Some would say that I've written too many posts about Rudyard Kipling already. They include an extensive discussion and a complete-as-I-can-make-it bibliography of his eleven books of short stories for grown-ups; there's also an account of his rather equivocal attitude towards séances and spiritualism in general. I ended up reprinting a revised version of the latter in my 2019 book Ghost Stories.
While it's simple enough to separate his books for adults from the books meant unequivocally for children - The Jungle Book (1894), Stalky & Co. (1899), Just So Stories (1902), Puck of Pook's Hill (1906) - the overlap between the two goes far beyond that. What, for instance, are we to make of 'Captains Courageous', his 1896 novel about the adventures of a spoilt rich kid picked up by a fishing boat off the Grand Banks? Is it a book about a boy, or a book for boys? It depends on how you read it, I suppose.
And then there are the legions of other stories about children scattered throughout his 11 major short story collections. Stories such as "Muhammad Din" (1886) and "They" (1904) are harrowing expressions of sorrow at the loss of a child, clearly not meant for younger readers. But what of a story such as "The Brushwood Boy"? About but not for children, once again, I would have to conclude, despite such enticing features as the hand-drawn map of George Cottar’s dream country.
I remarked in an earlier piece on the children's books of Kipling's younger contemporary John Masefield, that the latter:
was not perhaps so well suited to the form as ... Kipling, who found it the ideal way to convey his somewhat reactionary views without the full apparatus of authoritarianism and militarism which pervades so much of his writing for adults.That's certainly the case with the four books I've mentioned above: the ideas are all there, and readily detectable by adult readers, but they're agreeably disguised and softened for children (though the public school stories in Stalky & Co. test those boundaries almost to breaking point).
The least successful of his efforts in the genre, perhaps for this reason, has to be the little-read Land and Sea Tales for Scouts and Guides. Here Kipling tries to blend his imperial enthusiasms with childish diction, and collects a series of simplistic and condescending stories unpalatable to either interest group. Interestingly enough, I see that the American edition was entitled Land and Sea Tales for Boys and Girls, but that doesn't really help with the central problem.
As for Thy Servant a Dog, in its various editions and expansions, it's hard to know just what audience it was meant for: too allusive for children and too mawkish for grown-ups. Mind you, there's no doubt that Kipling's affection for dogs was entirely whole-hearted, and it's hard not to respect a writer so willing to admit it. As a cat-worshipper myself, I don't really get it, but I can try to empathise by analogy with the superior species.
A good summary of all this can be found in Roger Lancelyn Green's biographical study Kipling and the Children. Though outdated in parts - for example, his insistence that political readings of Kipling's ideology through his writings are no longer viable in the go-ahead 1960s - it remains a good guide to the nuts-and-bolts of Kipling's career as a writer in this form.
I can't resist including this one example of the blatantly racist things you could apparently get away with saying back then, though:
... in India servants were even more plentiful than in England and notoriously apt to 'spoil' the young people committed to their charge, treating them as 'little godlings' and slavishly obeying their every command. Also, with the strange dichotomy of loyalty and selfishness typical of their race [my emphasis], they were in the habit of putting fractious children to sleep quickly by administering opium hidden in a finger-nail - yet another reason for sending children home to England as young as possible. [p. 20]Green appears to have had a number of old Sahib relatives who filled him in on such details of life in the Raj: the "slavish" devotion of the natives to their masters, their "selfish" desire to have a bit of time to themselves, etc. etc. A Passage to India (1924) must have sounded like dangerous radical propaganda to R. L. Green and his rellies ...
Kipling himself begins to seem quite liberal by comparison with these old India hands, which does have the beneficial effect of reminding us just how much of an outsider he always was, in every walk of life he explored. He may have made terrible mistakes: sending his short-sighted son John off to die in the trenches, when he'd already been rejected as medically unfit by both the Army and the Navy, but at least Kipling never tried to dodge the responsibility for his own folly:
If any question why we died,is only one, and not the most bitter, of his heart-wrenching war epitaphs.
Tell them, because our fathers lied.
So it's perhaps not so surprising, after all, that Mowgli, Stalky and Co., The Cat That Walked by Himself, and Puck of Pook's Hill - along with their various friends and rivals - are the only characters among the oh-so-many created by Kipling who seem fated to endure. His multi-layered later stories, and some of his catchier poems will always have their fans, but it's the kid's books which continue to be read - often without any reference to the man who actually wrote them.
