Ему пришлось пережить смерть своей старшей дочери Джозефины, которая скончалась от воспаления легких в 1899 году. Семья в то время находилась в путешествии по Америке.

Редьярд долго не мог оправиться от этой потери, но она была еще не последней в его жизни. В Первую мировую войну погиб его единственный сын. Джон служил в батальоне ирландских гвардейцев, он участвовал в битве при Лосе и вероятно погиб 27 сентября 1915 года. Тело его так и не было найдено. Во время войны супруги Киплинг трудились в Красном Кресте, на протяжении четырех лет они пытались выяснить, где и как погиб их сын, но все оказалось тщетным.

Они надеялись, что Джон в плену у немцев. Летом 1919 года супруги поняли, что попытки выяснить, что случилось с сыном не дали результата,  Киплинг написал военному командованию части, где служил Джон, и признал, что, скорее всего, он погиб. Эти события нашли отражение в картине «Мой мальчик Джек».

Только одному ребенку писателя – дочери Элси судьба уготовила долголетие. Она скончалась в 80-летнем возрасте, составив завещание, согласно которого владельцем всей ее собственности стал Национальный фонд.

Смерть

Киплинг продолжал сочинять свои произведения вплоть до 1930-х годов, но успехом они почти не пользовались. Когда в Германии к власти пришел Гитлер, писатель убрал из обложек своих книг собственный логотип. Этот символ разработал еще его отец, взявший за основу знак индийского торговца. Логотип выглядел в виде свастики с головой слона, который держит в своем хоботе цветок лотоса.

Еще в 1915 году писателю поставили диагноз — гастрит, но спустя много лет выяснилось, что доктора ошиблись. На самом деле Редьярду не давала жизни язва желудка. Он согласился на операцию, которая вроде бы была успешной, но не прошло и недели, как он умер. Это случилось 18 января 1936 года в Лондоне. Тело писателя кремировали, прах его погребли в Уголке поэтов Вестминстерского аббатства. Рядом с ним покоятся известные личности – Томас Харди и Чарльз Диккенс.

По мнению критиков, писательская слава Киплинга пошла на закат из-за его консервативных и великодержавных взглядов. Возможно, этому посодействовала и общедоступность его произведений. Модернисты выразили мнение, что Киплинг отказался освещать эстетические принципы и темы, которым они следуют.

Однако с годами интерес к творчеству Редьярда Киплинга не ослабевает. Еще в начале 40-х годов прошлого века критики начали переосмысливать его произведения. После того, как из печати повторно вышел сборник его стихотворений, интерес к творческому наследию литератора возродился с новой силой.

Избранные произведения

• Маугли
• Рикки-Тикки-Тави
• Книга джунглей
• Ким
• Сказки
• Пак с Волшебных Холмов
• Свет погас

Ссылки

• Страница в Википедии

Rudyard Kipling
Species: Human Place of Origin: Bombay Gender: Male Death: Died of a hemorrhage from a perforated duodenal ulcer on 18 January 1936
Books Appears in:

Joseph Rudyard Kipling (30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936) was an English author and poet. Born in Bombay, British India (now Mumbai), he is best known for his works The Jungle Book (1894) and Rikki-Tikki-Tavi (1902), his novel, Kim (1901); his poems, including Mandalay (1890), Gunga Din (1890), If— (1910); and his many short stories, including The M

an Who Would Be King (1888). He is regarded as a major «innovator in the art of the short story»;^[1] his children’s books are enduring classics of children’s literature; and his best works speak to a versatile and luminous narrative gift.^[2][3]

Kipling was one of the most popular writers in English, in both prose and verse, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.^[1] The author Henry James said of him: «Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius (as distinct from fine intelligence) that I have ever known.»^[1] In 1907, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the first English language writer to receive the prize, and to date he remains its youngest recipient.^[4] Among other honours, he was sounded out for the British Poet Laureateship and on several occasions for a knighthood, all of which he declined.^[5]

Later in life Kipling came to be seen (in George Orwell‘s words) as a «prophet of British imperialism.»^[6] Many saw prejudice and militarism in his works,^[7][8] and the resulting controversy about him continued for much of the 20th century.^[9][10] According to critic Douglas Kerr: «He is still an author who can inspire passionate disagreement and his place in literary and cultural history is far from settled. But as the age of the European empires recedes, he is recognized as an incomparable, if controversial, interpreter of how empire was experienced. That, and an increasing recognition of his extraordinary narrative gifts, make him a force to be reckoned with.»^[11]

Childhood and early life[]

File:Malabarpoint governmenthouse bombay.jpg

Rudyard Kipling was born on 30 December 1865 in Bombay, British India, to Alice Kipling (née MacDonald) and (John) Lockwood Kipling.^[12] Alice Kipling (one of four remarkable Victorian sisters)^[13] was a vivacious woman^[14] about whom a future Viceroy of India would say, «Dullness and Mrs. Kipling cannot exist in the same room.»^[1] Lockwood Kipling, a sculptor and pottery designer, was the principal and professor of architectural sculpture at the newly founded Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy School of Art and Industry in Bombay.^[14]

The couple, who had moved to India earlier that year, met in courtship two years before at Rudyard Lake in rural Staffordshire, England, and had been so taken by its beauty that they now named their firstborn after it. Kipling’s maternal aunt, Georgiana, was married to the painter Edward Burne-Jones and his aunt Agnes was married to the painter Edward Poynter. His most famous relative was his first cousin, Stanley Baldwin, who was Conservative Prime Minister three times in the 1920s and 1930s.^[15] Kipling’s birthplace home still stands on the campus of the Sir J.J. Institute of Applied Art in Mumbai and for many years was used as the Dean’s residence. Mumbai historian Foy Nissen points out however that although the cottage bears a plaque stating that this is the site where Kipling was born, the original cottage was pulled down decades ago and a new one built in its place. The wooden bungalow has been empty and locked up for years.^[16]

File:Kiplingsindia.jpg

Of Bombay, Kipling was to write:^[17]

Mother of Cities to me,
For I was born in her gate,
Between the palms and the sea,
Where the world-end steamers wait.

According to Bernice M. Murphy: «Kipling’s parents considered themselves ‘Anglo-Indians’ (a term used in the 19th century for British citizens living in India) and so too would their son, though he in fact spent the bulk of his life elsewhere. Complex issues of identity and national allegiance would become prominent features in his fiction.»^[18] Kipling himself was to write about these conflicts: «In the afternoon heats before we took our sleep, she (the Portuguese ayah, or nanny) or Meeta (the Hindu bearer, or male attendant) would tell us stories and Indian nursery songs all unforgotten, and we were sent into the dining-room after we had been dressed, with the caution ‘Speak English now to Papa and Mamma.’ So one spoke ‘English,’ haltingly translated out of the vernacular idiom that one thought and dreamed in».^[19]

File:Tissot HMS Calcutta.jpg

Kipling’s days of «strong light and darkness» in Bombay were to end when he was six years old.^[19] As was the custom in British India, he and his three-year-old sister, Alice («Trix»), were taken to England—in their case to Southsea (Portsmouth), to be cared for by a couple that took in children of British nationals living in India. The two children would live with the couple, Captain and Mrs. Holloway, at their house, Lorne Lodge, for the next six years. In his autobiography, published some 65 years later, Kipling would recall this time with horror, and wonder ironically if the combination of cruelty and neglect he experienced there at the hands of Mrs. Holloway might not have hastened the onset of his literary life: «If you cross-examine a child of seven or eight on his day’s doings (specially when he wants to go to sleep) he will contradict himself very satisfactorily. If each contradiction be set down as a lie and retailed at breakfast, life is not easy. I have known a certain amount of bullying, but this was calculated torture—religious as well as scientific. Yet it made me give attention to the lies I soon found it necessary to tell: and this, I presume, is the foundation of literary effort».^[19]

Kipling’s sister Trix fared better at Lorne Lodge, Mrs. Holloway apparently hoping that Trix would eventually marry the Holloway son.^[20] The two children, however, did have relatives in England they could visit. They spent a month each Christmas with their maternal aunt Georgiana («Georgy»), and her husband, the artist Edward Burne-Jones, at their house, «The Grange» in Fulham, London, which Kipling was to call «a paradise which I verily believe saved me.»^[19] In the spring of 1877, Alice Kipling returned from India and removed the children from Lorne Lodge. Kipling remembers, «Often and often afterwards, the beloved Aunt would ask me why I had never told any one how I was being treated. Children tell little more than animals, for what comes to them they accept as eternally established. Also, badly-treated children have a clear notion of what they are likely to get if they betray the secrets of a prison-house before they are clear of it».^[19]

File:Westwardho ladiesgolfclub1873.jpg

In January 1878 Kipling was admitted to the United Services College, at Westward Ho!, Devon, a school founded a few years earlier to prepare boys for the armed forces. The school proved rough going for him at first, but later led to firm friendships, and provided the setting for his schoolboy stories Stalky & Co. published many years later.^[20] During his time there, Kipling also met and fell in love with Florence Garrard, a fellow boarder with Trix at Southsea (to which Trix had returned). Florence was to become the model for Maisie in Kipling’s first novel, The Light that Failed (1891).^[20]

File:Kiplingsengland3.jpg

Towards the end of his stay at the school, it was decided that he lacked the academic ability to get into Oxford University on a scholarship^[20] and his parents lacked the wherewithal to finance him;^[14] consequently, Lockwood Kipling obtained a job for his son in Lahore (now in Pakistan), where Lockwood was now Principal of the Mayo College of Art and Curator of the Lahore Museum. Kipling was to be assistant editor of a small local newspaper, the Civil & Military Gazette.

