Rudyard Kipling [Kipling - The Jungle Books

Rudyard Kipling

THE JUNGLE BOOKS

Edited and with an Introduction and Notes by
KAORI NAGAI

PENGUIN CLASSICS

SERIES EDITOR: JAN MONTEFIORE

RUDYARD KIPLING , born in December 1865 in Bombay (now Mumbai), was taken to England in 1871 with his younger sister Alice and left for five years with an abusive foster-family in Southsea, after which he was sent to the United Services College in Devon, the public school affectionately recalled in Stalky & Co. (1899). He returned to India in the autumn of 1882 to work as a reporter. The poems, sketches and stories which he wrote during his Seven Years Hard in India, especially the series Plain Tales from the Hills, published as a book in 1888, won him immediate acclaim and, from his arrival in London in 1889, worldwide literary celebrity. This was increased by the powerful stories collected in Lifes Handicap and the originality of Barrack-Room Ballads (1892), whose poems Mandalay, Tommy and Gunga Din became immensely popular performance items in music-halls which, like hymns and ballads, were a lasting influence on Kiplings verse.

In 1892 Kipling married the American Caroline Balestier and lived with her in Vermont for four happy years, during which their daughters Josephine and Elsie were born and Kipling wrote some of his best work, including the two Jungle Books (1894, 1895). They moved to England in 1896, settling in Rottingdean, East Sussex, where their son John was born, and eventually at the house Batemans, at Burwash. Kipling continued to travel widely with his family, spending nearly all the winters from 1898 to 1908 in South Africa. On a trip to New York in 1899, his six-year-old daughter Josephine died of pneumonia, which Kipling himself narrowly survived.

Kipling published his masterpiece, Kim, in 1901, and the Just So Stories in 1902. He turned to the theme of Englishness and history in his childrens books Puck of Pooks Hill (1906) and Rewards and Fairies (1910), interweaving poems and stories to subtle intertextual effect. His stories for adults after 1900 focus on the lives of ordinary people, uniquely combining a creative response to the new twentieth-century technologies of communication with a strong imaginative feeling for the strange and the numinous, intensified by his pared-down, understated style. His public poems, including Recessional, The White Mans Burden and The Islanders, all printed in The Times, preached the virtues of patriotism and duty.

From the outset, Kipling identified with the rulers and officials of the British Empire, although he was never their servant (he refused both a knighthood and the Order of Merit). Yet he sympathized deeply with children, outlaws and outsiders, who often engaged his best energies as a writer, as witnessed by the vitality and subtlety of the Jungle Books and Kim. He was a strong supporter of the Boer War, for which he wrote journalism and propaganda; this, together with the hardening of his conservative political views after 1900, made him increasingly unpopular with liberals and anti-imperialists. Kipling returned their dislike. His books continued to sell and to be read widely and he was awarded honorary doctorates by many universities and the Nobel Prize in 1907, but he never again enjoyed the brilliant reputation which he had held in the 1890s.

In the First World War, Kipling remained a strongly patriotic writer, but after the blow of losing his son John at the Battle of Loos in 1915 he became a more private man. He none the less played a major role in the War Graves Commission, arguing successfully for equality of treatment for all ranks and choosing the inscriptions for the memorial stones. He commemorated the dead in his own moving Epitaphs of the War and his History of the Irish Guards in the Great War (1923), an account of his sons regiment. His late stories of loss and bereavement are written with an acuteness and subtlety not always perceived by their contemporary readers.

Kipling died in 1936.

KAORI NAGAI teaches at the University of Kent. She is the author of Empire of Analogies: Kipling, India and Ireland (2006) and of many articles on colonial discourses in the nineteenth century. She has edited Kiplings Plain Tales from the Hills for Penguin Classics and has co-edited a collection of essays on Rudyard Kipling entitled Kipling and Beyond (2010).

JAN MONTEFIORE is Professor of Twentieth-Century English Literature at the University of Kent at Canterbury. Her books include Rudyard Kipling (2007).