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Rudyard Kipling - Facts

Rudyard Kipling

Photo from the Nobel Foundation archive.

Rudyard Kipling The Nobel Prize in Literature 1907

Born: 30 December 1865, Bombay, British India (now Mumbai, India)

Died: 18 January 1936, London, United Kingdom

Residence at the time of the award: United Kingdom

Prize motivation: “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”

Language: English

Prize share: 1/1

Rudyard Kipling was born in Mumbai and lived with relatives in England between the ages of 6 and 17, when he returned to India. As a child he spoke English, Hindi and Portuguese. This is evident in his writing, which revolves around issues of language and identity. After returning to India, Kipling traveled around the country as a correspondent. Contemporary Great Britain appreciated him for his depictions of life, religions, traditions and nature in what was then the British colony of India.

As a poet, short story writer, journalist and novelist, Rudyard Kipling described the British colonial empire in positive terms, which made his poetry popular in the British Army. The Jungle Book (1894) has made him known and loved by children throughout the world, especially thanks to Disney’s 1967 film adaptation. The Swedish Academy pointed out that Kipling’s special strengths were his personal portraits and descriptions of social settings that “penetrate to the essence of things” rather than just reproducing the transitory.

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Rudyard Kipling

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Rudyard Kipling is one of the best-known of the late Victorian poets and story-tellers. Although he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1907, his political views, which grew more toxic as he aged, have long made him critically unpopular. In the New Yorker, Charles McGrath remarked “Kipling has been variously labelled a colonialist, a jingoist, a racist, an anti-Semite, a misogynist, a right-wing imperialist warmonger; and—though some scholars have argued that his views were more complicated than he is given credit for—to some degree he really was all those things. That he was also a prodigiously gifted writer who created works of inarguable greatness hardly matters anymore, at least not in many classrooms, where Kipling remains politically toxic.” However, Kipling’s works for children, above all his novel The Jungle Book, first published in 1894, remain part of popular culture through the many movie versions made and remade since the 1960s.

Kipling was born in Bombay, India, in 1865. His father, John Lockwood Kipling, was principal of the Jeejeebyhoy School of Art, an architect and artist who had come to the colony, writes Charles Cantalupo in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, “to encourage, support, and restore native Indian art against the incursions of British business interests.” He meant to try, Cantalupo continues, “to preserve, at least in part, and to copy styles of art and architecture which, representing a rich and continuous tradition of thousands of years, were suddenly threatened with extinction.” His mother, Alice Macdonald, had connections through her sister’s marriage to the artist Sir Edward Burne-Jones with important members of the Pre-Raphaelite movement in British arts and letters. Kipling spent the first years of his life in India, remembering it in later years as almost a paradise. “My first impression,” he wrote in his posthumously published autobiography Something of Myself for My Friends Known and Unknown, “is of daybreak, light and colour and golden and purple fruits at the level of my shoulder.” In 1871, however, his parents sent him and his sister Beatrice—called “Trix”—to England, partly to avoid health problems, but also so that the children could begin their schooling. Kipling and his sister were placed with the widow of an old Navy captain named Holloway at a boarding house called Lorne Lodge in Southsea, a suburb of Portsmouth. Kipling and Trix spent the better part of the next six years in that place, which they came to call the “House of Desolation.” 1871 until 1877 were miserable years for Kipling. “In addition to feelings of bewilderment and abandonment” from being deserted by his parents, writes Mary A. O’Toole in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, “Kipling had to suffer bullying by the woman of the house and her son.” Kipling may have brought some of this treatment on himself—he was a formidably aggressive and pampered child. He once stamped down a quiet country road shouting: “Out of the way, out of the way, there’s an angry Ruddy coming!,” reports J.I.M. Stewart in his biography Rudyard Kipling, which led an aunt to reflect that “the wretched disturbances one ill-ordered child can make is a lesson for all time to me.” In Something of Myself, however, he recounted punishments that went far beyond correction. “I had never heard of Hell,” he wrote, “so I was introduced to it in all its terrors. … Myself I was regularly beaten.” On one occasion, after having thrown away a bad report card rather than bring it home, “I was well beaten and sent to school through the streets of Southsea with the placard ‘Liar’ between my shoulders.” At last, Kipling suffered a sort of nervous breakdown. An examination showed that he badly needed glasses—which helped explain his poor performance in school—and his mother returned from India to care for him. “She told me afterwards,” Kipling stated in Something of Myself, “that when she first came up to my room to kiss me good-night, I flung up an arm to guard off the cuff that I had been trained to expect.” Kipling did have some happy times during those years. He and his sister spent each December time with his mother’s sister, Lady Burne-Jones, at The Grange, a meeting-place frequented by English artisans such as William Morris—or “our Deputy ‘Uncle Topsy’” as Kipling called him in Something of Myself. Sir Edward Burne-Jones occasionally entered into the children’s play, Kipling recalled: “Once he descended in broad daylight with a tube of ‘Mummy Brown’ [paint] in his hand, saying that he had discovered it was made of dead Pharaohs and we must bury it accordingly. So we all went out and helped—according to the rites of Mizraim and Memphis, I hope—and—to this day I could drive a spade within a foot of where that tube lies.” “But on a certain day—one tried to fend off the thought of it—the delicious dream would end,” he concluded, “and one would return to the House of Desolation, and for the next two or three mornings there cry on waking up.” In 1878, Kipling was sent off to school in Devon, in the west of England. The institution was the United Services College, a relatively new school intended to educate the sons of army officers, and Kipling was probably sent there because the headmaster was one Cormell Price, “one of my Deputy-Uncles at The Grange … ‘Uncle Crom.’” There Kipling formed three close friends, whom he later immortalized in his collection of stories Stalky Co, published in 1899. “We fought among ourselves ‘regular an’ faithful as man an’ wife,’” Kipling reported in Something of Myself, “but any debt which we owed elsewhere was faithfully paid by all three of us.” “I must have been ‘nursed’ with care by Crom and under his orders,” Kipling recalled. “Hence, when he saw I was irretrievably committed to the ink-pot, his order that I should edit the School Paper and have the run of his Library Study. … Heaven forgive me! I thought these privileges were due to my transcendent personal merits.” Since his parents could not afford to send him to one of the major English universities, in 1882 Kipling left the Services College, bound for India to rejoin his family and to begin a career as a journalist. For five years he held the post of assistant editor of the Civil and Military Gazette at Lahore. During those years he also published the stories that became Plain Tales from the Hills, works based on British lives in the resort town of Simla, and Departmental Ditties, his first major collection of poems. In 1888, the young journalist moved south to join the Allahabad Pioneer, a much larger publication. At the same time, his works had begun to be published in cheap editions intended for sale in railroad terminals, and he began to earn a strong popular following with collections such as The Phantom ‘Rickshaw and Other Tales, The Story of the Gadsbys, Soldiers Three, Under the Deodars, and “Wee Willie Winkie” and Other Child Stories. In March 1889 Kipling left India to return to England, determined to pursue his future as a writer there. The young writer’s reputation soared after he settled in London. “Kipling’s official biographer, C.E. Carrington,” declares Cantalupo, “calls 1890 ‘Rudyard Kipling’s year. There had been nothing like his sudden rise to fame since Byron.’” “His poems and stories,” writes O’Toole, “elicited strong reactions of love and hate from the start—almost none of his advocates and detractors were temperate in praise or in blame. Ordinary readers liked the rhythms, the cockney speech, and the imperialist sentiments of his poems and short stories; critics generally damned the works for the same reasons.” Many of his works were originally published in periodicals and later collected in various editions as Barrack-Room Ballads; famous poems such as “The Ballad of East and West,”“ Danny Deever ,” “Tommy,” and “The Road to Mandalay” date from this time. Kipling’s literary life in London brought him to the attention of many people. One of them was a young American publisher named Wolcott Balestier, who became friends with Kipling and persuaded him to work on a collaborative novel. The result, writes O’Toole, entitled The Naulahka, “reads more like one of Kipling’s travel books than like a novel” and “seems rather hastily and opportunistically concocted.” It was not a success. Balestier himself did not live to see the book published—he died on December 6, 1891—but he influenced Kipling strongly in another way. Kipling married Balestier’s sister, Caroline, in January, 1892, and the couple settled near their family home in Brattleboro, Vermont. The Kiplings lived in America for several years, in a house they built for themselves and called “Naulahka.” Kipling developed a close friendship with Theodore Roosevelt, then Under Secretary of the Navy, and often discussed politics and culture with him. “I liked him from the first,” Kipling recalled in Something of Myself, “and largely believed in him. … My own idea of him was that he was a much bigger man than his people understood or, at that time, knew how to use, and that he and they might have been better off had he been born twenty years later.” Both of Kipling’s daughters were born in Vermont—Josephine late in 1892, and Elsie in 1894—as was one of the classic works of juvenile literature: The Jungle Books, which are ranked among Kipling’s best works. The adventures of Mowgli, the foundling child raised by wolves in the Seeonee Hills of India, are “the cornerstones of Kipling’s reputation as a children’s writer,” declared William Blackburn in Writers for Children , “and still among the most popular of all his works.” The Mowgli stories and other, unrelated works from the collection—such as “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” and “The White Seal”—have often been filmed and adapted into other media. In Something of Myself, Kipling traced the origins of these stories to a book he had read when he was young “about a lion-hunter in South Africa who fell among lions who were all Freemasons, and with them entered into a confederacy against some wicked baboons.” Martin Seymour-Smith, writing in Rudyard Kipling: A Biography, identifies another of the major sources as “the Jataka tales of India. Some of these fables go back as early as the fourth century BC and incorporate material of even earlier eras. One version, Jatakamala, was composed in about 200 AD by the poet Aryasura. They are Buddhist birth-stories— Jatakamala means ‘Garland of Birth Stories’—which the 19th-century scholar Rhys Davids described as ‘the most important collection of ancient folk-lore extant.’ Each of the 550 stories tells of the Buddha in some previous incarnation, and each is a story of the past occasioned by some incident in the present. … Some of the beast fables resemble Aesop’s, but the Jataka tales are more deliberately brutal. They teach not merely that men should be more tender towards animals, but the equivalence of all life.” The Kiplings left Vermont in 1896 after a fierce quarrel with Beatty Balestier, Kipling’s surviving brother-in-law. The writer’s unwillingness to be interviewed made him unpopular with the American press, and he was savagely ridiculed when the facts of the case became public. Rather than remain in America, Kipling and his wife returned to England, settling for a time in Rottingdean, Sussex, near the home of Kipling’s parents. The writer soon published another novel, drawing on his knowledge of New England life: Captains Courageous, the story of Harvey Cheney, a spoiled young man who is washed overboard while on his way to Europe and is rescued by fishermen. Cheney spends the summer learning about human nature and self-discipline. “After the ship has docked in Gloucester and Harvey’s parents have come to take him home,” explains O’Toole, “his father, a self-made man, is pleased to see that his son has grown from a snobbish boy to a self-reliant young man who has learned how to make his own way through hard work and to judge people by their own merits rather than by their bank balances.” The Kiplings returned to America on several occasions, but this practice ended in 1899 when the whole family came down with pneumonia and Josephine, his eldest daughter, died from it. She had been, writes Seymour-Smith, “by all accounts … unusually lively, witty and enchanting,” and her loss was deeply felt. Kipling sought solace in his work. In 1901 he published what many critics believe is his finest novel: Kim, the story of an orphaned Irish boy who grows up in the streets of Lahore, is educated at the expense of his father’s old Army regiment, and enters into “the Great Game,” the “cold war” of espionage and counter-espionage on the borders of India between Great Britain and Russia in the late 19th century. In many ways, Kipling suggested in Something of Myself, the book was a collaboration between himself and his father: “He would take no sort of credit for any of his suggestions, memories or confirmations,” the writer recalled, but “there was a good deal of beauty in it, and not a little wisdom; the best in both sorts being owed to my Father.” “The glory of Kim, ” declares O’Toole, “lies not in its plot nor in its characters but in its evocation of the complex Indian scene. The great diversity of the land—its castes; its sects; its geographical, linguistic, and religious divisions; its numberless superstitions; its kaleidoscopic sights, sounds, colors, and smells—are brilliantly and lovingly evoked.” In 1902 the Kiplings settled in their permanent home, a 17th-century house called “Bateman’s” in East Sussex. “In the years following the move,” O’Toole explains, “Kipling for the most part turned away from the types of stories he had written early in his career and explored new subjects and techniques.” One example, completed before the Kiplings occupied Bateman’s, was the collection called the Just So Stories, perhaps Kipling’s best-remembered and best-loved work. The stories, written for his own children and intended to be read aloud, deal with the beginnings of things: “How the Camel Got His Hump,” “The Elephant’s Child,” “The Sing-Song of Old Man Kangaroo,” “The Cat That Walked by Himself,” and many others. In these works, Kipling painted rich, vivid word-pictures that honor and at the same time parody the language of traditional Eastern stories such as the Jataka tales and the Thousand and One Arabian Nights. “In no other collection of children’s stories,” writes Elisabeth R. Choi in her foreword to the 1978 Crown edition of the Just So Stories, “is there such fanciful and playful language.” The area around Bateman’s, rich in English history, inspired Kipling’s last works for children, Puck of Pook’s Hill and its sequel, Rewards and Fairies. The main sources of their inspiration, Kipling explained in Something of Myself, came from artifacts discovered in a well they were drilling on the property: “When we stopped at twenty-five feet, we had found a Jacobean tobacco-pipe, a worn Cromwellian latten spoon and, at the bottom of all, the bronze cheek of a Roman horse-bit.” At the bottom of a drained pond, they “dredged two intact Elizabethan ‘sealed quarts’ … all pearly with the patina of centuries. Its deepest mud yielded us a perfectly polished Neolithic axe-head with but one chip on its still venomous edge.” From these artifacts—and a suggestion made by a cousin, the ruins of an ancient forge, and the playing of his children—Kipling constructed a series of related stories of how Dan and Una come to meet Puck, the last remaining Old Thing in England, and from him learn the history of their land. Kipling wrote many other works during the periods that he produced his children’s classics. He was actively involved in the Boer War in South Africa as a war correspondent, and in 1917 he was assigned the post of “Honorary Literary Advisor” to the Imperial War Graves Commission—the same year that his son John, who had been missing in action for two years, was confirmed dead. In his last years, explains O’Toole, he became even more withdrawn and bitter, losing much of his audience because of his unpopular political views—such as compulsory military service—and a “cruelty and desire for vengeance [in his writings] that his detractors detested.” Modern critical opinions, O’Toole continues, “are contradictory because Kipling was a man of contradictions. He had enormous sympathy for the lower classes … yet distrusted all forms of democratic government.” He declined awards offered him by his own government, yet accepted others from foreign nations. He finally succumbed to a painful illness early in 1936.

