Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein

Guillermo del Toro, dir. Frankenstein (2025)

In an earlier piece on Mary Shelley, I discussed Brian Aldiss's suggestion that she should be regarded as the founder of the modern genre of Science Fiction. The appearance of this new film by horror maestro Guillermo del Toro offers a chance to reexamine the question from a rather different angle.

What exactly is Frankenstein?

Leslie Klinger, ed. The New Annotated Frankenstein. Introduction by Guillermo del Toro (2017)

Well, on the surface, it's clearly a Gothic novel written in the mode pioneered by William Beckford (Vathek, 1786); Ann Radcliffe (The Mysteries of Udolpho, 1794); Matthew "Monk" Lewis (The Monk, 1796), and many, many others - including Mary Shelley's own husband Percy, who'd published two such romances as a schoolboy: Zastrozzi (1810) and St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian (1811).

But if that were all it is, then Frankenstein would presumably have long since achieved honourable oblivion along with most of the other specimens of the genus: except, of course, for Jane Austen's lively satire Northanger Abbey - written in 1799, but not published (posthumously) until 1817.

Guillermo del Toro's own work is (according to Wikipedia):

characterized by a strong connection to fairy tales, gothicism and horror, often blending the genres, with an effort to infuse visual or poetic beauty in the grotesque.

That list of influences - fairy tales, gothicism and horror - is certainly vital when it comes to defining his approach to Frankenstein.

•

Anon.: Frontispiece to Frankenstein (1831)

As far as Horror goes, Shelley's monster certainly has a far worse temper than del Toro's. He kills Victor Frankenstein's young brother William, his friend Henry Clerval, and Victor's bride Elizabeth Lavenza on their wedding night. Worse than that, he contrives to frame a faithful family servant for the murder of little William. Despite his suspicions, Victor doesn't try to prevent her execution for the crime.

Jacob Elordi as the Creature

Del Toro's monster, by contrast, is a gentle pastoralist and an innocent victim of circumstances. He's constantly being blamed for murders he didn't commit, and even when Victor tries to kill him with a pistol - and instead ends up shooting his brother's bride in the stomach - Victor still manages to read this as somehow the monster's fault.

There's an inordinate amount of shooting in del Toro's film, in fact. Hunters, villagers, sailors - all seem to have loaded muskets ready to fire at the drop of a hat. Shelley herself is more sparing with the special effects, so the one significant exception - when the monster is shot by the father of a young girl he's just saved from drowning - has far more resonance.

Guillermo del Toro, dir.: Frankenstein (2025)

•

Ken Russell, dir. Gothic (1986)

When it comes to Gothic, it's important to remember that despite our associations with clanking chains and gloomy old castles, it's a far more varied genre than one might have expected.

Yes, it's a repository for dream imagery and extreme emotions: the repressed unconscious of the Age of Reason. But it's also associated with hidden knowledge and forbidden lore. One of Percy Shelley's novellas was about a Rosicrucian. Mary Shelley's own introduction to the 1831 revised edition of her novel (the first to include her name as its author) sums up perfectly the fusion of these ideas:

I saw - with shut eyes, but acute mental vision - I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.

It's phrases such as "unhallowed arts" and "mocking the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world" which stand out here, rather than the scientific trappings with which she also adorns her story: for instance, "the experiments of Dr. Darwin, ... who preserved a piece of vermicelli in a glass case, till by some extraordinary means it began to move with voluntary motion."

Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth.

It's worth noting that the word "scientist" was not yet in common use. "Natural Philosopher" was the only description readily to hand. Mary herself appears to prefer the term "artist":

His success would terrify the artist; he would rush away from his odious handywork, horror-stricken. He would hope that, left to itself, the slight spark of life which he had communicated would fade; that this thing, which had received such imperfect animation, would subside into dead matter; and he might sleep in the belief that the silence of the grave would quench for ever the transient existence of the hideous corpse which he had looked upon as the cradle of life. He sleeps; but he is awakened; he opens his eyes; behold the horrid thing stands at his bedside, opening his curtains, and looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes.

Brrr! That Mary Shelley certainly could write. I love that description of the thing's "yellow, watery, but speculative eyes" ... Not only was her story conceived in a dream, but her intention here - and in other passages - seems to be to recall the atmosphere of a nightmare.

