Rudyard Kipling

Introduction

Joseph Rudyard Kipling was a writer, poet, and journalist. His origins back in British India impacted much of his work. He is considered as a forefather of the short story form. His children's books have become timeless classics.

Kipling was among the most popular writers in the United Kingdom in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. He was the first English-language writer to earn the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907. At 41, he was the prize's youngest recipient to date. He was also considered for the position of British Poet Laureate and knighted multiple times but refused both. Following his death in 1936, his ashes were placed in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey's South Transept.

Kipling's reputation has evolved in tandem with the political and social context of the time. For most of the twentieth century, opposing perspectives about him persisted.

Childhood

Rudyard Kipling was born on December 30, 1865, in Bombay, British India, to Alice Kipling and John Lockwood Kipling. John Lockwood Kipling, a sculptor and pottery designer, was the Principal and Professor of Architectural Sculpture at Bombay's newly established Sir Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy School of Art.

John Lockwood and Alice met at Rudyard, Staffordshire, England, in 1863 and courted in Rudyard Lake. After John Lockwood became Professor at the School of Art in 1865, they married and travelled to India. They were so impressed by the beauty of the Rudyard Lake region that they named their first child Joseph Rudyard after it. Georgiana married the painter Edward Burne-Jones, and her sister Agnes married the sculptor Edward Poynter. Kipling's most renowned relative, his first cousin Stanley Baldwin, who was Conservative Prime Minister of the United Kingdom three times in the 1920s and 1930s, was the mother of a third sister, Louisa.

Kipling's natal house on the J. J. School of Art campus in Bombay served as the dean's apartment for many years. Although a cottage holds a plaque commemorating his birthplace, the structure may have been demolished and reconstructed decades ago. Some historians and conservationists believe the bungalow is near Kipling's birthplace because it was erected in 1882 roughly 15 years after his birth. When Kipling visited J. J. School in the 1930s, he told the dean as much.

Kipling and his three-year-old sister Alice were sent to the United Kingdom to live with a couple who boarded children of British subjects living overseas, as was customary in British India. For the following six years (from October 1871 to April 1877), the children resided at Lorne Lodge, 4 Campbell Road, Southsea, with Captain Pryse Agar Holloway, a former merchant naval officer, and Sarah Holloway. Kipling dubbed the location "the House of Desolation." Kipling recalled the stay with dread in his autobiography, released 65 years later, and pondered if the mix of brutality and neglect he encountered at the hands of Mrs Holloway could not have expedited the commencement of his creative life.

Mrs. Holloway presumably believed that Alice would ultimately marry the Holloways' son, and Alice fared better at Lorne Lodge. The two Kipling children, on the other hand, had no family in England other than a maternal aunt Georgiana ("Georgy") and her husband, Edward Burne-Jones, who lived at The Grange in Fulham, London, for a month each Christmas.

Their mother, Alice, arrived from India in the spring of 1877 and withdrew the children from Lorne Lodge. She moved the children to Goldings Farm near Loughton in the spring of 1877, where they enjoyed a pleasant summer and fall on the farm and neighbouring Forest, some of the time with Stanley Baldwin. While at Southsea, Kipling met and fell in love with Florence Garrard, who was staying with his Alice. Florence inspired Maisie in Rudyard Kipling's debut novel, The Light That Failed (1891).

Near the end of his education, it was determined that Kipling lacked the intellectual capacity to gain admission to Oxford University on a scholarship. Kipling's parents couldn't afford to pay for him, so his father got him a position in Lahore, where he was Principal of the Mayo College of Art and Curator of the Lahore Museum. Kipling was hired as the Civil and Military Gazette's deputy editor. He set ship for India on September 20, 1882, and landed in Bombay on October 18, 1882.

Adult life

Kipling worked in British India for local publications such as the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore and The Pioneer in Allahabad from 1883 to 1889. The former, Kipling's "Mistress and Most True Love," published six days a week throughout the year, with one-day pauses for Christmas and Easter. The editor, Stephen Wheeler, worked hard with Kipling, but Kipling's desire to write was overpowering. Departmental Ditties, his first collection of poems, was released in 1886. That year also saw a change in editors at the newspaper; the new editor, Kay Robinson, gave Kipling greater creative license, and he was invited to write short tales for the daily.

