Rudyard Kipling: the story on HearLore

Rudyard Kipling

Joseph Rudyard Kipling was born on the 30th of December 1865 in Bombay, British India, into a family that embodied the complex identity of the Anglo-Indian community. His father, John Lockwood Kipling, was a sculptor and professor of architectural sculpture, while his mother, Alice Kipling, was a vivacious woman from the prominent MacDonald family. The couple had met in England and courted at Rudyard Lake in Staffordshire, a place so beautiful they named their first child after it. Kipling's early years were spent in a bungalow on the campus of the Sir J. J. School of Art, a home that would later be torn down and replaced by a structure built fifteen years after his birth. He wrote of Bombay as the Mother of Cities, a place where he was born between the palms and the sea, where the world-end steamers waited. This birthplace would become the wellspring for his entire literary career, providing the sights, smells, and vernacular rhythms that would define his early work. Yet, the idyllic childhood ended abruptly when he was five years old. In a practice common to British India, he and his three-year-old sister, Alice, known as Trix, were sent to England to live with strangers. They were placed in the care of Captain Pryse Agar Holloway and his wife Sarah at a house called Lorne Lodge in Southsea, a place Kipling would later describe as the House of Desolation. The experience was one of calculated torture, where the children were subjected to cruelty and neglect that Kipling believed hastened the onset of his literary life. He recalled how the contradictions of his daily life were treated as lies, creating a foundation for his future storytelling. The only sanctuary during those dark years was a month spent each Christmas with his aunt Georgiana and her husband, the painter Edward Burne-Jones, at their home in Fulham, which Kipling called a paradise that saved him. It was a stark contrast to the bullying and fear that defined his time at Lorne Lodge, where he learned to tell lies to survive and found the foundation of his literary effort.

The Ink-Stained Journalist

Kipling's return to India at the age of sixteen marked a profound transformation, shedding his English years to become a man of the East. He sailed for India on the 20th of September 1882, arriving in Bombay where he was immediately immersed in the sights and smells of his birthplace. At sixteen years and nine months, he looked four or five years older and was adorned with real whiskers, which his mother abolished within an hour of seeing them. He moved to Lahore to work as an assistant editor for the Civil and Military Gazette, a newspaper he would later call his mistress and most true love. The work was frenetic; he wrote six days a week, often covering the office in ink, resembling a Dalmatian dog more than a human being. His need to write was unstoppable, and he produced a flood of short stories that would eventually form his first prose collection, Plain Tales from the Hills, published in Calcutta in January 1888. These stories captured the lives of the British in India with a raw, unvarnished realism that was new to the genre. He also wrote for The Pioneer in Allahabad, where he lived in Belvedere House from 1888 to 1889. His time in Simla, the summer capital of British India, was pure joy, a time of leisure and work that he cherished. He wrote about the heat and discomfort of the journey to the hills, ending in the cool evening with a wood fire and long talks with his family. By 1889, he had sold the rights to his six volumes of stories for £200 and a small royalty, and the Plain Tales for £50, along with six months' salary from The Pioneer. He decided to use the money to move to London, the literary center of the British Empire, leaving behind the life he had known for over a decade. His journey took him through Rangoon, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan, where he was favorably impressed by the people and their manners. He even wrote that he had lost his heart to a geisha he called O-Toyo, a sentiment he expressed while writing in the United States. This period of travel and writing established him as a versatile storyteller, capable of capturing the nuances of different cultures and settings.

When and where was Rudyard Kipling born?

Joseph Rudyard Kipling was born on the 30th of December 1865 in Bombay, British India. He was born into a family that embodied the complex identity of the Anglo-Indian community.

What happened to Rudyard Kipling when he was five years old?

Rudyard Kipling and his three-year-old sister were sent to England to live with strangers at a house called Lorne Lodge in Southsea. The experience was one of calculated torture where the children were subjected to cruelty and neglect that Kipling believed hastened the onset of his literary life.

When did Rudyard Kipling die and what was the cause of death?

Rudyard Kipling died on the 18th of January 1936 at Middlesex Hospital in London. He died of a perforated duodenal ulcer after suffering a haemorrhage in his small intestine on the 12th of January 1936.

Why did Rudyard Kipling write the poem If?

The poem If was written as an exhortation to self-control and stoicism and was voted the UK's favourite poem in a 1995 BBC opinion poll. It is arguably Kipling's most famous poem and is contained in the collection Rewards and Fairies.

When did Rudyard Kipling receive the Nobel Prize in Literature?