The section on the writing of Kipling's "Puck" books is one of the most interesting parts of his self-consciously reticent autobiography, Something of Myself, published posthumously in 1937.
They were a crucial aspect of the very elaborate return from India, America, and the larger Empire to his native England staged by him in the early 1900s - then consolidated with his retreat to the Jacobean manor house Bateman's in rural Sussex after the death of his six-year-old daughter Josephine.
As the National Trust article on the history of the house puts it:
The record of previous owners is not complete and is complicated by stories invented by Kipling ... There is no record of anyone living at Bateman’s called ‘Bateman’.What could be more tempting for a fantasist like Kipling? The first thing he published after moving in was the Just So Stories, written in the wake of his daughter's death. After that, though, the house itself (and its environs) began to intervene:
These things [about the repairs to Bateman's] are detailed that you may understand how, when my cousin, Ambrose Poynter, said to me; ‘Write a yarn about Roman times here,’ I was interested. ‘Write,’ said he, ‘about an old Centurion of the Occupation telling his experiences to his children.’ ‘What is his name?’ I demanded, for I move easiest from a given point. ‘Parnesius,’ said my cousin; and the name stuck in my head ...
Then, it pleased our children to act for us, in the open, what they remembered of A Midsummer-Night’s Dream. Then a friend gave them a real birchbark canoe, drawing at least three inches, in which they went adventuring on the brook. And in a near pasture of the water-meadows lay out an old and unshifting Fairy Ring.Which is not to say that the process was as easy as this makes it sound. Irritating though Kipling's tricksy reminiscences can be at times, they're of considerable value to other writers (though whether the same is true for literary critics, I couldn't say). Here are a couple of those fausses pistes:
You see how patiently the cards were stacked and dealt into my hands? The Old Things of our Valley glided into every aspect of our outdoor works. Earth, Air, Water and People had been — I saw it at last — in full conspiracy to give me ten times as much as I could compass, even if I wrote a complete history of England, as that might have touched or reached our Valley.
I went off at score — not on Parnesius, but a story told in a fog by a petty Baltic pirate, who had brought his galley to Pevensey and, off Beachy Head — where in the War we heard merchant ships being torpedoed — had passed the Roman fleet abandoning Britain to her doom. That tale may have served as a pipe-opener, but one could not see its wood for its trees, so I threw it away.Having tried (and rejected) this method of the echo direct of the past on the present, he tried another approach, à propos of a casual remark of his father's about needing to look up his references "rather more carefully."
This led me on another false scent. I wrote a tale told by Daniel Defoe in a brickyard ... of how he had been sent to stampede King James II, then havering about Thames mouth, out of an England where no party had any use for him. It turned out a painstaken and meritorious piece of work, overloaded with verified references, with about as much feeling to it as a walking-stick. So it also was discarded, with a tale of Doctor Johnson telling the children how he had once thrown his spurs out of a boat in Scotland, to the amazement of one Boswell. Evidently my Daemon would not function in brickyards or schoolrooms. Therefore, like Alice in Wonderland, I turned my back on the whole thing and walked the other way.First it sounded too allusive and indirect, now it was too documentary and referenced. However, by choosing to turn his back on the problem:
... the whole thing set and linked itself. I fell first upon Normans and Saxons. Parnesius came later, directly out of a little wood above the Phoenician forge; and the rest of the tales in Puck of Pook’s Hill followed in order.Not only that, but the freedom of invention allowed him by the idea of having all the stories curated by Shakespeare's "shrewd and knavish sprite" Puck (or Robin Goodfellow) ended up enabling Kipling to make some "prized petty triumphs" of conjecture:
I had put a well into the wall of Pevensey Castle circa A.D. 1100, because I needed it there. Archaeologically, it did not exist till this year (1935) when excavators brought such a well to light. But that I maintain was a reasonable gamble. Self-contained castles must have self-contained water supplies. A longer chance that I took in my Roman tales was when I quartered the Seventh Cohort of the Thirtieth (Ulpia Victrix) Legion on the Wall, and asserted that there Roman troops used arrows against the Picts. The first shot was based on honest ‘research’; the second was legitimate inference. Years after the tale was told, a digging-party on the Wall sent me some heavy four-sided, Roman-made, ‘killing’ arrows found in situ and — most marvellously — a rubbing of a memorial-tablet to the Seventh Cohort of the Thirtieth Legion! Having been brought up in a suspicious school, I suspected a ‘leg-pull’ here, but was assured that the rubbing was perfectly genuine.
