Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling an English writer of fiction, poetry and journalism (1865-1936), born in Bombay and awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907, the first English-language author to receive it. He is celebrated for stories of empire, of soldiers and animals, and of India, and he remains at once one of the most popular and one of the most disputed authors in English.

Life and India

Joseph Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay on 30 December 1865 to English parents; his father was a teacher at an art school. He spent his early childhood in India, then was sent to England for schooling, an unhappy period he later recalled in the story Baa Baa, Black Sheep. He returned to India in 1882 as a journalist.

Working for newspapers in Lahore and Allahabad, he travelled widely and published poems, sketches and short stories at a remarkable rate. His collections Departmental Ditties and Plain Tales from the Hills, both issued in the late 1880s, made his name. In 1889 he left India and travelled through Asia and America to London, where his reputation grew quickly.

He married Caroline Balestier in 1892 and lived for several years in Vermont in the United States, then settled at Rottingdean and later at Bateman's in Sussex. He travelled to South Africa, where he formed a close attachment to the imperial cause, and his only son John was killed in the First World War, a loss that darkened his later years.

Fiction and Poetry

Kipling's fiction includes the novel The Light That Failed, the adventure story Captains Courageous, the complex novel Kim about a boy in India, and many collections of short stories, among them The Man Who Would Be King and the tales gathered in Debits and Credits. He was a master of the short story, admired for compression and for the swift revelation of character.

His poetry was enormously popular in its day. Barrack-Room Ballads contains the dialect verse of ordinary soldiers; The Seven Seas and The Five Nations speak of empire and of duty; and famous poems such as If, Mandalay, Gunga Din and Recessional entered the common memory of English-speaking readers around the world.

The Jungle Book and its sequel, published in the 1890s, tell of Mowgli, a boy raised by wolves, and of such memorable creatures as Baloo the bear, Bagheera the panther and Shere Khan the tiger. Just So Stories, written for his children, offers playful explanations of how the camel got its hump and the leopard its spots.

Themes and Style

Kipling wrote about work, duty and craft. He admired engineers, soldiers, sailors and officials, and he treated the ordinary discipline of a job as a form of moral seriousness. His celebration of empire has drawn fierce criticism, since it often assumed the superiority of British rule, and modern readers weigh his achievement against his politics.

His style is distinctive for its energy, its use of slang and dialect, and its precise observation of place and trade. He could write with tender sympathy for children and animals and with a hard realism about violence and suffering. He experimented with form and narration, and his late stories grow increasingly subtle and oblique.

He was also a poet of exile and homesickness, of the distance between the imperial centre and the far frontier. His best work often comes from a tension between confidence in the imperial project and an awareness of its costs, and it is this ambivalence that gives his stories and poems their lasting hold on readers.

Public Life and Beliefs

Kipling was a public figure who identified strongly with the British Empire and with the idea of a civilising mission. He wrote in support of imperial federation and of military preparedness, and his poem The White Man's Burden, published in 1899, became a notorious expression of that outlook, though its immediate occasion was the American annexation of the Philippines.

He refused many honours, including the order of merit and the laureateship, but he accepted the Nobel Prize in 1907. He worked on behalf of soldiers and their families and wrote about the machinery and the human cost of war. His son's death at the battle of Loos in 1915 left him grief-stricken and gave his later writing a new austerity.

His political views have made him a contested figure. Critics have condemned his imperial assumptions, while others have argued that his best work transcends them and that his sympathy for ordinary people, whatever their nationality, complicates any simple reading of his beliefs.

Influence and Legacy

Kipling's influence on popular culture has been immense. The Jungle Book has been adapted for film and stage many times, If is one of the most quoted poems in English, and his stories helped shape the adventure tradition and the literature of empire. Writers as different as T. S. Eliot and George Orwell engaged seriously with his work.

Orwell, who admired him while rejecting his politics, described him as a good bad poet and saw in his verse a genuine popular voice. Later criticism has examined his treatment of India, of race and of gender, complicating but not erasing his achievement. His craftsmanship is widely respected even by those who dislike his message.

He died in London on 18 January 1936 and his ashes were placed in Westminster Abbey. His reputation has moved in and out of fashion, but his stories and poems remain in print throughout the world, and he is remembered as a writer of extraordinary range whose work continues to provoke both admiration and argument.

See also

• The Jungle Book
• Kim
• British Empire in literature
• Nobel Prize in Literature