Rudyard Kipling

Joseph Rudyard Kipling was born on December 30, 1865, in Bombay (now Mumbai), where his father, John Lockwood Kipling, taught at the Jeejeebhoy School of Art ^[1]. His mother, Alice Macdonald, came from a family whose sisters married into notable circles: one became the mother of the future prime minister Stanley Baldwin, another the wife of the painter Edward Burne-Jones ^[2]. The boy's first name honored Lake Rudyard in Staffordshire, where his parents had courted.

His earliest years in India were, by his own later account, warm and full of color. He spoke Hindustani with the household servants before he was fluent in English, and the sounds and markets of Bombay left impressions he drew on for decades ^[1]. That comfort ended abruptly in 1871, when, following the custom of Anglo-Indian families, the five-year-old Rudyard and his younger sister Alice were sent to England and boarded with a foster family in Southsea, near Portsmouth.

Kipling later described the Southsea years as a period of misery and harsh treatment, calling the place the 'House of Desolation' in his memoir Something of Myself ^[3]. The experience surfaced in his story 'Baa Baa, Black Sheep'. In 1878 he entered the United Services College at Westward Ho! in Devon, a school for the sons of military officers. He was too nearsighted for a service career, but the school gave him material for the schoolboy tales later collected as Stalky and Co., and its headmaster encouraged his early writing ^[2].

At sixteen, lacking the funds for a university education, Kipling sailed back to India. In 1882 he joined the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore, where his father now ran the museum and art school, as an assistant editor ^[1]. Journalism trained him fast. He filed copy in punishing heat, learned the workings of the Anglo-Indian administrative world, and roamed the walled city at night gathering the sights that fed his fiction.

His verse collection Departmental Ditties appeared in 1886, and the following year he moved to the larger Pioneer newspaper in Allahabad. Plain Tales from the Hills, published in 1888, collected the short, sharp stories of colonial life he had written for the Gazette, and six paperback story collections followed in quick succession on the Indian Railway Library series ^[2]. These slim volumes traveled home to London ahead of him.

When Kipling reached London in 1889, after a long journey through Burma, Southeast Asia, Japan, and the United States, he found his reputation already made. Critics hailed the young man from India as a startling new voice, and by 1890 he was one of the most talked-about writers in Britain ^[1]. Barrack-Room Ballads (1892), which contained 'Gunga Din', 'Mandalay', and 'Danny Deever', fixed his fame as the poet of the ordinary British soldier, written in a vernacular voice no established poet had attempted with such success ^[4].

Any account of Rudyard Kipling achievements begins with the extraordinary run of the 1890s. In 1892 he married Caroline Balestier, an American, and the couple settled near Brattleboro, Vermont, where Kipling wrote The Jungle Book (1894) and The Second Jungle Book (1895) ^[2]. The Mowgli stories, with their law of the jungle and unforgettable animal figures, became children's classics almost immediately and have never gone out of print. Captains Courageous (1897), a sea story of the Grand Banks fisheries, also came out of the American years.

Kim, published in 1901, is widely judged his finest novel. Following an orphan boy and a Tibetan lama across the Grand Trunk Road while the 'Great Game' of imperial espionage plays out around them, it distilled everything Kipling knew and loved about India ^[1]. The Just So Stories (1902), written for his own children, and the poem 'If-' (published 1910), which polls have repeatedly named among Britain's favorite poems, extended his reach across generations ^[5].

Recognition came at the highest level. In 1907 the Swedish Academy awarded Kipling the Nobel Prize in Literature, citing his powers of observation, originality of imagination, and remarkable talent for narration. He was the first writer in English to receive the prize and, at forty-one, remains the youngest literature laureate ^[6]. He declined a knighthood more than once, along with the post of Poet Laureate, preferring to keep his independence, though he accepted honorary degrees from Oxford, Cambridge, and other universities ^[2].

Kipling was the loudest literary champion of the British Empire at its height, and that allegiance has shaped his reputation ever since. His 1899 poem 'The White Man's Burden', addressed to the United States after its takeover of the Philippines, urged Americans to accept imperial responsibility, and it has become a byword for the racial paternalism of the era ^[4]. Defenders point out that his portraits of Indian characters were often more attentive and affectionate than those of most contemporaries; critics answer that affection never shook his conviction that British rule was right.