Kipling visited Shimla, a well-known hill station and British India's summer capital 1883. By then, it was customary for the Viceroy of India and the administration to spend six months in Simla, and the town had become a "centre of power as well as pleasure." From 1885 until 1888, Rudyard Kipling went to Simla for his yearly leave, and the town figured heavily in several of his pieces for the Gazette.

Between November 1886 and June 1887, 39 of his pieces were published in the Lahore Gazette. Most of these were featured in Kipling's first written book, Plain Tales from the Hills, published in Calcutta in January 1888, a month after his 22nd birthday. Kipling's stay in Lahore, on the other hand, had come to an end. He was transferred to the Gazette's larger sister daily, The Pioneer, in Allahabad, United Provinces, in November 1887, where he worked as an assistant editor and stayed in Belvedere House from 1888 to 1889.

Kipling's writing proceeded at breakneck speed. Soldiers Three, The Story of the Gadsbys, In Black and White, Under the Deodars, The Phantom Rickshaw, and Wee Willie Winkie were his six short story collections released in 1888. There are 41 tales in all, some of which are extremely long. Furthermore, as The Pioneer's special correspondent in Rajputana's western area, he produced many sketches, which were later gathered in Letters of Marque and published in From Sea to Sea and Other Sketches, Letters of Travel.

After a disagreement, Kipling was fired from The Pioneer in early 1889. He was beginning to consider his future at this point. He sold the rights to his six volumes of stories, a tiny royalty for £200 and a small royalty, and the Plain Tales for £50; he also received six months' income from The Pioneer as a replacement for notice.

Return to London

On March 9, 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." When awarding Kipling the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907, the Nobel Prize committee noted his writing on Japanese manners and traditions.

Kipling stated that he "had lost his heart" to O-Toyo, a geisha. Kipling then journeyed throughout America, penning pieces for The Pioneer that were collected in "From Sea to Sea and Other Sketches - Letters Of Travel."

He met Mark Twain in Elmira, New York, during this tour and was highly impressed. Kipling showed up at Twain's house uninvited and rang the doorbell. Twain eagerly welcomed Kipling and had a two-hour talk with him about trends in Anglo-American writing and what Twain planned to write in a sequel to Tom Sawyer, with Twain assuring Kipling that a sequel was on the way. However, he had not decided upon the ending: either Sawyer would be elected to Congress, or he would be hanged. After the lovely meeting with Twain, Kipling crossed the Atlantic to Liverpool in October 1889. He soon made his début in the London literary world to great acclaim.

Kipling had numerous pieces published in publications in London. He found a room to reside on Villiers Street, near Charing Cross, for the following two years. In the next two years, he released "The Light That Failed," experienced a mental breakdown and met Wolcott Balestier, an American writer and publishing agent, with whom he worked on The Naulahka.

Kipling returned to South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and India in 1891, as instructed by his doctors. When he learned of Balestier's untimely death from typhoid illness, he cancelled his plans to spend Christmas with his family in India and opted to return to London right away. Before his return, he used the telegram to propose to and be accepted by Wolcott's sister, Caroline Starr Balestier (1862-1939), known as "Carrie," whom he had met a year before and with whom he had reportedly had an intermittent passion. Meanwhile, Life's Handicap, a collection of short stories about the British in India, was released in London in 1891.

Carrie Balestier and Rudyard Kipling married in London on January 18, 1892. All Souls Church in Langham Place, central London, hosted the wedding. Henry James married the bride.

United States Visits

Kipling and his bride decided to spend their honeymoon in the United States and Japan. They realized their bank, The New Oriental Banking Corporation, had failed when they arrived in Yokohama. They returned to the United States and Vermont, taking their defeat with stride. Carrie was expecting their first child, and they were renting a little cottage on a farm near Brattleboro for $10 per month. Their first child, Josephine, was born in this cottage, which they named "Bliss Cottage." Here in this place, Kipling first got an idea for "The Jungle Books."