Henry Fuseli: The Nightmare (1790=-91)

So don't be too misled by the affectionate parody behind Jane Austen's famous list of "horrid novels" in chapter six of Northanger Abbey:

"... Castle of Wolfenbach, Clermont, Mysterious Warnings, Necromancer of the Black Forest, Midnight Bell, Orphan of the Rhine, and Horrid Mysteries. Those will last us some time.”
“Yes, pretty well; but are they all horrid, are you sure they are all horrid?”

Not only are they "horrid", but they're also quite real. The Folio Society published a box-set of all seven in 1968, and followed it up a few years later with an edition of Ann Radcliffe's six novels in the same vein.

The Northanger Set of the Seven Horrid Novels (1968)

•

Richard Dadd: The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke (1855-64)

Which brings us to fairy tales. There was a time when this term would have led us to visualise dew-sipping flower-fairies with diaphanous wings - the Cottingley Fairy photographs, for instance, along with the literature which inspired them.

Ever since the appearance of J. R. R. Tolkien's influential essay "On Fairy-stories" in 1947, however - reprinted in Tree and Leaf in 1964 - the concept of Faerie as a destination, rather than simply a species of diminutive, supernatural creatures, has transformed our approach to the subject.

J. R. R. Tolkien: On Fairy-stories (2008)

The statement in Wikipedia's Guillermo del Toro article that:

He has had a lifelong fascination with monsters, which he considers symbols of great power

applies, then, just as much to his interest in fairy-stories as it does to his taste for Gothic horror.

Fairy-stories, after all (whether traditional or literary) generally embody some kind of quest, and thus have a tendency to reenact Vladimir Propp's classic breakdown of the narrative structure of a folktale:

Vladimir Propp: The Functions of Folktales (1928)

Frankenstein's Monster is far from a conventional Fairy-tale hero, but he certainly has his avatars in the folktale tradition. He's a kind of holy innocent (or, if you prefer, Rousseau-istic noble savage). Both Boris Karloff (in James Whale's classic Frankenstein of 1931) and Jacob Elordi (in del Toro's film) play him as a creature whose innate good nature is gradually corrupted by the brutality and suspicion which surround him - not to mention Victor's primal act of abandonment of his own, self-created child.

James Whale, dir.: Frankenstein (1931)

Guillermo del Toro, dir.: Frankenstein (2025)

It's this aspect of the monster which transforms Mary Shelley's gothic novel into a more potent myth of despair and redemption. Anticipating Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by almost a century, she reverses the positions of Monster and Creator. It's Victor who's the real monster, in virtually every version of the story.

Víctor Erice, dir.: The Spirit of the Beehive (1973)

It's for this reason that, in Víctor Erice's Spanish Civil War film El espíritu de la colmena [Spirit of the Beehive] - a masterpiece which del Toro constantly references in his own work (either directly, as in Pan's Labyrinth, or indirectly, as in the elven scenes of The Golden Army) - it's the Spirit embodied in Frankenstein's Monster who inspires the little girl to try to help a wounded Republican soldier.

Another avatar exerting a strong influence over del Toro's film is David Lynch's Elephant Man - in particular the scene where John Hurt, playing the monster, is cornered in a public lavatory by a crowd of angry townies, and quells them with a speech which Jacob Elordi seems, at times, on the verge of uttering in propria persona.

David Lynch, dir.: The Elephant Man (1980)

•

Guillermo del Toro, dir. Pan's Labyrinth (2006)

Does all of this help? This labyrinth of references, this visual library of clues, this invocation of the great symbolic performances of the past?

I'm inclined, much against my will, to conclude not. Jacob Elordi's performance as the monster is flawless and intuitive. He stands with any of the other greats who've inhabited the role. The sublime Mia Goth, too, brings an unexpected breath of fresh air to an otherwise emotionally claustrophobic film.

Two faces of Mia Goth

There's so much to admire in Guillermo del Toro's film! And yet it's not, in the end, particularly likeable. It dissolves into a series of amazing set and character designs. Unlike James Whale's twin masterpieces, Frankenstein (1931) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935), del Toro's version lacks the humorous exuberance of his own two almost criminally entrancing Hellboy movies.

