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Joseph Rudyard Kipling (December 30, 1865 - January 18,
1936) was a British author and poet.
Kipling's Childhood
Kipling was born in Bombay, India. His father
was John Lockwood Kipling, a teacher at the local Jeejeebhoy School of Art,
and his mother was Alice Macdonald. They are said to have met at
Rudyard Lake in Staffordshire, England, hence Kipling's name. His mother's
sister was married to the artist Edward Burne-Jones, and young Kipling and
his sister spent much time with the Burne-Joneses in England from the ages of
six to twelve, while his parents remained in India. Kipling was a cousin of
the three-times prime minister Stanley Baldwin.
After a spell at boarding school, Kipling returned to India himself, to
Lahore (in modern-day Pakistan) where his parents now were, in 1881. He began
working as a newspaper editor for a local edition and continued tentative
steps into the world of poetry; his first professional sales were in 1883.
His Early Travels
By the mid-1880s he was
travelling around the subcontinent as a correspondent for the Allahabad
Pioneer. His fiction sales also began to bloom, and he published six short
books of short stories in 1888. One short story dating from this time is
"The Man Who Would Be a King", later made famous as a slightly
differently named movie featuring Sean Connery and Michael Caine.
The next year Kipling began a long journey back to England, going through
Burma, China, Japan, and California before crossing the United States and the
Atlantic Ocean and settling in London. From then on his fame grew rapidly,
and he positioned himself as the literary voice most closely associated with
the imperialist tempo of the time in the United Kingdom (and, indeed, the
rest of the Western world and Japan). His first novel, The Light that Failed,
was published in 1890. The most famous of his poems of this time is probably
"The Ballad of East and West" (which begins "Oh, East is East,
and West is West, and never the twain shall meet")
His Career as a Writer
In 1892 he married Caroline
Balastier; her brother, an American writer, had been Kipling's friend but had
died of typhoid fever the previous year. While on honeymoon Kipling's bank
failed and cashing in their travel tickets only let the couple return as far
as Vermont (where most of the Balastier family lived). Rudyard and his new
bride would live in the United States for the next four years. During this
time he turned his hand to writing for children, and he published the work
for which he is most remembered today -- The Jungle Book -- and its sequel
The Second Jungle Book -- in 1894 and 1895.
After a quarrel with his in-laws, he and his wife returned to England, and in
1897 he published Captains Courageous. The next year he would begin
travelling to southern Africa for winter vacations almost every year. There
he would meet and befriend another icon of British imperialism, Cecil Rhodes,
and begin collecting material for another of his children's classics, Just So
Stories for Little Children. That work was published in 1902, and another of
his enduring works, the Indian spy novel Kim, first saw the light of day the
previous year. In 2001, the novel would be listed as one of the 100 best
English-language novels of the 20th century by the editorial board of the
American Modern Library.
Kipling's poetry of the time included "The White Man's Burden". In
the non-fiction realm he also became involved in the debate over the British
response to the rise in German naval power, publishing a series of articles
collectively entitled A Fleet in Being.
During the first decade of the 20th century, Kipling was at the height of his
popularity. In 1907 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature; bookending
this achievement was the publication of two connected poetry and story
collections, 1906's Puck of Pook Hill and 1910's Rewards and Fairies. The
latter contained the poem If -. In a 1995 BBC opinion poll, it was voted
Britain's favourite poem. This exhortation to seize the day is arguably
Kipling's single most famous poem.
The Effects of World War I
Kipling was so closely
associated with the expansive, confident attitude of late 19th-century
European civilization that it was inevitable that his reputation would suffer
in the years of and after World War I; Kipling also knew personal tragedy at
the time as his eldest son, John, died in 1915 at the Battle of Loos. Partly
in response, he joined Sir Fabian Ware's Imperial War Graves Commission (now
the Commonwealth 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. His most significant contribution to the project was
his selection of the biblical phrase "Their Name Liveth For
Evermore" found on the Stones of Remembrance in larger war graves.
In 1922, Kipling, who had made reference to the work of engineers in some of
his poems and writings, was asked by a University of Toronto civil
engineering professor for his assistance in developing a dignified obligation
and ceremony for graduating engineering students. Kipling was very
enthusiastic in his response and shortly produced both an obligation and a
ceremony formally entitled "The Ritual of the Calling of an
Engineer." Today, engineering graduates all across Canada, and even some
in the United States, are presented with an iron ring at the ceremony as a
reminder of their obligation to society.
His Death and Legacy
Kipling kept writing until the early 1930s, but at a
slower pace and with much less success than before. He died of a brain
haemorrhage in early 1936.
He continued falling into critical eclipse afterwards. Today it is difficult
to decide if Kipling has a rightful place in the pantheon of great writers.
As the European colonial empires collapsed in the mid-20th century and the
ideas of communism gained influence, Kipling's works fell far out of step
with the times. Many who condemn him are really criticizing the imperialist
ideal, rather than Kipling himself.
His main literary legacy in the period immediately following his death was on
American science fiction, as John W. Campbell considered him an ideal to be
followed. Many science fiction writers still consciously follow his example.
Today, Kipling is most highly regarded for his children's books, while in his
own lifetime he was primarily considered a poet, and was even offered the
post of British Poet Laureate — though he turned it down. There are signs of
rehabilitation in Kipling's reputation both as a writer of mature prose and
of poetry, as public tastes change once again. Where the pendulum of regard
will come to rest remains to be seen.
After the death of Kipling's wife in 1939, his house in Sussex was bequeathed
to the National Trust and is now a public museum to the author. There is a
thriving Kipling Society in the UK.
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