With the arrival of Josephine, Bliss Cottage became overcrowded, so the couple finally purchased 10 acres of land on a rocky slope overlooking the Connecticut River from Carrie's brother Beatty Balestier and erected their own house. Kipling named this Naulakha after Wolcott and their partnership, and the name was spelt correctly this time. From his early years in Lahore (1882-87), Kipling was enthralled with Mughal architecture, particularly the Naulakha pavilion in Lahore Fort, which inspired both the title of his work and the home. The home still exists on Kipling Road in Dummerston, Vermont, 4.8 kilometres north of Brattleboro: a large, remote, dark-green house with a shingled roof and sides. Kipling became imaginative and prolific due to his solitude in Vermont and healthy lifestyle.

Along with the Jungle Books, he wrote a collection of short tales (The Day's Work), a novel (Captains Courageous), and a slew of poetry, including The Seven Seas. The collection of Barrack-Room Ballads was released in March 1892 after being published separately for the most part in 1890. He really liked creating the Jungle Books and communicating with the numerous youngsters who wrote about them.

Life in New England

Visitors, notably his father, who arrived shortly after his retirement in 1893, periodically disrupted his literary life at Naulakha. Arthur Conan Doyle, a British writer who brought his golf equipment, stayed for two days and gave Kipling extensive golf instruction. Kipling seemed to like golf, occasionally practising with the local Congregational pastor and even playing with snow-covered red-painted balls.

Kipling loved the outdoors, and one of his favourite sights in Vermont was changing the leaves each October. Elsie Kipling, the couple's second daughter, was born in February 1896. Various biographers say their married relationship was no longer lighthearted and spontaneous. Although they will always be devoted to one another, they have settled into roles. Later that year, he worked as a substitute teacher at Bishop's College School in Quebec, Canada.

The Kiplings liked Vermont and would have remained there till the end of their lives if it hadn't been for two episodes, one of world politics and the other of family strife. The United Kingdom and Venezuela had a boundary dispute concerning British Guiana by the early 1890s. The United States has made repeated offers to mediate. Nonetheless, in 1895, the new American Secretary of State Richard Olney increased the ante by arguing for the American "right" to arbitrate based on continental sovereignty. This infuriated the British, and the situation escalated into a huge Anglo-American crisis, with both sides threatening war.

Although the crisis led to stronger US-British collaboration, Kipling was perplexed by the continued anti-British attitude in the U.S., particularly in the press. By January 1896, he had abandoned his family's "good wholesome life" in the United States and pursued their riches overseas.

The final straw was a family feud. Carrie and her brother Beatty Balestier's relationship had been strained for some time due to his drinking and debt. A drunken Beatty approached Kipling on the street in May 1896 and threatened him with bodily damage. The incident resulted in Beatty's arrest, but the accompanying hearing and publicity wrecked Kipling's seclusion, leaving him depressed and weary. The Kiplings packed their stuff, left the United States, and returned to England in July 1896, a week before the hearing commenced.

In Devon

By September 1896, the Kiplings had settled in Torquay, Devon, on England's southwest coast, in a hillside mansion overlooking the English Channel. Despite his dissatisfaction with his new home, the design of which he said made its residents depressed and gloomy, Kipling managed to stay creative and socially engaged.

Kipling was now well-known, and his works had become increasingly political in the previous two or three years. In August 1897, the Kiplings had their first son, John. Kipling had started writing two poems, "Recessional" (1897) and "The White Man's Burden" (1899), that would cause controversy when they were published. Some regarded the poems as hymns to enlightened and duty-bound empire-building; others saw them as propaganda for brazen-faced imperialism and its concomitant racial views, yet others saw the poems as irony and warnings of the hazards of empire.

During his time in Torquay, he penned Stalky & Co., a collection of school stories in which the juvenile heroes demonstrated a know-it-all, cynical attitude toward patriotism and authority. Kipling, according to his family, liked reading aloud stories from Stalky & Co. to them and frequently burst out laughing at his own humour.

In South Africa

The Kiplings flew to South Africa for their winter vacation in early 1898, commencing an annual habit that lasted until 1908. They would stay at "The Woolsack," a house on Cecil Rhodes' estate in Groote Schuur, just a short walk from Rhodes' mansion.