Additional insight on Kipling’s life, career, and views can be gleaned from the three volumes of The Letters of Rudyard Kipling. The volumes contain selected surviving letters written by Kipling between 1872 and 1910; it is believed that both Kipling and his wife destroyed many of Kipling’s other letters. Kipling’s chief correspondent was Edmonia Hill, who was his counselor and confidante beginning during his days as a journalist in India. Reviewers note that all of the letters reflect Kipling’s distinctive literary style. Jonathan Keates in the Observer wrote, “this gathering of survivors shows that Kipling, with his gift for the resonant, throat-grabbing phrase and his obsessive interest in watching and listening, could never write a dud letter.” John Bayley points out in the Times Literary Supplement : “[Kipling] wrote his letters, as he did his stories and early sketches, in an amalgam of Wardour Street and schoolboyese, with biblical overtones, often transposed into a sort of Anglo-Indian syntax. … Kipling is inimitable: at his innocently aesthetic worst, he can be deeply embarrassing; and the letters, like the stories, contain both sorts.” Writing in the Observer, Amit Chaudhuri remarks that the third volume of letters reveals “the contractions of a unique writer; a loving father and husband who was also deeply interested in the asocial, predominantly male pursuit of Empire; a conservative who succumbed to the romance of the new technology [the automobile]; an apologist for England for whom England was, in a fundamental and positive way, a ‘foreign country.’”

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Bibliography

The city of sleep, danny deever, a death-bed, epitaphs of the war, "for all we have and are", harp song of the dane women, the long trail, mesopotamia, a pict song, recessional, the secret of the machines, sestina of the tramp-royal, the song of the banjo, song of the galley-slaves, "the trade", the verdicts.

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Schoolboy Lyrics, privately printed, 1881.
(With sister, Beatrice Kipling) Echoes: By Two Writers, Civil and Military Gazette Press (Lahore), 1884.
Departmental Ditties and Other Verses, Civil and Military Gazette Press, 1886, 2nd edition, enlarged, Thacker, Spink (Calcutta), 1886, 3rd edition, further enlarged, 1888, 4th edition, still further enlarged, W. Thacker (London), 1890, deluxe edition, 1898.
Departmental Ditties, Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses (contains the fifty poems of the fourth edition of Departmental Ditties and Other Verses and seventeen new poems later published as Ballads and Barrack-Room Ballads ), United States Book Co., 1890, revised edition published as Departmental Ditties and Ballads and Barrack-Room Ballads, Doubleday McClure, 1899.
Ballads and Barrack-Room Ballads, Macmillan, 1892, new edition, with additional poems, 1893, published as The Complete Barrack-Room Ballads of Rudyard Kipling, edited by Charles Carrington, Methuen, 1973, reprint published as Barrack Room Ballads and Other Verses, White Rose Press, 1987.
The Rhyme of True Thomas, D. Appleton, 1894.
The Seven Seas, D. Appleton, 1896, reprinted, Longwood Publishing Group, 1978.
Recessional (Victorian ode in commemoration of Queen Victoria's Jubilee), M. F. Mansfield, 1897.
Mandalay, drawings by Blanche McManus, M. F. Mansfield, 1898, reprinted, Doubleday, Page, 1921.
The Betrothed, drawings by McManus, M. F. Mansfield and A. Wessells, 1899.
Poems, Ballads, and Other Verses, illustrations by V. Searles, H. M. Caldwell, 1899.
Belts, A. Grosset, 1899.
Cruisers, Doubleday McClure, 1899.
The Reformer, Doubleday, Page, 1901.
The Lesson, Doubleday, Page, 1901.
The Five Nations, Doubleday, Page, 1903.
The Muse among the Motors, Doubleday, Page, 1904.
The Sons of Martha, Doubleday, Page, 1907.
The City of Brass, Doubleday, Page, 1909.
Cuckoo Song, Doubleday, Page, 1909.
A Patrol Song, Doubleday, Page, 1909.
A Song of the English, illustrations by W. Heath Robinson, Doubleday, Page, 1909.
If, Doubleday, Page, 1910, reprinted, Doubleday, 1959.
The Declaration of London, Doubleday, Page, 1911.
The Spies' March, Doubleday, Page, 1911.
Three Poems (contains The River's Tale, The Roman Centurion Speaks, and The Pirates in England ), Doubleday, Page, 1911.
Songs from Books, Doubleday, Page, 1912.
An Unrecorded Trial, Doubleday, Page, 1913.
For All We Have and Are, Methuen, 1914.
The Children's Song, Macmillan, 1914.
A Nativity, Doubleday, Page, 1917.
A Pilgrim's Way, Doubleday, Page, 1918.
The Supports, Doubleday, Page, 1919.
The Years Between, Doubleday, Page, 1919.
The Gods of the Copybook Headings, Doubleday, Page, 1919, reprinted, 1921.
The Scholars, Doubleday, Page, 1919.
Great-Heart, Doubleday, Page, 1919.
Danny Deever, Doubleday, Page, 1921.
The King's Pilgrimage, Doubleday, Page, 1922.
Chartres Windows, Doubleday, Page, 1925.
A Choice of Songs, Doubleday, Page, 1925.
Sea and Sussex, with an introductory poem by the author and illustrations by Donald Maxwell, Doubleday, Page, 1926.
A Rector's Memory, Doubleday, Page, 1926.
Supplication of the Black Aberdeen, illustrations by G. L. Stampa, Doubleday, Doran, 1929.
The Church That Was at Antioch, Doubleday, Doran, 1929.
The Tender Achilles, Doubleday, Doran, 1929.
Unprofessional, Doubleday, Page, 1930.
The Day of the Dead, Doubleday, Doran, 1930.
Neighbours, Doubleday, Doran, 1932.
The Storm Cone, Doubleday, Doran, 1932.
His Apologies, illustrations by Cecil Aldin, Doubleday, Doran, 1932.
The Fox Meditates, Doubleday, Doran, 1933.
To the Companions, Doubleday, Doran, 1933.
Bonfires on the Ice, Doubleday, Doran, 1933.
Our Lady of the Sackcloth, Doubleday, Doran, 1935.
Hymn of the Breaking Strain, Doubleday, Doran, 1935.
Doctors, The Waster, The Flight, Cain and Abel, [and] The Appeal, Doubleday, Doran, 1939.
A Choice of Kipling's Verse, selected and introduced by T. S. Eliot, Faber, 1941, Scribner, 1943.
B.E.L., Doubleday, Doran, 1944.
Poems of Rudyard Kipling, Avenel, 1995.

SHORT STORIES

In Black and White, A. H. Wheeler (Allahabad), 1888, 1st American edition, Lovell, 1890.
Plain Tales from the Hills, Thacker, Spink, 1888 , 2nd edition, revised, 1889, 1st English edition, revised, Macmillan, 1890, 1st American edition, revised, Doubleday McClure, 1899, reprint edited by H. R. Woudhuysen, Penguin, 1987.
The Phantom 'Rickshaw and Other Tales, A. H. Wheeler, 1888, revised edition, 1890, reprinted, Hurst, 1901.
The Story of the Gadsbys: A Tale With No Plot, A. H. Wheeler, 1888, 1st American edition, Lovell, 1890.
Soldiers Three: A Collection of Stories Setting Forth Certain Passages in the Lives and Adventures of Privates Terence Mulvaney, Stanley Ortheris, and John Learoyd, A. H. Wheeler, 1888, 1st American edition, revised, Lovell, 1890, reprinted, Belmont, 1962.
Under the Deodars, A. H. Wheeler, 1888, 1st American edition, enlarged, Lovell, 1890.
The Courting of Dinah Shadd and Other Stories, with a biographical and critical sketch by Andrew Lang, Harper, 1890, reprinted, Books for Libraries, 1971.
His Private Honour, Macmillan, 1891.
The Smith Administration, A. H. Wheeler, 1891.
Mine Own People, introduction by Henry James, United States Book Co., 1891.
Many Inventions, D. Appleton, 1893, reprinted, Macmillan, 1982.
Mulvaney Stories, 1897, reprinted, Books for Libraries, 1971.
The Day's Work, Doubleday McClure, 1898, reprinted, Books for Libraries, 1971, reprinted with introduction by Constantine Phipps, Penguin, 1988.
The Drums of the Fore and Aft, illustrations by L. J. Bridgman, Brentano's, 1898.
The Man Who Would Be King, Brentano's, 1898.
Black Jack, F. T. Neely, 1899.
Without Benefit of Clergy, Doubleday McClure, 1899.
The Brushwood Boy, illustrations by Orson Lowell, Doubleday & McClure, 1899, reprinted, with illustrations by F. H. Townsend, Doubleday, Page, 1907.
Railway Reform in Great Britain, Doubleday, Page, 1901.
Traffics and Discoveries, Doubleday, Page, 1904, reprinted, Penguin, 1987.
They, Scribner, 1904.
Abaft the Funnel, Doubleday, Page, 1909.
Actions and Reactions, Doubleday, Page, 1909.
A Diversity of Creatures, Doubleday, Page, 1917, reprinted, Macmillan, 1966, reprinted, Penguin, 1994.
"The Finest Story in the World" and Other Stories, Little Leather Library, 1918.
Debits and Credits, Doubleday, Page, 1926, reprinted, Macmillan, 1965.
Thy Servant a Dog, Told by Boots, illustrations by Marguerite Kirmse, Doubleday, Doran, 1930.
Beauty Spots, Doubleday, Doran, 1931.
Limits and Renewals, Doubleday, Doran, 1932.
The Pleasure Cruise, Doubleday, Doran, 1933.
Collected Dog Stories, illustrations by Kirmse, Doubleday, Doran, 1934.
Ham and the Porcupine, Doubleday, Doran, 1935.
Teem: A Treasure-Hunter, Doubleday, Doran, 1935.
The Maltese Cat: A Polo Game of the 'Nineties, illustrations by Lionel Edwards, Doubleday, Doran, 1936.
"Thy Servant a Dog" and Other Dog Stories, illustrations by G. L. Stampa, Macmillan, 1938, reprinted, 1982.
Their Lawful Occasions, White Rose Press, 1987.
John Brunner Presents Kipling's Science Fiction: Stories, T. Doherty Associates (New York, NY), 1992.
John Brunner Presents Kipling's Fantasy: Stories, T. Doherty Associates (New York, NY), 1992.
The Man Who Would Be King, and Other Stories, Dover, 1994.
The Science Fiction Stories of Rudyard Kipling, Carol, 1994.
Collected Stories, edited by John Brunner, Knopf, 1994.
The Works of Rudyard Kipling, Longmeadow Press, 1995.
The Haunting of Holmescraft , Books of Wonder (New York, NY), 1998.
The Mark of the Beast, and Other Horror Tales , Dover Publications (Mineola, NY), 2000.
The Metaphysical Kipling , Aeon (Mamaroneck, NY), 2000.
L. L. Owens, Tales of Rudyard Kipling: Retold Timeless Classics , Perfection Learning (Logan, IA), 2000.
Craig Raine, editor and author of introduction, Selected Stories of Rudyard Kipling , Modern Library (New York, NY), 2002.
The Light That Failed, J. B. Lippincott, 1891, revised edition, Macmillan, 1891, reprinted, Penguin, 1988.
(With Wolcott Balestier) The Naulahka: A Story of West and East, Macmillan, 1892, reprinted, Doubleday, Page, 1925.
Kim, illustrations by father, J. Lockwood Kipling, Doubleday, Page, 1901, new edition, with illustrations by Stuart Tresilian, Macmillan, 1958, reprinted, with introduction by Alan Sandison, Oxford University Press, 1987.

CHILDREN'S BOOKS

"Wee Willie Winkie" and Other Child Stories, A. H. Wheeler, 1888, 1st American edition, Lovell, 1890, reprinted, Penguin, 1988.
The Jungle Book (short stories and poems; also see below), illustrations by John Lockwood Kipling, W. H. Drake, and P. Frenzeny, Macmillan, 1894, adapted and abridged by Anne L. Nelan, with illustrations by Earl Thollander, Fearon, 1967 , reprinted, with illustrations by John Lockwood Kipling and Drake, Macmillan, 1982, adapted by G. C. Barrett, with illustrations by Don Daily, Courage Books, 1994, reprinted, with illustrations by Fritz Eichenberg, Grosset Dunlap, 1995, reprinted, with illustrations by Kurt Wiese, Knopf, 1994.
The Second Jungle Book (short stories and poems), illustrations by John Lockwood Kipling, Century Co., 1895, reprinted, Macmillan, 1982.
"Captains Courageous": A Story of the Grand Banks, Century Co., 1897, abridged edition, illustrated by Rafaello Busoni, Hart Publishing, 1960, reprinted, with an afterword by C. A. Bodelsen, New American Library, 1981, reprinted, Oxford University Press, 1995.
Stalky Co. (short stories), Doubleday McClure, 1899, reprinted, Bantam, 1985, new and abridged edition, Pendulum Press, 1977.
Just So Stories for Little Children (short stories and poems), illustrations by the author, Doubleday, Page, 1902, reprinted, Silver Burdett, 1986, revised edition, edited by Lisa Lewis, Oxford University Press, 1995, reprinted, with illustrations by Barry Moser, Books of Wonder, 1996.
Puck of Pook's Hill (short stories and poems), Doubleday, 1906, reprinted, New American Library, 1988.
Rewards and Fairies (short stories and poems), illustrations by Frank Craig, Doubleday, Page, 1910, revised edition, with illustrations by Charles E. Brock, Macmillan, 1926, reprinted, Penguin, 1988.
Toomai of the Elephants, Macmillan, 1937.
The Miracle of Purun Bhagat, Creative Education, 1985.
Gunga Din, Harcourt, 1987.
Mowgli Stories from "The Jungle Book," illustrated by Thea Kliros, Dover, 1994.
The Elephant's Child, illustrated by John A. Rowe, North-South Books, 1995.
The Beginning of the Armadillos, illustrated by John A. Rowe, North-South Books, 1995.
Thomas Pinney, editor and author of introduction, The Jungle Play , Allen Lane/Penguin Press (New York, NY), 2000.
How the Camel Got His Hump , North-South Books (New York, NY), 2001.
The Classic Tale of the Jungle Book: A Young Reader's Edition of the Classic Story , Courage Books (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.

TRAVEL WRITINGS

Letters of Marque (also see below), A. H. Wheeler, 1891.
American Notes, M. J. Ivers, 1891, reprinted, Ayer Co., 1974, revised edition published as American Notes: Rudyard Kipling's West, University of Oklahoma Press, 1981.
From Sea to Sea and Other Sketches, two volumes, Doubleday & McClure, 1899, published as one volume, Doubleday, Page, 1909, reprinted, 1925.
Letters to the Family: Notes on a Recent Trip to Canada, Macmillan of Canada, 1908.
Letters of Travel, 1892-1913, Doubleday, Page, 1920.
Land and Sea Tales for Scouts and Guides, Macmillan (London), 1923, published as Land and Sea Tales for Boys and Girls, Doubleday, Page, 1923.
Souvenirs of France, Macmillan, 1933.
Brazilian Sketches, Doubleday, Doran, 1940.
Letters from Japan, edited with an introduction and notes by Donald Richie and Yoshimori Harashima, Kenkyusha, 1962.