He threw himself into public causes. During the South African War (1899 to 1902) he traveled to the Cape, helped produce a newspaper for the troops, and raised funds for soldiers' families with the poem 'The Absent-Minded Beggar' ^[2]. Before 1914 he campaigned against Irish Home Rule and warned insistently about German military ambitions.

George Orwell, in a famous 1942 essay, called Kipling a 'prophet of British imperialism' and morally insensitive, yet conceded that he had added more phrases to the English language than almost any writer of his time ^[7]. That double verdict, distaste for the politics and respect for the craft, has framed most serious criticism since.

Kipling's marriage to Caroline (Carrie) Balestier lasted from January 1892 until his death. They had three children: Josephine, born in 1892, Elsie in 1896, and John in 1897 ^[2]. The family left Vermont in 1896 after a bitter public quarrel between Kipling and his brother-in-law Beatty Balestier, and settled in England, first in Devon and Rottingdean, then from 1902 at Bateman's, a seventeenth-century ironmaster's house in Burwash, East Sussex, now preserved by the National Trust ^[8].

Grief marked the household. Josephine died of pneumonia in New York in 1899, at six, during a family visit in which Kipling himself nearly died of the same illness ^[1]. The loss was one he could barely speak of for the rest of his life.

A heavier blow fell in 1915. His son John, badly nearsighted like his father, had been rejected for military service, and Kipling used his influence to secure the boy a commission in the Irish Guards. John was killed at the Battle of Loos in September 1915, aged eighteen, and his body was not identified in his father's lifetime ^[5]. Kipling afterward served on the Imperial War Graves Commission, choosing the biblical phrase 'Their Name Liveth For Evermore' for memorial stones and the words 'Known unto God' for the graves of unidentified soldiers ^[8]. He also wrote a two-volume history of his son's regiment, The Irish Guards in the Great War (1923).

The postwar decades were quieter and darker. Kipling's popularity with critics had faded even as ordinary readers kept buying his books, and the modernist generation regarded him as a relic of empire ^[4]. His later story collections, including Debits and Credits (1926) and Limits and Renewals (1932), turned inward, dealing with grief, healing, and psychological strain, and some critics now rank these late tales among his subtlest work ^[2].

His health declined through the 1920s and 1930s. He suffered for years from undiagnosed duodenal ulcers, which caused him chronic pain long attributed to other causes ^[1]. He continued to write and to warn publicly about the rise of Nazi Germany; he had used an ancient Indian sun symbol on many of his book covers for decades and ordered it removed once the Nazis adopted the swastika ^[5].

Kipling died in London on January 18, 1936, two days after a hemorrhage from a perforated ulcer, and just two days before the death of King George V ^[1]. His ashes were buried in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey, beside the graves of Dickens and Hardy. His unfinished autobiography, Something of Myself, appeared posthumously in 1937 ^[3].

Few writers have left as many phrases in everyday English. 'East is East, and West is West', 'the female of the species', 'the white man's burden': all entered common speech from his pen ^[7]. The Jungle Book alone has generated a continuous stream of adaptations, from Disney's 1967 animated film to later live-action versions, and Mowgli's stories shaped the imagery and terminology of the worldwide Scouting movement, whose founder Robert Baden-Powell was Kipling's friend ^[5].

A reliable Rudyard Kipling biography must hold two truths at once. The scale of the achievement is not in dispute: a Nobel Prize, children's classics of permanent standing, a novel in Kim that historians of the British in India still mine, and short stories that Henry James and later critics admired for their compression and technique ^[2]. At the same time, postcolonial scholarship reads him as the most gifted spokesman of an empire built on conquest, and debates about how to teach and commemorate him continue in Britain and India alike ^[4].

Among the plain Rudyard Kipling facts that anchor his story: born in Bombay in 1865, famous before twenty-five, Nobel laureate at forty-one, bereaved of two children, dead at seventy in 1936. Bateman's, his Sussex home, receives thousands of visitors each year, his study kept as he left it ^[8]. Readers keep returning, some for the music of the verse, some to argue with the man, which may be the surest sign that his work is still alive.