Kipling's new status as Poet of the Empire was well embraced by some of the Cape Colony's most powerful leaders, including Rhodes, Sir Alfred Milner, and Leander Starr Jameson. Kipling fostered their connection and grew to respect the guys and their ideas. The years 1898-1910 were pivotal in South African history, encompassing the Second Boer War (1899-1902), the subsequent peace settlement, and the foundation of the Union of South Africa in 1910. Back in England, Kipling composed poems in support of the British cause during the Boer War. On his second trip to South Africa in early 1900, he became a reporter for The Friend newspaper in Bloemfontein, which Lord Roberts had commandeered for British troops.

Kipling's journalistic engagement was just two weeks long. Still, it was his first employment on a newspaper staff since leaving The Pioneer in Allahabad more than 10 years ago. At The Friend, he formed lifelong connections with Perceval Landon, H. A. Gwynne, and others. He also penned widely distributed pieces, expressing his thoughts on the fight. Kipling wrote an inscription for the Kimberley Honoured Dead Memorial.

Mansion in Sussex

Kipling relocated from Torquay to Rottingdean, East Sussex, in 1897, first to North End House and subsequently to the Elms. Kipling purchased Bateman's, a mansion erected in 1634 in rural Burwash, in 1902.

Kipling lived at Bateman's from 1902 until he died in 1936. For £9,300, the house and its surrounding structures, the mill, and 33 acres were purchased. It had no bathroom, running water, or electricity, but Kipling liked it.

In nonfiction, he became embroiled in the argument about the British reaction to the growth of German naval might, known as the Tirpitz Plan, to create a fleet to confront the Royal Navy, writing a series of essays in 1898 that were gathered as A Fleet in Being. Kipling and his daughter Josephine contracted pneumonia on a tour to the United States in 1899, and she died as a result.

Following Kim's death, Kipling gathered material for Just So Stories for Little Children, published in 1902. Kipling was upset by German Emperor Wilhelm II's Hun speech in 1900, in which he urged German troops headed to China to destroy the Boxer Rebellion to act like "Huns" and take no prisoners. He used Wilhelm's own comments and the deeds of German forces in China to paint Germans as basically barbarians in "The Rowers," a 1902 poem in which he criticized the Kaiser as a menace to Britain and made the first use of the term "Hun" as an anti-German epithet. Kipling, a Francophile, declared Germany a threat in an interview with the French daily Le Figaro and urged for an Anglo-French alliance to oppose it.

During the First World War

Kipling, like many other authors, produced pamphlets and songs during the start of the First World War, passionately supporting the U.K. war goals of regaining Belgium after it had been taken by Germany, as well as generic claims that Britain was standing up for the cause of good. Kipling received an offer from the government to write propaganda in September 1914. During the war, Kipling's pamphlets and stories were popular with the British people, with his main themes glorifying the British military as a place for heroic men to be while citing German atrocities against Belgian civilians and stories of women brutalized by a horrific war unleashed by Germany, yet surviving and triumphing despite their suffering.

Kipling was outraged by stories of the Belgian rape and the sinking of the R.M.S. Lusitania in 1915, which he considered highly brutal acts, and he saw the war as a struggle for civilization against barbarism.

Along with his strong dislike for Germany, Kipling was privately critical of how the British Army was fighting the war, stating as early as October 1914 that Germany should have been conquered by now and that something must be wrong with the British Army. Kipling, astounded by the British Expeditionary Force's high casualties by the fall of 1914, chastised the whole pre-war generation of British politicians for failing to grasp the lessons of the Boer War. As a result, hundreds of British men were now paying with their lives for their failures in France and Belgium.

In 1914, Kipling was one of 53 prominent British authors, including H. G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Thomas Hardy, who signed the "Authors' Declaration." This manifesto argued that the German invasion of Belgium was a heinous crime.