Rudyard Kipling was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907 as the first writer to receive the prize. He was 41 years old at the time, making him the youngest recipient to date.

The Vermont Years

Kipling's life in the United States was a period of intense creativity and personal turmoil. He and his wife, Caroline Starr Balestier, whom he married on the 18th of January 1892, settled in a small cottage on a farm near Brattleboro, Vermont, which they called Bliss Cottage. It was in this house, with snow lying level with the window-sill from December to April, that the first dawnings of The Jungle Books came to him. He wrote about Mowgli and animals, which later grew into the two Jungle Books. The couple's first child, Josephine, was born in three-foot of snow on the night of the 29th of December 1892. However, the idyllic life in Vermont was shattered by a family dispute and global politics. Kipling's brother-in-law, Beatty Balestier, was an inebriated man who threatened Kipling with physical harm, leading to his arrest and a subsequent hearing that destroyed Kipling's privacy. The couple left the United States in July 1896, returning to England. The loss of their daughter Josephine, who died of pneumonia in 1899, was a devastating blow. Kipling's grief was profound, and he turned to writing to cope. He produced a book of short stories, The Day's Work, and a novel, Captains Courageous, along with a profusion of poetry, including the volume The Seven Seas. The collection of Barrack-Room Ballads was issued in March 1892, containing his poems Mandalay and Gunga Din. He especially enjoyed writing the Jungle Books and also corresponding with many children who wrote to him about them. The writing life in Naulakha, the house he built on a rocky hillside overlooking the Connecticut River, was occasionally interrupted by visitors, including his father and the British writer Arthur Conan Doyle. Kipling seemed to take to golf, occasionally practicing with the local Congregational minister and even playing with red-painted balls when the ground was covered in snow. He loved the outdoors, not least of whose marvels in Vermont was the turning of the leaves each fall. He described this moment in a letter, capturing the beauty and transience of the natural world. The Kiplings loved life in Vermont and might have lived out their lives there, were it not for the family dispute and the global political climate that drove them back to England.

The Poet of Empire

Kipling's reputation as the Poet of the Empire was cemented by his support for the British cause in the Second Boer War and his political writings. He traveled to South Africa in early 1898, beginning an annual tradition that would last until 1908. He stayed in The Woolsack, a house on Cecil Rhodes's estate at Groote Schuur, and cultivated friendships with influential politicians like Rhodes, Sir Alfred Milner, and Leander Starr Jameson. He wrote poetry in support of the British cause and became a correspondent for The Friend newspaper in Bloemfontein, which had been commandeered by Lord Roberts for British troops. His journalistic stint lasted only two weeks, but it was his first work on a newspaper staff since he left The Pioneer in Allahabad more than ten years before. At The Friend, he made lifelong friendships with Perceval Landon, H. A. Gwynne, and others. He also wrote articles published more widely expressing his views on the conflict. Kipling penned an inscription for the Honoured Dead Memorial in Kimberley. His poems Recessional and The White Man's Burden were to create controversy when published. Regarded by some as anthems for enlightened and duty-bound empire-building, the poems were seen by others as propaganda for brazen-faced imperialism and its attendant racial attitudes. Still others saw irony in the poems and warnings of the perils of empire. The period 1898, 1910 was crucial in the history of South Africa and included the Second Boer War, the ensuing peace treaty, and the 1910 formation of the Union of South Africa. Kipling's political views were complex, and he was a staunch opponent of Bolshevism, a position which he shared with his friend Henry Rider Haggard. The two had bonded on Kipling's arrival in London in 1889, largely on the strength of their shared opinions, and remained lifelong friends. Kipling's popularity was such that he was asked by his friend Max Aitken to intervene in the 1911 Canadian federal election on behalf of the Conservatives. He wrote a front-page appeal against the reciprocity treaty with the United States, which is credited with helping to turn Canadian public opinion against the Liberal government. Kipling sympathized with the anti-Home Rule stance of Irish Unionists, who opposed Irish autonomy. He was friends with Edward Carson, the Dublin-born leader of Ulster Unionism, who raised the Ulster Volunteers to prevent Home Rule in Ireland. Kipling wrote in a letter to a friend that Ireland was not a nation, and that before the English arrived in 1169, the Irish were a gang of cattle thieves living in savagery and killing each other while writing dreary poems about it all. In his view, it was only British rule that allowed Ireland to advance. A visit to Ireland in 1911 confirmed Kipling's prejudices. He wrote that the Irish countryside was beautiful, but spoiled by what he called the ugly homes of Irish farmers, with Kipling adding that God had made the Irish into poets having deprived them of love of line or knowledge of color. In contrast, Kipling had nothing but praise for the decent folk of the Protestant minority and Unionist Ulster, free from the threat of constant mob violence. Kipling wrote the poem Ulster in 1912, reflecting his Unionist politics. He often referred to the Irish Unionists as our party. Kipling had no sympathy or understanding for Irish nationalism, seeing Home Rule as an act of treason by the government of the Liberal Prime Minister H. H. Asquith that would plunge Ireland into the Dark Ages and allow the Irish Catholic majority to oppress the Protestant minority. The scholar David Gilmour wrote that Kipling's lack of understanding of Ireland could be seen in his attack on John Redmond, the Anglophile leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party who wanted Home Rule because he believed it was the best way of keeping the United Kingdom together, as a traitor working to break up the United Kingdom. Ulster was first publicly read at an Unionist rally in Belfast, where the largest Union Jack ever made was unfolded. Kipling admitted it was meant to strike a hard blow against the Asquith government's Home Rule bill. Ulster generated much controversy with the Conservative MP Sir Mark Sykes, who as a Unionist was opposed to the Home Rule bill, condemning Ulster in The Morning Post as a direct appeal to ignorance and a deliberate attempt to foster religious hate.