NAVAL AND MILITARY WRITINGS

A Fleet in Being: Notes of Two Trips With the Channel Squadron, Macmillan, 1899.
The Army of a Dream, Doubleday, Page, 1904, reprinted, White Rose Press, 1987.
The New Army, Doubleday, Page, 1914.
The Fringes of the Fleet, Doubleday, Page, 1915.
France at War: On the Frontier of Civilization, Doubleday, Page, 1915.
Sea Warfare, Macmillan, 1916, Doubleday, Page, 1917.
Tales of "The Trade," Doubleday, Page, 1916.
The Eyes of Asia, Doubleday, Page, 1918.
The Irish Guards, Doubleday, Page, 1918.
The Graves of the Fallen, Imperial War Graves Commission, 1919.
The Feet of the Young Men, photographs by Lewis R. Freeman, Doubleday, Page, 1920.
The Irish Guards in the Great War: Edited and Compiled from Their Diaries and Papers, two volumes, Doubleday, Page, 1923, Volume I: The First Battalion, Volume II: The Second Battalion and Appendices.
The City of Dreadful Night and Other Places (articles; also see below), A. H. Wheeler, 1891.
Out of India: Things I Saw, and Failed to See, in Certain Days and Nights at Jeypore and Elsewhere (includes The City of Dreadful Night and Other Places and Letters of Marque ), Dillingham, 1895.
(With Charles R. L. Fletcher) A History of England, Doubleday, Page, 1911, published as Kipling's Pocket History of England, with illustrations by Henry Ford, Greenwich, 1983.
How Shakespeare Came to Write "The Tempest," introduction by Ashley H. Thorndike, Dramatic Museum of Columbia University, 1916.
London Town: November 11, 1918-1923, Doubleday, Page, 1923.
The Art of Fiction, J. A. Allen, 1926.
A Book of Words: Selections from Speeches and Addresses Delivered between 1906 and 1927, Doubleday, Doran, 1928.
Mary Kingsley, Doubleday, Doran, 1932.
Proofs of Holy Writ, Doubleday, Doran, 1934.
Something of Myself for My Friends Known and Unknown (autobiography), Doubleday, Doran, 1937, reprinted, Penguin Classics, 1989.
Rudyard Kipling to Rider Haggard: The Record of a Friendship, edited by Morton Cohen, Hutchinson, 1965.
The Portable Kipling, edited by Irving Howe, Viking, 1982.
"O Beloved Kids": Rudyard Kipling's Letters to His Children, selected and edited by Elliot L. Gilbert, Harcourt, 1984.
The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, Vols. 1-3, edited by Thomas Pinney, University of Iowa Press (Iowa City, IA), 1990.
Writings of Literature by Rudyard Kipling, edited by Sandra Kemp and Lisa Lewis, Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Writings on Writing, edited by Kemp and Lewis, Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Also author of The Harbor Watch (one-act play; unpublished), 1913, and The Return of Imray (play; unpublished), 1914. Many of Kipling's works first appeared in periodicals, including four Anglo-Indian newspapers, the Civil and Military Gazette, the Pioneer, Pioneer News, Week's News; the Scots Observer and its successor, the National Observer; London Morning Post, the London Times, the English Illustrated Magazine, Macmillan's Magazine, McClure's Magazine, Pearson's Magazine, Spectator, Atlantic, Ladies' Home Journal, and Harper's Weekly. The recently discovered short story "Scylla and Charybdis" was published in the Spring, 2004 issue of the Kipling Society Journal. His works are collected in more than one hundred omnibus volumes. Collections of his papers may be found in many libraries, including the Houghton Library at Harvard University, the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, and the Pierpoint Morgan Library.

Rudyard Kipling summary

Rudyard Kipling , (born Dec. 30, 1865, Bombay, India—died Jan. 18, 1936, London, Eng.), Indian-born British novelist, short-story writer, and poet. The son of a museum curator, he was reared in England but returned to India as a journalist. He soon became famous for volumes of stories, beginning with Plain Tales from the Hills (1888; including “The Man Who Would Be King”), and later for the poetry collection Barrack-Room Ballads (1892; including “Gunga Din” and “Mandalay”). His poems, often strongly rhythmic, are frequently narrative ballads. During a residence in the U.S., he published a novel, The Light That Failed (1890); the two Jungle Book s (1894, 1895), stories of the wild boy Mowgli in the Indian jungle that have become children’s classics; the adventure story Captains Courageous (1897); and Kim (1901), one of the great novels of India. He wrote six other volumes of short stories and several other verse collections. His children’s books include the famous Just So Stories (1902) and the fairy-tale collection Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907. His extraordinary popularity in his own time declined as his reputation suffered after World War I because of his widespread image as a jingoistic imperialist.

A wax work of Joseph Rudyard Kipling in his office

Rudyard Kipling: Biography

The story of Rudyard Kipling is a tale of paradise lost. It is the story of a literary genius who wrote some of the world's best known and enduring books yet whose own life was filled with tragedy.

Kipling was a literary giant of the twentieth century, a man whose remarkable range of work captivated not just a nation but an empire. He was the nations laureate, the voice of the people and he became an international superstar.

His work continues to fascinate and enchant. ‘The Jungle Book’ and the famous poem, ‘If’, remain as popular today as they were when published one hundred years ago.

Less well-known is the private life of the man who produced such masterpieces. Kipling endured an appalling childhood, a domineering wife, and the devastating loss of two of his children.

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Rudyard Kipling Biography: Life, Achievements, and Legacy

{ Read his poems }

Rudyard Kipling, born on December 30, 1865, in Bombay, India, was an English author, poet, and journalist whose extensive body of work has made him one of the most influential literary figures of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His vivid storytelling and unforgettable characters brought to life the culture and spirit of the British Empire and the Indian subcontinent, earning him a dedicated and widespread readership.

Kipling’s work spans various literary genres, including short stories, novels, and poetry, which have been celebrated for their exceptional narrative quality, captivating characters, and profound exploration of human nature. With classics like The Jungle Book, Kim, and the Just So Stories, Kipling introduced readers to rich, fantastical worlds while also addressing the complex social and political issues of his time.

His writings continue to inspire and provoke discussions on subjects such as colonialism, race, and the human experience, while also influencing countless authors and artists that followed him. As a testament to his literary prowess, Kipling was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907, further solidifying his position as a towering figure in the realm of English literature.

Table of Contents

Early Life and Influences

Birth and family background.

Rudyard Kipling was born on December 30, 1865, in Bombay (now Mumbai), India, to John Lockwood Kipling and Alice Macdonald Kipling. His father, an artist and educator, was the principal and professor of architectural sculpture at the Jeejeebhoy School of Art in Bombay. His mother, Alice, was a vivacious woman with a strong social circle, which included many influential figures of the time. Rudyard was named after the picturesque Rudyard Lake in Staffordshire, England, where his parents had met and courted.

Education and formative experiences

United services college.

At the age of six, Kipling was sent to England to receive a British education, as was customary for children of British colonial officials. He attended the United Services College in Westward Ho!, Devon, a boarding school that primarily prepared boys for military service. It was here that Kipling experienced the harsh realities of British boarding school life, which he later chronicled in his semi-autobiographical novel, Stalky & Co. (1899). Kipling’s time at the United Services College helped shape his outlook on life and instilled in him a deep appreciation for discipline, order, and loyalty.

Influence of India on his work

Kipling’s childhood years in India had a lasting impact on his writing, as he was captivated by the country’s vibrant culture, folklore, and diverse landscape. The sights, sounds, and experiences of his early years in Bombay permeated his work, providing rich and authentic details that set his stories apart. Kipling’s deep connection to India would later serve as the backdrop for some of his most acclaimed works, including The Jungle Book, Kim, and many of his short stories.

Apprenticeship as a journalist

Work at the civil and military gazette.

At the age of 16, Kipling returned to India to work as a journalist at the Civil and Military Gazette, an English-language newspaper in Lahore (now in Pakistan). During his time there, he honed his writing skills and developed a keen eye for observing and capturing the subtleties of human nature. He also began publishing his poetry and short stories in the newspaper, marking the beginning of his literary career.

Work at The Pioneer

In 1887, Kipling moved to Allahabad to work for The Pioneer, another prominent English-language newspaper in India. This new position allowed him to further develop his journalistic and literary skills, while also offering him the opportunity to travel extensively throughout the Indian subcontinent. These experiences further enriched his writing, as he gained invaluable insights into the lives, customs, and struggles of the diverse people who inhabited the region.

Literary Career

Early writings and poetry, departmental ditties (1886).

Kipling’s first collection of verse, Departmental Ditties, was published in 1886. It contained satirical poems that humorously depicted the bureaucracy and daily life of British colonial administration in India. The poems showcased Kipling’s wit and keen observational skills, highlighting the foibles and eccentricities of the characters he encountered during his journalistic career.

Plain Tales from the Hills (1888)

In 1888, Kipling published his first collection of short stories, Plain Tales from the Hills. The stories, initially published in the Civil and Military Gazette, offered a unique glimpse into the lives of British colonial officers, their families, and the local Indian population. Kipling’s vivid descriptions and engaging storytelling made the collection an instant success, both in India and England.

The Barrack-Room Ballads (1892)

In 1892, Kipling released The Barrack-Room Ballads, a collection of poems that captured the experiences of British soldiers in India. Among the most famous of these poems is “Gunga Din,” which tells the story of an Indian water-bearer who bravely saves a British soldier’s life despite facing discrimination and ill-treatment.

Danny Deever

Another notable poem from The Barrack-Room Ballads is “Danny Deever,” which recounts the execution of a British soldier for murdering a fellow comrade. The poem’s somber tone and vivid imagery struck a chord with readers and further demonstrated Kipling’s versatility as a writer.

The Jungle Book (1894) and The Second Jungle Book (1895)

Mowgli’s story.

Kipling’s most famous work, The Jungle Book, was published in 1894, followed by The Second Jungle Book in 1895. The books consist of a series of short stories, with the most well-known centering on Mowgli, a young boy raised by wolves in the Indian jungle. Mowgli’s adventures and encounters with various animals, including the wise panther Bagheera and the villainous tiger Shere Khan, have captivated readers for generations.

Rikki-Tikki-Tavi

Another beloved story from The Jungle Book is “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi,” which tells the tale of a courageous mongoose who protects a human family from two deadly cobras. The story is a testament to Kipling’s ability to create memorable characters and weave engaging tales that transcend time and culture.

Captains Courageous (1897)

Captains Courageous, published in 1897, is a coming-of-age novel that follows the journey of Harvey Cheyne, a spoiled American boy who is transformed through his experiences working on a fishing schooner. The novel showcases Kipling’s talent for capturing the human spirit and the challenges faced by individuals in unique circumstances.

Kim, published in 1901, is Kipling’s most acclaimed novel. Set in colonial India, it tells the story of Kimball O’Hara, a young orphan who becomes embroiled in the “Great Game” of espionage and political intrigue between the British and Russian Empires. The novel is a rich exploration of the complexities of identity, loyalty, and friendship, as well as a vivid portrayal of the Indian subcontinent’s diverse culture and landscape.

Just So Stories (1902)

In 1902, Kipling published the Just So Stories, a collection of imaginative and humorous tales for children that explain how various animals acquired their unique features, such as “How the Leopard Got His Spots” and “The Elephant’s Child.”

Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) and Rewards and Fairies (1910)

Puck of Pook’s Hill, published in 1906, is a collection of short stories and poems centered around the adventures of two English children, Dan and Una, who encounter Puck, a mischievous and wise fairy from ancient English folklore. This collection of short stories introduces the children to a series of historical figures, transporting them through various eras of English history. The stories are woven together with Kipling’s deep love for his country and its rich heritage. Rewards and Fairies, the sequel published in 1910, continues the adventures of Dan and Una with Puck as their guide, providing further insights into England’s history and mythology.

Later writings and poetry

A diversity of creatures (1917).

A Diversity of Creatures, published in 1917, is a collection of short stories and poems that reflect Kipling’s diverse literary interests and talents. The collection includes tales that delve into the human condition, explore the natural world, and touch upon the social and political issues of the time. Some of the notable stories in this collection include “Mary Postgate,” a chilling tale of revenge, and “The Eye of Allah,” which explores the consequences of the discovery of a powerful scientific invention.

Debits and Credits (1926)

Debits and Credits, published in 1926, is another collection of short stories and poems that showcase Kipling’s versatility as a writer. This collection touches on a wide range of themes, from the complexities of human relationships to the moral dilemmas faced by individuals in wartime. The poignant tale “The Gardener,” for instance, tells the story of a woman’s quest to find her nephew’s grave after World War I. These later works by Kipling further demonstrate his ability to captivate readers with his storytelling and to delve deeply into the human experience.

Personal Life

Marriage to caroline balestier.

In 1892, Kipling married Caroline “Carrie” Balestier, the sister of his American publisher and collaborator Wolcott Balestier. Their union was marked by a deep mutual affection and understanding, with Carrie providing the emotional and practical support that Kipling needed to navigate the demands of his literary career. Together, they had three children: Josephine, Elsie, and John.

Life in the United States

Naulakha, their vermont home.

Shortly after their marriage, Kipling and Carrie moved to the United States, where they built a home called “Naulakha” in Dummerston, Vermont. This period in Kipling’s life was marked by both personal happiness and professional success, as he penned some of his most enduring works, including The Jungle Book and Captains Courageous, while enjoying the serenity and beauty of the Vermont countryside.

Relationship with American culture and people

Kipling’s time in the United States allowed him to develop an appreciation for American culture and its people, whom he found to be warm, friendly, and open-hearted. His experiences in America influenced his writing, as he incorporated American themes and characters into his works, such as the protagonist of Captains Courageous. However, Kipling’s relationship with America was not without its challenges, as he faced criticism for his views on imperialism and international politics.

Return to England

Bateman’s, their sussex home.

In 1896, after a legal dispute with Carrie’s brother, the Kiplings decided to return to England. They settled in a 17th-century house called Bateman’s in Burwash, East Sussex, where Kipling found solace and inspiration in the English countryside. Bateman’s would remain their home for the rest of Kipling’s life, serving as a sanctuary where he could write and reflect on the world around him.

Kipling’s later years and friendships

Kipling’s later years were marked by both personal tragedy and professional triumph. He faced the heartbreaking loss of his daughter Josephine to pneumonia in 1899 and his son John in World War I in 1915. Despite these challenges, Kipling continued to write and maintain friendships with notable figures of his time, including fellow authors H.G. Wells and Henry James. As Kipling aged, his literary output slowed, but he remained a respected and influential figure in the world of English literature until his death in 1936.

Literary Achievements and Honors

Nobel prize in literature (1907).

In 1907, Rudyard Kipling was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the first English-language writer to receive this prestigious honor. The Swedish Academy lauded Kipling for his extraordinary narrative gifts and his ability to capture the essence of the human experience in a powerful and vivid manner. The Nobel Prize not only recognized Kipling’s exceptional body of work but also cemented his place as one of the most important literary figures of his time.

Influence on contemporary writers

Kipling’s innovative storytelling, unique characters, and masterful use of language have left an indelible mark on the world of literature. He has influenced countless authors, including Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, and J.R.R. Tolkien, who have drawn inspiration from his vivid descriptions, moral themes, and compelling narratives. Kipling’s work has also been adapted for film, television, and stage, further attesting to the enduring appeal and relevance of his stories.

Criticisms and controversies

Accusations of racism and imperialism.