Death of John Kipling

John Kipling, Kipling's son, was killed in action at the Battle of Loos in September 1915 at the age of 18. John planned to join the Royal Navy at first. Still, after his application was denied due to a failed medical check due to bad eyesight, he registered for military duty as an army commander. During the medical check, his eyesight was once again an issue. In fact, he attempted to enlist twice but was turned down both times. His father had been lifetime friends with Lord Roberts, previous British Army commander-in-chief and Irish Guards colonel. John was admitted into the Irish Guards at Rudyard's request.a

Two days into the fight, John Kipling was despatched to Loos as part of a reinforcement contingent. He was last spotted staggering through the mud, maybe with a face injury. A corpse identified as his was discovered in 1992, although the identification has since been questioned. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission verified in 2015 that it has accurately located John Kipling's burial location; they list his death date as September 27, 1915, and that he is buried in St Mary's A.D.S. Cemetery, Haines.

Kipling wrote in a poem titled "Epitaphs of the War" after his son's death, "If any question why we died / Tell them because our fathers lied." According to critics, these sentences may represent Kipling's shame for his involvement in organizing John's commission. According to Professor Tracy Bilsing, the line refers to Kipling's displeasure that British leaders failed to learn the lessons of the Boer War and were unprepared for the conflict with Germany in 1914, with the "lie" of the "fathers" being that the British Army was ready for any war when it was not.

Kipling's 1916 poem "My Boy Jack" has been linked to John's death, most notably in the play My Boy Jack and its later television version, as well as the documentary Rudyard Kipling: A Remembrance Tale. The poem, however, was initially written at the beginning of a tale about the Battle of Jutland and appears to relate to a death at sea; the "Jack" referenced may be the kid VC Jack Cornwell or even a generic "Jack Tar." The name Jack was given to the family dog in the Kipling household. In contrast, John Kipling was always known as John, making the connection of the protagonist of "My Boy Jack" with John Kipling highly dubious. On the other hand, Kipling was deeply crushed by his son's death. He is supposed to have relieved his sadness by reading Jane Austen's works aloud to his wife and children. During the war, he authored a pamphlet called The Fringes of the Fleet, with essays and poetry on numerous nautical topics. Some of them were put to music by the English musician Edward Elgar.

Kipling became acquainted with a French soldier called Maurice Hammoneau. His life was spared in the First World War when a bullet was deflected by a copy of Kim in his left breast pocket. As a sign of thanks, Hammoneau presented Kipling with the book, which still had a bullet embedded in it and his Croix de Guerre. They kept in touch, and when Hammoneau had a child, Kipling insisted on returning the book and medal.

The poem "The Old Volunteer" was published in The Times under his name on August 1, 1918. The following day, he wrote to the newspaper to deny authorship, and a correction was published. Although The Times hired a private detective to investigate, the investigator appears to have accused Kipling of being the author, and the hoaxer's identity was never determined.

After the War

Kipling joined Sir Fabian Ware's Imperial War Graves Commission, which is responsible for the garden-like British war graves that can still be found dotted along the former Western Front and other places around the world where British Empire troops are buried, in part in response to John's death. His significant contributions to the project were his choice of the biblical phrase "Their Name Liveth forever," which appears on Stones of Remembrance at bigger war cemeteries, and his suggestion of the phrase "Known unto God" for unidentified servicemen's gravestones. He also picked the "The Glorious Dead" inscription for the London Cenotaph. In addition, he authored a two-volume history of his son's regiment, the Irish Guards, which was released in 1923 and is regarded as one of the greatest instances of regimental history.

Kipling was sceptical of the Fourteen Points and the League of Nations after the war. Still, he hoped that the U.S. would reject isolationism and that an Anglo-French-American alliance would govern the postwar world. He thought that the United States would accept a League of Nations mission for Armenia as the best way to avoid isolationism and that Theodore Roosevelt, whom he respected, would be re-elected president. Kipling mourned Roosevelt's death in 1919, thinking him the only American leader capable of maintaining the U.S. in the "game" of international politics.

Kipling was an outspoken opponent of communism, claiming that after the Bolshevik takeover in 1917, one-sixth of the world had "passed bodily out of civilization." Kipling observed about Soviet Russia in a 1918 poem, "Everything good in Russia has been destroyed by the Bolsheviks." Kipling, Haggard, and Lord Sydenham co-founded the Liberty League in 1920. This short-lived venture promoted traditional liberal ideas in reaction to the growing dominance of communist inclinations in the United Kingdom, or, as Kipling phrased it, "to combat the advance of Bolshevism."