He sailed for India on 20 September 1882 and arrived in Bombay on 18 October 1882. He described this moment years later: «So, at sixteen years and nine months, but looking four or five years older, and adorned with real whiskers which the scandalised Mother abolished within one hour of beholding, I found myself at Bombay where I was born, moving among sights and smells that made me deliver in the vernacular sentences whose meaning I knew not. Other Indian-born boys have told me how the same thing happened to them.»^[19] This arrival changed Kipling, as he explains, «There were yet three or four days’ rail to Lahore, where my people lived. After these, my English years fell away, nor ever, I think, came back in full strength».^[19]

Early travels[]

The Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore, which Kipling was to call «mistress and most true love,»^[19] appeared six days a week throughout the year except for a one-day break each for Christmas and Easter. Kipling was worked hard by the editor, Stephen Wheeler, but his need to write was unstoppable. In 1886, he published his first collection of verse, Departmental Ditties. That year also brought a change of editors at the newspaper. Kay Robinson, the new editor, allowed more creative freedom and Kipling was asked to contribute short stories to the newspaper.^[2]

File:Lahore railway station1880s.JPG

During the summer of 1883, Kipling visited Simla (now Shimla), well-known hill station and summer capital of British India. By then it was established practice for the Viceroy of India and the government to move to Simla for six months and the town became a «centre of power as well as pleasure.»^[2] Kipling’s family became yearly visitors to Simla and Lockwood Kipling was asked to serve in the Christ Church there. He returned to Simla for his annual leave each year from 1885 to 1888, and the town figured prominently in many of the stories Kipling was writing for the Gazette.^[2] Kipling describes this time: «My month’s leave at Simla, or whatever Hill Station my people went to, was pure joy—every golden hour counted. It began in heat and discomfort, by rail and road. It ended in the cool evening, with a wood fire in one’s bedroom, and next morn—thirty more of them ahead!—the early cup of tea, the Mother who brought it in, and the long talks of us all together again. One had leisure to work, too, at whatever play-work was in one’s head, and that was usually full.»^[19] Back in Lahore, some thirty-nine stories appeared in the Gazette between November 1886 and June 1887. Most of these stories were included in Plain Tales from the Hills, Kipling’s first prose collection, which was published in Calcutta in January 1888, a month after his 22nd birthday. Kipling’s time in Lahore, however, had come to an end. In November 1887, he had been transferred to the Gazette’s much larger sister newspaper, The Pioneer, in Allahabad in the United Provinces.

File:Bundi palace1990.jpg

His writing continued at a frenetic pace and during the following year, he published six collections of short stories: Soldiers Three, The Story of the Gadsbys, In Black and White, Under the Deodars, The Phantom Rickshaw, and Wee Willie Winkie, containing a total of 41 stories, some quite long. In addition, as The Pioneer’s special correspondent in western region of Rajputana, he wrote many sketches that were later collected in Letters of Marque and published in From Sea to Sea and Other Sketches, Letters of Travel.^[2]

In early 1889, The Pioneer relieved Kipling of his charge over a dispute. For his part, Kipling had been increasingly thinking about the future. He sold the rights to his six volumes of stories for £200 and a small royalty, and the Plain Tales for £50; in addition, from The Pioneer, he received six-months’ salary in lieu of notice.^[19] He decided to use this money to make his way to London, the centre of the literary universe in the British Empire. On 9 March 1889, Kipling left India, travelling first to San Francisco via Rangoon, Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan. He then travelled through the United States writing articles for The Pioneer that too were collected in From Sea to Sea and Other Sketches, Letters of Travel. Starting his American travels in San Francisco, Kipling journeyed north to Portland, Oregon; on to Seattle, Washington; up into Canada, to Victoria and Vancouver, British Columbia; back into the U.S. to Yellowstone National Park; down to Salt Lake City; then east to Omaha, Nebraska and on to Chicago, Illinois; then to Beaver, Pennsylvania on the Ohio River to visit the Hill family; from there he went to Chautauqua with Professor Hill, and later to Niagara, Toronto, Washington, D.C., New York and Boston.^[21] In the course of this journey he met Mark Twain in Elmira, New York, and felt much awed in his presence. Kipling then crossed the Atlantic, and reached Liverpool in October 1889. Soon thereafter, he made his début in the London literary world to great acclaim.^[1]

Career as a writer[]

London[]

In London, Kipling had several stories accepted by various magazine editors. He also found a place to live for the next two years:

Meantime, I had found me quarters in Villiers Street, Strand, which forty-six years ago was primitive and passionate in its habits and population. My rooms were small, not over-clean or well-kept, but from my desk I could look out of my window through the fanlight of Gatti’s Music-Hall entrance, across the street, almost on to its stage. The Charing Cross trains rumbled through my dreams on one side, the boom of the Strand on the other, while, before my windows, Father Thames under the Shot Tower walked up and down with his traffic.

File:Kiplinghouse villiers steet.jpg

In the next two years, and in short order, he published a novel, The Light That Failed; had a nervous breakdown; and met an American writer and publishing agent, Wolcott Balestier, with whom he collaborated on a novel, The Naulahka (a title he uncharacteristically misspelt; see below).^[14] In 1891, on the advice of his doctors, Kipling embarked on another sea voyage visiting South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and once again India. However, he cut short his plans for spending Christmas with his family in India when he heard of Wolcott Balestier’s sudden death from typhoid fever, and immediately decided to return to London. Before his return, he had used the telegram to propose to (and be accepted by) Wolcott’s sister Caroline (Carrie) Balestier, whom he had met a year earlier, and with whom he had apparently been having an intermittent romance.^[14] Meanwhile, late in 1891, his collection of short stories of the British in India, Life’s Handicap, was also published in London.

On 18 January 1892, Carrie Balestier (aged 29) and Rudyard Kipling (aged 26) were married in London, in the «thick of an influenza epidemic, when the undertakers had run out of black horses and the dead had to be content with brown ones.»^[19] The wedding was held at All Souls Church, Langham Place. Henry James gave the bride away.

United States[]

The couple settled upon a honeymoon that would take them first to the United States (including a stop at the Balestier family estate near Brattleboro, Vermont) and then on to Japan.^[14] However, when the couple arrived in Yokohama, Japan, they discovered that their bank, The New Oriental Banking Corporation, had failed. Taking their loss in their stride, they returned to the U.S., back to Vermont—Carrie by this time was pregnant with their first child—and rented a small cottage on a farm near Brattleboro for ten dollars a month. According to Kipling, «We furnished it with a simplicity that fore-ran the hire-purchase system. We bought, second or third hand, a huge, hot-air stove which we installed in the cellar. We cut generous holes in our thin floors for its eight inch tin pipes (why we were not burned in our beds each week of the winter I never can understand) and we were extraordinarily and self-centredly content.»^[19]

File:Naulakha fall.jpg

In this cottage, Bliss Cottage, their first child, Josephine, was born «in three foot of snow on the night of 29 December 1892. Her Mother’s birthday being the 31st and mine the 30th of the same month, we congratulated her on her sense of the fitness of things …»^[19]

File:Jungle book 1894 138.jpg

It was also in this cottage that the first dawnings of the Jungle Books came to Kipling: «workroom in the Bliss Cottage was seven feet by eight, and from December to April the snow lay level with its window-sill. It chanced that I had written a tale about Indian Forestry work which included a boy who had been brought up by wolves. In the stillness, and suspense, of the winter of ’92 some memory of the Masonic Lions of my childhood’s magazine, and a phrase in Haggard’s Nada the Lily, combined with the echo of this tale. After blocking out the main idea in my head, the pen took charge, and I watched it begin to write stories about Mowgli and animals, which later grew into the Jungle Books«.^[19] With Josephine’s arrival, Bliss Cottage was felt to be congested, so eventually the couple bought land—ten acres on a rocky hillside overlooking the Connecticut River—from Carrie’s brother Beatty Balestier, and built their own house.

Kipling named the house «Naulakha» in honour of Wolcott and of their collaboration, and this time the name was spelled correctly.^[14] From his early years in Lahore (1882-87), Kipling had become enthused by the Mughal architecture^[22] especially the Naulakha pavilion situated in Lahore Fort, which eventually became an inspiration for the title of his novel as well as the house.^[23] The house still stands on Kipling Road, three miles (5 km) north of Brattleboro: a big, secluded, dark-green house, with shingled roof and sides, which Kipling called his «ship», and which brought him «sunshine and a mind at ease.»^[14] His seclusion in Vermont, combined with his healthy «sane clean life», made Kipling both inventive and prolific.

