The novelist, short-story writer and poet Rudyard Kipling was widely regarded in his lifetime as the foremost chronicler of the British Raj, and in 1907 became the first English-language writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. His Jungle Books and poems such as ‘If’ and ‘Mandalay’ have remained deeply embedded in popular consciousness.
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Born in 1865 in Mumbai, India, where his father, Lockwood, was Professor of Architectural Sculpture, Rudyard Kipling was sent to England at the age of five; aged sixteen he returned to the subcontinent, where he began work as a journalist in Lahore (now in Pakistan) and published his first short stories. Their success financed a round-the-world trip in 1889, via Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, San Francisco and New York – a voyage that would furnish much material for his writing.
After touring parts of North America and Canada, Kipling travelled to London, where he was received with great acclaim, and in January 1892 married Caroline ‘Carrie’ Balestier. The couple honeymooned in Japan before returning to the States and, in a cottage near the Balestier family estate in Vermont, Kipling wrote his Jungle Books – illustrated by his father – and Barrack-Room Ballads.
Kipling’s sense of an anti-British feeling and a dispute with Carrie’s brother prompted a new start in Torquay in 1896, but no decline in productivity – collections of poetry and short stories soon followed, then the humorous school stories Stalky & Co. and his enduringly popular novel Kim. In 1902, the year he published his children’s classic the Just So Stories, he bought a 17th-century house at Burwash on the Sussex coast, where he would live until his death in 1936.
While Kipling’s later reputation as a jingoistic champion of the British Empire attracted criticism, his work was consistently admired by writers as diverse as TS Eliot, WH Auden and George Orwell. Subsequent generations have arrived at a more nuanced appreciation of his writing, noting his ambivalence towards imperial government and sympathy for both its subject peoples and the common soldier, which took on a darker, angrier tone after his son John was killed in the Battle of Loos in 1915: ‘If any question why we died / Tell them, because our fathers lied.’
As Orwell wrote in 1942, while ‘every enlightened person has despised him... nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there.’