The War and The Son

The death of Kipling's only son, John, at the Battle of Loos in September 1915, was a devastating blow that changed the course of his life and work. John initially wanted to join the Royal Navy, but having had his application turned down due to poor eyesight, he applied for military service as an army officer. Again, his eyesight was an issue during the medical examination. He tried twice to enlist, but was rejected. His father had been lifelong friends with Lord Roberts, former commander-in-chief of the British Army, and colonel of the Irish Guards, and at Rudyard's request, John was accepted into the Irish Guards. John Kipling was sent to Loos two days into the battle in a reinforcement contingent. He was last seen stumbling through the mud blindly, with a possible facial injury. A body identified as his was found in 1992, although that identification has been challenged. In 2015 the Commonwealth War Grave Commission confirmed that it had correctly identified the burial place of John Kipling; they recorded his date of death as the 27th of September 1915, and that he is buried at St Mary's A.D.S. Cemetery, Haisnes. After his son's death, in a poem titled Epitaphs of the War, Kipling wrote If any question why we died / Tell them, because our fathers lied. Critics have speculated that these words may express Kipling's guilt over his role in arranging John's commission. Professor Tracy Bilsing contends that the line refers to Kipling's disgust that British leaders failed to learn the lessons of the Boer War, and were unprepared for the struggle with Germany in 1914, with the lie of the fathers being that the British Army was prepared for war when it was not. John's death has been linked to Kipling's 1916 poem My Boy Jack, by the play My Boy Jack and its subsequent television adaptation, along with the documentary Rudyard Kipling: A Remembrance Tale. However, the poem was originally published at the head of a story about the Battle of Jutland and appears to refer to a death at sea; the Jack referred to may be the boy VC Jack Cornwell, or perhaps a generic Jack Tar. In the Kipling family, Jack was the name of the family dog, while John Kipling was always John, making the identification of the protagonist of My Boy Jack with John Kipling questionable. However, Kipling was emotionally devastated by the death of his son. He is said to have assuaged his grief by reading the novels of Jane Austen aloud to his wife and daughter. During the war, he wrote a booklet The Fringes of the Fleet containing essays and poems on various nautical subjects of the war. Some of these were set to music by the English composer Edward Elgar. Kipling became friends with a French soldier named Maurice Hammoneau, whose life had been saved in the First World War when his copy of Kim, which he had in his left breast pocket, stopped a bullet. Hammoneau presented Kipling with the book, with bullet still embedded, and his Croix de Guerre as a token of gratitude. They continued to correspond, and when Hammoneau had a son, Kipling insisted on returning the book and medal. The library also possesses the actual French 389-page paperback edition of Kim that saved Hammoneau's life. On the 1st of August 1918 the poem The Old Volunteer appeared under his name in The Times. The next day, he wrote to the newspaper to disclaim authorship and a correction appeared. Although The Times employed a private detective to investigate, the detective appears to have suspected Kipling of being the author, and the identity of the hoaxer was never established. Kipling's grief and guilt were profound, and they shaped his later work and his involvement in the Imperial War Graves Commission.

