Favourite Children's Authors: T. H. White

Sylvia Townsend Warner: T. H. White: A Biography (1967)

The blurb for a recent reprint of Sylvia Townsend Warner's biography of her old friend Tim White claims that:

Warner treats White's repressed sexual predilections with humane understanding in this wise portrait of a tormented literary giant, written by a novelist and a poet.

Certainly he had his oddities - as did Sylvia Townsend Warner, for that matter - but it seems rather a strange way to characterise him: "When did you stop beating your wife?" - or, as in this case, repressing your sexual predilections?

T. H. White: The Master (1957)

I suppose that it highlights a problem with T. H. White's body of work as a whole, though. Just what exactly was he? As a writer, that is. We tend to see him as a children's author nowadays - if we think about him at all.

And, certainly, a couple of his books - The Sword in the Stone (1938) and Mistress Masham's Repose (1946) - have become children's classics. Confining him to that pigeon-hole seems more than a little reductive, however.

T. H. White: Mistress Masham's Repose (1946)

Actually I could easily have listed him under either of the other two categories of writer I've been compiling occasional posts about on this blog: Ghost Story Writers, or SF Luminaries.

The Master (1957) is - more or less - SF; and there are a number of ghost stories included in Earth Stopped (1934) and his other short story collections, some of them ("Soft Voices at Passenham") very good indeed.

T. H. White: The Maharajah and Other Stories (1981)

Perhaps he was primarily a fantasy writer, then? Certainly his most famous book, The Once and Future King (1958) is more fantasy than anything else. It is, in fact, probably the most influential retelling of the Arthurian legend since Tennyson's Idylls of the King - and, like Tennyson, its principal source of both raw material and inspiration is Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur (1485).

T. H. White: The Once and Future King (1958 / 1967)

I remember the blurb on the back of my paperback copy referring to White's tetralogy as "a glorious dream of the Middle Ages as they never were but should have been." That strikes me as a pretty accurate description.

In form, The Once and Future King masquerades as a kind of modern commentary on Malory's translation/adaptation of his original French sources in the 13th-century Vulgate Cycle. But it's that pretence which allows White to soar into complex realms of psychology visible only by implication behind the conventions of late medieval romance.

T. H. White: The Sword in the Stone (1938)

I once examined an Honours essay on The Once and Future King. In pursuit of their thesis, this particular student had examined quite closely the extensive revisions White made in both The Sword in the Stone and The Witch in the Wood in order to fit them into the more ambitious, interlinked structure of the larger collection.

T. H. White: The Witch in the Wood (1939)

I see that I said in my comments:

I’m particularly impressed by the textual comparisons this student has made between the initial and revised versions of the first two volumes of the tetralogy (or set of five books: depending on whether or not one counts the Book of Merlyn). The points he makes about the changes in the 1958 text are worked seamlessly and tellingly into his overall argument.

I recommended the highest possible grade for the essay, perhaps partially because I'd been longing to make that comparison myself ever since I learned that there was an earlier version of "The Queen of Air and Darkness", Part Two of The Once and Future King.

T. H. White: The Goshawk (1951)

To complicate things still further, White's initial successes were in the field of outdoorsy, sporting adventure. England Have My Bones (1936) was his first bestseller. It was followed by Burke's Steerage (1938), and then by his masterpiece in the genre, The Goshawk - the terrifyingly intimate and (at times) shocking account of his largely unavailing attempts to tame a wild raptor.

T. H. White & Brownie

As far as his personal life goes, if White ever had a great love, it was definitely for his Irish setter Brownie. He tried to explain the intensity of his feelings for her in a letter to his friend David "Bunny" Garnett:

It is a queer difference between this kind of thing and getting married ... married people love each other at first (I understand) and it fades by use and custom, but with dogs you love them most at last.

Garnett wasn't having any. A real and lasting relationship with an animal was, to him, absurd. In response he lectured White on the immaturity and childishness of so extravagant an overreaction to the "natural" death of a pet.

Still, the poignancy of White's letter about his beloved dog's last days has to be read to be believed:

[November 1944]

Dearest Bunny,

Brownie died today. In all her 14 years of life I have only been away from her at night for 3 times ... but I did go in to Dublin about twice a year to buy books ... and I thought she understood about this. To-day I went at 10, but the bloody devils had managed to kill her somehow when I got back at 7. She was in perfect health. I left her in my bed this morning, as it was an early start. Now I am writing with her dead head in my lap. I will sit up with her tonight, but tomorrow we must bury her. I don’t know what to do after that. I am only sitting up because of that thing about perhaps consciousness persisting a bit. She has been to me more perfect than anything else in all my life, and I have failed her at the end, an 180-1 chance. If it had been any other day I might have known that I had done my best. These fools here did not poison her — I will not believe that. But I could have done more. They kept rubbing her, they say. She looks quite alive. She was wife, mother, mistress & child. Please forgive me for writing this distressing stuff, but it is helping me. Her little tired face cannot be helped. Please do not write to me at all about her, for very long time, but tell me if I ought to buy another bitch or not, as I do not know what to think about anything. I am certain I am not going to kill myself about it, as I thought I might once. However, you will find this all very hysterical, so I may as well stop. I still expect to wake up and find it wasn’t. She was all I had.