And yet I'm sure that I'll watch it again - if only to savour Elordi and Goth at work - and, more importantly, I feel that it's helped to enhance my appreciation of Mary Shelley's genius. That her novel can still be such a source of inspiration two hundred years after it was first written is in itself astonishing.

Under the circumstances, it's hardly surprising that the most potent image left to us by all this plethora of Frankensteins large and small is that of a hastily married, recently bereaved young woman scratching away with a quill-pen in a villa by Lake Geneva, halfway through the notorious year without a summer, 1816.

Emma Jensen: Mary Shelley (2018)

•

Guillermo del Toro (2025)

Guillermo del Toro Gómez
(1964- )

Film:

Director & Writer:

1. Doña Lupe [short film] (1985)
2. Geometría [short film] (1987)
3. Cronos (1992)
4. Mimic (1997)
5. El espinazo del diablo [The Devil's Backbone] (2001)
6. Hellboy (2004)
   • Hellboy, dir. & writ. Guillermo del Toro – with Ron Perlman, Selma Blair, Karel Roden, Rupert Evans, Jeffrey Tambor, John Hurt – (USA, 2004)
7. El laberinto del fauno [Pan's Labyrinth] (2006)
   • Pan’s Labyrinth, writ. & dir. Guillermo del Toro – with Sergi López, Maribel Verdú, Ivana Baquero – (Spain / Mexico, 2006)
8. Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008)
   • Hellboy II: The Golden Army, dir. & writ. Guillermo del Toro – with Ron Perlman, Selma Blair, Doug Jones, Jeffrey Tambor, John Hurt – (USA, 2008)
9. Pacific Rim (2013)
10. Crimson Peak (2015)
11. The Shape of Water (2017)
12. Nightmare Alley (2021)
13. [with Mark Gustafson] Pinocchio (2022)
14. Frankenstein (2026)

Director:

15. Blade II (2002)

Writer:

16. Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (2010)
17. [co-written] The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012)
    • The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (Extended DVD Edition), dir. Peter Jackson, writ. Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson, Guillermo del Toro (based on the novel by J. R. R. Tolkien) – with Ian McKellen, Martin Freeman, Richard Armitage, James Nesbitt, Ken Stott, Sylvester McCoy, Cate Blanchett, Ian Holm, Christopher Lee, Hugo Weaving, Elijah Wood, Andy Serkis – (NZ/USA, 2012)
18. [co-written] The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013)
    • The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (Extended DVD Edition), dir. Peter Jackson, writ. Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson, Guillermo del Toro (based on the novel by J. R. R. Tolkien) – with Ian McKellen, Martin Freeman, Richard Armitage, James Nesbitt, Ken Stott, Sylvester McCoy, Cate Blanchett, Ian Holm, Christopher Lee, Hugo Weaving, Elijah Wood, Andy Serkis – (NZ/USA, 2013)
19. [co-written] The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014)
    • The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (Extended DVD Edition), dir. Peter Jackson, writ. Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson, Guillermo del Toro (based on the novel by J. R. R. Tolkien) – with Ian McKellen, Martin Freeman, Richard Armitage, James Nesbitt, Ken Stott, Sylvester McCoy, Cate Blanchett, Ian Holm, Christopher Lee, Hugo Weaving, Elijah Wood, Andy Serkis – (NZ/USA, 2014)
20. [story] Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019)
21. The Witches (2020)
22. Trollhunters: Rise of the Titans (2021)

Producer:

23. Un embrujo (1998)
24. Crónicas (2004)
25. Insignificant Things (2008)
26. Rudo y Cursi (2008)
27. Rabia (2009)
28. Julia's Eyes (2010)
29. The Book of Life (2014)
30. Pacific Rim Uprising (2018)
31. Antlers (2021)
32. The Boy in the Iron Box (TBA)

Executive producer:

33. Dona Herlinda and Her Son (1985)
34. The Orphanage (2007)
35. While She Was Out (2008)
36. Splice (2009)
37. Puss in Boots (2011)
38. The Captured Bird [short film] (2012)
39. Rise of the Guardians (2012)
40. Mama (2013)
41. Kung Fu Panda 3 (2016)

Television:


42. La hora marcada (1986–1989)

    Wrote & directed episodes "Hamburguesas", "Caminos de ayer", "Con todo para llevar" & "Invasión"; directed "Les gourmets"