Despite his significant literary achievements, Kipling’s work has not been without controversy. Critics have accused him of promoting racism and imperialism, particularly in his portrayal of non-European cultures and his endorsement of British colonial rule. Kipling’s famous poem “The White Man’s Burden” has been widely criticized for its paternalistic and condescending tone towards colonized peoples.

Kipling’s response to critics

Kipling was not oblivious to the criticisms of his work and the controversy surrounding his views on race and imperialism. In some instances, he defended his position, arguing that he genuinely believed in the civilizing mission of the British Empire. In other cases, Kipling acknowledged the complexities and contradictions inherent in colonial rule, as evidenced by the nuanced portrayal of characters and situations in works like Kim. While Kipling’s views on race and imperialism remain a subject of debate, his literary contributions and their impact on generations of readers and writers cannot be denied.

Enduring Legacy

Adaptations of kipling’s work, film and television adaptations.

The enduring appeal of Rudyard Kipling’s stories is evident in the numerous film and television adaptations of his work. Among the most famous adaptations are the multiple versions of The Jungle Book, which have captivated audiences worldwide with their engaging characters and memorable songs. Additionally, other works like Kim, Captains Courageous, and Rikki-Tikki-Tavi have been brought to life on screen, introducing Kipling’s stories to new generations of viewers and solidifying his status as a beloved storyteller.

Influence on popular culture

Kipling’s work has also made a significant impact on popular culture, with phrases from his poems and stories becoming part of the common lexicon. For example, the expression “the law of the jungle” is derived from The Jungle Book, while “East is East, and West is West” comes from his poem “The Ballad of East and West.” Kipling’s characters, stories, and themes continue to resonate with contemporary audiences, demonstrating his enduring influence on our collective imagination.

Continued impact on literature

Themes and motifs in kipling’s work.

Kipling’s work is characterized by its exploration of themes such as the complexities of human nature, the struggle for survival, and the moral dilemmas faced by individuals in challenging situations. His stories often feature characters who must navigate the tensions between tradition and modernity, loyalty and betrayal, and duty and desire. These timeless themes continue to inspire and engage readers, while also providing a rich source of study for scholars and critics.

Kipling’s place in the literary canon

Despite the controversies surrounding some aspects of his work, Rudyard Kipling’s place in the literary canon remains secure. His unique storytelling style, evocative descriptions, and memorable characters have made him a towering figure in the world of English literature. Kipling’s work has been analyzed, interpreted, and celebrated for generations, and his influence on subsequent writers is undeniable. As a result, his stories and poems continue to be read, studied, and cherished, ensuring that his literary legacy will endure for years to come.

Rudyard Kipling

Biography of rudyard kipling.

Rudyard Kipling was an English writer and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. He is best known for his poems and stories set in India during the period of British imperial rule.

Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay, India, on 30 December 1865. His father was an artist and teacher. In 1870, Kipling was taken back to England to stay with a foster family in Southsea and then to go to boarding school in Devon. In 1882, he returned to India and worked as a journalist, writing poetry and fiction in his spare time. Books such as 'Plain Tales from the Hills' (1888) gained success in England, and in 1889 Kipling went to live in London.

In 1892, Rudyard Kipling married Caroline Balestier, the sister of an American friend, and the couple moved to Vermont in the United States, where her family lived. Their two daughters were born there and Kipling wrote 'The Jungle Book' (1894). In 1896, a quarrel with his wife's family prompted Kipling to move back to England and he settled with his own family in Sussex. His son John was born in 1897.

By now Rudyard Kipling had become an immensely popular writer and poet for children and adults. His books included 'Stalky and Co.' (1899), 'Kim' (1901) and 'Puck of Pook's Hill' (1906). The 'Just So Stories' (1902) were originally written for his daughter Josephine, who died of pneumonia aged six.

Rudyard Kipling turned down many honours in his lifetime, including a knighthood and the poet laureateship, but in 1907, he accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first English author to be so honoured.

In 1902, Rudyard Kipling bought a 17th century house called Bateman's in East Sussex where he lived for the rest of his life. He also travelled extensively, including repeated trips to South Africa in the winter months.

In 1915, his son, John, went missing in action while serving with the Irish Guards in the Battle of Loos during World War One. Rudyard Kipling had great difficulty accepting his son's death - having played a major role in getting the chronically short-sighted John accepted for military service - and subsequently wrote an account of his regiment, 'The Irish Guards in the Great War'. He also joined the Imperial War Graves Commission and selected the biblical phrase inscribed on many British war memorials: 'Their Name Liveth For Evermore'.

Rudyard Kipling died on 18 January 1936 and is buried at Westminster Abbey.

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Kipling, (joseph) rudyard.

Thomas Pinney
https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/34334
Published in print: 23 September 2004
Published online: 23 September 2004
This version: 07 January 2016
Previous version

(Joseph) Rudyard Kipling ( 1865–1936 )

by Sir Philip Burne-Jones , 1899

Kipling, (Joseph) Rudyard ( 1865–1936 ), writer and poet , was born in Bombay, India, on 30 December 1865, the son of John Lockwood Kipling (1837–1911) , professor of architectural sculpture in the Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy School of Art in Bombay, and his wife, Alice Kipling [ see under Macdonald sisters ]. The name Joseph (never used) was family tradition, elder sons being named Joseph or John in alternation; ‘Rudyard’ came from Lake Rudyard in Staffordshire, where his parents had first met. Both his father and his mother were the children of Methodist ministers, and both quietly rebelled against their evangelical origins. Kipling was brought up in indifference to organized religion; although he always believed in the reality of the spiritual, he never held any religious doctrine. His childish impressions of Muslim, Hindu, and Parsi—he recalled ' little Hindu temples ' with ' dimly-seen, friendly Gods ' ( Kipling , Something of Myself , chap. 1 )—made him more sympathetic to those forms than to the charmless protestantism he afterwards encountered in England.

Early years and education

In 1871 the Kipling family, now including his younger sister Alice (always called Trix ), Rudyard's only sibling, returned to England on leave. On their return to India the parents left their children with people in Southsea, now part of Portsmouth, who had advertised their services in caring for the children of English parents in India. It was a usual practice for the children of the English in India to be thus separated from their parents, but Rudyard and his sister were not prepared for the event. ' We had had no preparation or explanation ', Kipling's sister wrote; ' it was like a double death, or rather, like an avalanche that had swept away everything happy and familiar ' ( Fleming , 171 ). Nor is it known why the parents chose to put them in the hands of paid guardians rather than with one or more members of Alice Kipling's family. One sister was married to Alfred Baldwin , a prosperous manufacturer: their child, about the same age as Rudyard , was Stanley Baldwin , afterwards prime minister; another sister had married Sir Edward Burne-Jones , the painter; a third sister had married Sir Edward Poynter , who became president of the Royal Academy. By 1871 all of these families would have been able and willing to receive the Kipling children.

Instead they went to Southsea, to a house now notorious as the House of Desolation (so-called in Kipling's 'Baa baa, black sheep' ). Kipling was not yet six years old; Trix was three. Here he attended ' a terrible little day-school ' ( Kipling , Something of Myself , chap. 1 ). The woman who cared for them, Mrs Pryse Agar Holloway , is, in Kipling's account of her as Aunty Rosa, a monster. Deliberately cruel and unjust, she tries to set sister against brother, systematically humiliates the young Kipling , allows her son to terrorize him mentally and physically, and denies him simple pleasures. She also introduces a Calvinistic protestantism into Kipling's experience: ' I had never heard of Hell, so I was introduced to it in all its terrors '. He took refuge in reading. One of his punishments was to be compelled to read devotional literature: in this way he acquired a mastery of biblical phrase and image. The Kipling children remained with Mrs Holloway for five and a half years: towards the end of that time, Kipling's eyesight began to fail, and to his other miseries were added ' the nameless terrors of broad daylight that were only coats on pegs after all '. Kipling's mother returned from India in April 1877, and for the rest of the year her children lived with her. At the beginning of the next year Kipling went off to public school; Trix returned to the care of Mrs Holloway .

The truth of Kipling's description of his childhood has been doubted: Mrs Holloway was not cruel but misunderstood by a spoiled, preternaturally imaginative child; 'Baa baa, black sheep' is fiction, not autobiography; or, if autobiography, then shamelessly self-indulgent. And how can one explain Trix's return to Southsea? We cannot now know the facts. The effects of Kipling's abandonment in the House of Desolation upon his psyche, and, in turn, upon his works, continues to be at the centre of biographical and interpretive arguments. Kipling's own judgement was that his sufferings ' drained me of any capacity for real, personal hate for the rest of my days ', a conclusion not generally agreed with. He also thought that the experience contributed to the growth of the artist: ' it demanded constant wariness, the habit of observation, and attendance on moods and tempers ' ( Kipling , Something of Myself , chap. 1 ). If he blamed his parents, that did not appear in his behaviour towards them; he was not merely dutiful and loving but seems genuinely to have admired them both.

Kipling believed that what ' saved ' him during his Southsea ordeal was an annual visit to his aunt, Georgiana Burne-Jones , at The Grange, in Fulham, London, where he ' possessed a paradise ' of ' love and affection ' ( Kipling , Something of Myself , chap. 1 ). He was also much interested at The Grange in the example of his uncle at work and by Burne-Jones's conversations with such friends as William Morris , interests that Kipling's own artist father must have helped to encourage. We know little about Kipling's imaginative development until rather late in his school-days, but the impact of Burne-Jones and of the group to which he belonged, devoted to the highest standards of craftsmanship and to an unembarrassed worship of beauty, must be allowed to have had an important part in forming Kipling .

At the beginning of 1878 Kipling was sent to the United Services College at Westward Ho!, Bideford, north Devon, founded in 1874 by army officers in order to provide an affordable public school for their sons. Most of the students had the army as their goal. The headmaster, Cormell Price , an Oxford graduate, was a friend from early days of both Burne-Jones and of Kipling's mother. The new, raw, impoverished school was an unlikely place, but, after a long period of unhappiness following his entry, Kipling thrived there. For this happy result he always credited Price , whose virtues he magnified in the figure of the Head in Stalky & Co. ; more practically, he remained devoted to Price to the end of his days, helping him financially in his retirement and, after Price's death, acting as a trustee for Price's son. It is now impossible to see Kipling's school-days uncoloured by Stalky & Co. (1899), Kipling's fictional version of his life at Westward Ho! The bare facts that we have are often mildly at variance with Stalky , but the energy of the Stalky version overwhelms all attempts to correct the record. One may safely say that Kipling did make friends with Lionel Dunsterville (Stalky), with G. C. Beresford (M'Turk), was himself a recognizable original for Beetle, and was impressed more than he knew by the example of William Carr Crofts (King) and his passion for Latin literature. He admired Price , was given the run of Price's library, and edited the school paper, revived by Price for the express purpose of allowing Kipling to edit it. He also began to experiment in poetry, the form of literature he loved first and best. The extent and variety of Kipling's precocious exercises in poetry have been made clear in Andrew Rutherford's edition, Early Verse by Rudyard Kipling (1986), which includes fluent imitations of popular ballads, Pope , Keats , Browning , and Swinburne , among many others. In 1881 his parents privately printed a selection of this work under the title Schoolboy Lyrics . Though it was produced without Kipling's knowledge, and though he was embarrassed by it then and afterwards, the book is technically Kipling's first and is now one of the rarissima in his bibliography.

Despite the army flavour of the United Services College, Kipling's interests at the time seem to have been almost wholly literary. His school-days ended in May 1882; an indifferent school record and his parents' lack of means put Oxford and Cambridge out of the question. For a brief time Kipling flirted with the idea of medicine (an admiration for doctors and an interest in the art of healing always remained with him). Kipling's parents were both occasional contributors to the Civil and Military Gazette (CMG) , published in Lahore, where, in 1875, John Lockwood Kipling had been appointed head of both the newly founded Mayo School of Art and of the Lahore Museum. Through his parents' influence with the proprietors of the paper Kipling was offered a position as sub-editor and went to India in September 1882, arriving in Lahore towards the end of October. For the next six years and four months Kipling was to work uninterruptedly on newspapers in India.

Journalist in India

Though he was at first kept to routine editorial work, gradually Kipling began to write more, and more variously, for the paper—verse, an irregular column of local gossip, summaries of official reports, news paragraphs, and the like. In March 1884 he was sent to Patiala to report a state visit of the viceroy, and his success in this trial was such that from that point on the flow of his writing in the CMG is unchecked. The overflow found other outlets. In 1884 he and his sister published a collection of verses titled Echoes , exhibiting English life in India in the form of parodies of standard poets: Kipling's knowledge of American literature appears in his parodies of Emerson , Longfellow , and Joaquin Miller . For Christmas 1885 all four Kiplings published an annual called Quartette , containing such distinguished early work as 'The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes' and 'The Phantom 'Rickshaw' . These exhibit the remarkably precocious maturity— Kipling was not yet twenty when they were written—that prompted Henry James to write of Kipling as a youth who ' has stolen the formidable mask of maturity and rushes about making people jump with the deep sounds, the sportive exaggerations of tone, that issue from its painted lips ' ( James ).

In 1886 Kipling published Departmental Ditties , lightly satirical verses about official life in India reprinted from the CMG . This, which Kipling always regarded as his first book, had a great success among the community it satirized. It also drew a brief, friendly notice from Andrew Lang in London, Kipling's first recognition in England.

As a journalist, Kipling was neither a civil servant nor a military officer, but could move freely among the different levels of Lahore society. The capital of the Punjab, Lahore abounded in high officials. It was also an army post, and Kipling discovered a new pleasure in observing and making friends with the officers and men of the British troops stationed at Fort Lahore and at Mian Mir , the nearby barracks. He wandered through the streets of Lahore at night, and though he claimed afterwards to have seen perhaps more of native life than in fact he did, he certainly paid that life more sympathetic attention than usually allowed to the English in India. In 1886, while still under age, he joined the masonic lodge Hope and Perseverance of Lahore, and was active in its affairs while he remained in Lahore. The prominence of masonic lore and masonic symbolism in Kipling's work from this time on is a recognized critical topic, as is the attraction to fraternal or exclusive organizations (for example Stalky & Co., Soldiers Three, the Seonee Pack, the Janeites) witnessed by his membership in the freemasons.

In November 1887 Kipling , now recognized as one of the best journalists in India, was transferred by his proprietors to their other, larger paper, The Pioneer , of Allahabad. Lahore had been Muslim; Allahabad, on the banks of the Ganges, was Hindu. Kipling made no secret of his preference for the Muslim element in India, a preference only reinforced by his residence in Allahabad. His work now mostly consisted in providing verse or fiction for his paper, or in carrying out special assignments. Kipling now travelled round India to produce the articles collected in From Sea to Sea (1900) as 'Letters of marque' , 'The city of dreadful night' , 'Among the railway folk' , and 'The Giridh coal-fields' , articles that combined the oldest India with the newest one of railways, factories, and other works of the raj. Before he went to Allahabad Kipling had been publishing a series of stories in the CMG under the title 'Plain Tales from the Hills' , the hills being the high foothills of the Himalayas at Simla, the summer capital of British India where Kipling had spent several of his summer leaves. Simla society, with its gossip, jealousies, amours, and other amusements, gave Kipling his material; the 'Plain Tales' were a sort of 'Departmental Ditties' converted to prose and somewhat more serious. In book form Plain Tales from the Hills (1888) was an immediate hit.

