Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling was the dominant English-language writer of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras — the most widely read, the most widely quoted, the most extravagantly admired, and, after his death, the most fiercely contested. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907 at the age of forty-one, the youngest recipient ever and the first English-language writer to receive the honour. His best work — The Jungle Book, Kim, the Just So Stories, and the finest of his short stories and poems — belongs to the permanent literature of the English language. His worst impulses — the jingoism, the racial condescension, the imperial self-satisfaction — have made him one of the most problematic major writers in the canon.

India and the Making of a Writer

Joseph Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay in 1865, the son of John Lockwood Kipling, an artist and museum curator, and Alice Macdonald Kipling. His early childhood in India, surrounded by servants who spoke Hindi and told him Indian stories, left an indelible mark: India was his imaginative homeland, and his best fiction draws its power from his deep, intimate knowledge of the subcontinent.

At the age of six, he and his sister were sent to England and placed in the care of a foster family in Southsea — a period of misery, bullying, and emotional deprivation that haunted him for the rest of his life and that he described with barely suppressed fury in “Baa Baa, Black Sheep” (1888) and in the early chapters of The Light That Failed (1891).

He was educated at the United Services College in Devon — the model for Stalky & Co. (1899) — and returned to India at seventeen to work as a journalist on the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore. Within a few years, he had published Departmental Ditties (1886), a collection of satirical verse about Anglo-Indian society, and Plain Tales from the Hills (1888), short stories that revealed an astonishing knowledge of both British and Indian life, a narrative economy that was already Kipling’s signature, and an ear for dialogue — soldiers’ slang, bazaar Hindi, bureaucratic English — that no other writer could match.

The Jungle Book and Just So Stories

The Jungle Book (1894) and The Second Jungle Book (1895) are among the most universally known works of children’s literature. The Mowgli stories — the tale of the human boy raised by wolves in the Indian jungle, taught by Baloo the bear and Bagheera the panther, and threatened by Shere Khan the tiger — are mythic in their power and precision. They work on multiple levels: as animal adventure stories, as parables of law, community, and belonging, and as allegories of imperialism (a reading Kipling would have rejected but that the texts support).

The Just So Stories for Little Children (1902), written for his own children and illustrated with his own drawings, are perfect examples of the storytelling art — rhythmic, inventive, and endlessly rereadable.

Kim

Kim (1901) is Kipling’s masterpiece and one of the greatest novels of the nineteenth century. Kimball O’Hara, the orphaned son of an Irish soldier, grows up as a street urchin in Lahore, speaking Hindi like a native, moving freely between the British and Indian worlds. He becomes simultaneously the disciple of a Tibetan lama on a spiritual quest and a player in the “Great Game” — the British intelligence war against Russian influence in Central Asia.

The novel is extraordinary for the richness of its sensory world — the Grand Trunk Road, the teeming bazaars, the Himalayan landscapes — and for the complexity of its central character, who belongs fully to neither British nor Indian culture but moves between them with a fluency that is both exhilarating and poignant. Kim is the finest portrait of India in English fiction before E.M. Forster and Paul Scott.

The Poet

Kipling’s poetry reached a popular audience that no serious English poet has matched before or since. “If—” (1910), “Gunga Din” (1890), “Mandalay” (1890), “The White Man’s Burden” (1899), and “Recessional” (1897) are among the most frequently quoted poems in the English language. T.S. Eliot edited a selection of Kipling’s verse and argued that, while Kipling was not a “poet” in the narrow sense, he was a great verse writer whose best work possessed “a queer gift of second sight” — the ability to capture the voice and experience of ordinary people, particularly soldiers.

Critical Standing

Kipling’s reputation collapsed in the decades after his death, as the British Empire he celebrated dissolved and as literary taste shifted toward modernist complexity. George Orwell’s essay “Rudyard Kipling” (1942) remains the most balanced assessment: Orwell acknowledged Kipling’s “good bad” poetry, condemned his politics, and conceded that “he survives while the refined people who have sniggered at him seem to wear so badly.”

Modern criticism has rediscovered Kipling’s late stories — “Mary Postgate,” “The Gardener,” “Mrs. Bathurst” — as works of devastating psychological subtlety, far more complex and morally ambiguous than the patriotic swagger of his earlier work.

Collecting Kipling

Plain Tales from the Hills (Thacker, Spink, Calcutta, 1888) is the key first edition — Kipling’s first prose book, published in India. The Jungle Book (Macmillan, 1894) and Kim (Macmillan, 1901) in first editions are major targets. The Outward Bound Edition (Scribner’s, 36 volumes, 1897–1937) is the standard collected edition. Kipling’s bibliography is enormous and complex, and E.W. Martindell’s A Bibliography of the Works of Rudyard Kipling is the essential reference.