43. The Simpsons (2013)

    Opening sequence of episode "Treehouse of Horror XXIV"

44. The Strain (2014–2017)

    Wrote & directed episode "Night Zero"; directed prologue of episode "BK, NY"; directed Luchador sequence in episode "The Silver Angel"

45. Trollhunters: Tales of Arcadia (2016–2018)

    Wrote & directed episodes "Becoming: Part 1 & 2"; directed episodes "The Eternal Knight: Part 1 & 2"

46. 3Below: Tales of Arcadia (2018–2019)

    Wrote & directed episodes "Terra Incognita: Part 1 & 2"

47. Carnival Row (2019)

    Original story

48. Wizards: Tales of Arcadia (2020)

    Wrote episodes "Spellbound" & "History in the Making"

49. Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities (2022)

    Showrunner; wrote episode "Lot 36"; wrote story of episode "The Murmuring"


Video games:


50. [writer & voiceover director] Hellboy: The Science of Evil (2008)
51. [director] P.T. (2014)
52. [character likeness]] Death Stranding (2019)
53. [writer & producer] Trollhunters: Defenders of Arcadia (2020)
54. [character likeness] Death Stranding 2: On the Beach (2025)

Books:


55. Alfred Hitchcock (1990)
56. La invención de Cronos (1992)
57. Hellboy: The Golden Army Comic (2008)
58. Hellboy II: The Art of the Movie (2008)
59. The Monsters of Hellboy II (2008)
60. The Strain [novel] (2009)
61. The Fall [novel] (2010)
62. Don't Be Afraid of the Dark: Blackwood's Guide to Dangerous Fairies (2011)
63. The Night Eternal [novel] (2011)
64. Cabinet of Curiosities: My Notebooks, Collections, and Other Obsessions (2013)
    • Cabinet of Curiosities: My Notebooks, Collections, and Other Obsessions. Ed. Marc Scott Zicree. Foreword by James Cameron. Contributions by Tom Cruise, Alfonso Cuaron, Cornelia Funke, Neil Gaiman, John Landis, Mike Mignola, Ron Perlman & Adam Savage. An Insight Editions Book. Harper Design. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2013.
65. [with Daniel Kraus] Trollhunters (2015)
66. The Shape of Water (2018)
67. At Home With Monsters (2019)
68. Pan's Labyrinth: The Labyrinth of the Faun (2019)
69. The Hollow Ones (2020)
70. The Boy in the Iron Box Series (2024)

•

Josef Astor: Guillermo del Toro's Movie Monsters (2011)

•

Bibliomania

Rebecca Rego Barry: Rare Books Uncovered (2015)

Rebecca Rego Barry. Rare Books Uncovered: True Stories of Fantastic Finds in Unlikely Places. Foreword by Nicholas A. Basbanes. Voyageur Press. Minneapolis, MN: Quarto Publishing Group USA Inc., 2015.

It's always a bit difficult to explain the appeal of your particular fetish objects to those who don't share that passion. Why, for instance, do I find myself perking up with excitement every time I see a shop-window full of mouldy old books?

Others presumably feel the same when they spot a fine piece of pottery, or an old Meccano set, or a 1930s propaganda poster - and I'm guessing that each of those passions has earned its own name by now. Bibliophilia is the usual term for my own illness. When you've really let yourself go, though, I think it's appropriate to take it up a notch and call it bibliomania.

Recently I bought a copy of the book above from one of the few remaining second-hand bookshops left in Auckland, the Hospice Bookshop in Birkenhead.

Rebecca Rego Barry (1976- )

Its author, Rebecca Rego Barry, has collected together a series of anecdotes from booksellers and collectors about the most remarkable finds they've made in the course of their careers. Catnip to the likes of me, one might have thought.

Actually I'd have to admit that most of the stories are a bit on the underwhelming side: barn-found volumes of botanical prints, or obscure editions of Vitruvius discovered under a heap of old comics at a garage sale. Nevertheless, I dutifully read it from cover to cover: it was like hearing the distant voices of my own kind, fellow sufferers from this most inconvenient of ailments.

Why inconvenient? Well, because books - especially in large numbers - are so bulky, and heavy, and unwieldy; and so subject to damp, heat, insects, and a variety of other ills.