love from TIM

Another letter followed hot on its heels:

Dear Bunny,

Please forgive me writing again, but I am so lonely and can’t stop crying and it is the shock. I waked her for two nights and buried her this morning in a turf basket, all my eggs in one basket. Now I am to begin a new life and it is important to begin it right, but I find it difficult to think straight. It is about whether I ought to buy another dog or not ... I might not survive another bereavement like this in 12 years’ time, and dread to put myself in the way of it. If your father & mother & both sons had died at the same moment as Ray, unexpectedly, in your absence, you would know what I am talking about. Unfortunately Brownie was barren, like myself, and as I have rather an overbearing character I had made her live through me, as I lived through her. Brownie was my life and I am lonely for just such another reservoir for my love. But if I did get such reservoir it would die in about 12 years and at present I feel I couldn’t face that. Do people get used to being bereaved? This is my first time. I am feeling very lucky to have a friend like you that I can write to without being thought dotty to go on like that about mere dogs.
They did not poison her. It was one of her little heart attacks and they did not know how to treat it and killed her by the wrong kindnesses.
You must try to understand that I am and will remain entirely without wife or brother or sister or child and that Brownie supplied more than the place of these to me. We loved each other more and more every year.

... All I can do now is to remember her dead as I buried her, the cold grey jowl in the basket, and not as my heart’s blood, which she was for the last eight years of our twelve.

- Quoted from The Futility Closet (17/10/2014)

Angelica Garnett: Deceived with Kindness: A Bloomsbury Childhood (1984)

Knowing what we now do about the perversity of some of David Garnett's own relationships - his curious April-November marriage to his male lover Duncan Grant's young daughter Angelica Bell, for instance - it's hard not to see his indignation at White's confessions as the pot calling the kettle black.

But then, in this as in so many other matters, White seems to have been ahead of his times rather than - as the censorious Garnett implied - behind them. Such intense love for an animal companion: especially, as in this case, a dog who had been by White's side, through thick and thin, for fourteen years, surely no longer requires an apology?

There were, to be sure, other aspects to White's "repressed sexual predilections" - most of them innocuous enough to a modern reader - but for more detail on that I'll refer you to the White / Garnett Letters or, preferably, S. T. Warner's biography.

T. H. White: The Elephant and the Kangaroo (1947)

Mind you, White's generic and stylistic experiments certainly could lead him astray at times. His account of a new great flood, set in Ireland, where he lived during most of World War II, was greatly resented by his local hosts, who felt that it depicted them as ignorant peasants.

White was horrified by this - as he saw it - misreading of a light-hearted fantasy. but the fact remains that he was no longer welcome in this home away from home. The disposition to turn everything you encounter into copy is, I suppose, the writer's curse: but particularly so in White's case, since it took so long for each of his books to accrete.

Maybe he's not a great writer. Maybe he is. It's hard to take much interest in such matters of literary taxonomy. Above all, he was a great original, and each of his books takes a strikingly different approach to the question of how to live on this earth. His inability to fit into any particular category or mold is probably why they remain so lively and intriguing sixty years after his death.

I'm very fond of Sylvia Townsend Warner's writing, too. All things considered, given her own political and social leanings, I'm not sure she was best placed to interpret her friend Tim. She certainly did her best, however - throwing up her hands at times to admit her perplexity - and her biography remains an indispensable adjunct to the body of his work.

All of it, imho, deserves to be read, reread, and treasured.

Sylvia Townsend Warner: T. H. White: A Biography (1967 / 2023)

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T. H. White

Terence Hanbury White
(1906-1964)

Books I own are marked in bold:

Poetry:


1. Loved Helen (1929)
   • Loved Helen and Other Poems. London: Chatto & Windus, 1929.
2. The Green Bay Tree (1929)
3. A Joy Proposed. Ed. Kurth Sprague (1980)
   • A Joy Proposed: Poems. Ed. Kurth Sprague. 1980. London: Secker & Warburg, 1982.

Fiction:


4. [with R. McNair Scott] Dead Mr Nixon (1931)
5. [as James Aston] First Lesson (1932)
6. [as James Aston] They Winter Abroad (1932)
7. Darkness at Pemberley (1932)
8. Farewell Victoria (1933)
   • Farewell Victoria. 1933. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1945.
9. Earth Stopped (1934)
   • Earth Stopped, or Mr. Marx’s Sporting Tour. London: Collins, 1934.
10. Gone to Ground (1935)
11. The Sword in the Stone (1938)
    • The Sword in the Stone. 1938. London: Collins, 1945.
12. The Witch in the Wood (1939)
13. The Ill-Made Knight (1940)
14. Mistress Masham's Repose (1946)
    • Mistress Masham’s Repose. London: Jonathan Cape, 1947.
15. The Elephant and the Kangaroo (1947)
    • The Elephant and the Kangaroo. London: Jonathan Cape, 1948.
16. The Master: An Adventure Story (1957)
    • The Master: An Adventure Story. 1957. A Puffin Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.
17. The Once and Future King (1958)
    1. The Sword in the Stone (1938)
    2. The Queen of Air and Darkness (1939)
    3. The Ill-Made Knight (1940)
    4. The Candle in the Wind (1958)
    • The Once and Future King. London: Collins, 1958.
    • The Once and Future King. 1958. Fontana Books. London: Collins, 1967.
18. The Book of Merlyn (1977)
    • The Book of Merlyn: The Unpublished Conclusion to the Once and Future King. Prologue by Sylvia Townsend Warner. Illustrations by Trevor Stubley. 1977. London: Fontana / Collins, 1978.
19. The Maharajah and Other Stories: from Earth Stopped (1934) and Gone to Ground (1935). Ed. Kurth Sprague (1981)
    • The Maharajah and Other Stories. Ed. Kurth Sprague. 1981. London: Futura, 1983.
20. The Once and Future King (1996)
    1. The Sword in the Stone (1938)
    2. The Queen of Air and Darkness (1939)
    3. The Ill-Made Knight (1940)
    4. The Candle in the Wind (1958)
    5. The Book of Merlyn (1977)
    • The Once and Future King. 1939, 1940, 1958, 1977. HarperVoyager. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1996.

Non-fiction:


21. England Have My Bones (1936)
    • England Have My Bones. 1936. St. James’s Library. London: Collins, 1952.
22. Burke's Steerage, or, The Amateur Gentleman’s Introduction to Noble Sports and Pastimes (1938)
23. The Age of Scandal (1950)
    • The Age of Scandal: an Excursion through a Minor Period. 1950. London: Jonathan Cape, 1951.
24. The Goshawk (1951)
    • The Goshawk. 1951. With diagrams from sketches by the author and specially illustrated for RU by Ralph Thompson. London: Readers Union Ltd. / Jonathan Cape, 1953.
    • The Goshawk. 1951. Penguin Modern Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975.
25. The Scandalmonger (1952)
    • The Scandalmonger. London: Jonathan Cape, 1952.
26. The Book of Beasts (1954)
    • The Bestiary: a Book of Beasts. 1954. New York: Capricorn Books, 1960.
27. The Godstone and the Blackymor (1959)
    • The Godstone and the Blackymor. Illustrated by Edward Ardizzone. 1959. London: The Reprint Society, 1960.
28. America at Last (1965)

Letters:


29. The White / Garnett Letters. Ed. David Garnett (1968)
30. Letters to a Friend: The Correspondence Between T. H. White and L. J. Potts (1984)
    • Letters to a Friend: The Correspondence between T. H. White and L. J. Potts. Ed. François Gallix. Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1984.

Secondary:


31. Warner, Sylvia Townsend. T. H. White: A Biography. London: Jonathan Cape / Chatto & Windus, 1967.

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Favourite Children's Authors: Margaret Mahy

Margaret Mahy: The Haunting (1982)

My father had a strong interest in local New Zealand children's books. He collected them assiduously, even investing in such oddball series as the "Dr Duffer" books of ex-NZ Prime Minister Sir John Marshall. He was particularly pleased when Betty Gilderdale's history of NZ "junior fiction" appeared in 1982, and even tried sending her a list of titles she'd overlooked in her survey. I'm not sure if she responded or not. Authors aren't always as receptive as they should be to being corrected.

Betty Gilderdale: A Sea Change: 145 Years of New Zealand Junior Fiction (1982)

I, for my part, was way too toplofty back then to bother much with such matters. There were definite exceptions, though. I did follow up on my father's recommendation of Maurice Gee's 1979 children's book Under the Mountain, which I greatly enjoyed. I think I preferred Gee's Halfmen of O trilogy (1982-85), though. It still seems to me a major contribution to the genre.

More to the point, my father also bought a copy of Margaret Mahy's Carnegie Medal-winning YA novel The Haunting when it first came out, and I duly read that as well.

Kathryn Lynskey: Margaret Mahy (2011)

Margaret Mahy never came to our school, or a library near me, so I never got to see her in her rainbow-coloured wig. It's just as well, because I fear it might have put me off. As it was, my only sense of her was what was on the page. I really responded to the sense of supernatural darkness behind The Haunting. In fact, my only criticism was that it was far too short!

Margaret Mahy: The Changeover (1984)

She made up for that in her next novel, though. The Changeover remains one of my favourites among all her books. It didn't surprise me that it, too, won the Carnegie Medal, as it was manifestly better and more powerful than its predecessor.

Yvonne Mackay, dir.: The Haunting of Barney Palmer (1987)

Both books have been filmed. The Haunting for New Zealand TV in 1987; The Changeover more recently, in 2017. Both were a little disappointing. The first because of a limited budget and uninspired direction. The second is a more complex case. Despite a strong cast and good auspices, it somehow managed to fumble the charm and originality of the novel - perhaps because so many films and TV series have plundered not dissimilar territory in the forty years since the first appearance of Mahy's book.

Margaret Mahy: The Changeover (2017)

You'll gather from the bibliography at the foot of this post that YA novels were not the major component in Mahy's output. Her kids' picture books remain her principal claim to fame. She wrote an immense number of them, and they formed an important part of the upbringing of many, many children, both here and abroad.