Early in 1888 Kipling's proprietors, confident of their star young employee's productive power, made him editor of a new weekly supplement to The Pioneer called the Week's News , which provided a page to be filled each week with a new fiction. Kipling now began to pour out the stories that, collected and reprinted in the series of paperbacks called the Railway Library , made his name in India and, soon enough, in England and America as well. Carrying modestly anonymous illustrated covers drawn by John Lockwood Kipling , the series of volumes—the product of a single year—included Soldiers Three (1888), The Story of the Gadsbys (1888), In Black and White (1889), Under the Deodars (1889), The Phantom 'Rickshaw (1889), and Wee Willie Winkie (1889). This prodigality was no fluke. Kipling , throughout his career, always found more opportunities for fiction and poetry bidding for his attention than he could possibly respond to. As he wrote to his sister late in life, the ideas kept ' rising in the head … one behind the other ' ( Kipling , letter, 8–10 March 1931 ). And so it always was.

Return to England and early fame

India was now too small for Kipling . Before the end of 1888 he had determined to return to England to try his fortunes as a writer, and early in March 1889 he sailed from Calcutta for London. He reversed the usual route and travelled to Singapore, China, and Japan, before crossing the north Pacific to San Francisco and then across the United States. He sent back stories at every stage of his journey to The Pioneer , later collected in From Sea to Sea . His companions on the voyage were Professor and Mrs Alex Hill , friends from Allahabad. Mrs Hill , an American, was more than an ordinary friend; she had been confidante and muse to Kipling and had exercised a strong attraction upon him during the entire period of his life in Allahabad. While staying with her family in Pennsylvania towards the end of his journey Kipling became engaged to her sister, Caroline Taylor . The engagement did not long survive Kipling's return to England, but it is a curious episode in his emotional life, apparently having more to do with his feelings towards Mrs Hill than towards her sister. The articles that Kipling sent back to India during his travels across the Pacific and the Atlantic were typical of his youthful manner—enthusiastic, unrestrained, sometimes tactless, but always striking and vivid. One of them reports his pilgrimage to the greatly admired Mark Twain in upstate New York. On his travels across the American continent Kipling saw reason to confirm his already formed opinion of the United States as an attractive but violent and lawless community. Did he in fact see a man shot dead in a Chinese gambling-hell in San Francisco? No matter. He wrote as though he had. Americans were a people ' without the Law '.

Kipling at last arrived in England early in October 1889, took chambers in London, and almost at once entered into his fame. Some editors already knew his work, or had heard of it; others needed only to see some of it to bid eagerly for it. He had no interval of starving in a garret (nor did he ever have to worry about money) but rather had to defend himself against demands he could not possibly meet. He encountered this sudden success warily: publishers were rascals; editors wanted only to skim one's brains; the public cared only for the latest celebrity, no sooner exalted than cast aside. Kipling was determined that he would have nothing to do with this. He put his literary affairs in the hands of an agent and for the rest of his life had no direct dealings with publishers. He would be identified with no literary clique, and he sought to avoid publicity. He did join the Savile Club, and was gratified by the friendship of such men as Andrew Lang , H. Rider Haggard , Edmund Gosse , Thomas Hardy , and Sir Walter Besant . In the course of his life Kipling would have many other literary and artistic acquaintances— Henry James , for example, whose achievement Kipling fully appreciated—but he did not seek them out, and always seemed to prefer public men or men of action, Theodore Roosevelt or Dr Jameson , for example. A more agreeable side of this stand-offishness was Kipling's resolve never to criticize or to comment in print on the work of his fellow authors, a resolve strictly maintained throughout his life, despite the fact that his private comments and indirect published remarks show him to have been an extremely shrewd judge.

Kipling's return to London at the end of 1889 began a quarter-century of unbroken production of literary work of the highest originality, distinction, and popularity: three novels, four volumes of poems, twelve volumes of stories, including such unclassifiable inventions as the Jungle Books and Puck of Pook's Hill , four volumes of essays and sketches, and much miscellaneous writing, some of it uncollected, came from his pen between 1890 and 1914. It would be difficult to match this record for sustained quantity, variety, and quality in the whole of English literature. Kipling's fame grew immense, and was matched by his sales, which were measured in the millions world-wide and which were never much affected by the chops and changes in his critical reputation.

Kipling's first impact upon a wide public was as the poet of British India, including the British tommy, a subject quite new to most readers. It is likely that, despite all Kipling's varied later work, the Indian association will always come first whenever his name is mentioned. Kipling's ‘imperialism’ did not crystallize until after his return to England, when he saw that the realities of the empire at work were unknown to the people at home; thereafter it was a part of his artistic purpose to give a voice to the administrators, the soldiers, and their women who made the empire function. Two ideas running through his work arise in connection with his imagination of India but are not confined to it: the notion of a ‘law’ that must be obeyed as the condition of human society, and the notion that what we do is set for us by the conditions of our situation—by ‘history’. Thus Kipling's ‘imperialists’ are not swashbuckling conquistadores but men whose work has been laid upon them: in this sense they do not differ from the English at home or from any other historical community. Another theme, not yet much apparent but always present, was that of the occult—of things beyond the grasp of reason but nevertheless powerful. Kipling the man, as opposed to the artist, was hostile to such ideas: he held that his sister's long periods of mental disturbance were partly caused by the ' soul-destroying business of “spiritualism” ' ( Kipling , letter, 3 June 1927 ). Nevertheless, many stories, from the early 'Phantom 'Rickshaw' to the late 'Wish House' , show how strongly Kipling the artist was drawn in that direction. Another marked interest was in giving to every kind of creature a voice—from the dialect of Soldiers Three to the canine speech of Thy Servant a Dog (1930): in doing this, Kipling displays one of the largest vocabularies in English literature.

When Kipling burst upon the public in 1889 he was just about to turn twenty-four. A short, slight man, his notable features were bushy dark eyebrows, penetrating bright blue eyes behind thick spectacles, a full, bristling moustache, and a prominent cleft chin. These made him an easy mark for the caricaturists, the most formidable of them Max Beerbohm , upon whom Kipling long exercised the fascination of abomination. Kipling was beginning to lose his hair at the time he left India, and by the end of the 1890s he was bald on top, a strong contrast to the bushy eyebrows and moustache. He was inordinately fond of tobacco, as was his father, and enjoyed it in cigarettes, cigars, and pipes. Otherwise he was temperate in his habits, though he knew and enjoyed good food and wine until illness denied it to him ( George Saintsbury's Notes on a Cellar-Book is dedicated to Kipling ). Drunkenness he abhorred. His defective eyesight is supposed to have adversely affected his athletic ability, but he at least attempted to play polo and tennis in India. Fishing especially appealed to him, and he seems to have been at least a competent fly-fisherman. His daughter remembered him as ' compact of neatness and energy. He never fumbled, and his gestures were alway expressive ' ( Carrington , 517 ).

Kipling was no ordinary reader, but consumed books of every kind, rapidly and in large numbers. His years of journalism had taught him that no subject was without interest, and he enjoyed forms of print not usually regarded as attractive, including blue books (official government reports). Although a literary traditionalist, who knew English literature thoroughly and French literature well, and who delighted in the Latin of Horace , Kipling read widely in current literature as a matter of course. He claimed to be unmusical, though he was acutely sensitive to metrical form. Painting interested him, as one would expect in a man whose father and two of whose uncles were professional artists, and his own work in illustrating the Just So Stories shows that he had a distinct gift. But he does not seem to have paid any special attention to the graphic arts.

Within the first two years of his entering the London literary life, Kipling produced The Light that Failed (1890), Life's Handicap (1891), The Naulahka (1892, in collaboration with Wolcott Balestier ), Barrack-Room Ballads (1892), and most of the stories collected in Many Inventions (1893); to this one may add Plain Tales from the Hills and the six volumes of the Railway Library , now reprinted from the Indian editions for the British and American public. Readers who had not heard of Kipling at the beginning of 1890 could have a whole shelf of Kipling by the end of 1892. Kipling several times broke down under the strain of his work, a strain complicated by the confusions of his personal life. The engagement to Caroline Taylor ended early in 1890; at the same time he encountered again a woman named Flo Garrard , to whom he had imagined himself engaged when he left England for India and who contributed to the figure of Maisie in The Light that Failed . Kipling renewed his pursuit of Flo Garrard for a time, unsuccessfully.

Marriage and residence in the United States

In August 1891 Kipling set out on a voyage around the southern hemisphere, making his first visit to South Africa and his only visits to New Zealand and Australia. In December he reached Lahore, where he learned of the sudden death of his friend, the American Wolcott Balestier , with whom he had collaborated on the romance called The Naulahka , and to whom Barrack-Room Ballads was dedicated. Kipling immediately left Lahore (he was never to return to India), arrived in London early in January, and at once married Balestier's sister, Caroline (1862–1939) , by special licence on 18 January 1892. This curious story has never been elucidated, and hardly any record survives of the early history of the Balestier – Kipling relation. It has been suggested that the attraction between Wolcott Balestier and Kipling was homosexual, but, if so, it is hard to see how that explains Kipling's marriage to the sister. Kipling and Caroline Balestier had been known to each other since 1890 and there is some reason to think that there had been an understanding between them before Kipling set off on his voyage. Many, but by no means all, of those who knew the Kiplings did not like Mrs Kipling , finding her dictatorial, selfish, and ill-spirited. Whatever others thought, Rudyard and Caroline appear to have been happy in each other and maintained a steady mutual respect and affection through forty-four years of marriage.

They travelled as far as Japan on their wedding-journey, when the failure of Kipling's bank drove them back to Vermont, where Mrs Kipling's family then lived. There they bought property near Brattleboro, built a house, and began a family: Josephine , their first child, was born in 1893, Elsie , their second, in 1896. Kipling flourished in the isolation of Vermont in the citadel of his own house: here he wrote The Jungle Book (1894), The Second Jungle Book (1895), Captains Courageous (1897), and most of the stories collected in The Day's Work (1898); he also published the second collection of his poems, The Seven Seas (1896), mostly written between 1892 and 1896. He hoped in time to write stories about America ( Captains Courageous is a very restricted venture); in the meantime, the subject of India grew steadily less prominent in his work. On his fairly frequent expeditions out of Vermont, Kipling made the acquaintance of a wide range of distinguished Americans, including Charles Eliot Norton , Theodore Roosevelt , Samuel Langley , Henry Adams , and Brander Matthews . Nevertheless, the American episode ended badly. Kipling was much troubled by the anti-English spirit aroused by a border dispute between Britain and Venezuela at the end of 1895. In 1896 he quarrelled with his brother-in-law, Beatty Balestier , had him arrested for threatened violence, and was humiliated in a courtroom hearing. In September the Kiplings left Vermont for England.

After a false start in Devon they settled at The Elms, Rottingdean, Sussex, where the Burne-Joneses also had a house. Here, in August 1897, the Kiplings' last child and only son, John , was born. Early in 1899 Kipling , with some idea of repairing his American relations, took his family to New York; there he and the children fell ill. Josephine and Kipling developed pneumonia, and for many days in February and March Kipling's struggle against death was headline news across the United States. At the crisis of Kipling's illness, Josephine died, unknown to him. Not until June was Kipling strong enough to return to England, never to visit the United States again.

While recuperating Kipling put together the articles in From Sea to Sea (2 vols., 1900), compelled by pirated American editions thus to reprint early work that he would otherwise have left in obscurity. About this time Kipling fought several cases in the American courts, always unsuccessfully, against what he regarded as piratical publishing. Stalky & Co. appeared at the end of 1899; Kim , which Kipling had matured for nearly a decade, in 1901; the Just So Stories , begun as stories for Josephine , were published serially from 1897 and collected in 1902. Kipling called Kim ' a labour of great love ' and thought it ' a bit more wise and temperate than much of my stuff ' ( 15 Jan 1900, Letters , 3.11 ). It is, effectively, his farewell to India, in the form of a romance that has pleased even many of those not disposed to like Kipling's work.

South Africa and England

After his serious illness Kipling was advised to spend his winters out of England. In the winter of 1898 he had taken his family to South Africa, where he had met Rhodes and Milner and had travelled as far as Bulawayo. He now determined to make South Africa his regular winter home, a decision that coincided with the outbreak of the South African War.

From this time until he abandoned it in 1908, South Africa played a large part in Kipling's life. His admiration for Rhodes , Milner , and Jameson was unqualified. In South Africa in the spring of 1900 he was delighted to serve briefly, at Lord Roberts's invitation, on the staff of a paper called The Friend , got out for the troops at Bloemfontein. Two of the journalists he met on the staff, Perceval Landon and H. A. Gwynne , remained lifelong friends. Kipling's one experience of live battle was outside Bloemfontein in March 1900.

South Africa and the war reinvigorated Kipling : ' I'm glad I didn't die last year ', he wrote from Cape Town ( 7 April 1900, Letters , 2.14 ). The experience did him no good with his public, however. The British unpreparedness exposed by the early Boer successes persuaded Kipling and many others that the country needed fresh discipline. Kipling now took up the theme of preparedness through compulsory military service, and his hectoring of the British public on this subject (for example in 'The Islanders' ) alienated many readers. The poems of The Five Nations (1903) and the stories of Traffics and Discoveries (1904) are the main literary memorials of Kipling's South African adventure, but they are not only that. Two stories in the collection— 'They' and 'Mrs. Bathurst' —embody a delicacy of suggestion and a richness of allusion greater, perhaps, than what had been seen in Kipling's work before. They mark out the line of development leading to the great stories of Kipling's last decade. The contrast from this point on in Kipling's life between the stridency of his political views and the wide sympathy of his work shows how little we understand the relations of politics to literature. Unfortunately, much of Kipling's work continues to be judged through a simple connection of the two.

When Kipling and his family returned to Cape Town at the end of 1900 they lived in a house called The Woolsack, built for them by Rhodes in the grounds of his Cape Town estate. Here Kipling and his wife consulted with Rhodes about his scheme for international scholarships at Oxford ( Kipling was later a Rhodes trustee), and here Kipling dreamed about a South African future after Rhodes's ideas, in which a dominant English population would create a golden peace and prosperity. The dreams were shattered by the great Liberal victory in Britain in 1906, followed by the return to responsible government of the Boers. Kipling saw this as the destruction of all that Rhodes had worked for; after a last stay in the winter of 1908 he left, bitterly disappointed, never to return to South Africa.

Kipling now turned to English history on the widest possible basis. In 1902 he bought a seventeenth-century house called Bateman's, Burwash, Sussex, where he spent the rest of his life, and where he made himself master of the traditions and topography of the region (the house is now a Kipling memorial owned by the National Trust ). He was helped in this by the advent of automobile travel, of which he was an early and enthusiastic champion. As he wrote in April 1904,

The chief end of my car is the discovery of England. To me it is a land full of stupefying marvels and mysteries; and a day in the car in an English county is a day in some fairy museum where all the exhibits are alive and real and yet none the less delightfully mixed up with books.