File:Kiplingseastcoast2.JPG

In the short span of four years, he produced, in addition to the Jungle Books, a collection of short stories (The Day’s Work), a novel (Captains Courageous), and a profusion of poetry, including the volume The Seven Seas. The collection of Barrack-Room Ballads, first published individually for the most part in 1890, which contains his poems «Mandalay» and «Gunga Din» was issued in March 1892. He especially enjoyed writing the Jungle Books—both masterpieces of imaginative writing—and enjoyed too corresponding with the many children who wrote to him about them.^[14]

The writing life in Naulakha was occasionally interrupted by visitors, including his father, who visited soon after his retirement in 1893,^[14] and British author Arthur Conan Doyle, who brought his golf-clubs, stayed for two days, and gave Kipling an extended golf lesson.^[24][25] Kipling seemed to take to golf, occasionally practising with the local Congregational minister, and even playing with red painted balls when the ground was covered in snow.^[25][12] However, the latter game was «not altogether a success because there were no limits to a drive; the ball might skid two miles (3 km) down the long slope to Connecticut river.»^[12]

From all accounts, Kipling loved the outdoors,^[14] not least of whose marvels in Vermont was the turning of the leaves each fall. He described this moment in a letter: «A little maple began it, flaming blood-red of a sudden where he stood against the dark green of a pine-belt. Next morning there was an answering signal from the swamp where the sumacs grow. Three days later, the hill-sides as fast as the eye could range were afire, and the roads paved, with crimson and gold. Then a wet wind blew, and ruined all the uniforms of that gorgeous army; and the oaks, who had held themselves in reserve, buckled on their dull and bronzed cuirasses and stood it out stiffly to the last blown leaf, till nothing remained but pencil-shadings of bare boughs, and one could see into the most private heart of the woods.»^[26]

File:Kiplingcropped.jpg

In February 1896, the couple’s second daughter, Elsie, was born. By this time, according to several biographers, their marital relationship was no longer light-hearted and spontaneous.^[27] Although they would always remain loyal to each other, they seemed now to have fallen into set roles.^[14] In a letter to a friend who had become engaged around this time, the 29 year old Kipling offered this sombre counsel: marriage principally taught «the tougher virtues—such as humility, restraint, order, and forethought.»^[28]

The Kiplings might have lived out their lives in Vermont, were it not for two incidents—one of global politics, the other of family discord—that hastily ended their time there. By the early 1890s, Great Britain and Venezuela had long been locking horns over a border dispute involving British Guiana. Several times, the U.S. had offered to arbitrate, but in 1895 the new American Secretary of State Richard Olney upped the ante by arguing for the American «right» to arbitrate on grounds of sovereignty on the continent (see the Olney interpretation as an extension of the Monroe Doctrine).^[14] This raised hackles in Britain and before long the incident had snowballed into a major Anglo-American crisis, with talk of war on both sides.

Although the crisis led to greater U.S.-British cooperation, at the time Kipling was bewildered by what he felt was persistent anti-British sentiment in the U.S., especially in the press.^[14] He wrote in a letter that it felt like being «aimed at with a decanter across a friendly dinner table.»^[28] By January 1896, he had decided, according to his official biographer,^[12] to end his family’s «good wholesome life» in the U.S. and seek their fortunes elsewhere.

Devon[]

A family dispute became the final straw. For some time, the relations between Carrie and her brother Beatty Balestier had been strained on account of his drinking and insolvency. In May 1896, an inebriated Beatty ran into Kipling on the street and threatened him with physical harm.^[14] The incident led to Beatty’s eventual arrest, but in the subsequent hearing, and the resulting publicity, Kipling’s privacy was completely destroyed, and left him feeling both miserable and exhausted. In July 1896, a week before the hearing was to resume, the Kiplings hurriedly packed their belongings and left Naulakha, Vermont, and the U.S. for good.^[12]

File:Naulakha jsephne loggia.jpg

Back in England, in September 1896, the Kiplings found themselves in Torquay on the coast of Devon, in a hillside home overlooking the sea. Although Kipling did not much care for his new house, whose design, he claimed, left its occupants feeling dispirited and gloomy, he managed to remain productive and socially active.^[14] Kipling was now a famous man, and in the previous two or three years, had increasingly been making political pronouncements in his writings. He had also begun work on two poems, «Recessional» (1897) and «The White Man’s Burden» (1899) which were to create controversy when published. Regarded by some as anthems for enlightened and duty-bound empire-building (that captured the mood of the Victorian age), the poems equally were regarded by others as propaganda for brazenfaced imperialism and its attendant racial attitudes; still others saw irony in the poems and warnings of the perils of empire.^[14]

Take up the White Man’s burden—
Send forth the best ye breed—
Go, bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait, in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild—
Your new-caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.
— The White Man’s Burden^[29]

There was also foreboding in the poems, a sense that all could yet come to naught.^[30]

Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet.
Lest we forget — lest we forget!
— Recessional^[31]

A prolific writer—nothing about his work was easily labelled—during his time in Torquay, he also wrote Stalky & Co., a collection of school stories (born of his experience at the United Services College in Westward Ho!) whose juvenile protagonists displayed a know-it-all, cynical outlook on patriotism and authority. According to his family, Kipling enjoyed reading aloud stories from Stalky & Co. to them, and often went into spasms of laughter over his own jokes.^[14]

South Africa[]

File:Ralph, Landon, Gwynne and Kipling 1900-1901.jpg

In early 1898 Kipling and his family travelled to South Africa for their winter holiday, thus beginning an annual tradition which (excepting the following year) was to last until 1908. With his newly minted reputation as the poet of the Empire, Kipling was warmly received by some of the most powerful politicians of the Cape Colony, including Cecil Rhodes, Sir Alfred Milner, and Leander Starr Jameson. In turn, Kipling cultivated their friendship and came to greatly admire all three men and their politics. The period 1898–1910 was a crucial one in the history of South Africa and included the Second Boer War (1899–1902), the ensuing peace treaty, and the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910. Back in England, Kipling wrote poetry in support of the British cause in the Boer War and on his next visit to South Africa in early 1900, he helped start a newspaper, The Friend, for the British troops in Bloemfontein, the newly captured capital of the Orange Free State. Although his journalistic stint was to last only two weeks, it was the first time Kipling would work on a newspaper staff since he left The Pioneer in Allahabad more than ten years earlier.^[14] He also wrote articles published more widely expressing his views on the conflict.^[32]

Other writing[]

Kipling began collecting material for another of his children’s classics, Just So Stories for Little Children. That work was published in 1902, and another of his enduring works, Kim, first saw the light of day the previous year.

On a visit to the United States in 1899, Kipling and his eldest daughter Josephine developed pneumonia, from which she eventually died. During World War I, he wrote a booklet The Fringes of the Fleet^[33] containing essays and poems on various nautical subjects of the war. Some of the poems were set to music by the English composer Edward Elgar.

In 1934 he published a short story in Strand Magazine, «Proofs of Holy Writ», which postulated that William Shakespeare had helped to polish the prose of the King James Bible.^[34] In the non-fiction realm he also became involved in the debate over the British response to the rise in German naval power, publishing a series of articles in 1898 which were collected as A Fleet in Being.

Peak of his career[]

The first decade of the 20th century saw Kipling at the height of his popularity. In 1907 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The prize citation said: «in consideration of the power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas and remarkable talent for narration which characterize the creations of this world-famous author.» Nobel prizes had been established in 1901 and Kipling was the first English language recipient. At the award ceremony in Stockholm on 10 December 1907, the Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, C.D. af Wirsén, praised both Kipling and three centuries of English literature:^[35]

The Swedish Academy, in awarding the Nobel Prize in Literature this year to Rudyard Kipling, desires to pay a tribute of homage to the literature of England, so rich in manifold glories, and to the greatest genius in the realm of narrative that that country has produced in our times.

«Book-ending» this achievement was the publication of two connected poetry and story collections: 1906’s Puck of Pook’s Hill and 1910’s Rewards and Fairies. The latter contained the poem «If—«. In a 1995 BBC opinion poll, it was voted Britain’s favourite poem. This exhortation to self-control and stoicism is arguably Kipling’s most famous poem.

Kipling sympathised with the anti-Home Rule stance of Irish Unionists. He was friends with Edward Carson, the Dublin-born leader of Ulster Unionism, who raised the Ulster Volunteers to oppose «Rome Rule» in Ireland. Kipling wrote the poem «Ulster» in 1912 (?) reflecting this. The poem reflects on Ulster Day (28 September 1912) when half a million people signed the Ulster Covenant.

Many have wondered why he was never made Poet Laureate. Some claim that he was offered the post during the interregnum of 1892-96 and turned it down. It also appears — surprisingly — that Queen Victoria disapproved of himTemplate:Fact.
.

