Rudyard Kipling: A Life in Five Chapters

Chapter 1 · The House of Desolation

Sent from Bombay to a boarding household at six

1865 – 1882 · Bombay · Southsea · Devon

Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay in 1865, the son of John Lockwood Kipling, an artist and museum curator in British India, and Alice Macdonald. His first language was effectively Hindustani, learned from servants; he was brought to his parents at dinner and told to speak English, and often could not.

At six he and his younger sister were taken to England and left with a foster family in Southsea while their parents returned to India. This was ordinary practice among Anglo-Indian families and it was, for him, a catastrophe. He spent close to six years there. In his own account — in the story *Baa Baa, Black Sheep* and again in his memoir *Something of Myself* — he was bullied, beaten and made to feel he was being punished for something he could not identify. He called the place the House of Desolation. He read compulsively, was punished for it, and went half-blind before anybody noticed his eyesight was failing.

His mother eventually came and removed him. He was sent to the United Services College in Devon, a cheap school for the sons of officers, where he was short-sighted, unathletic and bookish, and where he edited the school paper and discovered he could write to order.

It is worth being careful here. Kipling's own accounts of Southsea are the main source, written decades later by a man who used his childhood as material. Something bad happened. Exactly how bad is not independently established.

Why this matters

Kipling's lifelong preoccupations — endurance, self-command, and the child who is not protected — begin in a documented but only partly verifiable childhood ordeal.

You have the six years at Southsea. What would you ask the man who wrote them down?

Ask Kipling

• “What actually happened in the house at Southsea?”
• “Did being sent away teach you self-command, or only how to hide?”
• “What was it like to think in Hindustani and be made to answer in English?”
• “Nobody noticed you were going blind — what did that do to you?”
• “How much of Baa Baa, Black Sheep should a reader take as fact?”

Chapter 2 · Seven Years to a Deadline

The newspaper that made the writer

1882 – 1889 · Lahore · Allahabad · Simla

At sixteen Kipling went back to India to work as assistant editor on the *Civil and Military Gazette* in Lahore. He stayed in Indian journalism for seven years. It is the most important professional fact about him.

A daily newspaper in a small colonial station taught him three things that never left his prose. It taught him to write short: the paper needed fillers of an exact length, and he supplied them. It taught him to write to a deadline whether or not he felt like it. And it taught him to be interested in *how things are done* — the working of a bridge, a locomotive, an irrigation channel, a regiment — because the paper covered them and he had to get the vocabulary right. His sentences are full of the exact noun of a trade, and that habit came from the Gazette.

The fillers became *Plain Tales from the Hills* in 1888: forty short stories about Anglo-Indian life, gossip, adultery, administration and death, published when he was twenty-two. *Departmental Ditties* and the *Barrack-Room Ballads*, written in the voice and idiom of the private soldier, followed. Nothing quite like the Ballads existed in English verse; educated poetry had not previously tried to sound like a soldier speaking.

He returned to London in 1889 and was, almost immediately, the most talked-about young writer in England. He was twenty-three.

Why this matters

Kipling's compression, his accuracy about machinery and trades, and his ear for non-literary speech are all traceable to seven years of daily newspaper work, not to inspiration.

You have the newspaper years. What would you put to him about them?

Ask Kipling

• “What did writing to a fixed length every day do to your prose?”
• “Why take the trouble to learn the vocabulary of other people's trades?”
• “What did the Barrack-Room Ballads let a private soldier say that poetry had not?”
• “Were the Anglo-Indians of Plain Tales your subject or your audience?”
• “What does fame at twenty-three do to a writer?”

Chapter 3 · The Empire's Poet, and the Argument About Him

A Nobel Prize, two refusals, and politics that will not be tidied away

1892 – 1910 · Vermont · Sussex · South Africa

Kipling married Caroline Balestier in 1892 and lived for four years in Vermont, where he wrote the *Jungle Books*. A vicious quarrel with his brother-in-law, conducted partly in court, drove the family back to England. Their eldest child Josephine died of pneumonia in New York in 1899, aged six, while Kipling himself was gravely ill in the same city. He never spoke about her afterwards.

His politics belong in the open. He was an imperialist, and not a decorative one. *The White Man's Burden* (1899) urged the United States to take up colonial rule of the Philippines and described the governed as half-devil and half-child. That is his own phrase, in his own poem, and no amount of admiration for his craft dissolves it. He supported the Boer War, campaigned against Irish Home Rule, and grew steadily more reactionary.

He is not, however, only that. *Recessional* (1897), written for Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, is a warning to the empire about its own arrogance and the certainty of its collapse. *Kim* takes India seriously as a world in its own right rather than as a backdrop. He was capable of both, sometimes in the same year.

He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907, the first writer in English to do so and, at forty-one, still the youngest ever. He refused a knighthood, the Order of Merit and the Poet Laureateship — repeatedly, and without explanation.

Why this matters

Kipling is the standing test case for reading a writer whose politics are genuinely objectionable and whose technique is genuinely first-rate; flattening either half produces a false account.