Locomotion always fascinated Kipling , and to stories about ships ( 'The Ship that Found Itself' ) or trains ( '.007' ) or airships in the future ( 'With the Night Mail' ) were now added car stories ( 'Steam Tactics' ). The ' discovery of England ' was embodied in Puck of Pook's Hill (1906) and Rewards and Fairies (1910), supplemented by the poems that Kipling contributed to the History of England (1911), written as a school text by the Oxford historian C. R. L. Fletcher . Actions and Reactions (1909), a very miscellaneous collection, includes stories from 1899 to 1909. Songs from Books (1912) brings together the many poems contained within or accompanying Kipling's stories.

In the first decade of the twentieth century Kipling was at the height of his fame and prestige, notwithstanding the discordant notes that began to be heard during the South African War. In 1907 he toured Canada, preaching the gospel of empire all the more emphatically now that South Africa was lost; his reception was not that of a private person but of a state dignitary, as he crossed and re-crossed the continent in a private rail car. His observations on this occasion appear in Letters to the Family (1908). In 1907 he was awarded honorary degrees by the University of Durham and by Oxford, and at the end of the year he received the Nobel prize for literature, the first English writer to be so distinguished. In the next year Cambridge gave him an honorary degree. Kipling refused all the official honours offered him, including the Order of Merit, because he did not wish to be identified with any government. He was never formally offered the Laureateship, but he would have refused it on the same grounds.

Deeply out of sympathy with the Liberal government, whose ' corruption ' he attacked in the savage verses in 'Gehazi' , and distressed by the social tensions expressed in the great strikes of 1910–12, Kipling saw the struggle over home rule as a test of strength between the forces of preservation and dissolution. When civil war and a rebellion of the army threatened over the fate of Ulster in 1914, Kipling joined the League of the British Covenant , helped to form refugee committees, made an inflammatory speech against the government, and published such passionate verses as 'Ulster' and 'The Covenant' .

The war years

All this was swept away in a moment by the outbreak of the First World War in August. Kipling put his writing entirely at the service of the war effort, as the record of his publication in these years shows: The New Army in Training (1915); France at War (1915), from Kipling's tour as a correspondent in France; The Fringes of the Fleet (1915), on the naval auxiliaries, submarines, and patrols; Sea Warfare (1916), partly written from reports furnished by the Admiralty ; The Eyes of Asia (1918), written from the letters of Indian troops in England; and the series of articles from the Italian front called 'The war in the mountains' (1917), never published separately by Kipling . A Diversity of Creatures (1917) had been planned for publication in October 1914, but postponed: Kipling was careful to date the stories so that they could be seen to be pre-war compositions. The last two stories in the collection— 'Swept and Garnished' and the much-misunderstood 'Mary Postgate' — had obviously been written after the outbreak of the war and needed no dating.

John Kipling , who had been commissioned in the Irish Guards at the outset of the war, had gone to France in August 1915; in September, a month after his eighteenth birthday, he was reported wounded and missing in the battle of Loos. His body was never found in Kipling's lifetime: the grave was identified in 1992. John's death coincided with the onset of Kipling's suffering from the undiagnosed duodenal ulcer that tormented the last twenty years of his life and that at last killed him. Under these afflictions, as the war dragged on, Kipling grew more bitter, his hatred of the Germans more violent. The exhilaration he had felt in the early days of the South African War was now replaced by a melancholy weariness in the face of the war's great destruction. When the armistice came at last he fled to Bateman's from the rejoicing in London: ' I … had my dark hour alone ' ( 18 Nov 1918, Letters , 4.520 ). To the end, Kipling regarded the peace settlement as a betrayal; the conduct of the United States in remaining for so long neutral was an irredeemable dishonour. Kipling's first book to be published after his years in the service of the war were ended was the volume of poems called The Years Between (1919); some of these, from before the war, reflected the turbulent political conflicts of those days; others, recording the experiences of the war, varied from savage to desolate. It is by far the darkest of all Kipling's collections.

After the war

The war remained constantly present to Kipling through two of his activities. He was made a member of the Imperial War Graves Commission in 1917, and served conscientiously until his death. He attended committees, wrote publicity for the commission, chose or composed inscriptions for its memorials, and visited its cemeteries in his travels on the continent and the Near East. In 1917 he also accepted an invitation to write the war history of his son's regiment, the Irish Guards . This work occupied him until 1923, when The Irish Guards in the Great War appeared in two volumes. His only other book in the first years after the war was Letters of Travel (1892–1913) (1920), a collection of travel articles from Kipling's wedding journey in 1892, his Canadian tour of 1907, and his first visit to Egypt in 1913. This, like A Diversity of Creatures , had been planned for publication in 1914 but was deferred by the war.

Kipling worked despite increasing illness, marked by frequent and unpredictable bouts of violent pain. Different doctors made different diagnoses, all of them wrong. In 1921 the diagnosis was ' septic foci of the teeth ', and all of his teeth were removed. In 1922 (he then weighed under 9 stone ) he was operated on for a ' twisted bowel '. Not until 1933 was a duodenal ulcer diagnosed by doctors in Paris, too late to provide any relief. His wife's health was also deteriorating in ways that put much strain on Kipling too: she was rheumatic, diabetic, and depressive. Even before the war she had sought hydropathic treatment in the south of France; from 1915 on they were frequently in Bath for the same purpose. Their travels after the war were largely quests for the warmth that would relieve her pains: Algeria, Spain, Sicily, Egypt, Brazil, the Caribbean, and, especially, the south of France. France was, of all countries, the one that Kipling most enjoyed, and for many years he explored it by car with undiminished pleasure in its people and places.

The Kiplings continued to entertain regularly at Bateman's and to visit London often, where their headquarters were at Brown's Hotel. They were faithful to old friends; by this time, perhaps inevitably, a larger proportion of them were titled, official, or wealthy than had been the case before the war. Many among Kipling's young friends were those he made in his son's regiment, the Irish Guards : one of these, Captain George Bambridge MC , married Kipling's surviving child, Elsie , in 1924. The marriage was childless.

Owing mostly to his ill health, Kipling's production sank in the years between the end of the war and his death. Some of what he published now was not new but a gathering-up of existing work: Land and Sea Tales for Scouts and Guides (1923) includes stories from 1893 to 1923; A Book of Words (1928) collects Kipling's speeches from 1906 to 1927. Some of the speeches, in effect brief essays to be spoken, are highly characteristic and interesting. Most important of the retrospective publications is Verse: Inclusive Edition , in three volumes (1919): this was Kipling's effort to arrange his poetical work, and was followed by one-volume editions in 1927 and 1933. He also began work on the great collected edition of his work published posthumously (though signed by Kipling ) as the Sussex Edition (1937–9). This was planned by Macmillan as a monument to the author who had been a pillar of the firm's prosperity and is one of the most splendid of modern editions.

Kipling , who always liked to give speech to the speechless, and who had always been a dog-lover, combined these inclinations in a series of stories collected as Thy Servant a Dog, Told by Boots (1930). Kipling also took a professional interest in the film adaptations of his work, which went back at least to 1911. In 1921 he worked on scripts from 'The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows' , 'Soldiers Three' , and 'Without Benefit of Clergy' : only the last of these was filmed. He helped develop the script for the unsuccessful One Family produced by the Empire Marketing Board in 1930, and he reviewed the scripts for Captains Courageous and Wee Willie Winkie , both released in 1937, after Kipling's death. If Kipling's production diminished through illness, what he managed to produce was nevertheless of the highest distinction. Debits and Credits (1926) and Limits and Renewals (1932) show Kipling's art in its richest maturity in such stories as 'The Wish House' , 'The Eye of Allah' , 'The Gardener' , 'Dayspring Mishandled' , and 'The Church that was at Antioch' , to name no more. The themes of self-sacrifice, of healing, and of indestructible love are prominent in these.

On 12 January 1936, two weeks after his seventieth birthday, Kipling and his wife were at Brown's Hotel, en route for the south of France, when he was stricken by haemorrhage from a perforated ulcer. Taken to the Middlesex Hospital, he was operated on the next day and died there on 18 January, his wedding anniversary. He was cremated at Golders Green, Middlesex, and the ashes were buried in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey, on 23 January. It was noted that the pallbearers included no literary men but, as his biographer C. E. Carrington put it, ' the Prime Minister, an Admiral, a General, the Master of a Cambridge College, Professor Mackail from Oxford, Sir Fabian Ware , and two old friends H. A. Gwynne and A. P. Watt ' ( p. 506 ). Some months before his death Kipling had begun work on an autobiography. This incomplete work was published posthumously as Something of Myself: for my Friends Known and Unknown (1937).

Kipling's critical reputation—as distinguished from his popularity among readers—has never been very firmly fixed. Even when the novelty and brilliance of his work had dazzled the public at the beginning of the 1890s, there had been doubting and hesitant voices, troubled by the excesses, the ' hooliganism ', the ' vulgarity ' of Kipling's work. His enthusiasm for the English cause in the South African War alienated many, and his constant urging of preparedness grew tedious and offensive, as did his accusations of corruption against the government. Others never reconciled themselves to the disappearance of India from Kipling's stories and poems. And there was certainly some reaction against the mere fact of his prominence: he had begun so early and had become so famous that, in time, a certain weariness of response was inevitable. He was so quotable (more than eighty entries in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations ) that he dwindled into cliché. After the war, when formal experiment was demanded as a necessary sign of belonging to the present, the apparent conventionality of Kipling's stories and poems made him easy to disregard. Among the young, Kipling could be—and was—thought of as a dead author, belonging to a dead order of faith in the empire. When, after the next war, the parts of the empire became independent countries and everything associated with the colonial became anathema, it was remembered that Kipling had admired the colonial idea. To a generation whose critical guides had not led them to read Kipling , this seemed enough to know. The censorship of political correctness habitually barred Kipling from a place among school texts in the United States in the late twentieth century.

The labels that are conventionally attached to Kipling —' imperialist ', ' racist ', ' jingoist '—express a very superficial knowledge of his work, which eludes all labels in its range and variety. There has yet been no writer of short stories in English to challenge his achievement, which ranges through space from India to the home counties, and through time from Stone Age man to the contemporary world of football matches and motor cars. These stories, moreover, exhibit every kind of treatment, from the farcical to the tragic, and their structures vary from the simplest anecdote to the most complex and allusive philosophical fiction, dense enough to support endless exegesis and commentary. He excelled in stories of adventure ( 'The Man who would be King' ), as well as in stories of obscure English life ( 'The Wish House' ). He excelled in historical fiction ( 'The Eye of Allah' ). He excelled in stories for children ( Just So Stories ) and in that kind of story that appeals both to child and adult ( Puck of Pook's Hill ) according, as he said, ' to the shifting light of sex, youth, and experience ' ( Kipling , Something of Myself ). He created a great picaresque romance in Kim . His stories touch the occult at one extreme ( 'A Madonna of the Trenches' ) and the technicalities of modern machinery at the other ( 'The Devil and the Deep Sea' ). No list can begin to exhaust the possibilities. And what may be said of his prose work may apply even more strongly to his poetry, whose extraordinary variety of form and content is only now beginning to be appreciated. Among modern writers in English, only Thomas Hardy can be compared to Kipling for high achievement in both poetry and prose. Kipling's work is not only of the highest artistic excellence, it is deeply humane and fully expresses the sense of one of his favourite texts: ' Praised be Allah for the diversity of his creatures. '

R. Kipling, Something of myself and other autobiographical writings , ed. T. Pinney (1990)
The letters of Rudyard Kipling , ed. T. Pinney, 4 vols. (1990–99)
C. E. Carrington, Rudyard Kipling : his life and work , rev. edn (1978)
Lord Birkenhead, Rudyard Kipling (1978)
R. E. Harbord, ed., The readers' guide to Rudyard Kipling's work , 8 vols. (1961–9)
R. Kipling, Early verse , ed. A. Rutherford (1986)
A. K. Fleming, ‘Some childhood memories of Rudyard Kipling’, Chambers's Journal (March 1939), 168–72
A. K. Fleming, ‘Some childhood memories of Rudyard Kipling’, Chambers's Journal (July 1939), 506–11
R. Kipling, letters, 8–10 March 1931, U. Sussex , Kipling MSS
H. James, ‘Introduction’, Mine own people (1891)
J. M. S. Tompkins, The art of Rudyard Kipling (1959)
R. Kipling, letter to Edith Macdonald, 3 June 1927, U. Sussex , Kipling MSS
Bodl. Oxf. , corresp.
Col. U., Butler Library , corresp. and literary papers
Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, corresp., family corresp., and literary papers
Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, corresp. and literary papers
Harvard U., Houghton L. , corresp. and papers
Hunt. L. , corresp. and literary papers
L. Cong. , corresp. and papers
NL Aus. , corresp.
NRA , corresp. and literary MSS
Princeton University, New Jersey, papers
Ransom HRC , corresp. and literary papers
Syracuse University, New York, George Arents Research Library, corresp. and literary papers
U. Cal., Berkeley, Bancroft Library , corresp.
U. Sussex Library, corresp. and literary papers
University of Rochester, New York, Rush Rhees Library, corresp. and papers
Yale U. , papers
BL , corresp. with Macmillans and corrected proofs, Add. MSS 54940, 55846–55875
BL , corresp. with Society of Authors, Add. MS 56734
Bodl. Oxf. , corresp. with Lady Milner
CKS , corresp. with Lady Milner
Commonwealth War Graves Commission, corresp. and papers relating to Imperial War Graves Commission
Hagley Hall, Hagley, Worcestershire, letters to the Leonard family
Kipling Society, London, letters to J. H. C. Brooking
Magd. Cam. , papers
McGill University, Montreal, McLennan Library, family corresp. with Lockwood and Meta de Forest
Metropolitan Toronto Reference Library, corresp. with James Watson Barry
NMM , letters to Sir Percy Bates
NMM , letters to Leslie Cope–Cornford
Norfolk RO , letters to Sir Henry Rider Haggard
Parl. Arch. , corresp. with Lord Beaverbrook
Parl. Arch. , corresp. with John St Loe Strachey
PRONI , corresp. with Edward Carson
Richmond Local Studies Library, London, corresp. with Douglas Sladen
U. Sussex Library, corresp. and papers relating to school life and friends, in particular George Beresford
U. Sussex Library, letters to L. C. Dunsterville
U. Sussex Library, letters to Harry Lewin
U. Sussex Library, corresp. and literary MSS kept by Miss Parker, his secretary
University of Essex Library, Colchester, letters to Samuel Levi Bensusan
Wisconsin State Historical Society, Madison, corresp. with F. N. Finney
BFINA , home footage
BL Sound and Moving Image Catalogue , recorded talks; performance recordings; documentary recording
Bourne and Shepherd (Simla), photograph, 1887–8, U. Sussex , Kipling papers; repro. in Kipling, Early verse (1986), frontispiece
J. Collier, oils, 1891, Bateman's, Burwash, Sussex
Violet, duchess of Rutland, lithograph, 1891, NPG
D. Strang, etching, 1898 (after W. Strang, 1898), NPG
W. Strang, pencil drawing, 1898, NPG
P. Burne-Jones, oils, 1899, NPG ; copy?, Johannesburg Art Gallery [see illus.]
W. Nicholson, coloured woodcut, 1899, NPG
W. Cushing Loring, pencil drawing, 1901, Athenaeum, London
W. Strang, oils, 1913, Magd. Cam.
photograph, 1913, repro. in The Bookman [NY], 38 (1913)
E. Kapp, chalk drawing, 1914, Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham
H. Manuel, photograph, 1915
W. Stoneman, photograph, 1924, NPG
F. Dodd, chalk drawing, 1929, FM Cam.
F. Dodd, charcoal drawing, 1929, FM Cam.
photograph, 1930, repro. in War writings and poems , Outward bound edition , vol. 34, frontispiece
W. Rothenstein, chalk drawing, 1932, NPG ; related drawing, FM Cam.
W. Stoneman, photograph, 1934, NPG
G. Bingguely-Lejeune, bronze cast of bust, 1936–1937, NPG
M. Beerbohm, caricature, repro. in The poets' corner (1904)
M. Beerbohm, caricature, AM Oxf.
M. Beerbohm, caricature, U. Cal., Berkeley, Bancroft Library
M. Beerbohm, caricature, Harvard TC
M. Beerbohm, caricature, NYPL
M. Beerbohm, caricature, oils ( Edwardian Parade ), U. Texas
H. Furniss, pen-and-ink drawing, NPG
A. P. F. Ritchie, cigarette card, NPG
Spy [L. Ward], lithograph, NPG ; repro. in VF (7 June 1894)
photograph, NPG

Wealth at Death

£121,470 4 s . 0 d .: probate, 6 April 1936, CGPLA Eng. & Wales

View the article for this person in the Dictionary of National Biography archive edition .