Effects of World War I[]

File:Plaque theirnamelivethforevermore.jpg

Kipling was so closely associated with the expansive, confident attitude of late 19th century European civilization that it was inevitable that his reputation would suffer in the years of and after World War I. Kipling also knew personal tragedy at the time as his only son, John Kipling, died in 1915 at the Battle of Loos, after which he wrote «If any question why we died/ Tell them, because our fathers lied» (Kipling’s son’s death inspired his poem, «My Boy Jack«, and the incident became the basis for the play My Boy Jack and its subsequent television adaptation, along with the documentary Rudyard Kipling: A Remembrance Tale.) It is speculated that these words may reveal Kipling’s feelings of guilt at his role in getting John a commission in the Irish Guards, despite his initially having been rejected by the army because of his poor eyesight, and his having exerted great influence to have his son accepted for officer training at the age of only 17.^[36]

File:Kipling timecover1101260927 400.jpg

Partly in response to this tragedy, Kipling joined Sir Fabian Ware‘s Imperial War Graves Commission (now the Commonwealth War Graves Commission), the group responsible for the garden-like British war graves that can be found to this day dotted along the former Western Front and all the other locations around the world where Commonwealth troops lie buried. His most significant contribution to the project was his selection of the biblical phrase «Their Name Liveth For Evermore» found on the Stones of Remembrance in larger war graves and his suggestion of the phrase «Known unto God» for the gravestones of unidentified servicemen. He also wrote a two-volume history of the Irish Guards, his son’s regiment, that was published in 1923 and is considered to be one of the finest examples of regimental history.^[37] Kipling’s moving short story, «The Gardener», depicts visits to the war cemeteries. With the increasing popularity of the automobile, Kipling became a motoring correspondent for the British press, and wrote enthusiastically of his trips around England and abroad, even though he was usually driven by a chauffeur.

In 1922, Kipling, who had made reference to the work of engineers in some of his poems and writings, was asked by a University of Toronto civil engineering professor for his assistance in developing a dignified obligation and ceremony for graduating engineering students. Kipling was very enthusiastic in his response and shortly produced both, formally entitled «The Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer«. Today, engineering graduates all across Canada are presented with an iron ring at the ceremony as a reminder of their obligation to society.^[38] The same year Kipling became Lord Rector of St Andrews University in Scotland, a position which ended in 1925.

Death and legacy[]

Kipling kept writing until the early 1930s, but at a slower pace and with much less success than before. He died of a hemorrhage from a perforated duodenal ulcer on 18 January 1936, two days before George V, at the age of 70. (His death had in fact previously been incorrectly announced in a magazine, to which he wrote, «I’ve just read that I am dead. Don’t forget to delete me from your list of subscribers.»)

Rudyard Kipling was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium and his ashes were buried in Poets’ Corner, part of the South Transept of Westminster Abbey, where many distinguished literary people are buried or commemorated.

Following his death, Kipling’s work continued to fall into critical eclipse.Template:Fact Fashions in poetry moved away from his exact metres and rhymes. Also, as the European colonial empires collapsed in the mid-20th century, Kipling’s works fell far out of step with the times. Many who condemn him feel that Kipling’s writing was inseparable from his social and political views, they point to his portrayals of Indian characters, which often supported the colonialist view that the Indians and other colonised peoples were incapable of surviving without the help of Europeans, claiming that these portrayals are racist. However, one can also find a remarkably cosmopolitan spirit in much of his writing as well and a surprising respect for non-Europeans occasionally surfaces. An example supporting this argument can be seen by denying any irony in the mention of «lesser breeds without the Law» in «Recessional» and the reference to colonised people in general, as «half-devil and half-child» in the poem «The White Man’s Burden«. However, George Orwell in his essay on Rudyard Kipling states that the lesser breeds referred to in «Recessional» are ‘almost certainly’ the Germans, and Orwell goes on to claim that the poem is a denunciation of power politics, both British and German.^[39]

File:Kipling funeral1936.jpg

Kipling’s links with the Scouting movements were strong. Baden-Powell, the founder of Scouting, used many themes from The Jungle Book stories and Kim in setting up his junior movement, the Wolf Cubs. These connections still exist today. Not only is the movement named after Mowgli’s adopted wolf family, the adult helpers of Wolf Cub Packs adopt names taken from The Jungle Book, especially the adult leader who is called Akela after the leader of the Seeonee wolf pack.^[40]

Those who defend Kipling from accusations of racism point out that much of the apparent racism in his writing is spoken by fictional characters, not by him, and thus accurately depicts the characters. They see irony or alternative meanings in poems written in the author’s own voice, including «The White Man’s Burden» and «Recessional».Template:Fact

File:Kipling poetscorner.jpg

Despite changes in racial attitudes and literary standards for poetry, Kipling’s poetry continues to be popular with those who see it as «vigorous and adept» rather than «jingling». Even T. S. Eliot, a very different poet, edited A Choice of Kipling’s Verse (1943), although in doing so he commented that «[Kipling] could write poetry on occasions—even if only by accident!» Kipling’s stories for adults also remain in print and have garnered high praise from writers as different as Poul Anderson, Jorge Luis Borges, and George Orwell. Nonetheless, Kipling is most highly regarded for his children’s books. His Jungle Books have been made into several movies; the first was made by producer Alexander Korda, and others by the Walt Disney Company. A number of his poems were set to music by Percy Grainger.

After the death of Kipling’s wife in 1939, his house, «Bateman’s» in Burwash, East Sussex was bequeathed to the National Trust and is now a public museum dedicated to the author. Elsie, the only one of his three children to live past the age of eighteen, died childless in 1976, and bequeathed his copyrights to the National Trust. There is a thriving Kipling Society in the United Kingdom.

In modern-day India, from where he drew much of material, his reputation remains controversial, especially amongst modern Hindu nationalists and some post-colonial critics. However, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, 1st Prime Minister of India, always described Kipling’s novel, Kim as his favourite book and, in November 2007, it was announced that his birthplace in the campus of the JJ School of Art in Mumbai will be turned into a museum celebrating the author and his works. Other Contemporary Indian intellectuals such as Ashis Nandy have taken a more nuanced view of his work.^[41]

Swastika in old editions[]

File:Kipling swastika.png

File:Kipling cover art.jpg

Many older editions of Rudyard Kipling’s books have a swastika printed on their covers associated with a picture of an elephant carrying a lotus flower. Since the 1930s this has raised the possibility of Kipling being mistaken for a Nazi-sympathiser, though the Nazi party did not adopt the swastika until 1920. Kipling’s use of the swastika, however, was based on the sign’s Indian meaning of good luck and well-being. He used the swastika symbol in both right- and left-facing orientations, and it was in general use at the time.Template:Fact Even before the Nazis came to power, Kipling ordered the engraver to remove it from the printing block so that he should not be thought of as supporting them. Less than one year before his death Kipling gave a speech (titled «An Undefended Island») to The Royal Society of St George on 6 May 1935 warning of the danger Nazi Germany posed to Britain.^[42]

Works of Rudyard Kipling[]

See List of the works of Rudyard Kipling for a complete list.

See also Rudyard Kipling: Collected Works for lists of the collected volumes by type.

• The Story of the Gadsbys (1888)
• Plain Tales from the Hills (1888)
• The Phantom Rickshaw and other Eerie Tales (1888)
• The Light That Failed (1890)
• Mandalay (1890) (poetry)
• Gunga Din (1890) (poetry)
• The Jungle Book (1894) (short stories)
• The Second Jungle Book (1895) (short stories)
• «The Third Jungle Book» (1896) (short stories)
• If— (1895) (poetry)
• Captains Courageous (1897)
• The Day’s Work (1898)
• Stalky & Co. (1899)
• Kim (1901)
• Just So Stories (1902)
• Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906)
• Life’s Handicap (1915) (short stories)

References[]

External links[]

Works

• Template:Gutenberg author, HTML online, text download.
• Works by Rudyard Kipling, HTML online.
• Works by Rudyard Kipling at Archive.org, scanned books viewable online or PDF download.
• Works by Rudyard Kipling at Google Books
• KIM free mp3 recording from LibriVox.org.

Resources

• Kipling reads 7 lines from his poem France (audio).
• Something of Myself, Kipling’s autobiography
• The Kipling Society website
• Kipling Readers’ Guide from the Kipling Society; annotated notes on stories and poems.
• Kipling Journal Published by The Kipling Society. Searchable Text Archive and Indexes from issue no.1, March 1927 (complete except for the latest eight issues).
• A Master Of Our Art: Rudyard Kipling and Modern Science Fiction
• Template:Gutenberg, by John Palmer, 1915 biography from Project Gutenberg
• Mowglis at mowglis.org
• The Rudyard Kipling Collection maintained by Marlboro College.