John Fenton

When it comes to the question of thinning out your collection, I thought I might share a few insights from my friend John Fenton's recent article "Lost Libraries — Biblioclasm: a deadly sin" in the Christchurch literary journal takahē. His essay touches on a number of angles to do with books, book-collecting, libraries, storage, and - what interests me most here - dispersal:

All ageing book collectors are forced to confront the mortality of their libraries, and the inevitability that most of these libraries will die with them ... Yet there is nothing that brings on the cold sweats in a bibliophile more than the realisation that their precious library, one that has been amassed over a lifetime, might soon be tipped into a landfill. There are surprisingly few antiquarian booksellers left in my city, and so the rats wait patiently for the day when they can nest in an association copy of a rare first edition ...

A friend once told me that he often lay awake at night, the prospect of his collection being disbursed to philistines too much for him to bear, or at least to allow peaceful slumber. I didn’t tell him, but the prospect is worse than that. Many of those beloved books are more than likely to end up in a skip. He was worried that a sharp-eyed antiquarian bookseller would obtain his best books for a pittance and sell them on at a huge profit. My fear is more aligned with reality. That a buyer or an auction house would be shown the collection, select one or two, and declare the rest unsellable. Books should be read. The idea of a book-dealer making a killing at my expense is of little concern, so long as the books are read and loved.

takahē 115 (2025)

I feel your pain, John - but at least you can contemplate spending your twilight years in the house you now own. We don't have that luxury. And when Bronwyn and I are forced to move, as we eventually will be, grim reality really will set in. We know not the day nor the hour, but still it will come.

John's account of the various possible ways of dispersing a large private collection is particularly relevant to this dilemma:

Having more books than I could accommodate, I knew the day of reckoning was here; it was time for a serious book purge. I needed a nudge to get started, and the nudge came when family members paid for a nice built-in bookcase. It was not easy sorting the books into ‘keep’ or ‘sell’ piles, but I did so, worried about the burden my children would face if I neglected the task ...

As I thinned, I loaded quite a few into rubbish sacks and paid a junk collector to take them away. He assured me that he would re-home as many as possible to care homes. Others were just binned — the dismembered and the commonplace. I had become a biblioclast.

I had also set aside what I thought were the more saleable discard items. I loaded them into my car and visited a few second-hand and antiquarian booksellers. There are very few remaining in Auckland, and those that remain face the same storage problems I do. One shook his head sadly at the sight of my boxes and rejected most of them. The ‘baby boomers,’ according to him, are the last book-collecting generation. His shop and the containers behind his shop were stacked with boomers’ collections. He had reached his limit. The second buyer I approached was closing down; now, a few months later, both are gone ... All that remains is the drawn-out hassle of selling piecemeal on TradeMe or eBay.

Bronwyn Lloyd: Jack the Book Maniac (December 2019)

I presume that the picture above speaks for itself. It's from a post called "Seven Stages of Book Collecting", one of many I've devoted to the subject in the past. It dates from a time when I was revising the purely geographical aspect of my bibliography blog. I'd already listed all the books I owned. Now it was time to map just where they were: on what shelf of what bookcase in what room.

Having already compiled such exhaustive data on this collection should surely make it easier for me to work out what should stay and what should go. Strangely enough, it doesn't. I don't keep books I don't want. All of them speak to me in one way or another. But there are, at present, almost 20,000 of them! I doubt I can keep more than a quarter of those - even that is stretching it a bit.

Marie Kondo, where are you when we really need you?

Radical Moderate: Tidying Up (2021)

Kondo now claims that that 30 books figure was a "misconception", but it sounds like she did actually say something very like it in her Tidying Up With Marie Kondo show on Netflix:

[In] episode five of season one ... Kondo visits Los Angeles to meet Matt and Frank, two writers who need her help in tackling their stacks and stacks of books.

While helping the couple to decide whether keeping the books will be “beneficial” to their lives going forward, Kondo states that we should “ideally keep fewer than 30 books”, a practice she follows herself.

I used to scoff at the madness of this idea, but now it's beginning to exert a strange fascination over me. Why not own "fewer than 30 books." You could keep them in a backpack! You could become a wandering scholar, like the Vagantes of the Middle Ages.