Alas, it appears that the "leg-pull" hypothesis is now in the ascendant. Contemporary archaeologists no longer credit the validity of the inscription on this memorial tablet:
The ‘primary’ inscription read ‘Legionis XX V(aleriae) V(ictricis) coh(ors) VII’, ‘the Seventh Cohort of the Twentieth Legion Valeria Victrix (built this)’. The editors comment ‘The first x is a later insertion in Roman times’ ... R. S. Tomlin adds the following:In other words, it is a forgery, but (it would seem) an ancient rather than a modern one. Poor Kipling! Dished again. At least he didn't live to find out ...This stone was found six years after Kipling published Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906), with its centurion of the Seventh Cohort of the Thirtieth Legion. The suspicion that the ‘secondary’ inscription (the inserted X) is modern has been discussed by A. L. F. Rivet in his inaugural lecture, Rudyard Kipling’s Roman Britain: Fact and Fiction (University of Keele, 1976), but he reluctantly accepts it as coincidence.
The account in Something of Myself goes on as follows:
I embarked on Rewards and Fairies — the second book — in two minds. Stories a plenty I had to tell, but how many would be authentic and how many due to ‘induction’? There was moreover the old Law; ‘As soon as you find you can do anything, do something you can’t.’It's hard to imagine a clearer account of just what he was trying to accomplish with these two books: writing for adults in the guise of writing for children, and thus setting a seal on "some aspects of my ‘Imperialistic’ output in the past". I don't know if the latter statement meant that he regretted any of this output, or simply that he felt it had been misunderstood.
My doubt cleared itself with the first tale, ‘Cold Iron,’ which gave me my underwood; ‘What else could I have done?’ — the plinth of all structures. Yet, since the tales had to be read by children, before people realised that they were ‘meant for grown-ups'; and since they had to be a sort of balance to, as well as a seal upon, some aspects of my ‘Imperialistic’ output in the past, I worked the material in three or four overlaid tints and textures, which might or might not reveal themselves according to the shifting light of sex, youth, and experience.
Certainly the later, post-war Kipling, seems to have felt considerable doubts about the extreme ways in which some of his earlier work was interpreted: "The White Man's Burden" (1899), for instance. W. B. Yeats recorded a not dissimilar disquiet in his 1938 poem "The Man and the Echo":
Did that play of mine send outIn any case, whatever Kipling's intentions, most readers of the Puck stories then and since have agreed that:
Certain men the English shot?
It was glorious fun; and I knew it must be very good or very bad because the series turned itself off just as Kim had done.It's not given to many writers to have made additions to that list of immortal characters who continue to fascinate mankind long after the rest of their work has become the preserve of fans and specialists. Count Dracula, Peter Pan, Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan of the Apes ... Mowgli - along with Akela, Bagheera, Baloo, Kaa, Shere Khan, and even the Bandar-log - would certainly have to be counted among their number.
Puck of Pook's Hill and Stalky and Co. are probably now more recondite references, but the Just So Stories are, I think, still widely read. Roger Lancelyn Green's attempt to equate them with the Alice books does point up their limitations, though. They do sound awfully didactic to a modern taste, whereas the most wonderful thing about Alice is that she continues to be subversive more than a century and a half since she first went down that rabbit-hole.
But it's nice to have both. As Alice so sagely observed - and it remains true of the work of both authors - "what is the use of a book ... without pictures or conversations?”
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Children's Books:
- The Jungle Book (1894)
- Mowgli’s Brothers
- Kaa’s Hunting
- ‘Tiger! Tiger!’
- The White Seal
- ‘Rikki-Tikki-Tavi’
- Toomai of the Elephants
- Her Majesty’s Servants
- The Second Jungle Book (1895)
- How Fear Came
- The Miracle of Purun Bhagat
- Letting in the Jungle
- The Undertakers
- The King’s Ankus
- Quiquern
- Red Dog
- The Spring Running
- The Jungle Books. 1894 & 1895. Illustrated by Stuart Tresilian. 1955. London: the Reprint Society, 1956.
- Animal Stories from Rudyard Kipling. Illustrated by Stuart Tresilian. 1932. London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1961.
- All the Mowgli Stories. 1933. St. Martin’s Library. 1961. London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1962.
- The Brushwood Boy (1895)
- The Brushwood Boy. [from The Day's Work, 1898]. Illustrations by F. H. Townsend. 1907. London: Macmillan & Co., Limited, 1914.
