Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling and his world

Joseph Rudyard Kipling was an English journalist, novelist, poet and short-story writer, born on 30 December 1865 in Bombay in the Bombay Presidency of British India. British India gave him much of the material that later filled his fiction and verse. His parents, Alice Kipling and John Lockwood Kipling, had moved to India in 1865 after John accepted a post as Principal and Professor of Architectural Sculpture at the newly founded Sir J. J. School of Art in Bombay. They named their first child after Rudyard Lake in Staffordshire, a place whose beauty had moved them during their courtship.

Kipling grew up amid questions of language, place and belonging. His parents considered themselves Anglo-Indians, a term then used for people of British origin living in India, and Kipling would later be described in the same way, though he spent much of his life elsewhere. He remembered being cared for by an ayah and a bearer who told stories and Indian nursery songs, then being told, “Speak English now to Papa and Mamma.” He later wrote that he thought and dreamed in the vernacular idiom before translating himself into English. Such conflicts of identity and national allegiance became prominent in his fiction.

At five, as was the custom among British families in India, Kipling and his sister Alice, called Trix, were sent to the United Kingdom. From October 1871 to April 1877 they lived in Southsea, Portsmouth, with Captain Pryse Agar Holloway and Sarah Holloway at Lorne Lodge, a house Kipling later called “the House of Desolation.” In his autobiography, he remembered cruelty and neglect there and wondered whether that experience had hastened the beginning of his literary life. Relief came through Christmas visits to his aunt Georgiana and her husband, the painter Edward Burne-Jones, at The Grange in Fulham, which Kipling called “a paradise.”

Books, poems, and public standing

Kipling became one of the United Kingdom’s most popular writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His fiction includes “The Man Who Would Be King” (1888), The Jungle Book (1894), The Second Jungle Book (1895), Kim (1901), and Just So Stories (1902). His poems include “Mandalay” (1890), “Gunga Din” (1890), “The White Man’s Burden” (1899), “If—” (1910), and “The Gods of the Copybook Headings” (1919). He is seen as an innovator in the art of the short story, and his children’s books are regarded as classics. One critic noted “a versatile and luminous narrative gift.”

In 1907 Kipling received the Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming the first English-language recipient and, at age 41, the youngest recipient to that date. He was sounded out for the British Poet Laureateship and several times for a knighthood, but declined both. After his death on 18 January 1936, his ashes were interred at Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. His reputation changed with the political and social climate, and debate over his work continued through much of the twentieth century. Literary critic Douglas Kerr wrote that Kipling can still inspire passionate disagreement, but is now recognized as an incomparable, if controversial, interpreter of how empire was experienced. Readers return to his words for their narrative force, their sharp memory of childhood and exile, and their unsettled view of a world shaped by empire.