Oddly enough, we weren't among them. We read a lot of such books as children - Richard Scarry and Maurice Sendak were among my particular favourites, as I recall. But somehow Margaret Mahy's books just passed us by. For me she's a YA Fantasy / SF author to be ranked alongside Maurice Gee and Elizabeth Knox here in New Zealand; and, internationally, with such writers as Joan Aiken, Susan Cooper, and Peter Dickinson - perhaps even Ursula Le Guin.

Margaret Mahy: The Tricksters (1986)

Her next major novel, The Tricksters, is in many ways her masterpiece. No-one's yet ventured to try and film it, and (speaking personally) I hope they never do. It's a multi-layered novel about the nature of human nature - if that phrase makes sense to you.

On the one hand it's a classic Kiwi yarn, set at a beachhouse, with something of the atmosphere of Mansfield's "At the Bay." On the other hand it's a supernatural ghost story, with talismans, split personalities, and constant, complex interplay between the two.

It's hard to describe - but not to appreciate. It might perhaps be a little too strong meat for some children: better just to think of it as one of New Zealand's greatest pieces of speculative fiction, fit for readers of any age.

Margaret Mahy: The Catalogue of the Universe (1985)

Not that there's anything wrong with its predecessor, The Catalogue of the Universe. Despite the SF-sounding title, it's actually a very moving bildungsroman about the ordinary perils of growing up. Mahy shows she's every bit as adept at conveying the pressures of everyday life as she is at grappling with revenants and other ghostly phenomena.

And so it went on. For the next quarter century or so, every few years another thoughtful, well-written YA novel would appear among the blizzard of picture books and personal appearances that dominated Mahy's public life. I make the total 16: 15 of which I own. Precise questions of definition make it difficult to establish just which titles can be said to belong to this category, however. There are certainly other books I could have included (and have duly listed in the bibliography below).

Here's my own attempt at a list:

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1. The Haunting (1982)

2. The Changeover: a Supernatural Romance (1984)

3. The Catalogue of the Universe (1985)

4. Aliens in the Family (1985)

5. The Tricksters (1986)

6. Memory (1987)

7. Dangerous Spaces (1991)

8. Underrunners (1992)

9. The Other Side of Silence (1995)

10. 24 hours (2000)

11. The Riddle of the Frozen Phantom (2001)

12. Alchemy (2002)

13. Maddigan's Fantasia (2005)

14. Kaitangata Twitch (2005)

15. Portable Ghosts (2006)

16. The Magician of Hoad (2008)

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Inevitably, some of them appealed to me more than others. What's really astonishing, though, is the extent to which she avoided sticking to a formula. Granted, most of the books have a central adolescent heroine, but otherwise what really distinguishes them is their immense inventiveness and the boldness with which she sought out new themes.

Dementia, homelessness, abuse and neglect of various kinds stand shoulder to shoulder throughout with the other haunted and abandoned rubble of the New Zealand past.

Margaret Mahy: Maddigan's Quest (2005)

The success of the novel Maddigan's Fantasia - and its TV spinoff Maddigan's Quest - promised for a moment to propel her into the world of such mega-bestsellers as the "Twilight" or "Hunger Games" books. But her next substantive novel, Kaitangata Twitch, returned to the - slightly disguised - Canterbury which was her favourite setting.

While probably a better book (not to mention a better TV series) than Maddigan's Quest, it lacked the immediate international appeal. In the end, quirkiness and close attention to her own location in space and time - the twin strengths of her work all along - prevailed. Margaret Mahy remains a resolutely New Zealand writer, despite her undoubted success abroad.

In any case, for those of you who've never read them - or who read them at school and have largely forgotten them - I think that this set of books is well worth visiting. In fact, as fashions come and go in the intensely competitive field of children's picture books, I can't help feeling that it's this extraordinary series of well-written, approachable YA novels which will prove her most durable legacy.

I suppose, in the end, only time will tell.

Kaitangata Twitch (2010)

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Christchurch City Libraries: Margaret Mahy (1936-2012)

Margaret Mahy
(1936-2012)

Novels:

The Pirate Uncle (1977)