- 'Captains Courageous' (1896)
- ‘Captains Courageous’: A Story of the Grand Banks. 1896. Melbourne & London: Macmillan & Company Ltd., 1942.
- Stalky & Co. (1899)
- ‘In Ambush’
- Slaves of the Lamp – Part I
- An Unsavoury Interlude
- The Impressionists
- The Moral Reformers
- A Little Prep.
- The Flag of their Country
- The Last Term
- Slaves of the Lamp, Part II
- The Complete Stalky & Co. (1929)
- ‘Stalky’
- The United Idolaters
- Regulus
- The Propagation of Knowledge
- The Satisfaction of a Gentleman
- Stalky & Co.: Complete. 1899 & 1929. Ed. Isabel Quigley. The World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.
- Kim (1901)
- Kim. 1901. London: Macmillan & Co. Limited, 1940.
- Just So Stories (1902)
- How the Whale got his Throat
- How the Camel got his Hump
- How the Rhinoceros got his Skin
- How the Leopard got his Spots
- The Elephant’s Child
- The Sing-Song of Old Man Kangaroo
- The Beginning of the Armadilloes
- How the First Letter was Written
- How the Alphabet was Made
- The Crab that Played with the Sea
- The Cat that Walked by Himself
- The Butterfly that Stamped
- Just So Stories for Little Children: A Reprint of the First Edition. Illustrated by the Author. 1902. New York: Weathervane Books, 1978.
- Puck of Pook's Hill (1906)
- Weland’s Sword
- Young Men at the Manor
- The Knights of the Joyous Venture
- Old Men at Pevensey
- A Centurion of the Thirtieth
- On the Great Wall
- The Winged Hats
- Hal o’ the Draft
- Dymchurch Flit
- The Treasure and the Law
- Puck of Pook's Hill. 1906. London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1957.
- Rewards and Fairies (1910)
- Cold Iron
- Gloriana
- The Wrong Thing
- Marklake Witches
- The Knife and the Naked Chalk
- Brother Square-Toes
- A Priest in Spite of Himself
- The Conversion of St Wilfrid
- A Doctor of Medicine
- Simple Simon
- The Tree of Justice
- Rewards and Fairies. 1910. Macmillan’s Pocket Kipling. London: Macmillan & Co. Limited, 1920.
- All the Puck Stories. With Illustrations by H. R. Millar & Charles E. Brock, R.I. 1906 & 1910. London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1935.
- Land and Sea Tales for Scouts and Guides (1923)
- Winning the Victoria Cross
- The Way that he Took
- An Unqualified Pilot
- His Gift
- A Flight of Fact
- “Stalky”
- The Burning of the Sarah Sands
- The Parable of Boy Jones
- The Bold ‘Prentice
- The Son of His Father
- An English School
- Land & Sea Tales for Scouts and Guides. 1923. Macmillan’s Pocket Kipling. London: Macmillan & Co. Limited, 1935.
- Thy Servant a Dog, Told by Boots (1930)
- Thy Servant a Dog
- The Great Play Hunt
- Toby Dog
- Thy Servant a Dog, Told by Boots. Illustrated by G. L. Stampa. 1930. London: Macmillan & Co. Limited, 1931.
- 'Thy Servant a Dog' and Other Dog Stories (1938)
- Thy Servant a Dog
- The Great Play Hunt
- Toby Dog
- A Sea Dog
- Teem — a Treasure-Hunter
- 'Thy Servant a Dog' and Other Dog Stories. Illustrated by G. L. Stampa. 1938. London: Macmillan & Co. Limited, 1960.
- Carrington, Charles. Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Work. 1955. London: Macmillan Limited, 1978.
- Green, Roger Lancelyn. Kipling and the Children. London: Elek Books Ltd., 1965.
- Gilbert, Elliot L., ed. “O Beloved Kids”: Rudyard Kipling’s Letters to his Children. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson., 1983.
- Hopkirk, Peter. Quest for Kim: In Search of Kipling's Great Game. Illustrations by Janina Slater. London: John Murray (Publishers) Ltd., 1996.
- Ricketts, Harry. The Unforgiving Minute: A Life of Rudyard Kipling. 1999. Pimlico. London: Random House, 2000.
Rudyard Kipling: All the Puck Stories (1935):Puck of Pook's Hill (1906) & Rewards and Fairies (1911)
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