Rudyard Kipling
Species: Human Place of Origin: Bombay Gender: Male Death: Died of a hemorrhage from a perforated duodenal ulcer on 18 January 1936
Books Appears in:

Joseph Rudyard Kipling (30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936) was an English author and poet. Born in Bombay, British India (now Mumbai), he is best known for his works The Jungle Book (1894) and Rikki-Tikki-Tavi (1902), his novel, Kim (1901); his poems, including Mandalay (1890), Gunga Din (1890), If— (1910); and his many short stories, including The M

an Who Would Be King (1888). He is regarded as a major «innovator in the art of the short story»;^[1] his children’s books are enduring classics of children’s literature; and his best works speak to a versatile and luminous narrative gift.^[2][3]

Kipling was one of the most popular writers in English, in both prose and verse, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.^[1] The author Henry James said of him: «Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius (as distinct from fine intelligence) that I have ever known.»^[1] In 1907, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the first English language writer to receive the prize, and to date he remains its youngest recipient.^[4] Among other honours, he was sounded out for the British Poet Laureateship and on several occasions for a knighthood, all of which he declined.^[5]

Later in life Kipling came to be seen (in George Orwell‘s words) as a «prophet of British imperialism.»^[6] Many saw prejudice and militarism in his works,^[7][8] and the resulting controversy about him continued for much of the 20th century.^[9][10] According to critic Douglas Kerr: «He is still an author who can inspire passionate disagreement and his place in literary and cultural history is far from settled. But as the age of the European empires recedes, he is recognized as an incomparable, if controversial, interpreter of how empire was experienced. That, and an increasing recognition of his extraordinary narrative gifts, make him a force to be reckoned with.»^[11]

Childhood and early life[]

File:Malabarpoint governmenthouse bombay.jpg

Rudyard Kipling was born on 30 December 1865 in Bombay, British India, to Alice Kipling (née MacDonald) and (John) Lockwood Kipling.^[12] Alice Kipling (one of four remarkable Victorian sisters)^[13] was a vivacious woman^[14] about whom a future Viceroy of India would say, «Dullness and Mrs. Kipling cannot exist in the same room.»^[1] Lockwood Kipling, a sculptor and pottery designer, was the principal and professor of architectural sculpture at the newly founded Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy School of Art and Industry in Bombay.^[14]

The couple, who had moved to India earlier that year, met in courtship two years before at Rudyard Lake in rural Staffordshire, England, and had been so taken by its beauty that they now named their firstborn after it. Kipling’s maternal aunt, Georgiana, was married to the painter Edward Burne-Jones and his aunt Agnes was married to the painter Edward Poynter. His most famous relative was his first cousin, Stanley Baldwin, who was Conservative Prime Minister three times in the 1920s and 1930s.^[15] Kipling’s birthplace home still stands on the campus of the Sir J.J. Institute of Applied Art in Mumbai and for many years was used as the Dean’s residence. Mumbai historian Foy Nissen points out however that although the cottage bears a plaque stating that this is the site where Kipling was born, the original cottage was pulled down decades ago and a new one built in its place. The wooden bungalow has been empty and locked up for years.^[16]

File:Kiplingsindia.jpg

Of Bombay, Kipling was to write:^[17]

Mother of Cities to me,
For I was born in her gate,
Between the palms and the sea,
Where the world-end steamers wait.

According to Bernice M. Murphy: «Kipling’s parents considered themselves ‘Anglo-Indians’ (a term used in the 19th century for British citizens living in India) and so too would their son, though he in fact spent the bulk of his life elsewhere. Complex issues of identity and national allegiance would become prominent features in his fiction.»^[18] Kipling himself was to write about these conflicts: «In the afternoon heats before we took our sleep, she (the Portuguese ayah, or nanny) or Meeta (the Hindu bearer, or male attendant) would tell us stories and Indian nursery songs all unforgotten, and we were sent into the dining-room after we had been dressed, with the caution ‘Speak English now to Papa and Mamma.’ So one spoke ‘English,’ haltingly translated out of the vernacular idiom that one thought and dreamed in».^[19]

File:Tissot HMS Calcutta.jpg

Kipling’s days of «strong light and darkness» in Bombay were to end when he was six years old.^[19] As was the custom in British India, he and his three-year-old sister, Alice («Trix»), were taken to England—in their case to Southsea (Portsmouth), to be cared for by a couple that took in children of British nationals living in India. The two children would live with the couple, Captain and Mrs. Holloway, at their house, Lorne Lodge, for the next six years. In his autobiography, published some 65 years later, Kipling would recall this time with horror, and wonder ironically if the combination of cruelty and neglect he experienced there at the hands of Mrs. Holloway might not have hastened the onset of his literary life: «If you cross-examine a child of seven or eight on his day’s doings (specially when he wants to go to sleep) he will contradict himself very satisfactorily. If each contradiction be set down as a lie and retailed at breakfast, life is not easy. I have known a certain amount of bullying, but this was calculated torture—religious as well as scientific. Yet it made me give attention to the lies I soon found it necessary to tell: and this, I presume, is the foundation of literary effort».^[19]

Kipling’s sister Trix fared better at Lorne Lodge, Mrs. Holloway apparently hoping that Trix would eventually marry the Holloway son.^[20] The two children, however, did have relatives in England they could visit. They spent a month each Christmas with their maternal aunt Georgiana («Georgy»), and her husband, the artist Edward Burne-Jones, at their house, «The Grange» in Fulham, London, which Kipling was to call «a paradise which I verily believe saved me.»^[19] In the spring of 1877, Alice Kipling returned from India and removed the children from Lorne Lodge. Kipling remembers, «Often and often afterwards, the beloved Aunt would ask me why I had never told any one how I was being treated. Children tell little more than animals, for what comes to them they accept as eternally established. Also, badly-treated children have a clear notion of what they are likely to get if they betray the secrets of a prison-house before they are clear of it».^[19]

File:Westwardho ladiesgolfclub1873.jpg

In January 1878 Kipling was admitted to the United Services College, at Westward Ho!, Devon, a school founded a few years earlier to prepare boys for the armed forces. The school proved rough going for him at first, but later led to firm friendships, and provided the setting for his schoolboy stories Stalky & Co. published many years later.^[20] During his time there, Kipling also met and fell in love with Florence Garrard, a fellow boarder with Trix at Southsea (to which Trix had returned). Florence was to become the model for Maisie in Kipling’s first novel, The Light that Failed (1891).^[20]

File:Kiplingsengland3.jpg

Towards the end of his stay at the school, it was decided that he lacked the academic ability to get into Oxford University on a scholarship^[20] and his parents lacked the wherewithal to finance him;^[14] consequently, Lockwood Kipling obtained a job for his son in Lahore (now in Pakistan), where Lockwood was now Principal of the Mayo College of Art and Curator of the Lahore Museum. Kipling was to be assistant editor of a small local newspaper, the Civil & Military Gazette.

He sailed for India on 20 September 1882 and arrived in Bombay on 18 October 1882. He described this moment years later: «So, at sixteen years and nine months, but looking four or five years older, and adorned with real whiskers which the scandalised Mother abolished within one hour of beholding, I found myself at Bombay where I was born, moving among sights and smells that made me deliver in the vernacular sentences whose meaning I knew not. Other Indian-born boys have told me how the same thing happened to them.»^[19] This arrival changed Kipling, as he explains, «There were yet three or four days’ rail to Lahore, where my people lived. After these, my English years fell away, nor ever, I think, came back in full strength».^[19]

Early travels[]

The Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore, which Kipling was to call «mistress and most true love,»^[19] appeared six days a week throughout the year except for a one-day break each for Christmas and Easter. Kipling was worked hard by the editor, Stephen Wheeler, but his need to write was unstoppable. In 1886, he published his first collection of verse, Departmental Ditties. That year also brought a change of editors at the newspaper. Kay Robinson, the new editor, allowed more creative freedom and Kipling was asked to contribute short stories to the newspaper.^[2]

File:Lahore railway station1880s.JPG

During the summer of 1883, Kipling visited Simla (now Shimla), well-known hill station and summer capital of British India. By then it was established practice for the Viceroy of India and the government to move to Simla for six months and the town became a «centre of power as well as pleasure.»^[2] Kipling’s family became yearly visitors to Simla and Lockwood Kipling was asked to serve in the Christ Church there. He returned to Simla for his annual leave each year from 1885 to 1888, and the town figured prominently in many of the stories Kipling was writing for the Gazette.^[2] Kipling describes this time: «My month’s leave at Simla, or whatever Hill Station my people went to, was pure joy—every golden hour counted. It began in heat and discomfort, by rail and road. It ended in the cool evening, with a wood fire in one’s bedroom, and next morn—thirty more of them ahead!—the early cup of tea, the Mother who brought it in, and the long talks of us all together again. One had leisure to work, too, at whatever play-work was in one’s head, and that was usually full.»^[19] Back in Lahore, some thirty-nine stories appeared in the Gazette between November 1886 and June 1887. Most of these stories were included in Plain Tales from the Hills, Kipling’s first prose collection, which was published in Calcutta in January 1888, a month after his 22nd birthday. Kipling’s time in Lahore, however, had come to an end. In November 1887, he had been transferred to the Gazette’s much larger sister newspaper, The Pioneer, in Allahabad in the United Provinces.