1. The Pirate Uncle. Illustrated by Mary Dinsdale (1977)
2. The Haunting (1982)
   • The Haunting. London: J. M. Dent, 1982.
3. The Changeover: a Supernatural Romance (1984)
   • The Changeover: A Supernatural Romance. Auckland: Waiatarua Publishing Co., 1984.
4. The Catalogue of the Universe (1985)
   • The Catalogue of the Universe. London & Melbourne: J. M. Dent, 1985.
5. Aliens in the Family (1985)
   • Aliens in the Family. 1985. Auckland: Ashton Scholastic, 1990.
6. The Tricksters (1986)
   • The Tricksters. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1986.
   • The Tricksters. 1986. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988.
7. Memory (1987)
   • Memory. 1987. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989.
8. Dangerous Spaces (1991)
   • Dangerous Spaces. 1991. Harmondsworth: Puffin, 1992.
9. Underrunners (1992)
   • Underrunners. London: Hamish Hamilton Ltd., 1992.
   • Underrunners. 1992. Harmondsworth: Puffin, 1994.
10. The Other Side of Silence (1995)
    • The Other Side of Silence. 1995. Harmondsworth: Puffin, 1997.
11. 24 hours. Illustrated by Margaret K. McElderry (2000)
    • Twenty-Four Hours. London: Collins, 2000.
12. The Riddle of the Frozen Phantom. Illustrated by Chris Mould (2001)
    • The Riddle of the Frozen Phantom. London: Collins, 2001.
13. Alchemy (2002)
    • Alchemy. London: CollinsFlamingo, 2002.
14. Maddigan's Fantasia [aka "Maddigan's Quest"] (2005)
    • Maddigan’s Quest. 2005. Auckland: HarperCollins Publishers (New Zealand) Limited, 2006.
15. Kaitangata Twitch (2005)
    • Kaitangata Twitch. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2005.
16. Portable Ghosts (2006)
17. The Magician of Hoad (2008)
    • The Magician of Hoad. Auckland: HarperCollins Publishers (New Zealand) Limited, 2008.

Picture Books:

A Lion in the Meadow (1969)