The Architect of Memory

Kipling's response to the loss of his son and the horrors of the First World War was to dedicate himself to the memory of the dead. He joined Sir Fabian Ware's Imperial War Graves Commission, the group responsible for the garden-like British war graves that can be found to this day dotted along the former Western Front and the other places in the world where British Empire troops lie buried. His main contributions to the project were his selection of the biblical phrase Their Name Liveth For Evermore, found on the Stones of Remembrance in larger war cemeteries, and his suggestion of the phrase Known unto God for the gravestones of unidentified servicemen. He also chose the inscription The Glorious Dead on the Cenotaph, Whitehall, London. Additionally, he wrote a two-volume history of the Irish Guards, his son's regiment, published in 1923 and seen as one of the finest examples of regimental history. Kipling's short story The Gardener depicts visits to the war cemeteries, and the poem The King's Pilgrimage a journey which King George V made, touring the cemeteries and memorials under construction by the Imperial War Graves Commission. With the increasing prevalence of the automobile, Kipling became a motoring correspondent for the British press, writing enthusiastically of trips around England and abroad, though he was usually driven by a chauffeur. After the war, Kipling was skeptical of the Fourteen Points and the League of Nations, but had hopes that the United States would abandon isolationism and the post-war world be dominated by an Anglo-French-American alliance. He hoped the United States would take on a League of Nations mandate for Armenia as the best way of preventing isolationism, and hoped that Theodore Roosevelt, whom Kipling admired, would again become president. Kipling was saddened by Roosevelt's death in 1919, believing him to be the only American politician capable of keeping the United States in the game of world politics. Kipling was hostile towards communism, writing of the Bolshevik take-over in 1917 that one sixth of the world had passed bodily out of civilization. In a poem in 1918 Kipling wrote of Soviet Russia that everything good in Russia had been destroyed by the Bolsheviks , all that was left was the sound of weeping and the sight of burning fire, and the shadow of a people trampled into the mire. In 1920 Kipling co-founded the Liberty League with Haggard and Lord Sydenham. This short-lived enterprise focused on promoting classic liberal ideals as a response to the rising power of communist tendencies within Great Britain, or as Kipling put it, to combat the advance of Bolshevism. In 1922 Kipling, having referred to the work of engineers in some of his poems, such as The Sons of Martha, Sappers and McAndrew's Hymn, and in other writings, including short-story anthologies such as The Day's Work, was asked by a University of Toronto civil engineering professor, Herbert E. T. Haultain, for assistance in developing a dignified obligation and ceremony for graduating engineering students. Kipling was enthusiastic in his response and shortly produced both, formally titled The Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer. Today, engineering graduates all across Canada are presented with an iron ring at a ceremony to remind them of their obligation to society. In 1922 Kipling became Lord Rector of the University of St Andrews, a three-year position. Kipling, as a Francophile, argued strongly for an Anglo-French alliance to uphold the peace, calling Britain and France in 1920 the twin fortresses of European civilization. Similarly, Kipling repeatedly warned against revising the Treaty of Versailles in Germany's favor, which he predicted would lead to a new world war. An admirer of Raymond Poincaré, Kipling was one of few British intellectuals who supported the French Occupation of the Ruhr in 1923, at a time when the British government and most public opinion was against the French position. In contrast to the popular British view of Poincaré as a cruel bully intent on impoverishing Germany with unreasonable reparations, Kipling argued that he was rightfully trying to preserve France as a great power in the face of an unfavourable situation. Kipling argued that even before 1914, Germany's larger economy and higher birth rate had made that country stronger than France; with much of France devastated by war and the French suffering heavy losses meant that its low birth rate would give it trouble, while Germany was mostly undamaged and still with a higher birth rate. So he reasoned that the future would bring German domination if Versailles were revised in Germany's favor, and it was madness for Britain to press France to do so. In 1924 Kipling was opposed to the Labour government of Ramsay MacDonald as Bolshevism without bullets. He believed Labour was a communist front organisation, and excited orders and instructions from Moscow would expose Labour as such to the British people. Kipling's views were on the political right. Though he admired Benito Mussolini to some extent in the 1920s, he was against fascism, calling Oswald Mosley a bounder and an arriviste. By 1935 he was calling Mussolini a deranged and dangerous egomaniac and in 1933 wrote, The Hitlerites are out for blood. Despite his anti-communism, Kipling was popular with Russian readers in the interwar period. Many younger Russian poets and writers, such as Konstantin Simonov, were influenced by him. Kipling's clarity of style, use of colloquial language and employment of rhythm and rhyme were seen as major innovations in poetry that appealed to many younger Russian poets. Though it was obligatory for Soviet journals to begin translations of Kipling with an attack on him as a fascist and an imperialist, such was Kipling's popularity with Russian readers that his works were not banned in the Soviet Union until 1939, with the signing of the Molotov, Ribbentrop Pact. The ban was lifted in 1941 after Operation Barbarossa, when Britain became a Soviet ally, but imposed again with the Cold War in 1946. Kipling's use of the swastika symbol in his books was based on the Indian sun symbol conferring good luck and the Sanskrit word meaning fortunate or well-being. He used the swastika symbol in both right and left-facing forms, and it was in general use by others at the time. In a note to Edward Bok after the death of Lockwood Kipling in 1911, Rudyard said: I am sending with this for your acceptance, as some little memory of my father to whom you were so kind, the original of one of the plaques that he used to make for me. I thought it being the Swastika would be appropriate for your Swastika. May it bring you even more good fortune. Once the swastika had become widely associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, Kipling ordered that it should no longer adorn his books. Less than a year before his death, Kipling gave a speech titled An Undefended Island to the Royal Society of St George on the 6th of May 1935, warning of the danger which Nazi Germany posed to Britain. Kipling scripted the first Royal Christmas Message, delivered via the BBC's Empire Service by George V in 1932. In 1934, he published a short story in The Strand Magazine, Proofs of Holy Writ, postulating that William Shakespeare had helped to polish the prose of the King James Bible.