Helen Waddell: The Wandering Scholars (1927)

It's true that I've written more than 30 books (48 at last count - with one more in the pipeline at present), and wouldn't it be the height of hypocrisy to try to peddle my produce to people when I wasn't even prepared to give them shelfroom myself? It's still a nice fantasy to bask in, though ...

As I browse through my previous posts on the subject, I notice the slightly sheepish tone of "Crazy like a Fox" (2009) modulating into the straightforward denialism of "My New Bookcase" (2022) - by way of my 2020 encomium of bibliophilia-apologist and book-buying enabler extraordinaire, Nicholas A. Basbanes.

It's action stations now, though. I'm finally ready to admit that I need help. John Fenton's solution to his storage dilemmas was to get a new floor-to-ceiling bookcase. Mine would probably have to be something more in the region of Hercules' cleansing of the Augean stables. As you'll recall, the demigod diverted the course of the rivers Alpheus and Peneus to wash out the accumulated detritus of ages.

Greek Mythology: Hercules tidies up

But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd furniture-van hurrying near
And, breaking our literate fellowship,
The uncouth shadow of the skip.

- after Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Bookcase"

Skip full o' Books

•

All suggestions - serious or flippant - are only too welcome ...

•

Favourite Children's Authors: Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling: Puck of Pook's Hill (1906)

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.

Rudyard Kipling: The Jungle Book (1894)
[cover by John Lockwood Kipling]

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.

Rudyard Kipling: Captains Courageous [US Edition] (1897)

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.

Rudyard Kipling: The Brushwood Boy (1895)

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).

Rudyard Kipling: The Stalky Stories Complete (1929)

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.

Rudyard Kipling: Thy Servant a Dog: Told by Boots (1930)

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.

Roger Lancelyn Green: Kipling and the Children (1965)

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 ...

Peter Hopkirk: Quest for Kim: In Search of Kipling's Great Game (1996)

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,
Tell them, because our fathers lied.

is only one, and not the most bitter, of his heart-wrenching war epitaphs.

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.

Elliot L. Gilbert, ed.: "O Beloved Kids" (1984)

•

Rudyard Kipling: Something of Myself: For My Friends Known and Unknown (1937)

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.

National Trust: Bateman's (built 1634)

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 ...

H. R. Millar: Parnesius the Centurion (1906)

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.
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.

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:

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:

H. R. Millar: Puck appears to the children (1906)

... 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.

H. R. Millar: Parnesius on the Great Wall (1906)

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:

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.

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 ...

Rudyard Kipling: Rewards and Fairies (1911)

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.’
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.

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.

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 out
Certain men the English shot?

In any case, whatever Kipling's intentions, most readers of the Puck stories then and since have agreed that:

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?”

Companion Classics: The Jungle Book / Treasure Island / Alice in Wonderland

•

Rudyard & Josephine Kipling

Joseph Rudyard Kipling
(1865–1936)

Children's Books:



Rudyard Kipling: The Jungle Books (1894-95)
[cover by Stuart Tresilian (1955)]



1. The Jungle Book (1894)
   1. Mowgli’s Brothers
   2. Kaa’s Hunting
   3. ‘Tiger! Tiger!’
   4. The White Seal
   5. ‘Rikki-Tikki-Tavi’
   6. Toomai of the Elephants
   7. Her Majesty’s Servants
2. The Second Jungle Book (1895)
   1. How Fear Came
   2. The Miracle of Purun Bhagat
   3. Letting in the Jungle
   4. The Undertakers
   5. The King’s Ankus
   6. Quiquern
   7. Red Dog
   8. 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.
3. The Brushwood Boy (1895)
   • The Brushwood Boy. [from The Day's Work, 1898]. Illustrations by F. H. Townsend. 1907. London: Macmillan & Co., Limited, 1914.
4. 'Captains Courageous' (1896)
   • ‘Captains Courageous’: A Story of the Grand Banks. 1896. Melbourne & London: Macmillan & Company Ltd., 1942.