18. The Wind Beneath the Stars [School Journal, 3: 3]. Illustrated by Jill McDonald (1966)
19. A Lion in the Meadow. Illustrated by Jenny Williams (1969)
    • A Lion in the Meadow. Rev. ed. Illustrated by Jenny Williams (1986)
20. The Dragon of an Ordinary Family. Illustrated by Helen Oxenbury (1969)
    • The Dragon of an Ordinary Family. Rev. ed. Illustrated by Helen Oxenbury (1991)
21. Pillycock's Shop. Illustrated by Carol Barker (1969)
22. The Procession. Illustrated by Charles Mozley (1969)
23. Mrs Discombobulous. Illustrated by Jan Brychta (1969)
24. The Little Witch. Illustrated by Charles Mozley (1970)
25. Sailor Jack and the 20 Orphans. Illustrated by Robert Bartelt (1970)
26. The Princess and the Clown. Illustrated by Carol Barker (1971)
27. The Boy with Two Shadows. Illustrated by Jenny Williams (1971)
    • The Boy with Two Shadows. Rev. ed. Illustrated by Jenny Williams (1987)
28. Seventeen Kings and 42 Elephants. Illustrated by Charles Mozley (1972)
    • 17 Kings and 42 Elephants. Rev. ed. Illustrated by Patricia MacCarthy (1987)
29. The Man Whose Mother was a Pirate. Illustrated by Brian Froud (1972)
    • The Man Whose Mother Was a Pirate. Rev. ed. Illustrated by Margaret Chamberlain (1985)
30. The First Margaret Mahy Story Book [aka "Wonderful Me!" (2000)]. Illustrated by Shirley Hughes (1972)
31. The Railway Engine and the Hairy Brigands. Illustrated by Brian Froud (1973)
32. The Second Margaret Mahy Story Book [aka "Wait for Me!", 2003]. Illustrated by Shirley Hughes (1973)
33. The Bus Under the Leaves. Illustrated by Margery Gill (1974)
34. Clancy's Cabin. Illustrated by Trevor Stubley (1974)
35. Rooms for Rent [aka "Rooms to Let"]. Illustrated by Jenny Williams (1974)
36. The Rare Spotted Birthday Party. Illustrated by Belinda Lyon (1974)
37. The Witch in the Cherry Tree. Illustrated by Jenny Williams (1974)
38. Stepmother. Illustrated by Terry Burton (1974)
39. Ultra-violet Catastrophe or, The Unexpected Walk with Great-Uncle Magnus Pringle. Illustrated by Brian Froud (1975)
40. Leaf Magic. Illustrated by Jenny Williams (1975)
41. The Third Margaret Mahy Story Book [aka 'Watch Me!', 2004]. Illustrated by Shirley Hughes (1975)
42. The Great Millionaire Kidnap. Illustrated by Jan Brychta (1975)
43. The Boy Who Was Followed Home. Illustrated by Steven Kellogg (1975)
44. New Zealand: Yesterday and Today. Illustrated by Franklin Watts (1975)
45. The Wind Between the Stars. Illustrated by Brian Froud (1976)
46. David's Witch Doctor. Illustrated by Jim Russell (1976)
47. A Lion in the Meadow and Five Other Favourites. Illustrated by Jenny Williams, Robert Bartelt, Jan Brychta, Charles Mozley, Brian Froud & Molly Lovejoy (1976)
    • The Little Witch and Five Other Favourites. Illustrated by Jenny Williams et al. (1987)
48. Look under 'V'. Illustrated by Deirdre Gardiner (1977)
49. The Great Piratical Rumbustification & The Librarian and the Robbers. Illustrated by Quentin Blake (1978)
50. Dry Days for Climbing George. Illustrated by Judith Trevalyn (1978)
51. Nonstop Nonsense. Illustrated by Quentin Blake (1979)
52. Raging Robots and Unruly Uncles. Illustrated by Peter Stevenson (1981)
53. The Chewing-gum Rescue and Other Stories. Illustrated by Jan Ormerod (1982)
54. Brrm Brrm!. Illustrated by Bob Kirk (1982)
55. The Crocodile's Christmas Jandals. Illustrated by Deirdre Gardiner (1982)
56. [with Joy Cowley & June Melser] Roly-Poly. Illustrated by Deirdre Gardiner (1982)
57. [with Joy Cowley & June Melser] Cooking Pot. Illustrated by Deirdre Gardiner (1982)
58. [with Joy Cowley & June Melser] Fast and Funny. Illustrated by Lynette Vondrusha (1982)
59. [with Joy Cowley & June Melser] Sing to the Moon. Illustrated by Isabel Lowe (1982)
60. [with Joy Cowley & June Melser] Tiddalik. Illustrated by Philip Webb (1982)
61. The Pirates' Mixed-up Voyage: Dark Doings in the Thousand Islands. Illustrated by Margaret Chamberlain (1983)
62. A Crocodile in the Library. Illustrated by Deirdre Gardiner (1982)
63. Mrs Bubble's Baby. Illustrated by Diane Perham (1982)
64. The Bubbling Crocodile. Illustrated by Deirdre Gardiner (1982)
65. Shopping with a Crocodile. Illustrated by Deirdre Gardiner (1982)
66. The Birthday Burglar & A Very Wicked Headmistress. Illustrated by Margaret Chamberlain (1984)
67. Leaf Magic and Five Other Favourites. Illustrated by Margaret Chamberlain (1984)
68. Fantail, Fantail. Illustrated by Bruce Phillips (1984)
69. Going to the Beach. Illustrated by Dick Frizzell (1984)
70. The Great Grumbler and the Wonder Tree. Illustrated by Diane Perham (1984)
71. The Dragon's Birthday. Illustrated by Philip Webb (1984)
72. The Spider in the Shower. Illustrated by Rodney McRae (1984)
73. Ups and Downs and Other Stories. Illustrated by Philip Webb (1984)
74. Wibble Wobble and Other Stories (1984)
75. Jam: A True Story. Illustrated by Helen Craig (1985)
76. Horrakopotchin. Illustrated by Fiona Kelly (1985)
77. The Adventures of a Kite. Illustrated by David Cowe (1985)
78. The Cake. Illustrated by David Cowe (1985)
79. The Catten. Illustrated by Jo Davies (1985)
80. Clever Hamburger. Illustrated by Rodney McRae (1985)
81. A Very Happy Birthday. Illustrated by Elizabeth Fuller (1985)
82. The Earthquake. Illustrated by Dianne Perham (1985)
83. Sophie's Singing Mother. Illustrated by Jo Davies (1985)
84. Out in the Big Wild World. Illustrated by Rodney McRae (1985)
85. Rain. Illustrated by Elizabeth Fuller (1985)
86. My Wonderful Aunt. 4 vols. Illustrated by Deirdre Gardiner (1986)
87. The Downhill Crocodile Whizz and Other Stories. Illustrated by Ian Newsham (1986)
88. Mahy Magic: A Collection of the Most Magical Stories from the Margaret Mahy Story Books [aka "The Boy Who Bounced and Other Magic Tales"]. Illustrated by Shirley Hughes (1986)
89. Arguments. Illustrated by Kevin Hawley (1986)
90. Beautiful Pig (1986)
91. The Fight on the Hill. Illustrated by Jan va der Voo (1986)
92. An Elephant in the House. Illustrated by Elizabeth Fuller (1986)
93. Jacko, the Junk Shop Man. Illustrated by Jo Davies (1986)
94. The Long Grass of Tumbledown Road. Illustrated by Elizabeth Fuller (1986)
95. The Mouse Wedding. Illustrated by Elizabeth Fuller (1986)
96. Mr Rooster's Dilemma [aka "How Mr Rooster Didn't Get Married"]. Illustrated by Elizabeth Fuller (1986)
97. The Robber Pig and Green Eggs. Illustrated by Rodney McRae (1986)
98. The Robber Pig and the Ginger Beer. Illustrated by Rodney McRae (1986)
99. Squeak in the Gate. Illustrated by Jo Davies (1986)
100. Tinny Tiny Tinker. Illustrated by David Cowe (1986)
101. Baby's Breakfast. Illustrated by Madeline Beasley (1986)
102. Feeling Funny. Illustrated by Rodney McRae (1986)
103. The Garden Party. Illustrated by Rodney McRae (1986)
104. Mr Rumfit. Illustrated by Nick Price (1986)
105. Muppy's Ball. Illustrated by Jan van der Voo (1986)
106. The New House Villain. Illustrated by Elizabeth Fuller (1986)
107. A Pet to the Vet. Illustrated by Philip Webb (1986)