The Final Years

Kipling kept writing until the early 1930s, but at a slower pace and with less success than before. On the night of the 12th of January 1936 he suffered a haemorrhage in his small intestine. He underwent surgery, but died at Middlesex Hospital in London less than a week later on the 18th of January 1936, at the age of 70, of a perforated duodenal ulcer. Kipling's body lay in state in the Fitzrovia Chapel, part of Middlesex Hospital, after his death, and is commemorated with a plaque near the altar. His death had previously been incorrectly announced in a magazine, to which he wrote, I've just read that I am dead. Don't forget to delete me from your list of subscribers. The pallbearers at the funeral included Kipling's cousin, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, and the marble casket was covered by a Union Jack. Kipling was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium in north-west London, and his ashes interred at Poets' Corner, part of the south transept of Westminster Abbey, next to the graves of Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy. Kipling's will was proven on the 6th of April, with his estate valued at £168,141 2s. 11d. (roughly equivalent to £10 million today). Kipling's subsequent reputation has changed with the political and social climate of the age. The contrasting views of him continued for much of the 20th century. The literary critic Douglas Kerr wrote that Kipling is still an author who can inspire passionate disagreement and his place in literary and cultural history is far from settled. But as the age of the European empires recedes, he is recognised as an incomparable, if controversial, interpreter of how empire was experienced. That, and an increasing recognition of his extraordinary narrative gifts, make him a force to be reckoned with. Kipling's works of fiction include the Jungle Book duology, Kim, the Just So Stories and many short stories, including The Man Who Would Be King. His poems include Mandalay, Gunga Din, The Gods of the Copybook Headings, The White Man's Burden and If, . He is seen as an innovator in the art of the short story. James Joyce considered Tolstoy, Kipling and D'Annunzio the three writers of the nineteenth century who had the greatest natural talents, but that they did not fulfill that promise. He also noted their semi-fanatic ideas about religion, or about patriotism. Kipling in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was among the United Kingdom's most popular writers. Henry James said Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius, as distinct from fine intelligence, that I have ever known. In 1907, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, as the first writer to receive the prize, and at 41, its youngest recipient to date. He was also sounded out for the British Poet Laureateship and several times for a knighthood, but declined both. Kipling's children's books are classics; one critic noted a versatile and luminous narrative gift. The Nobel Prize committee cited Kipling's writing on the manners and customs of the Japanese when they awarded his Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907. The Swedish Academy, in awarding the Nobel Prize in Literature this year to Rudyard Kipling, desires to pay a tribute of homage to the literature of England, so rich in manifold glories, and to the greatest genius in the realm of narrative that that country has produced in our times. To book-end this achievement came the publication of two connected poetry and story collections: Puck of Pook's Hill and Rewards and Fairies. The latter contained the poem If, which in a 1995 BBC opinion poll was voted the UK's favourite poem. This exhortation to self-control and stoicism is arguably Kipling's most famous poem. Kipling's life and work remain a complex and controversial legacy, reflecting the changing tides of history and the enduring power of his storytelling.