Baldwin, Stanley, first Earl Baldwin of Bewdley (1867–1947), prime minister
Dunsterville, Lionel Charles (1865–1946), army officer and literary prototype
Jones, Sir Edward Coley Burne-, first baronet (1833–1898), painter
Kipling, Alice (1837–1910)
Macdonald sisters (act. 1837–1925)
Poynter, Sir Edward John, first baronet (1836–1919), painter and arts administrator

External resources

Bibliography of British and Irish history
Churchill Archive
National Portrait Gallery
National Archives
BBC, In Our Time
English Heritage Blue Plaque
Westminster Abbey, poets' corner
British Pathe
Royal Academy

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Rudyard Kipling: 6 Facts About 'The Jungle Book' Creator

With several adaptions of the book hitting the big screen over the years, take a look at the original classic and its creator:

Kipling wrote The Jungle Book while living in the United States

Kipling had been good friends with American writer and editor Wolcott Balestier, and he ended up marrying Wolcott’s sister Caroline “Carrie” Balestier, in January 1892. The couple bought land from one of her other brothers, Beatty Balestier, in Vermont where they built their dream home, called “The Naulahka.” Naulakha means “jewel beyond price” in Hindi, according to the home’s website . The name is also shared with a book Kipling worked on with Wolcott Balestier.

Becoming a father inspired Kipling to write for children

He had started The Jungle Book around the time he and his wife were expecting their first child together. Daughter Josephine was born in 1892. According to BBC News, he gave her a special copy of The Jungle Book to his daughter, in which he wrote: "This book belongs to Josephine Kipling for whom it was written by her father, May 1894." The Kipling family soon grew to include daughter Elsie, born in 1895, and later son John in 1897. Sadly, Josephine only lived to be 6 years old. Both she and her father came down with pneumonia in 1899, and she ended up succumbing to the illness. Her death left Kipling heartbroken, and he never fully recovered from this tremendous loss.

Baloo and Mowgli in The Jungle Book Photo

Kipling never even visited the jungle mentioned in 'The Jungle Book'

Despite spending years in India, he chose to set his stories in the Seonee jungle (now known as Seoni), an area he’d never visited. Kipling instead drew from the experiences of others. According to Angus Wilson’s The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Works , Kipling saw photographs of this jungle taken by his friends, Aleck and Edmonia “Ted” Hill, and listened to their experiences there. He also likely found inspiration from the works of Robert Armitage Sterndale, including Mammalia of India , according to Martin Seymour-Smith’s Rudyard Kipling: A Biography . Others point to Sterndale’s 1877 book Seonee: Or, Camp Life on the Satpura Range , as an important influence on Kipling’s tales.

Another significant source was likely to be Kipling’s father

The elder Kipling was an illustrator, museum curator and art teacher. He produced Beast and Man in India: A Popular Sketch of Indian Animals in Their Relations with the People , which was published in 1891. John Lockwood Kipling also provided the images for some of his son’s works, including The Jungle Book and the 1901 novel Kim .

Another classic children’s tale, 'Rikki-Tikki-Tavi,' also comes from 'The Jungle Book'

While most remember the Mowgli stories, they, in fact, only make up part of The Jungle Book . And like the Kipling’s tales about Mowgli, “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” explores the relationship between the human world and the animal world. In this case, a mongoose seeks to protect a family of humans from a pair of deadly cobras. This battle of mongoose versus cobras has enjoyed some success outside of The Jungle Book , having been published as a stand-alone picture book several times over the years. “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” was also turned into a 1975 animated short with Hollywood heavyweight Orson Welles voicing one of the cold-hearted cobras.

'The Jungle Book' has inspired countless adaptations

The first live-action film debuted in 1942, but the best-known movie version up until now was the 1967 animated Disney tale. Disney took a lot of license with the original story and transformed it into a feel-good family musical. One of its songs, “The Bare Necessities,” was even nominated for an Academy Award. An interesting mix of actors lent their voices to the project. Sebastian Cabot, best known for the TV show Family Affair , played Bagheera, and bandleader Louis Prima played King Louie of the apes. Phil Harris, who was Baloo, went on to voice another animated bear for Disney, playing Little John in 1973’s Robin Hood .

The voice of Mowgli, however, came from a rookie performer. Bruce Reitherman, the son of the film’s director Wolfgang Reitherman, played the endearing “man cub” in the film. He told the Express newspaper that “The voice of Mowgli required something special, in the sense that he had to be absolutely ordinary. It had to feel like a really average kid.”

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Kipling: a Brief Biography

David cody , associate professor of english, hartwick college.

[ Victorian Web Home —> Authors —> Rudyard Kipling —> Biographical Materials ]

Rudyard Kipling was born on December 30, 1865 at Bombay, India, where his father, John Lockwood Kipling, himself an artist, was principal of the Jeejeebyhoy Art School. His mother, Alice Macdonald Kipling, had three sisters who married well: among his uncles young Rudyard could number not only the famous painters Sir Edward Burne-Jones (one of the most important of the Pre-Raphaelites ) and Sir Edward Poynter but Stanley Baldwin, a future Prime Minister, and all three family connections were to be of great importance in Kipling's life. His early years in India, until he reached the age of six, seem to have been idyllic, but in 1871 the Kipling family returned to England. After six months John and Alice Kipling returned to India , leaving six-year old Rudyard and his three-year-old sister as boarders with the Holloway family in Southsea. During his five years in this foster home he was bullied and physically mistreated, and the experience left him with deep psychological scars and a sense of betrayal.

Between 1878 and 1882 he attended the United Services College at Westward Ho in north Devon. The College was a new and very rough boarding school where, nearsighted and physically frail, he was once again teased and bullied, but where, nevertheless, he developed fierce loyalties and a love of literature.

In 1882 Kipling returned to India, where he spent the next seven years working in various capacities as a journalist and editor and where he began to write about India itself and the Anglo-Indian society which presided over it. His first volume of poetry, Departmental Ditties , was published in 1886, and between 1887 and 1889 he published six volumes of short stories (the first was Plain Tales from the Hills, the first of the "Indian Railway Series") set in and concerned with the India he had come to know and love so well: when he returned to England in 1889 via the United States he found himself already acclaimed as a brilliant young writer. The reissue in London of his "Indian Railway Series" titles, including Soldiers Three, In Black and White , and The Phantom Rickshaw , brought him even greater fame, and in 1890 The Light That Failed , his first novel (which was only modestly successful) also appeared. By the time Barrack-Room Ballads had appeared in 1892, the year Tennyson died, Kipling was an enormous popular and critical success.

Stalky & Co ., which drew heavily upon his experiences at the United Services College, was published in 1899. During the same year Kipling made his last visit to the United States, and was deeply affected by the death of his eldest child, Josephine. Frequently in poor health himself, Kipling would winter in South Africa every year between 1900 and 1908.

In 1902 he bought the house ("Bateman's") in Sussex which would remain his home in England until his death: Sussex itself lies at the center of books like Puck of Pook's Hill and Rewards and Fairies , which, though they are ostensibly for children, concern themselves with the ambiguous sense of historical, national, and racial identity which lay beneath Kipling's Imperialism.

In 1907 Kipling was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but his Imperialist sentiments , which grew stronger as he grew older, put him more and more out of touch with political, social, and moral realities.

In 1915 his son John was killed in action during World War I, and in 1917 he published A Diversity of Creatures , a collection of short stories which included " Mary Postgate ."

Between 1919 and 1932 Kipling travelled intermittently, and continued to publish stories, poems, sketches, and historical works. He died in London on January 18, 1936, just after his seventieth birthday, and was buried (beside T. S. Eliot, oddly enough) in Westminster Abbey. His pallbearers included a prime minister, an admiral, a general, and the head of a Cambridge college. The following year saw the posthumous publication of the autobiographical Something of Myself.

Last modified 11 June 2012

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Rudyard Kipling Biography

by EILeditor · Published April 30, 2024 · Updated November 20, 2023

Rudyard Kipling, c. 1899, New Amsterdam Book Co. From the Library of Congress website, www.loc.gov

Rudyard Kipling, whose full name was Joseph Rudyard Kipling (30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936), 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). 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. His children’s books are classics.

Kipling in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was among the United Kingdom’s most popular writers. Henry James said “Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius, as distinct from fine intelligence, that I have ever known.” 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.

He was also sounded out for the British Poet Laureateship and several times for a knighthood, but declined both. 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. The contrasting views of him continued for much of the 20th century. 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.”

Childhood (1865–1882)

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. Alice (one of the four noted MacDonald sisters) was a vivacious woman, of whom Lord Dufferin would say, “Dullness and Mrs. Kipling cannot exist in the same room.” 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.

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. 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.

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. Although a cottage bears a plaque noting it as his birth site, the original one may have been torn down and replaced decades ago. 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.

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.

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.”

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.”

Education in Britain

Kipling’s days of “strong light and darkness” in Bombay ended when he was five. 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. 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. Kipling referred to the place as “the House of Desolation”.

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.”

Trix fared better at Lorne Lodge; Mrs. Holloway apparently hoped that Trix would eventually marry the Holloways’ son. 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”.

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.”

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). While there, Kipling met and fell in love with Florence Garrard, who was boarding with Trix at Southsea (where Trix had returned). Florence became the model for Maisie in Kipling’s first novel, The Light That Failed (1891).

Return to India

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. His parents lacked the wherewithal to finance him, 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.”

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.”

Early adult life (1882–1914)

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.

The former, which was the newspaper Kipling was to call his “mistress and most true love”, 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.

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.” 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.” 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 . “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.”

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.

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 .

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.

Voyage to London, via Japan and San Francisco

Kipling decided to use the money to move to London, the literary center 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 favorably impressed by Japan, calling its people and ways “gracious folk and fair manners”. 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.

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.” 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 .

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.

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.”

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. 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.”

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.” Kipling then crossed the Atlantic to Liverpool in October 1889. He soon made his début in the London literary world, to great acclaim.

Time in London

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.

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). In 1891, as advised by his doctors, Kipling took another sea voyage, to South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and once again India.

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. Meanwhile, late in 1891, a collection of his short stories on the British in India, Life’s Handicap , was published in London.

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.” The wedding was held at All Souls Church in Langham Place, central London. Henry James gave away the bride.

Move to United States

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. 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.

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.”

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…”

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 .”

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. From his early years in Lahore (1882–87), Kipling had become enamored with the Mughal architecture, especially the Naulakha pavilion situated in Lahore Fort, which eventually inspired the title of his novel as well as the house.

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.” 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.

Life in New England

The writing life in Naulakha was occasionally interrupted by visitors, including his father, who visited soon after his retirement in 1893, and the British writer Arthur Conan Doyle, who brought his golf clubs, stayed for two days, and gave Kipling an extended golf lesson. Kipling seemed to take to golf, occasionally practicing with the local Congregational minister and even playing with red-painted balls when the ground was covered in snow. 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.”

Kipling loved the outdoors, 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.”

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. Although they would always remain loyal to each other, they seemed now to have fallen into set roles. 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.” Later in the same year, he temporarily taught at Bishop’s College School in Quebec, Canada.

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. 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. He wrote in a letter that it felt like being “aimed at with a decanter across a friendly dinner table.” By January 1896, he had decided 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. 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.

Move to Devon, England

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Visits to South Africa

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.

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.

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. At The Friend , he made lifelong friendships with Perceval Landon, H. A. Gwynne, and others. He also wrote articles published more widely expressing his views on the conflict. In addition, Kipling penned an inscription for the Honoured Dead Memorial (Siege memorial) in Kimberley.

In 1897, Kipling moved from Torquay to Rottingdean, near Brighton, East Sussex – first to North End House and then to the Elms. 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. 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).

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 . 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. 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.

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. 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. In another letter at the same time, Kipling described the “unfrei peoples of Central Europe” as living in “the Middle Ages with machine guns”.

Speculative fiction

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, 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 .

Nobel laureate and beyond

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. 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.

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. This exhortation to self-control and stoicism is arguably Kipling’s most famous poem.

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. 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.”

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.

Kipling sympathized 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.

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.” 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”.

Kipling wrote the poem “Ulster” in 1912, reflecting his Unionist politics. Kipling often referred to the Irish Unionists as “our party”. 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.

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. Ulster was first publicly read at an Unionist rally in Belfast, where the largest Union Jack ever made was unfolded.

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.” 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.”

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

According to the English magazine Masonic Illustrated , Kipling became a Freemason in about 1885, before the usual minimum age of 21, 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.

Kipling so loved his Masonic experience that he memorialized its ideals in his poem “The Mother Lodge”, and used the fraternity and its symbols as vital plot devices in his novella The Man Who Would Be King .

First World War (1914–1918)

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 generalized 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.

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 brutalized by a horrific war unleashed by Germany, yet surviving and triumphing in spite of their suffering.

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 civilization against barbarism. 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.”

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. 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.

Kipling had scorn for men who shirked duty in the First World War. In “The New Army in Training” (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.”

Death of John Kipling

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.

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. In 2015, the Commonwealth War Grave Commission confirmed that it had correctly identified the burial place of John Kipling; they record his date of death as 27 September 1915, and that he is buried at St Mary’s A.D.S. Cemetery, Haisnes.

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. 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.

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”.

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. During the war, he wrote a booklet The Fringes of the Fleet containing essays and poems on various nautical subjects of the war. Some of these were set to music by the English composer Edward Elgar.

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.

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.

After the war (1918–1936)

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.

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 skeptical 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. 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. 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.

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”. 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.”

In 1920, Kipling co-founded the Liberty League 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.”

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”, and in other writings, including short-story anthologies such as The Day’s Work , 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. 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”. Similarly, Kipling repeatedly warned against revising the Treaty of Versailles in Germany’s favour, which he predicted would lead to a new world war.