File:Bundi palace1990.jpg

His writing continued at a frenetic pace and during the following year, he published six collections of short stories: Soldiers Three, The Story of the Gadsbys, In Black and White, Under the Deodars, The Phantom Rickshaw, and Wee Willie Winkie, containing a total of 41 stories, some quite long. In addition, as The Pioneer’s special correspondent in western region of Rajputana, he wrote many sketches that were later collected in Letters of Marque and published in From Sea to Sea and Other Sketches, Letters of Travel.^[2]

In early 1889, The Pioneer relieved Kipling of his charge over a dispute. For his part, Kipling had been increasingly thinking about the future. He sold the rights to his six volumes of stories for £200 and a small royalty, and the Plain Tales for £50; in addition, from The Pioneer, he received six-months’ salary in lieu of notice.^[19] He decided to use this money to make his way to London, the centre of the literary universe in the British Empire. On 9 March 1889, Kipling left India, travelling first to San Francisco via Rangoon, Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan. He then travelled through the United States writing articles for The Pioneer that too were collected in From Sea to Sea and Other Sketches, Letters of Travel. Starting his American travels in San Francisco, Kipling journeyed north to Portland, Oregon; on to Seattle, Washington; up into Canada, to Victoria and Vancouver, British Columbia; back into the U.S. to Yellowstone National Park; down to Salt Lake City; then east to Omaha, Nebraska and on to Chicago, Illinois; then to Beaver, Pennsylvania on the Ohio River to visit the Hill family; from there he went to Chautauqua with Professor Hill, and later to Niagara, Toronto, Washington, D.C., New York and Boston.^[21] In the course of this journey he met Mark Twain in Elmira, New York, and felt much awed in his presence. Kipling then crossed the Atlantic, and reached Liverpool in October 1889. Soon thereafter, he made his début in the London literary world to great acclaim.^[1]

Career as a writer[]

London[]

In London, Kipling had several stories accepted by various magazine editors. He also found a place to live for the next two years:

Meantime, I had found me quarters in Villiers Street, Strand, which forty-six years ago was primitive and passionate in its habits and population. My rooms were small, not over-clean or well-kept, but from my desk I could look out of my window through the fanlight of Gatti’s Music-Hall entrance, across the street, almost on to its stage. The Charing Cross trains rumbled through my dreams on one side, the boom of the Strand on the other, while, before my windows, Father Thames under the Shot Tower walked up and down with his traffic.

File:Kiplinghouse villiers steet.jpg

In the next two years, and in short order, he published a novel, The Light That Failed; had a nervous breakdown; and met an American writer and publishing agent, Wolcott Balestier, with whom he collaborated on a novel, The Naulahka (a title he uncharacteristically misspelt; see below).^[14] In 1891, on the advice of his doctors, Kipling embarked on another sea voyage visiting South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and once again India. However, he cut short his plans for spending Christmas with his family in India when he heard of Wolcott Balestier’s sudden death from typhoid fever, and immediately decided to return to London. Before his return, he had used the telegram to propose to (and be accepted by) Wolcott’s sister Caroline (Carrie) Balestier, whom he had met a year earlier, and with whom he had apparently been having an intermittent romance.^[14] Meanwhile, late in 1891, his collection of short stories of the British in India, Life’s Handicap, was also published in London.

On 18 January 1892, Carrie Balestier (aged 29) and Rudyard Kipling (aged 26) were married in London, in the «thick of an influenza epidemic, when the undertakers had run out of black horses and the dead had to be content with brown ones.»^[19] The wedding was held at All Souls Church, Langham Place. Henry James gave the bride away.

United States[]

The couple settled upon a honeymoon that would take them first to the United States (including a stop at the Balestier family estate near Brattleboro, Vermont) and then on to Japan.^[14] However, when the couple arrived in Yokohama, Japan, they discovered that their bank, The New Oriental Banking Corporation, had failed. Taking their loss in their stride, they returned to the U.S., back to Vermont—Carrie by this time was pregnant with their first child—and rented a small cottage on a farm near Brattleboro for ten dollars a month. According to Kipling, «We furnished it with a simplicity that fore-ran the hire-purchase system. We bought, second or third hand, a huge, hot-air stove which we installed in the cellar. We cut generous holes in our thin floors for its eight inch tin pipes (why we were not burned in our beds each week of the winter I never can understand) and we were extraordinarily and self-centredly content.»^[19]

File:Naulakha fall.jpg

In this cottage, Bliss Cottage, their first child, Josephine, was born «in three foot of snow on the night of 29 December 1892. Her Mother’s birthday being the 31st and mine the 30th of the same month, we congratulated her on her sense of the fitness of things …»^[19]

File:Jungle book 1894 138.jpg

It was also in this cottage that the first dawnings of the Jungle Books came to Kipling: «workroom in the Bliss Cottage was seven feet by eight, and from December to April the snow lay level with its window-sill. It chanced that I had written a tale about Indian Forestry work which included a boy who had been brought up by wolves. In the stillness, and suspense, of the winter of ’92 some memory of the Masonic Lions of my childhood’s magazine, and a phrase in Haggard’s Nada the Lily, combined with the echo of this tale. After blocking out the main idea in my head, the pen took charge, and I watched it begin to write stories about Mowgli and animals, which later grew into the Jungle Books«.^[19] With Josephine’s arrival, Bliss Cottage was felt to be congested, so eventually the couple bought land—ten acres on a rocky hillside overlooking the Connecticut River—from Carrie’s brother Beatty Balestier, and built their own house.

Kipling named the house «Naulakha» in honour of Wolcott and of their collaboration, and this time the name was spelled correctly.^[14] From his early years in Lahore (1882-87), Kipling had become enthused by the Mughal architecture^[22] especially the Naulakha pavilion situated in Lahore Fort, which eventually became an inspiration for the title of his novel as well as the house.^[23] The house still stands on Kipling Road, three miles (5 km) north of Brattleboro: a big, secluded, dark-green house, with shingled roof and sides, which Kipling called his «ship», and which brought him «sunshine and a mind at ease.»^[14] His seclusion in Vermont, combined with his healthy «sane clean life», made Kipling both inventive and prolific.

File:Kiplingseastcoast2.JPG

In the short span of four years, he produced, in addition to the Jungle Books, a collection of short stories (The Day’s Work), a novel (Captains Courageous), and a profusion of poetry, including the volume The Seven Seas. The collection of Barrack-Room Ballads, first published individually for the most part in 1890, which contains his poems «Mandalay» and «Gunga Din» was issued in March 1892. He especially enjoyed writing the Jungle Books—both masterpieces of imaginative writing—and enjoyed too corresponding with the many children who wrote to him about them.^[14]

The writing life in Naulakha was occasionally interrupted by visitors, including his father, who visited soon after his retirement in 1893,^[14] and British author Arthur Conan Doyle, who brought his golf-clubs, stayed for two days, and gave Kipling an extended golf lesson.^[24][25] Kipling seemed to take to golf, occasionally practising with the local Congregational minister, and even playing with red painted balls when the ground was covered in snow.^[25][12] However, the latter game was «not altogether a success because there were no limits to a drive; the ball might skid two miles (3 km) down the long slope to Connecticut river.»^[12]

From all accounts, Kipling loved the outdoors,^[14] not least of whose marvels in Vermont was the turning of the leaves each fall. He described this moment in a letter: «A little maple began it, flaming blood-red of a sudden where he stood against the dark green of a pine-belt. Next morning there was an answering signal from the swamp where the sumacs grow. Three days later, the hill-sides as fast as the eye could range were afire, and the roads paved, with crimson and gold. Then a wet wind blew, and ruined all the uniforms of that gorgeous army; and the oaks, who had held themselves in reserve, buckled on their dull and bronzed cuirasses and stood it out stiffly to the last blown leaf, till nothing remained but pencil-shadings of bare boughs, and one could see into the most private heart of the woods.»^[26]

File:Kiplingcropped.jpg

In February 1896, the couple’s second daughter, Elsie, was born. By this time, according to several biographers, their marital relationship was no longer light-hearted and spontaneous.^[27] Although they would always remain loyal to each other, they seemed now to have fallen into set roles.^[14] In a letter to a friend who had become engaged around this time, the 29 year old Kipling offered this sombre counsel: marriage principally taught «the tougher virtues—such as humility, restraint, order, and forethought.»^[28]

The Kiplings might have lived out their lives in Vermont, were it not for two incidents—one of global politics, the other of family discord—that hastily ended their time there. By the early 1890s, Great Britain and Venezuela had long been locking horns over a border dispute involving British Guiana. Several times, the U.S. had offered to arbitrate, but in 1895 the new American Secretary of State Richard Olney upped the ante by arguing for the American «right» to arbitrate on grounds of sovereignty on the continent (see the Olney interpretation as an extension of the Monroe Doctrine).^[14] This raised hackles in Britain and before long the incident had snowballed into a major Anglo-American crisis, with talk of war on both sides.

Although the crisis led to greater U.S.-British cooperation, at the time Kipling was bewildered by what he felt was persistent anti-British sentiment in the U.S., especially in the press.^[14] He wrote in a letter that it felt like being «aimed at with a decanter across a friendly dinner table.»^[28] By January 1896, he had decided, according to his official biographer,^[12] to end his family’s «good wholesome life» in the U.S. and seek their fortunes elsewhere.