Rudyard Kipling: Stalky & Co. (1899)



5. Stalky & Co. (1899)
   1. ‘In Ambush’
   2. Slaves of the Lamp – Part I
   3. An Unsavoury Interlude
   4. The Impressionists
   5. The Moral Reformers
   6. A Little Prep.
   7. The Flag of their Country
   8. The Last Term
   9. Slaves of the Lamp, Part II
6. The Complete Stalky & Co. (1929)
   1. ‘Stalky’
   2. The United Idolaters
   3. Regulus
   4. The Propagation of Knowledge
   5. The Satisfaction of a Gentleman
   • Stalky & Co.: Complete. 1899 & 1929. Ed. Isabel Quigley. The World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.
7. Kim (1901)
   • Kim. 1901. London: Macmillan & Co. Limited, 1940.

Rudyard Kipling: Just So Stories: For Little Children (1902)



8. Just So Stories (1902)
   1. How the Whale got his Throat
   2. How the Camel got his Hump
   3. How the Rhinoceros got his Skin
   4. How the Leopard got his Spots
   5. The Elephant’s Child
   6. The Sing-Song of Old Man Kangaroo
   7. The Beginning of the Armadilloes
   8. How the First Letter was Written
   9. How the Alphabet was Made
   10. The Crab that Played with the Sea
   11. The Cat that Walked by Himself
   12. 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.

Rudyard Kipling: All the Puck Stories (1935):
Puck of Pook's Hill (1906) & Rewards and Fairies (1911)



9. Puck of Pook's Hill (1906)
   1. Weland’s Sword
   2. Young Men at the Manor
   3. The Knights of the Joyous Venture
   4. Old Men at Pevensey
   5. A Centurion of the Thirtieth
   6. On the Great Wall
   7. The Winged Hats
   8. Hal o’ the Draft
   9. Dymchurch Flit
   10. The Treasure and the Law
   • Puck of Pook's Hill. 1906. London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1957.
10. Rewards and Fairies (1910)
    1. Cold Iron
    2. Gloriana
    3. The Wrong Thing
    4. Marklake Witches
    5. The Knife and the Naked Chalk
    6. Brother Square-Toes
    7. A Priest in Spite of Himself
    8. The Conversion of St Wilfrid
    9. A Doctor of Medicine
    10. Simple Simon
    11. 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.

Rudyard Kipling: Land and Sea Tales for Scouts and Guides (1923)



11. Land and Sea Tales for Scouts and Guides (1923)
    1. Winning the Victoria Cross
    2. The Way that he Took
    3. An Unqualified Pilot
    4. His Gift
    5. A Flight of Fact
    6. “Stalky”
    7. The Burning of the Sarah Sands
    8. The Parable of Boy Jones
    9. The Bold ‘Prentice
    10. The Son of His Father
    11. An English School
    • Land & Sea Tales for Scouts and Guides. 1923. Macmillan’s Pocket Kipling. London: Macmillan & Co. Limited, 1935.

Rudyard Kipling: 'Thy Servant a Dog' and Other Dog Stories (1938)



12. Thy Servant a Dog, Told by Boots (1930)
    1. Thy Servant a Dog
    2. The Great Play Hunt
    3. Toby Dog
    • Thy Servant a Dog, Told by Boots. Illustrated by G. L. Stampa. 1930. London: Macmillan & Co. Limited, 1931.
13. 'Thy Servant a Dog' and Other Dog Stories (1938)
    1. Thy Servant a Dog
    2. The Great Play Hunt
    3. Toby Dog
    4. A Sea Dog
    5. Teem — a Treasure-Hunter
    • 'Thy Servant a Dog' and Other Dog Stories. Illustrated by G. L. Stampa. 1938. London: Macmillan & Co. Limited, 1960.

Secondary:


14. Carrington, Charles. Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Work. 1955. London: Macmillan Limited, 1978.
15. Green, Roger Lancelyn. Kipling and the Children. London: Elek Books Ltd., 1965.
16. Gilbert, Elliot L., ed. “O Beloved Kids”: Rudyard Kipling’s Letters to his Children. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson., 1983.
17. Hopkirk, Peter. Quest for Kim: In Search of Kipling's Great Game. Illustrations by Janina Slater. London: John Murray (Publishers) Ltd., 1996.
18. Ricketts, Harry. The Unforgiving Minute: A Life of Rudyard Kipling. 1999. Pimlico. London: Random House, 2000.

•

Rudyard Kipling: Ten Stories (1947)