108. The Pop Group. Illustrated by Madeline Beasley (1986)
109. The Man Who Enjoyed Grumbling. Illustrated by Wendy Hodder (1986)
110. Tai Taylor is Born. Illustrated by Nick Price (1986)
111. Tai Taylor Goes to School. Illustrated by Nick Price (1986)
112. Tai Taylor and His Education. Illustrated by Nick Price (1986)
113. Tai Taylor and the Sweet Annie. Illustrated by Nick Price (1986)
114. The Terrible Topsy-Turvey, Tissy-Tossy Tangle. Illustrated by Vickie Smillie-McItoull (1986)
115. The Tree Doctor. Illustrated by Wendy Hodder (1986)
116. Trouble on the Bus. Illustrated by Wendy Hodder (1986)
117. The Trouble with Heathrow. Illustrated by Rodney McRae (1986)
118. The Funny Funny Clown Face. Illustrated by Miranda Whitford (1986)
119. [with others] The Three Wishes. Illustrated by Rodney McRae et al. (1986)
120. The Horrible Story and Others [aka "Chocolate Porridge and Other Stories", 1989]. Illustrated by Shirley Hughes (1987)
121. The Haunting of Miss Cardamom. Illustrated by Korky Paul (1987)
122. Guinea Pig Grass. Illustrated by Kelvin Hawley (1987)
123. Iris La Bonga and the Helpful Taxi Driver. Illustrated by Vickie Smillie-McItoull (1987)
124. The Man Who Walked on His Hands. Illustrated by Martin Bailey (1987)
125. No Dinner for Sally. Illustrated by John Tarlton (1987)
126. The Mad Puppet. Illustrated by Jon Davis (1987)
127. The Girl Who Washed in Moonlight. Illustrated by Robyn Belton (1987)
128. The King's Jokes. Illustrated by Val Biro (1987)
129. The Door in the Air and Other Stories. Illustrated by Diana Catchpole (1988)
     • The Door in the Air and Other Stories. Illustrated by Diana Catchpole. 1988. Harmondsworth: Puffin, 1990.
130. When the King Rides By. Illustrated by Bettina Ogden (1988)
131. The Baby-sitter. Illustrated by Bryan Pollard (1988)
132. As Luck Would Have It. Illustrated by Deirdre Gardiner (1988)
133. A Not-so-quiet Evening. Illustrated by Glenda Jones (1988)
134. Sarah, the Bear and the Kangaroo. Illustrated by Elizabeth Fuller (1988)
135. The Blood-and-thunder Adventure on Hurricane Peak. Illustrated by Wendy Smith (1989)
136. The Great White Man-Eating Shark: A Cautionary Tale. Illustrated by Jonathan Allen (1989)
137. The Tin Can Band and Other Poems. Illustrated by Honey de Lacey (1989)
138. Trouble in the Supermarket. Illustrated by Trish Hill (1989)
139. The Seven Chinese Brothers. Illustrated by Jean and Mou-sien Tseng (1990)
140. Making friends. Illustrated by Wendy Smith (1990)
141. The Pumpkin Man and the Crafty Creeper. Illustrated by Helen Craig (1990)
142. Crocodile Crocodlie. Illustrated by Celia Canning (1991)
143. The Litte Round Husband. Illustrated by Val Biro (1991)
144. White Elephants. Illustrated by John Bendell-Brunello (1991)
145. The Solar System [aka "What is the Solar System", 1999]. Illustrated by Jeff Fowler (1991)
146. Bubble Trouble and Other Poems and Stories. Illustrated by Tony Ross (1991)
147. Keeping House. Illustrated by Wendy Smith (1991)
148. The Queen's Goat. Illustrated by Emma Chichester Clark (1991)
149. The Dentist's Promise. Illustrated by Wendy Smith (1991)
150. A Tall Story and Other Tales. Illustrated by Jan Nesbitt (1991)
151. Giant Soup (1991)
152. The Horrendous Hullabaloo. Illustrated by Patricia MacCarthy (1992)
153. The Girl With the Green Ear: Stories about Magic in Nature. Illustrated by Shirley Hughes (1992)
154. The Fiddle and the Gun: A Margaret Mahy Collection. Illustrated by Elizabeth Fuller et al. (1992)
155. [with Jean Fritz, Katherine Paterson and others] The World in Fourteen Ninety-Two. Illustrated by Stefano Vitale (1992)
156. Cousins Quarter series. Illustrated by John Farman:
     1. The Good Fortunes Gang (1993)
     2. A Fortunate Name (1993)
     3. A Fortune Branches Out (1994)
     4. Tangled Fortunes (1994)
157. The Three-legged Cat. Illustrated by Jonathan Allen (1993)
158. A Busy Day for a Good Grandmother. Illustrated by Margaret Chamberlain (1993)
159. Tick Tock Tales: Stories to Read Around the Clock. Illustrated by Wendy Smith (1993)
160. The Greatest Show Off Earth. Illustrated by Wendy Smith (1994)
161. The Rattlebang Picnic. Illustrated by Steven Kellogg (1994)
162. The Christmas Tree Tangle. Illustrated by Anthony Kerins (1994)
163. The Dragon's Telephone. Illustrated by Christine Ross (1994)
164. Shock Forest and Other Stories. White Wolves Series (1994)
165. Mr Mossop's Table. Various illustrators (1994)
166. The Big Black Bulging Bump. Illustrated by Robert Staermose (1995)
167. Tingleberries, Tuckertubs and Telephones: a Tale of Love and Ice-cream. Illustrated by Robert Staermose (1995)
168. Cobwebs, Elephants and Stars. Illustrated by Val Biro (1995)
169. The Greatest Binnie in the World. Illustrated by Michael Martchenko (1995)
170. The Five Sisters. Illustrated by Patricia MacCarthy (1996)
171. Boom, Baby, Boom, Boom!. Illustrated by Patricia MacCarthy (1996)
172. Beaten by a Balloon. Illustrated by Jonathan Allen (1996)
173. Operation Terror. Illustrated by Ron Tiner (1997)
174. The Horribly Haunted School. Illustrated by Robert Staermose (1997)
175. A Summery Saturday Morning. Illustrated by Selina Young (1998)
176. [with Susan Cooper, Uri Orlev and others] Don't read this! and Other Tales of the Unnatural. Illustrated by Thé Tjong-Khing (1998)
177. Off to the Shop. Photographs by Mary Walker (2002)
178. A Villain's Night Out. Illustrated by Harry Horse (1999)
179. Simply Delicious!. Illustrated by Jonathan Allen (1999)
180. Down in the Dump with Dinsmore. Illustrated by Stephen Axelsen (1999)
181. Down the Dragon's Tongue. Illustrated by Patricia MacCarthy (2000)
182. [with others] Storylines: The Anthology. Ed. Tessa Duder (2000)
183. Mischief and Mayhem: Two Margaret Mahy Fantasies. Illustrated by Helen Bacon (2001)
184. Dashing Dog. Illustrated by Sarah Garland (2002)
185. The Great Car Clean-out. Illustrated by Philip Webb (2002)
186. The Gargling Gorilla. Illustrated by Tony Ross (2003)
187. [with others] Kids Night In! Ed. Jessiac Adams, Juliet Partridge & Nick Earls (2003)
188. Me and My Dog. Illustrated by Philip Webb (2002)
189. Zerelda's Horses. Illustrated by Gabriella Klepatski (2005)
190. Down the Back of the Chair. Illustrated by Polly Dunbar (2006)
191. Family Surprises. Illustrated by Lyn Kriegler (2006)
192. Bubble Trouble. Illustrated by Polly Dunbar (2008)
193. Awesome Aotearoa: Margaret Mahy's History of New Zealand. Illustrated by Trace Hodgson (2009)
194. The Dark Blue 100-ride Bus Ticket (2009)
195. The Word Witch: the Magical Verse of Margaret Mahy. Ed. Tessa Duder. Illustrated by David Elliot (2009)
196. Organ Music (2010)
197. The Moon and Farmer McPhee. Illustrated by David Elliot (2010)
198. The Margaret Mahy Treasury: Eleven Favourite Stories from the Marvellous Margaret Mahy (2011)
199. Footsteps Through the Fog. Illustrated by Gavin Bishop (2012)
200. The Green Bath. Illustrated by Steven Kellogg (2013)
201. Tale of a tail. Illustrated by Tony Ross (2014)