Devon[]

A family dispute became the final straw. For some time, the relations between Carrie and her brother Beatty Balestier had been strained on account of his drinking and insolvency. In May 1896, an inebriated Beatty ran into Kipling on the street and threatened him with physical harm.^[14] The incident led to Beatty’s eventual arrest, but in the subsequent hearing, and the resulting publicity, Kipling’s privacy was completely destroyed, and left him feeling both miserable and exhausted. In July 1896, a week before the hearing was to resume, the Kiplings hurriedly packed their belongings and left Naulakha, Vermont, and the U.S. for good.^[12]

File:Naulakha jsephne loggia.jpg

Back in England, in September 1896, the Kiplings found themselves in Torquay on the coast of Devon, in a hillside home overlooking the sea. Although Kipling did not much care for his new house, whose design, he claimed, left its occupants feeling dispirited and gloomy, he managed to remain productive and socially active.^[14] Kipling was now a famous man, and in the previous two or three years, had increasingly been making political pronouncements in his writings. He had also begun work on two poems, «Recessional» (1897) and «The White Man’s Burden» (1899) which were to create controversy when published. Regarded by some as anthems for enlightened and duty-bound empire-building (that captured the mood of the Victorian age), the poems equally were regarded by others as propaganda for brazenfaced imperialism and its attendant racial attitudes; still others saw irony in the poems and warnings of the perils of empire.^[14]

Take up the White Man’s burden—
Send forth the best ye breed—
Go, bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait, in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild—
Your new-caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.
— The White Man’s Burden^[29]

There was also foreboding in the poems, a sense that all could yet come to naught.^[30]

Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet.
Lest we forget — lest we forget!
— Recessional^[31]

A prolific writer—nothing about his work was easily labelled—during his time in Torquay, he also wrote Stalky & Co., a collection of school stories (born of his experience at the United Services College in Westward Ho!) whose juvenile protagonists displayed a know-it-all, cynical outlook on patriotism and authority. According to his family, Kipling enjoyed reading aloud stories from Stalky & Co. to them, and often went into spasms of laughter over his own jokes.^[14]

South Africa[]

File:Ralph, Landon, Gwynne and Kipling 1900-1901.jpg

In early 1898 Kipling and his family travelled to South Africa for their winter holiday, thus beginning an annual tradition which (excepting the following year) was to last until 1908. With his newly minted reputation as the poet of the Empire, Kipling was warmly received by some of the most powerful politicians of the Cape Colony, including Cecil Rhodes, Sir Alfred Milner, and Leander Starr Jameson. In turn, Kipling cultivated their friendship and came to greatly admire all three men and their politics. The period 1898–1910 was a crucial one in the history of South Africa and included the Second Boer War (1899–1902), the ensuing peace treaty, and the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910. Back in England, Kipling wrote poetry in support of the British cause in the Boer War and on his next visit to South Africa in early 1900, he helped start a newspaper, The Friend, for the British troops in Bloemfontein, the newly captured capital of the Orange Free State. Although his journalistic stint was to last only two weeks, it was the first time Kipling would work on a newspaper staff since he left The Pioneer in Allahabad more than ten years earlier.^[14] He also wrote articles published more widely expressing his views on the conflict.^[32]

Other writing[]

Kipling began collecting material for another of his children’s classics, Just So Stories for Little Children. That work was published in 1902, and another of his enduring works, Kim, first saw the light of day the previous year.

On a visit to the United States in 1899, Kipling and his eldest daughter Josephine developed pneumonia, from which she eventually died. During World War I, he wrote a booklet The Fringes of the Fleet^[33] containing essays and poems on various nautical subjects of the war. Some of the poems were set to music by the English composer Edward Elgar.

In 1934 he published a short story in Strand Magazine, «Proofs of Holy Writ», which postulated that William Shakespeare had helped to polish the prose of the King James Bible.^[34] In the non-fiction realm he also became involved in the debate over the British response to the rise in German naval power, publishing a series of articles in 1898 which were collected as A Fleet in Being.

Peak of his career[]

The first decade of the 20th century saw Kipling at the height of his popularity. In 1907 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The prize citation said: «in consideration of the power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas and remarkable talent for narration which characterize the creations of this world-famous author.» Nobel prizes had been established in 1901 and Kipling was the first English language recipient. At the award ceremony in Stockholm on 10 December 1907, the Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, C.D. af Wirsén, praised both Kipling and three centuries of English literature:^[35]

The Swedish Academy, in awarding the Nobel Prize in Literature this year to Rudyard Kipling, desires to pay a tribute of homage to the literature of England, so rich in manifold glories, and to the greatest genius in the realm of narrative that that country has produced in our times.

«Book-ending» this achievement was the publication of two connected poetry and story collections: 1906’s Puck of Pook’s Hill and 1910’s Rewards and Fairies. The latter contained the poem «If—«. In a 1995 BBC opinion poll, it was voted Britain’s favourite poem. This exhortation to self-control and stoicism is arguably Kipling’s most famous poem.

Kipling sympathised with the anti-Home Rule stance of Irish Unionists. He was friends with Edward Carson, the Dublin-born leader of Ulster Unionism, who raised the Ulster Volunteers to oppose «Rome Rule» in Ireland. Kipling wrote the poem «Ulster» in 1912 (?) reflecting this. The poem reflects on Ulster Day (28 September 1912) when half a million people signed the Ulster Covenant.

Many have wondered why he was never made Poet Laureate. Some claim that he was offered the post during the interregnum of 1892-96 and turned it down. It also appears — surprisingly — that Queen Victoria disapproved of himTemplate:Fact.
.

Effects of World War I[]

File:Plaque theirnamelivethforevermore.jpg

Kipling was so closely associated with the expansive, confident attitude of late 19th century European civilization that it was inevitable that his reputation would suffer in the years of and after World War I. Kipling also knew personal tragedy at the time as his only son, John Kipling, died in 1915 at the Battle of Loos, after which he wrote «If any question why we died/ Tell them, because our fathers lied» (Kipling’s son’s death inspired his poem, «My Boy Jack«, and the incident became the basis for the play My Boy Jack and its subsequent television adaptation, along with the documentary Rudyard Kipling: A Remembrance Tale.) It is speculated that these words may reveal Kipling’s feelings of guilt at his role in getting John a commission in the Irish Guards, despite his initially having been rejected by the army because of his poor eyesight, and his having exerted great influence to have his son accepted for officer training at the age of only 17.^[36]

File:Kipling timecover1101260927 400.jpg

Partly in response to this tragedy, Kipling joined Sir Fabian Ware‘s Imperial War Graves Commission (now the Commonwealth War Graves Commission), the group responsible for the garden-like British war graves that can be found to this day dotted along the former Western Front and all the other locations around the world where Commonwealth troops lie buried. His most significant contribution to the project was his selection of the biblical phrase «Their Name Liveth For Evermore» found on the Stones of Remembrance in larger war graves and his suggestion of the phrase «Known unto God» for the gravestones of unidentified servicemen. He also wrote a two-volume history of the Irish Guards, his son’s regiment, that was published in 1923 and is considered to be one of the finest examples of regimental history.^[37] Kipling’s moving short story, «The Gardener», depicts visits to the war cemeteries. With the increasing popularity of the automobile, Kipling became a motoring correspondent for the British press, and wrote enthusiastically of his trips around England and abroad, even though he was usually driven by a chauffeur.

In 1922, Kipling, who had made reference to the work of engineers in some of his poems and writings, was asked by a University of Toronto civil engineering professor for his assistance in developing a dignified obligation and ceremony for graduating engineering students. Kipling was very enthusiastic in his response and shortly produced both, formally entitled «The Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer«. Today, engineering graduates all across Canada are presented with an iron ring at the ceremony as a reminder of their obligation to society.^[38] The same year Kipling became Lord Rector of St Andrews University in Scotland, a position which ended in 1925.

Death and legacy[]

Kipling kept writing until the early 1930s, but at a slower pace and with much less success than before. He died of a hemorrhage from a perforated duodenal ulcer on 18 January 1936, two days before George V, at the age of 70. (His death had in fact previously been incorrectly announced in a magazine, to which he wrote, «I’ve just read that I am dead. Don’t forget to delete me from your list of subscribers.»)

Rudyard Kipling was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium and his ashes were buried in Poets’ Corner, part of the South Transept of Westminster Abbey, where many distinguished literary people are buried or commemorated.