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. 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 unfavorable situation.

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.

In 1924, Kipling was opposed to the Labour government of Ramsay MacDonald as “Bolshevism without bullets”. He believed that Labour was a communist front organization, and “excited orders and instructions from Moscow” would expose Labour as such to the British people. 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”.

Despite his anti-communism, Kipling was popular with Russian readers in the interwar period. Many younger Russian poets and writers, such as Konstantin Simonov, were influenced by him. 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.

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. The ban was lifted in 1941 after Operation Barbarossa, when Britain become a Soviet ally, but imposed again with the Cold War in 1946.

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”. He used the swastika symbol in both right and left-facing forms, and it was in general use by others at the time.

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.”

Once the swastika had become widely associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, Kipling ordered that it should no longer adorn his books. 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.

Kipling scripted the first Royal Christmas Message, delivered via the BBC’s Empire Service by George V in 1932. 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.

The Writer’s Death

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 hemorrhage 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.

Kipling’s body lay 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.”

The pallbearers at the funeral included Kipling’s cousin, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, and the marble casket was covered by a Union Jack. 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.

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Rudyard Kipling

A short biography of rudyard kipling, rudyard kipling’s writing style, major themes, imperialism, masculinity and manhood, war and soldiers’ problems, works of rudyard kipling.

Rudyard Kipling Biography

Birthday: December 30 , 1865 ( Capricorn )

Born In: Mumbai, India

Joseph Rudyard Kipling was an English poet, short story writer and a novelist, chiefly remembered for his works for children and support for British imperialism. Born in British India in the middle of the nineteenth century, he was sent to England at the age of six for his education. Later he returned to India to begin his career as a journalist, but soon gave it up to return to his home country, where he concentrated full time on writing. After his marriage he lived for some years in Vermont, USA, before returning for good to England. He was a prolific writer whose children’s books are revered as classics of children’s literature. It is believed that at one point he was offered poet laureateship and on several occasions considered for knighthood, but he refused them. However, he accepted the Nobel Prize in Literature, which made him the first English writer to receive the honor.

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Also Known As: Joseph Rudyard Kipling

Died At Age: 70

Spouse/Ex-: Caroline Starr Balestier (m. 1892), Caroline Starr Balestier (m. 1892)

father: John Lockwood Kipling

mother: Alice Kipling (née MacDonald)

siblings: Alice Kipling

children: Elsie Kipling, John Kipling, Josephine Kipling

Born Country: England

Quotes By Rudyard Kipling Nobel Laureates In Literature

Died on: January 18 , 1936

place of death: London, England

education: United Services College

awards: 1907 - Nobel Prize in Literature

You wanted to know

When did rudyard kipling write "the jungle book".

Rudyard Kipling wrote "The Jungle Book" in 1894.

What inspired Rudyard Kipling to write "The Man Who Would Be King?"

Rudyard Kipling was inspired to write "The Man Who Would Be King" by his experiences in British India.

What is the significance of the poem "If—?"

The poem "If—" by Rudyard Kipling is known for its timeless wisdom and advice on how to navigate life's challenges with resilience and integrity.

What impact did Rudyard Kipling's travels have on his writing?

Rudyard Kipling's travels to various countries, including India and the United States, greatly influenced his writing by providing him with diverse cultural experiences and perspectives.

How did Rudyard Kipling's views on imperialism influence his work?

Rudyard Kipling's views on imperialism, which were complex and often criticized, are reflected in his works such as "The White Man's Burden" and "Kim."

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Rudyard Kipling had a pet mongoose named Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, which inspired one of his famous short stories.

Kipling was a proficient amateur artist and often illustrated his own works.

He was the first English-language writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1907.

Kipling was known for his love of the outdoors and spent much of his time exploring nature and wildlife.

He had a fascination with languages and was fluent in several, including English, Hindi, and French.

Quotes By Rudyard Kipling | Quote Of The Day | Top 100 Quotes

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Rudyard Kipling Biography

Joseph Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay (now Mumbai), India, on December 30, 1865. His father, John Lockwood Kipling of Yorkshire, England, was a scholar and an artist. The elder Kipling went to India as a professor of architectural sculpture in the Bombay School of Fine Arts and later became curator of the Lahore Museum, which Kipling was to describe meticulously in Kim . He also served as the Bombay correspondent of The Pioneer of Allahabad. In 1891, he published Beast and Man in India with the help of A. P. Watt, his son’s literary agent. The book contains excerpts from Rudyard Kipling’s newspaper reports to the Civil and Military Gazette . The book provided inspiration for Kipling’s Jungle Book stories and several others: “The Mark of the Beast,” “The Finances of the Gods,” and “Moti Guj, Mutineer” are some examples.

Kipling’s mother, Alice Macdonald, was one of five Macdonald sisters, three of whom married into prominent families. Georgina Macdonald married the distinguished Pre-Raphaelite painter Sir Edward Burne-Jones; Agnes Macdonald married another painter, Sir Edward Poynter, who was influential in helping John Kipling obtain a position in India; and a third sister married Alfred Baldwin, the railroad owner, whose son Stanley Baldwin became prime minister of England. Kipling was therefore connected with creative and intellectually stimulating families through his mother, while from his father he inherited a strong Wesleyan tradition.

Rudyard and his sister, Trix, spent the first six years of their lives in India. Surrounded by Indian servants who told them Indian folktales, Kipling absorbed the Indian vocabulary and unconsciously cultivated the habit of thinking in that vocabulary, as illustrated in his short story “Tod’s Amendment.” Kipling recalls these early years in his posthumously published autobiography, Something of Myself , noting how he and his sister had to be reminded constantly to speak English to their parents and that he spoke English “haltingly translated out of the vernacular idiom that one thought and dreamed in.” This contributed to the great facility with which he uses Indian words as part of his writing style. Edmund Wilson, in his essay “The Kipling That Nobody Read,” writes that Kipling even looked like an Indian as a young boy.

Like other Anglo-Indian children who were sent home to England for their education, Kipling and his sister were shipped to London to live with a relative of their father in Southsea. The pain and agony of those six years under the supervision of this sadistic woman in what Kipling calls “the house of desolation” is unflinchingly re-created in the early part of The Light That Failed and in the short story “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep.” According to Wilson, the traumatic experiences of those six years filled Kipling with hatred for the rest of his life.

Kipling studied at the United Services College, a public school for children from families with a military background or with the government civil service. Kipling served as editor of the school newspaper, the United Services College Chronicle , to which he contributed several youthful parodies of poets Robert Browning and Algernon Charles Swinburne. One poem, “Ave Imperatrix,” however, with its note of patriotism and references to England’s destiny to civilize the world, foreshadowed Kipling’s later imperial themes. Although Kipling makes fun of flag-waving in “The Flag of Their Country” (in Stalky and Co ., 1899), he did imbibe some of his imperial tendencies at the school, as there was an almost universal desire among the boys to join either the army or the civil service for the glory of the Empire.

In 1882, when Kipling was sixteen, he returned to India, and his “English years fell away” and never “came back in full strength.” Through his father’s connections, Kipling had no difficulty in becoming assistant editor on the Civil and Military Gazette of Lahore at the age of eighteen....

(The entire page is 1,272 words.)

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Rudyard Kipling
Rudyard Kipling (born December 30, 1865, Bombay [now Mumbai], India—died January 18, 1936, London, England) was an English short-story writer, poet, and novelist chiefly remembered for his celebration of British imperialism, his tales and poems of British soldiers in India, and his tales for children. He received the Nobel Prize for ...
Rudyard Kipling
Joseph Rudyard Kipling (/ ˈ r ʌ d j ər d / RUD-yərd; 30 December 1865 - 18 January 1936) 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 ...
Rudyard Kipling
Rudyard Kipling was born in India in 1865 and educated in England but returned to India in 1882. A decade later, Kipling married Caroline Balestier and settled in Brattleboro, Vermont, where he ...
Rudyard Kipling
Biographical. Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was born in Bombay, but educated in England at the United Services College, Westward Ho, Bideford. In 1882 he returned to India, where he worked for Anglo-Indian newspapers. His literary career began with Departmental Ditties (1886), but subsequently he became chiefly known as a writer of short stories.
Rudyard Kipling
Rudyard Kipling was born in Mumbai and lived with relatives in England between the ages of 6 and 17, when he returned to India. As a child he spoke English, Hindi and Portuguese. ... As a poet, short story writer, journalist and novelist, Rudyard Kipling described the British colonial empire in positive terms, which made his poetry popular in ...
Rudyard Kipling
Rudyard Kipling is one of the best-known of the late Victorian poets and story-tellers. Although he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1907, his political views, which grew more toxic as he aged, have long made him critically unpopular. In the New Yorker, Charles McGrath remarked "Kipling has been variously labelled a colonialist, a jingoist, a racist, an anti-Semite, a misogynist ...
Rudyard Kipling summary
Rudyard Kipling, (born Dec. 30, 1865, Bombay, India—died Jan. 18, 1936, London, Eng.), Indian-born British novelist, short-story writer, and poet.The son of a museum curator, he was reared in England but returned to India as a journalist. He soon became famous for volumes of stories, beginning with Plain Tales from the Hills (1888; including "The Man Who Would Be King"), and later for ...
BBC
Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay, India, on 30 December 1865. His father was an artist and teacher. In 1870, Kipling was taken back to England to stay with a foster family in Southsea and then ...
Biography: Rudyard Kipling
RUDYARD KIPLING. (1865-1936) Born in India where his father taught architecture in Bombay (now Mumbai), Rudyard Kipling always viewed his childhood there as idyllic. In contrast, he always viewed his introduction (even indoctrination) to "superior" British society—by being boarded out for six years to a sea captain living in Southsea—as ...
Rudyard Kipling: Biography
Kipling was a literary giant of the twentieth century, a man whose remarkable range of work captivated not just a nation but an empire. He was the nations laureate, the voice of the people and he became an international superstar. His work continues to fascinate and enchant. 'The Jungle Book' and the famous poem, 'If', remain as popular ...
Rudyard Kipling
Rudyard Kipling Biography. Rudyard Kipling was a British writer best known for his poems, short stories, and stories for children based in British-occupied India where he spent most of his ...
Rudyard Kipling Biography: Life, Achievements, and Legacy
Rudyard Kipling, born on December 30, 1865, in Bombay, India, was an English author, poet, and journalist whose extensive body of work has made him one of the most influential literary figures of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His vivid storytelling and unforgettable characters brought to life the culture and spirit of the British ...
Rudyard Kipling Biography
New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1967. Brief but succinct discussion of Kipling and his writing, including a survey of criticism and a list of the short stories. Kipling, Rudyard. Something of ...
Biography of Rudyard Kipling
Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay, India, on 30 December 1865. His father was an artist and teacher. In 1870, Kipling was taken back to England to stay with a foster family in Southsea and then to go to boarding school in Devon. In 1882, he returned to India and worked as a journalist, writing poetry and fiction in his spare time.
Kipling, (Joseph) Rudyard (1865-1936), writer and poet
Kipling, (Joseph) Rudyard (1865-1936), writer and poet, was born in Bombay, India, on 30 December 1865, the son of John Lockwood Kipling (1837-1911), professor of architectural sculpture in the Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy School of Art in Bombay, and his wife, Alice Kipling [see under Macdonald sisters].The name Joseph (never used) was family tradition, elder sons being named Joseph or John ...
Rudyard Kipling: 6 Facts About 'The Jungle Book' Creator
Published in 1894, Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book proved to be a hit with young and old alike. The Jungle Book's stories of a human boy named Mowgli raised by animals in the wild made for ...
Kipling: a Brief Biography
Between 1919 and 1932 Kipling travelled intermittently, and continued to publish stories, poems, sketches, and historical works. He died in London on January 18, 1936, just after his seventieth birthday, and was buried (beside T. S. Eliot, oddly enough) in Westminster Abbey. His pallbearers included a prime minister, an admiral, a general, and ...
Rudyard Kipling Biography
Rudyard Kipling, whose full name was Joseph Rudyard Kipling (30 December 1865 - 18 January 1936), 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 ...
Rudyard Kipling's Writing Style and Short Biography
Rudyard Kipling was a journalist and one of the most famous English authors and poets during the nineteenth and twentieth century. He was best known for his short stories and poems set in India during the period of British rule over India. He was the first English writer to be awarded a Nobel Prize in 1907 for his powerful observation ...
Rudyard Kipling Biography
Rudyard Kipling Biography (Journalist, Poet & Novelist) Birthday: December 30, 1865 . Born In: Mumbai, India. Advanced Search. Joseph Rudyard Kipling was an English poet, short story writer and a novelist, chiefly remembered for his works for children and support for British imperialism. Born in British India in the middle of the nineteenth ...
Rudyard Kipling
Joseph Rudyard Kipling was born on 30 December 1865 in Bombay (now Mumbai) India, son of Alice née MacDonald (1837-1910) and John Lockwood Kipling (1837-1911) Head of the Department of Architectural Sculpture at the Jejeebhoy School of Art and Industry in Bombay. Some of Kipling's earliest and fondest memories are of his and sister Alice's trips to the bustling fruit market with their ...
Rudyard Kipling Biography
Rudyard Kipling Biography for Just So Stories: Joseph Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay (now Mumbai), India, on December 30, 1865. His father, John Lockwood Kipling of Yorkshire, England, was a scholar and an artist. The elder Kipling went to India as a professor of architectural sculpture in the Bombay School of Fine Arts and later became curator of the Lahore Museum, which Kipling was to ...
Biography of Rudyard Kipling
For more videos about different works of literature and lessons in English, here are the links:Famous Writers and Poets: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL...

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Rudyard Kipling Biography: Life, Achievements, and Legacy

Early Life and Influences

Education and formative experiences

Influence of India on his work

Apprenticeship as a journalist

Work at The Pioneer

Literary Career

Plain Tales from the Hills (1888)

The Barrack-Room Ballads (1892)

Danny Deever

The Jungle Book (1894) and The Second Jungle Book (1895)

Rikki-Tikki-Tavi

Captains Courageous (1897)

Just So Stories (1902)

Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) and Rewards and Fairies (1910)

Later writings and poetry

Debits and Credits (1926)

Personal Life

Life in the United States

Relationship with American culture and people

Return to England

Kipling’s later years and friendships

Literary Achievements and Honors

Influence on contemporary writers

Criticisms and controversies

Kipling’s response to critics

Enduring Legacy

Influence on popular culture

Continued impact on literature

Kipling’s place in the literary canon

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Article contents

(Joseph) Rudyard Kipling ( 1865–1936 )

Early years and education

Journalist in India

Return to England and early fame

Marriage and residence in the United States

South Africa and England

The war years

After the war

Wealth at Death

More on this topic

External resources

Rudyard Kipling: 6 Facts About 'The Jungle Book' Creator

Kipling wrote The Jungle Book while living in the United States

Becoming a father inspired Kipling to write for children

Kipling never even visited the jungle mentioned in 'The Jungle Book'

Another significant source was likely to be Kipling’s father

Another classic children’s tale, 'Rikki-Tikki-Tavi,' also comes from 'The Jungle Book'

'The Jungle Book' has inspired countless adaptations