You have the prize, the refusals and the politics. What would you press him on?

Ask Kipling

• “Defend The White Man's Burden to a reader in this century.”
• “How do Recessional and The White Man's Burden come from the same man?”
• “Why refuse the knighthood, the Order of Merit and the Laureateship?”
• “Does Kim show a different India from your political writing?”
• “You never spoke of Josephine again — why not?”

Chapter 4 · Thirty-Two Lines That Refuse to Finish

If—, and the man it was actually about

c. 1895 – 1910 · Sussex · The Transvaal

*If—* was published in 1910 in *Rewards and Fairies*, tucked in after a story about the young George Washington. Kipling said afterwards that it came out of the character of Leander Starr Jameson.

Jameson had led a raid into the Transvaal at the end of 1895, intending to trigger a rising against the Boer republic. It failed completely and humiliatingly. Jameson was arrested, tried, imprisoned — and, in Kipling's reading, carried the public blame without complaint or excuse while others who had encouraged him stayed silent. Whether that reading of Jameson is historically fair is disputed; the raid was an act of aggression, and its consequences helped bring on the Boer War.

The poem's construction is rarely noticed and is the whole of its effect. It is a single sentence. Thirty-two of its thirty-four lines are conditional clauses — *if you can* do this, *if you can* bear that — and the main clause does not arrive until the last two lines. A reader therefore has to hold the entire argument open, unresolved, for the length of the poem: the suspension the poem is describing is the suspension the reader is performing.

Kipling regarded it as one of his slighter pieces. It has since been voted the nation's favourite poem in Britain, printed on more walls than any other English verse, and hung above the players' entrance to Centre Court at Wimbledon.

“If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you.”

— Rudyard Kipling, 'If—', Rewards and Fairies (1910), opening lines

Why this matters

If— is a machine, not a sentiment: the delayed main clause makes the reader physically experience the self-restraint the poem argues for.

You have the single unfinished sentence and the man behind it. What is your question?

Ask Kipling

• “Why make the reader wait thirty lines for the main verb?”
• “Who was Jameson, and was your reading of him fair?”
• “Does a poem about self-command speak to someone with no control over their life?”
• “Is If— addressed to your son, or to somebody else entirely?”
• “Does it irritate you to be remembered for a poem you thought slight?”

Chapter 5 · Loos, and the Words on the Stones

A father's influence, an eighteen-year-old, and no grave

1915 – 1936 · Loos · France · Sussex

Kipling's son John was twice rejected for a commission because of his eyesight — the same weak sight his father had. Kipling used his personal friendship with Lord Roberts, Colonel of the Irish Guards, to obtain one for him anyway. John Kipling was eighteen when he went to France.

He was reported missing at the Battle of Loos on 27 September 1915, six weeks after his eighteenth birthday, in his first action. His body was not identified in his parents' lifetime. Kipling and his wife spent years writing to hospitals, tracing survivors, and pursuing rumours of a prisoner. Nothing came back. A grave was identified as John's by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission in 1992, and that identification remains contested by some historians.

Afterwards Kipling served on the Imperial War Graves Commission and did the work himself. He chose the wording carved on the headstones of the unidentified — *A Soldier of the Great War, Known unto God* — and the inscription on the Stones of Remembrance. Those words stand in cemeteries across the world, and they were chosen by a man looking for his own son.

In *Epitaphs of the War* he wrote a two-line piece, *Common Form*: if any question why we died, tell them, because our fathers lied. He wrote it, and he was a father, and he knew what he had done.

He died in London in January 1936 of a perforated ulcer, and was buried in Poets' Corner.

Why this matters

The most quoted words in Britain's war cemeteries were written by a man who had used his influence to send his own son to the front and could not find his body.

You have Loos, and the words he chose afterwards. What would you ask?

Ask Kipling

• “Would you pull those strings for John again?”
• “Who are the fathers who lied, in Common Form?”
• “How did you choose 'Known unto God'?”
• “Did the war change what you believed about the Empire?”
• “What do you say to a reader who cannot separate your craft from your politics?”

What Kipling changed

Kipling brought the speech of ordinary soldiers and working people into English verse, wrote children's books that have never been out of print, and became the first English-language Nobel laureate in literature. He also gave imperialism some of its most effective and most damaging poetry. The words he chose for the Imperial War Graves Commission stand in cemeteries on every continent, and are read every year by people who do not know he wrote them.

A debate that continues

Kipling's standing has moved repeatedly since 1936 and is still contested: whether the craft can be taught separately from the politics, and whether his reading of Jameson's conduct — the seed of If— — was ever accurate.

Keep exploring — ask Kipling

• “Which of your own poems would you cut from the record?”
• “What did journalism give you that literature could not?”
• “Should a reader today be taught your politics alongside your craft?”

Related lives

• George Orwell — Chronicler of the Total State
• Winston Churchill — Prime Minister of Great Britain
• Vernon Scannell — Who Found The Violence In A Garden Game
• Queen Victoria — Queen & Empress of India

Related themes

Empire and its critics · Poetry of the First World War · Conditional syntax in verse