Following his death, Kipling’s work continued to fall into critical eclipse.Template:Fact Fashions in poetry moved away from his exact metres and rhymes. Also, as the European colonial empires collapsed in the mid-20th century, Kipling’s works fell far out of step with the times. Many who condemn him feel that Kipling’s writing was inseparable from his social and political views, they point to his portrayals of Indian characters, which often supported the colonialist view that the Indians and other colonised peoples were incapable of surviving without the help of Europeans, claiming that these portrayals are racist. However, one can also find a remarkably cosmopolitan spirit in much of his writing as well and a surprising respect for non-Europeans occasionally surfaces. An example supporting this argument can be seen by denying any irony in the mention of «lesser breeds without the Law» in «Recessional» and the reference to colonised people in general, as «half-devil and half-child» in the poem «The White Man’s Burden«. However, George Orwell in his essay on Rudyard Kipling states that the lesser breeds referred to in «Recessional» are ‘almost certainly’ the Germans, and Orwell goes on to claim that the poem is a denunciation of power politics, both British and German.^[39]

File:Kipling funeral1936.jpg

Kipling’s links with the Scouting movements were strong. Baden-Powell, the founder of Scouting, used many themes from The Jungle Book stories and Kim in setting up his junior movement, the Wolf Cubs. These connections still exist today. Not only is the movement named after Mowgli’s adopted wolf family, the adult helpers of Wolf Cub Packs adopt names taken from The Jungle Book, especially the adult leader who is called Akela after the leader of the Seeonee wolf pack.^[40]

Those who defend Kipling from accusations of racism point out that much of the apparent racism in his writing is spoken by fictional characters, not by him, and thus accurately depicts the characters. They see irony or alternative meanings in poems written in the author’s own voice, including «The White Man’s Burden» and «Recessional».Template:Fact

File:Kipling poetscorner.jpg

Despite changes in racial attitudes and literary standards for poetry, Kipling’s poetry continues to be popular with those who see it as «vigorous and adept» rather than «jingling». Even T. S. Eliot, a very different poet, edited A Choice of Kipling’s Verse (1943), although in doing so he commented that «[Kipling] could write poetry on occasions—even if only by accident!» Kipling’s stories for adults also remain in print and have garnered high praise from writers as different as Poul Anderson, Jorge Luis Borges, and George Orwell. Nonetheless, Kipling is most highly regarded for his children’s books. His Jungle Books have been made into several movies; the first was made by producer Alexander Korda, and others by the Walt Disney Company. A number of his poems were set to music by Percy Grainger.

After the death of Kipling’s wife in 1939, his house, «Bateman’s» in Burwash, East Sussex was bequeathed to the National Trust and is now a public museum dedicated to the author. Elsie, the only one of his three children to live past the age of eighteen, died childless in 1976, and bequeathed his copyrights to the National Trust. There is a thriving Kipling Society in the United Kingdom.

In modern-day India, from where he drew much of material, his reputation remains controversial, especially amongst modern Hindu nationalists and some post-colonial critics. However, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, 1st Prime Minister of India, always described Kipling’s novel, Kim as his favourite book and, in November 2007, it was announced that his birthplace in the campus of the JJ School of Art in Mumbai will be turned into a museum celebrating the author and his works. Other Contemporary Indian intellectuals such as Ashis Nandy have taken a more nuanced view of his work.^[41]

Swastika in old editions[]

File:Kipling swastika.png

File:Kipling cover art.jpg

Many older editions of Rudyard Kipling’s books have a swastika printed on their covers associated with a picture of an elephant carrying a lotus flower. Since the 1930s this has raised the possibility of Kipling being mistaken for a Nazi-sympathiser, though the Nazi party did not adopt the swastika until 1920. Kipling’s use of the swastika, however, was based on the sign’s Indian meaning of good luck and well-being. He used the swastika symbol in both right- and left-facing orientations, and it was in general use at the time.Template:Fact Even before the Nazis came to power, Kipling ordered the engraver to remove it from the printing block so that he should not be thought of as supporting them. Less than one year before his death Kipling gave a speech (titled «An Undefended Island») to The Royal Society of St George on 6 May 1935 warning of the danger Nazi Germany posed to Britain.^[42]

Works of Rudyard Kipling[]

See List of the works of Rudyard Kipling for a complete list.

See also Rudyard Kipling: Collected Works for lists of the collected volumes by type.

• The Story of the Gadsbys (1888)
• Plain Tales from the Hills (1888)
• The Phantom Rickshaw and other Eerie Tales (1888)
• The Light That Failed (1890)
• Mandalay (1890) (poetry)
• Gunga Din (1890) (poetry)
• The Jungle Book (1894) (short stories)
• The Second Jungle Book (1895) (short stories)
• «The Third Jungle Book» (1896) (short stories)
• If— (1895) (poetry)
• Captains Courageous (1897)
• The Day’s Work (1898)
• Stalky & Co. (1899)
• Kim (1901)
• Just So Stories (1902)
• Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906)
• Life’s Handicap (1915) (short stories)

References[]

External links[]

Works

• Template:Gutenberg author, HTML online, text download.
• Works by Rudyard Kipling, HTML online.
• Works by Rudyard Kipling at Archive.org, scanned books viewable online or PDF download.
• Works by Rudyard Kipling at Google Books
• KIM free mp3 recording from LibriVox.org.

Resources

• Kipling reads 7 lines from his poem France (audio).
• Something of Myself, Kipling’s autobiography
• The Kipling Society website
• Kipling Readers’ Guide from the Kipling Society; annotated notes on stories and poems.
• Kipling Journal Published by The Kipling Society. Searchable Text Archive and Indexes from issue no.1, March 1927 (complete except for the latest eight issues).
• A Master Of Our Art: Rudyard Kipling and Modern Science Fiction
• Template:Gutenberg, by John Palmer, 1915 biography from Project Gutenberg
• Mowglis at mowglis.org
• The Rudyard Kipling Collection maintained by Marlboro College.

Биография

Родился 30 декабря 1865 в Бомбее (Индия). Отец, крупный специалист по истории индийского искусства, был директором музея; мать происходила из известной лондонской семьи; оба деда были методистскими священниками. В шесть лет мальчика отослали в Англию на попечение кальвинистской семьи. В 1882 шестнадцатилетний Редьярд вернулся в Индию и устроился помощником редактора в лахорской газете. В 1886 он выпустил книгу стихов «Департаментские песни». За ней последовали Простые рассказы с гор (Plain Tales from the Hills, 1888) – лаконичные, зачастую грубоватые рассказы о жизни британской Индии. В 1887 Киплинг перешел в газету «Пайонир» в Аллахабаде. Лучшие его рассказы вышли в Индии, в дешевых изданиях, и позже были собраны в книгах «Три солдата» и «Ви-Вилли-Винки», содержащих картины жизни британской армии в Индии.

В 1889 Киплинг путешествовал по всему миру, писал дорожные заметки. В октябре он приехал в Лондон и почти сразу сделался знаменитостью. Следующий год стал годом славы Киплинга. Начав с «Баллады о Востоке и Западе», он шел к новой манере английского стихосложения, создав «Песни казармы».

С выходом первого романа Киплинга «Свет погас» (1890) связаны некоторые библиографические трудности, поскольку он появился в двух вариантах – один со счастливым концом, другой с трагическим. Из-за переутомления здоровье писателя пошатнулось, и большую часть 1891 он провел в путешествиях по Америке и британским доминионам. Вернувшись в январе 1892, женился на сестре американского издателя У.Балестьера, в соавторстве с которым написал не имевший успеха роман «Науланка» (1892).

Во время медового месяца, который чета Киплингов проводила в Японии, банковский крах оставил их без гроша, и они обосновались в доме Балестьеров в Братлборо (шт. Вермонт). За четыре года, прожитых в Америке, Киплинг написал лучшие свои произведения. Это рассказы, вошедшие в сборники «Масса выдумок» (1893) и «Труды дня» (1898), стихи о кораблях, о море и моряках-первопроходцах, собранные в книге «Семь морей» (1896), и две «Книги джунглей» (1894–1895). В 1896 он написал книгу «Отважные мореплаватели». Жизнь Киплингов в Новой Англии закончилась нелепой ссорой с шурином, и в 1896 они вернулись в Англию. По совету врачей писатель проводил зимы в Южной Африке, где сблизился с идеологами колониализма А.Милнером, Л.С.Джеймсоном и С.Родсом. Был военным корреспондентом во время англо-бурской войны 1899–1902.

На вершине славы и богатства Киплинг избегал публичности, игнорировал враждебную критику, отказался от звания поэта-лауреата и многих почестей. В 1902 он поселился в глухой деревне в графстве Суссекс. В 1901 Киплинг выпустил роман «Ким», свое прощальное слово к Индии, в 1902 – восхитительную детскую книгу «Сказки просто так».

К середине жизни писателя его литературная манера изменилась, теперь он писал неторопливо, осмотрительно, тщательно выверяя написанное. Для двух книг исторических рассказов «Пак с холма Пука» (1906) и «Награды и Феи» (1910) характерен более высокий строй чувств, некоторые из стихов достигают уровня чистой поэзии. Киплинг продолжал писать рассказы, собранные в книгах «Пути и открытия» (1904), «Действие и противодействие» (1909), «Самые разные существа» (1917), «Дебет и кредит» (1926), «Ограничение и обновление» (1932). В 1920-е годы популярность Киплинга уменьшилась. Гибель сына в Первую мировую войну и неотвязные болезни писатель перенес стоически. Умер Киплинг в Лондоне 18 января 1936.