Kipling 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 in 1922 after referring to the work of engineers in some of his poems. Kipling's answer was positive, and he quickly created both, formally titled "The Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer." Today, engineering graduates throughout Canada are awarded an iron ring at a ceremony to remind them of their societal responsibilities. Kipling was appointed Lord Rector of St Andrews University in Scotland for three years in 1922.

As a Francophile, Kipling campaigned forcefully for an Anglo-French alliance to keep the peace, referring to Britain and France as the "twin fortresses of European civilization" in 1920. Similarly, Kipling advised against amending the Treaty of Versailles in favour of Germany, which he believed would result in a second world war. Kipling, a fan of Raymond Poincaré, was one of the few British intellectuals who backed the French occupation of the Ruhr in 1923, while the British government and the majority of public opinion opposed the French stance. In contrast to the prevalent British perception of Poincaré as a harsh tyrant intent on impoverishing Germany with excessive reparations, Kipling maintained that he was legitimately attempting to preserve France as a great power in the face of adversity. Kipling argued that even before 1914, Germany's larger economy and higher birth rate had made it stronger than France; with much of France devastated by war and suffering heavy losses, the French's low birth rate would cause problems. In contrast, Germany was mostly undamaged and still had a higher birth rate. So he reasoned that revising Versailles in Germany's favour would lead to German dominance in the future and that Britain pressing France to do so was insane.

Kipling referred to Ramsay MacDonald's Labour administration as "Bolshevism without bullets" in 1924. He felt Labour was a communist front organization and that "excited orders and instructions from Moscow" would reveal Labour to the British people as such. Kipling held conservative ideas. Though he idolized Benito Mussolini in the 1920s, he opposed fascism, labelling Oswald Mosley a "bounder and an arriviste." By 1935, he was referring to Mussolini as a crazed and dangerous egomaniac, and he said in 1933, "The Hitlerites are out for blood."

Despite his anti-communist views, Kipling was well-liked by Russian readers throughout the interwar period. He influenced many younger Russian poets and authors, including Konstantin Simonov. Kipling's use of colloquial language, clarity of style, and rhythm and rhyme were important developments in poetry that attracted many younger Russian poets. Though Soviet publications were required to begin translations of Kipling with an assault on him as a "fascist" and an "imperialist," Kipling's writings were not prohibited in the Soviet Union until 1939. The restriction was abolished during Operation Barbarossa in 1941 when Britain became a Soviet ally. Still, it was reinstated during the Cold War in 1946.

Many earlier copies of Rudyard Kipling's novels feature a swastika emblazoned on the cover and an image of an elephant bearing a lotus blossom, evoking Indian culture. Kipling's usage of the swastika was inspired by the Indian sun emblem of good fortune and the Sanskrit term for "fortunate" or "well-being." He employed the swastika emblem in both right and left-facing variants, which was common at the period.

Kipling wrote the first Royal Christmas Message, which George V broadcast on the B.B.C.'s Empire Service in 1932. In 1934, he wrote a short fiction called "Proofs of Holy Writ" in The Strand Magazine, claiming that William Shakespeare had helped to polish the English of the King James Bible.

Death

Kipling continued to write until the early 1930s, although at a lesser pace and with less success. He had bleeding in his small intestine on the night of January 12, 1936. He had surgery but died less than a week later, on January 18, 1936, at the age of 70, at the Middlesex Hospital in London, of a ruptured duodenal ulcer. After his death, Kipling's remains were laid in state at the Fitzrovia Chapel, part of Middlesex Hospital, and is honoured by a plaque near the altar. Earlier, His death was proclaimed wrongly in a magazine, prompting him to write, "I've just read that I am dead." Don't forget to delete me from your list of subscribers."

Kipling's cousin, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, was among the pallbearers for the burial, and the marble casket was draped in a Union Jack. Kipling was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium in north-west London, and his ashes were placed at Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey's south transept, adjacent to the graves of Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy.