1896 The Kiplings’ second child, Elsie, is born. A violent ar gument with his unstable brother-in-law Beatty Balestier prompts Kipling to move back to England.
1897 Kipling settles in Rottingdean, on the Sussex coast. He publishes Captains Courageous, a seafaring novel. His son, John, is born.
1898- 1907 Kipling spends winters in South Africa and forms a close relationship with another British imperialist, Cecil Rhodes.
1899 By this time the British Empire includes almost a quar ter of the world’s land surface and population. The Boer War, a conflict of the South African Republic and Orange Free State against Great Britain, begins and continues until 1902. Kipling visits the United States for the last time, survives a near-fatal bout of pneumonia, and experiences the sudden death of his elder daugh ter, Josephine. Stalky & Co., based on the time he spent at the United Services College, is published. From Sea to Sea is published (see entry for 1889). Joseph Conrad publishes his novel Heart of Darkness.
1900 The Kipling Reader, a selection of his works, is published. Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim appears.
1901 Kim, Kipling’s last and best novel, becomes a best-seller; it tells the story of an Irish orphan raised in India who eventually becomes a member of the English Secret Ser vice. Queen Victoria of England dies and Edward VII becomes king; U.S. president William McKinley is assas sinated and succeeded by Theodore Roosevelt. Guglielmo Marconi transmits the first wireless mes sages. German writer Thomas Mann publishes Buddenbrooks and Swedish playwright August Strindberg The Dance of Death. Italian opera composer Giuseppe Verdi (La Traviatia, Rigoletto, etc.) and French artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec die. French novelist and critic André Malraux and American film producer Walt Disney are born.
1902 Kipling purchases a house known as Bateman’s in Bur wash, Sussex, where he writes, among other works, Just So Stories, a collection of fables for children, published this year. The Boer War ends in May with the Treaty of Vereeniging. The Tale of Peter Rabbit, by Beatrix Potter, appears.
1903 Jack London’s The Call of the Wild appears.
1906 Kipling publishes Puck of Pook’s Hill, a volume of poems and historical stories intended mainly for children. A Liberal government is elected in Great Britain. Kipling becomes critical of the regime’s pacifist sentiments and actively supports a militarized government.
1907 Kipling becomes the first English author to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. In spite of this honor, he is rapidly losing the favor of the British literary establish ment. He visits Canada.
1908 Lord Robert Baden-Powell, Kipling’s friend since the 1880s, founds the Boy Scouts movement. He incorpo rates names and ideals from The Jungle Books and Kim into much of the literature and philosophy regarding the Boy Scouts.
1910 Kipling’s most-quoted poem, “If,” is published in a col lection titled Rewards and Fairies.
1911 A School History of England, a collaborative work by Kipling and the historian C. R. L. Fletcher, is published. J. M. Barrie publishes his novel Peter and Wendy, more commonly published today under the title Peter Pan.
1914 On September 2, shortly after the outbreak of World War I, Britain’s War Propaganda Bureau holds a sympo sium of leading British writers (including Arthur Conan Doyle, Ford Madox Ford, and H. G. Wells) to discuss how to forward the nation’s interests in the war. Kipling’s invitation is withdrawn because of his political views, but he is subsequently allowed to tour Britain’s army camps. This experience leads to the publication of The New Army in Training and, after a visit to the Western Front in 1915, France in War and a commissioned work on the Royal Navy, The Fringes of the Fleet (both published in 1915). Edgar Rice Burroughs publishes Tarzan of the Apes.
1915 Six weeks after enlisting in the Irish Guards, Kipling’s son, John, is killed during the Battle of Loos in France. His death will haunt Kipling for the rest of his life.
1919- 1932 Between intermittent travels during the next dozen years, Kipling continues to publish stories, poems, and historical works, including The Graves of the Fallen, and a book of verse, The Years Between, both published in 1919.
1923 He is elected rector of St. Andrews University, Scotland, and publishes The Irish Guards in the Great War.
1924 He publishes Land and Sea: Tales for Boys and Girls. He appears before 6,000 Boy Scouts at the Imperial Jam boree in England.
1928 A Book of Words: Selections of Speeches and Addresses Delivered Between 1906 and 1927 is published.
1932 Kipling publishes a volume of stories, Limits and Renewals.
1936 Kipling dies on January 18 of peritonitis and is buried in Westminster Abbey.
1937 Something of Myself, Kipling’s autobiography, is pub lished.
1945 The end of World War II accelerates the decline of the British Empire.
Introduction
The term “jungle,” derived from the Hindi word jangala, entered the English language only in the eighteenth century; today it evokes dangerous terrain: impenetrable equatorial forests, menacing urban landscapes, and overall mayhem (as in, “it’s a jungle out there”). Even as jungles have gained a new designation—rain forest—and we have learned of their life-sustaining role in the biosphere, the word continues to conjure images of imperial adventure: the white man cutting his way through the brush to hunt big game, or Tarzan swinging from a vine. We owe our deep associations of jungles with mystery, threat, and the struggle for survival in large measure to Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Books, perhaps the most influential mythology of the jungle written in English.
Kipling composed The Jungle Books in the mid-1890s, just when he had reached the peak of his celebrity as a writer. The books were phenomenally popular and well received by critics when they first appeared in 1894 (The Jungle Book) and 1895 (The Second Jungle Book). The stories they include are marked not only by the events of Kipling’s life but by the interests and anxieties of late-Victorian culture, by prevailing attitudes toward empire, gender, nature, race, and children. Kipling’s jungle has been decoded by readers as both an allegory of empire and an allegory of childhood. It articulates a philosophy of human nature, a theory of education, and a distinct conception of the relationship between humans and the natural world. The Jungle Book tales also produce a powerful myth of male identity; they provided the inspiration for Robert Baden-Powell’s world-renowned organization, the Boy Scouts, and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s perennially popular Tarzan series. Although the stories are marked by the culture in which they were produced, they remain popular and have been translated into dozens of languages, including Estonian, Welsh, Finnish, Japanese, Yiddish, and Telugu.
EARLY LIFE: BETWEEN INDIA AND ENGLAND
Throughout his life, Rudyard Kipling was a prolific writer of short stories, journalistic sketches, poetry, essays, and children’s literature. He also penned several novels and was a gifted illustrator of his own work. Although this body of work is diverse—including historical tales, comic sketches, and science fiction—much of his writing focuses on life in India, where he was born to British parents in 1865. Kipling spent two stretches of his life in India, from birth to age five, and from sixteen to twenty-three, and India’s unique geographical, political, and social landscapes were recurrently a point of departure for his literary imaginings.
By all accounts, Kipling passed his early years with his family in Bombay in comfort, praised and pampered. He and his younger sister, Alice (called “Trix”), were principally tended by a set of adoring servants, with whom they spoke Hindustani. These servants gave young Rudyard ample opportunity to move freely across linguistic, race, and class lines. At the start of his fragmentary unfinished memoir, Something of Myself (1937), Kipling recalls, “Meeta, my Hindu bearer, would sometimes go into little Hindu temples where, being below the age of caste, I held his hand and looked at the dimly-seen friendly Gods” (Kipling, Something of Myself and Other Autobiographical Writings, p. 3; see “For Further Reading”). When Kipling returned to India in his teens, no longer “below the age of ca
ste,” he again associated his own mobility with the pleasures of looking. He wrote, “I would wander till dawn in all manner of odd places—liquor shops, gambling and opium dens ... wayside entertainments such as puppet shows, native dances; or in and about the narrow gullies under the Mosque of Wazir Khan for the sheer sake of looking” (p. 33). This delight in crossing social boundaries can be seen in his stories for adults and also in the Jungle Book tales, in which characters not only cross lines between social groups but cross borders between species: After being abandoned by his parents, the child Mowgli, perhaps the best-known of these characters, enters a wolf pack, is educated by a bear, and befriends a panther and a python.
As he explains in his memoir, Kipling felt that his own parents abandoned him as a child. When Rudyard was five years old, he and his sister were precipitously dispatched “home” to England to be raised by strangers for pay at a house in Southsea, which he later designated “the House of Desolation.” Although the Anglo-Indian practice of shipping one’s children to England to be educated was commonplace, Kipling’s descriptions of this early desertion by his parents were ever tainted with bitterness. He remained in Southsea in misery for six years until his parents “rescued” him. In his story “Baa Baa, Black Sheep,” a thinly disguised rendering of these years, he refers to himself and his sister as “Punch and Judy,” suggesting that they were mere puppets in Southsea and subject to violence at the hands of their foster family.
As a child in Southsea, Kipling discovered that reading offered an escape from his wretched circumstances. In Something of Myself, he recalls how books became “a means to everything that would make me happy” (p. 6). In “Baa Baa, Black Sheep,” he writes of Punch’s escape into the world of stories: “If he were only left alone Punch could pass, at any hour he chose, into a land of his own, beyond the reach of Aunty Rosa and her God” (p. 148). According to his own account, his childhood reading provided inspiration for The Jungle Books. Kipling explains that as a child, he “somehow or other came across a tale about a lion-hunter in South Africa who fell in among lions who were all freemasons, and with them entered into a confederacy against some wicked baboons.” He continues, “I think that, too, lay dormant until the Jungle Books began to be born” (p. 7). As in the lion-hunter’s story, which R. L. Green, in Kipling and the Children, has identified as James Greenwood’s tale “King Lion,” in The Jungle Books a human figure—Mowgli—joins in a fellowship with animals to whom he is bound by a code of ethics. Much like the role played by books for the boy Rudyard, the role played by this new fellowship with beasts is to provide salvation for young Mowgli and ultimately to help him rise to great power.
At the conclusion of Kipling’s sojourn in the “House of Desolation,” after a brief and joyful reunion with his family, his parents returned to India, and Kipling was sent off to the United Services College, a school for officers’ children in the North Devon resort town of Westward Ho! The adventures described in his children’s book Stalky & Co. (1899) were based on his experiences at this college. During his years there, Kipling began to experiment with short fiction and poetry. He submitted his first writing for publication—a poem entitled “The Dusky Crew”—to the American children’s monthly St. Nicholas Magazine, which rejected it. Only a decade later, the magazine would publish many of the stories collected in The Jungle Books.
At sixteen Rudyard bid farewell to both school and England to begin life as a journalist in India; he rejoined his parents and sister, restoring what the Kiplings called “the family square.” Kipling’s parents, Lockwood and Alice (née Macdonald) always held deep fascination for him. The children of Methodist ministers, they both rejected the faith of their fathers. Both were irreverent, spirited, and creative. Alice, who wrote poetry, was one of a group of beautiful and gifted sisters who married talented men; two wed painters—the Pre-Raphaelite artist Sir Edward Burne-Jones and the historical painter Sir Edward Poynter—and one married a wealthy industrialist named Alfred Baldwin and became the mother of future prime minister Stanley Baldwin. Before her marriage, Alice allegedly tossed a lock of hair belonging to the Evangelical preacher and founder of Methodism John Wesley into the fire, declaring, “A hair of the dog that bit us!” Lockwood was an artist and a teacher of artisans. His appointment as an artist craftsman at the Sir Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy School of Art and Industry in Bombay enabled him to marry Alice in 1865, shortly after they met. The Kiplings remained in Bombay for ten years, then moved to Lahore, where Lockwood became principal of the Mayo School of Industrial Arts and curator of the Lahore Museum. In 1882 Lockwood secured a position for his son at a daily paper, the Civil and Military Gazette, which was published in Lahore. Rudyard worked as a journalist at the Gazette for five years until he earned a position as an editor at its more prominent sister paper, the Pioneer, where he worked until 1889.
During his years working as a journalist in India, Kipling published many sketches, tales, and poems. In 1885 he collaborated with his family on a collection of poetry and stories entitled Quartette, which was published as a Christmas supplement to the Civil and Military Gazette. His first book of poetry, Departmental Ditties, was published in 1886, and his first book of short stories, Plain Tales from the Hills, appeared in 1888; the two volumes established his reputation as an important new writer. Plain Tales mostly portrayed Anglo-Indian society and army life; while some tales included comic elements, in places they depicted the unsettling or even tragic mixing of Indian and European cultures, as in “Lispeth,” “In the House of Suddhoo,” and “Beyond the Pale.” Kipling produced five more volumes of short stories before leaving India in 1889. During this period he also began a novel, Mother Maturin; but after writing more than 300 pages, he stopped work on it, saving some of the material to use in his novel Kim (1901) and destroying the rest.
It is no accident that Kipling’s phenomenal success as a writer coincided with the era of British high imperialism, beginning from about 1880. In 1876, just at the time Kipling began to experiment with fiction and poetry, Queen Victoria was declared empress of India by the viceroy of India, Lord Lytton, a friend of Kipling’s parents. Kipling’s popularity in Victorian Britain was based in part on the evocative and stylistic power of his early writing and in part on the allure of the exotic. The Victorians who admired Kipling had a predilection for the exotic: They acquired parrots as pets, viewed tropical blooms in their botanical gardens, and were fascinated by images and stories of fairylands and of the mysterious Orient. Many of the stories in Plain Tales from the Hills feature “half-castes.” Many depict the titillating and transgressive crossing of boundaries and the dangerous but exciting movement into the forbidden realms of the “native.” For example, the story “His Chance in Life” begins, “If you go straight away from Levees and Government House Lists, past Trades’ Balls—far beyond everything and everybody you ever knew in your respectable life—you cross, in time, the Borderline where the last drop of White blood ends and the full tide of Black sets in” (p. 79). Likewise, “Beyond the Pale” begins, “A man should, whatever happens, keep to his own caste, race and breed. Let the White go to the White and the Black to the Black.... This is the story of a man who wilfully stepped beyond the safe limits of decent everyday society, and paid for it heavily” (p. 171). Because of his success at stimulating the fantasy life of his readers, when Kipling arrived in London from India in 1889 at age twenty-three, he was an instant literary celebrity. Praise for his writing was enthusiastic. Henry James, a friend of Kipling‘s, dubbed him at this time “the infant monster.”
VERMONT
The events of the early 1890s, pivotal years for Kipling, set the scene for his composition of the stories that comprise The Jungle Books. Shortly after arriving in London, Kipling met and befriended Wolcott Balestier, a minor American novelist and a friend of eminent writers such as Henry James and William Dean Howells. The two quickly became intimate friends, calling each other “brother” and collaborating on an adventure novel, The Naulahka (1892), whi
ch narrates the exploits of an American in India. While Kipling was overseas in December 1891, Balestier died suddenly of typhoid. Only weeks after the funeral, Kipling precipitously married his friend’s sister, Car- rie. At the ceremony in London, Henry James gave the bride away. After an abbreviated honeymoon, the couple moved to Brattleboro, Vermont, where the Balestier family had property and some roots.
Rudyard and his new wife bought a large plot of land from Carrie’s younger brother, Beatty, on which they raised a house, calling it Naulakha (a slightly different spelling from the book title) in honor of Wolcott. In late 1892, while they waited for the house to be completed, they rented a cottage where Kipling began to compose the Jungle Book stories. It was here, during a dark and icy Vermont winter, that Kipling created stories about sunny, verdant India.
My workroom in the Bliss Cottage was seven feet by eight, and from December to April the snow lay level with its window-sill. It chanced that I had written a tale about Indian Forestry work which included a boy who had been brought up by wolves. In the stillness, and suspense, of the winter of ‘92 some memory of the Masonic Lions of my childhood’s magazine, and a phrase in [Rider] Haggard’s Nada the Lily combined with the echo of this tale (Something of Myself, pp. 67-68).
The “suspense” to which he refers here is the anticipation of the birth of his first child, Josephine, whose position in utero echoes Kipling’s description of his womblike workspace buried under snow in “Bliss” cottage. The “tale about Indian Forestry” is “In the Rukh.” The story, subsequently published in the collection Many Inventions (1893), centers on a grown-up Mowgli who appears mysteriously out of the jungle to succor a forester working for the British government. In this story as in the Jungle Book tales, Mowgli seems to possess magical powers, as he controls wild animals and communicates with them. Evoking the Greek god Pan, he plays the pipes as his wolf brothers dance, helping him to entrance a young girl. Interestingly, the powers that Mowgli is shown to accrue throughout The Jungle Books here are harnessed for the purposes of empire; at the end of “In the Rukh,” Mowgli agrees to work as a “forest guard,” essentially working for the British government as a forester. Similarly, in Kipling’s novel Kim, which he first conceived at this time, the abilities the eponymous hero acquires in his wanderings are ultimately channeled for his work in the “Great Game,” conducting business for the British Secret Service in India.
Jungle Books (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Page 2