Non-fiction:

A Dissolving Ghost (2000)



202. Surprising Moments. Inaugural Margaret Mahy Award Lecture (1991)
203. My Mysterious World. Photographs by David Alexander (1995)
204. Questions Kids Ask Margaret Mahy (1996)
205. A Dissolving Ghost: Essays and More (2000)
     • A Dissolving Ghost: Essays and More. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2000.

Theatre:

The Library at the End of the World (1990)



206. [libretto] The Library at the End of the World. Music by Dorothy Buchanan (1990)

Television:

Typhon's People (1993)



207. [writer] Woolly Valley (1982)
208. [writer] Cuckoo Land (1986)
209. [writer] The Haunting of Barney Palmer, dir. Yvonne Mackay [based on Margaret Mahy's The Haunting (1984)] - Alexis Banas, Ned Beatty & Eleanor Gibson - (NZ, 1987)
210. [original author] Aliens in the Family (1987)
211. [original author] Dramarama: "The Horrible Story" (1987)
212. [original author] Playbus: "The Princess and the Clown" & "Thunderstorms and Rainbows" (1988)
213. [writer] Strangers (1989)
214. [writer] Typhon's People (1993)
215. [original author] The Magical World of Margaret Mahy (1994)
216. [subject] Made in New Zealand – Margaret Mahy (2004 )
217. [writer] Maddigan's Quest (2005)
218. [subject] A Tall Long Faced Tale (2008)
219. [original author] Kaitangata Twitch (2010)

Cinema:

The Changeover (2017)



220. The Changeover, dir. & writ. Miranda Harcourt & Stuart McKenzie [based on Margaret Mahy's The Changeover (1984)] - with Timothy Spall, Melanie Lynskey, Lucy Lawless, Nicholas Galitzine & Erana James - (NZ, 2017)

Secondary:

Margaret Mahy: A Writer’s Life (2005)



221. Duder, Tessa. Margaret Mahy: A Writer’s Life: A Literary Portrait of New Zealand’s Best-Loved Children’s Author. Auckland: HarperCollins, 2005.
222. Mahy, Bridget. "The bridge builder: my mother Margaret Mahy." The Spinoff (28/6/2025)

•

Christchurch City Libraries: The Margaret Mahy Collection

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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.

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Rudyard Kipling: Ten Stories (1947)