Rudyard Kipling (0)

Rudyard Kipling - One of the most memorable English writers of all time
Family of Joseph Rudyard Kipling
Mother - Alice MacDonald Kipling. Alice Kipling (one of four remarkable Victorian sisters) was a vivacious woman about whom a future Viceroy of India would say, "Dullness and Mrs. Kipling cannot exist in the same room."[3]
Father - John Lockwood Kipling. Lockwood Kipling, a sculptor, an illustrator, museum curator and pottery designer, was the principal and professor of architectural sculpture at the newly- founded Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy School of Art and Industry in Bombay. Later in life Kipling illustrated many of Rudyard Kipling's books , and other works . Kipling also remained editor of the Journal of Indian Art and Industry, which carried drawing works from the students of the Mayo School.
COUPLE – named their son after the place they had first met – Rudyard Lake.
Alice Kipling Fleming - Sister of British author Rudyard Kipling who became a well- known psychic, producing automatic writing under the name "Mrs. Holland ." Born June 11, 1868, Alice Kipling was privately educated. She went to India at age 16 and married British army officer John Fleming. While in India she wrote a number of poems , and in 1893 initially experimented with automatic writing. After a long illness she returned to England in 1902 and in the following year read the classic study Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death , by F. W. H. Myers. As a result she contacted the secretary of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), London, regarding her own automatic writing. She was one of the seven principal mediums involved in the famous cross-correspondences cases. Fleming continued to do automatic writing until 1910 , when she suffered a nervous breakdown.
Early Life
Rudyard Kipling was born Joseph Rudyard Kipling on 30 December 1865 in Bombay, in British India. Some of Kipling’s earliest and fondest memories are of his and sister Alice’s trips to the bustling fruit market with their ayah or nanny , or her telling them Indian nursery rhymes and stories before their nap in the tropical afternoon heat . His father’s art studio provided many creative outlets with clay and paints. Often the family took evening walks along the Bombay Esplanade beside the Arabian Sea, the dhows bobbing on the glittering waters. Kipling's days of " strong light and darkness " in Bombay were to end when he was five years old.[21] As was the custom in British India, he and his three- year -old sister, Alice (or " Trix "), were taken to England—in their case to Southsea (Portsmouth), to be cared for by a couple that took in children of British nationals living in India. The two children would live with the couple, Captain and Mrs. Holloway, at their house, Lorne Lodge, for the next six years. In his autobiography, published some 65 years later, Kipling would recall this time with horror, and wonder ironically if the combination of cruelty and neglect he experienced there at the hands of Mrs. Holloway might not have hastened the onset of his literary life. She ruled the boarding house with fire and brimstone and Kipling was often beaten by her and her son. “Then the old Captain died, and I was sorry , for he was the only person in that house as far as I can remember who ever threw me a kind word.”—ibid. Kipling soon learned to read and found solace in literature and poetry , voraciously turning to the magazines and books his parents sent him including Daniel Defoe ’s Robinson Crusoe . Wilkie Collins ’ The Moonstone and works by the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Bret Harte also left an indelible impression on Kipling.
Respite from the Holloway household was gained when he spent one month a year in London with his mother’s kindly sister Aunt Georgie and her husband , pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne Jones and their children. Those months of December were a veritable paradise to Kipling; North End House was constantly brimming with visiting friends and relatives, and the homey and artistic effects of the affectionate couple were everywhere . Their home echoed with laughter and the patter of little feet or was eerily hushed as the children raptly listened to fantastic stories told by Edward. They also played the organ, sang songs , dressed up in costumes and acted out plays .
In January 1878 Kipling was admitted to the United Services College, at Westward Ho!, Devon , a school founded a few years earlier to prepare boys for the armed forces. The school proved rough going for him at first, but later led to firm friendships, and provided the setting for his schoolboy stories Stalky & Co. published many years later.[22] During his time there, Kipling also met and fell in love with Florence Garrard, a fellow boarder with Trix at Southsea (to which Trix had returned). Florence was to become the model for Maisie in Kipling's first novel , The Light that Failed (1891).[22] Towards the end of his stay at the school, it was decided that he lacked the academic ability to get into Oxford University on a scholarship[22] and his parents lacked the wherewithal to finance him;[16] consequently, Lockwood Kipling obtained a job for his son in Lahore (now in Pakistan ), where Lockwood was now Principal of the Mayo College of Art and Curator of the Lahore Museum. Kipling was to be assistant editor of a small local newspaper , the Civil & Military Gazette. He sailed for India on 20 September 1882 and arrived in Bombay on 18 October 1882. This arrival changed Kipling, as he explains, "There were yet three or four days’ rail to Lahore, where my people lived. After these, my English years fell away , nor ever, I think, came back in full strength ".
Travels & First writings
During the summer of 1883, Kipling visited Simla (now Shimla), well-known hill station and summer capital of British India. By then it was established practice for the Viceroy of India and the government to move to Simla for six months and the town became a " centre of power as well as pleasure." Kipling's family became yearly visitors to Simla and Lockwood Kipling was asked to serve in the Christ Church there. He returned to Simla for his annual leave each year from 1885 to 1888, and the town figured prominently in many of the stories Kipling was writing for the Gazette. Kipling describes this time: "My month’s leave at Simla, or whatever Hill Station my people went to, was pure joy—every golden hour counted. It began in heat and discomfort, by rail and road . It ended in the cool evening, with a wood fire in one’s bedroom, and next morn— thirty more of them ahead!—the early cup of tea, the Mother who brought it in, and the long talks of us all together again . One had leisure to work , too, at whatever play-work was in one’s head, and that was usually full." Back in Lahore, some thirty- nine stories appeared in the Gazette between November 1886 and June 1887. Most of these stories were included in Plain Tales from the Hills , Kipling's first prose collection , which was published in Calcutta in January 1888, a month after his 22nd birthday. Kipling's time in Lahore, however , had come to an end. In November 1887, he had been transferred to the Gazette's much larger sister newspaper, The Pioneer , in Allahabad in the United Provinces.
His writing continued at a frenetic pace and during the following year, he published six collections of short stories: Soldiers Three, The Story of the Gadsbys, In Black and White, Under the Deodars, The Phantom Rickshaw, and Wee Willie Winkie, containing a total of 41 stories, some quite long. In addition , as The Pioneer's special correspondent in western region of Rajputana, he wrote many sketches that were later collected in Letters of Marque and published in From Sea to Sea and Other Sketches, Letters of Travel.[4]
In early 1889, The Pioneer relieved Kipling of his charge over a dispute. For his part , Kipling had been increasingly thinking about the future. He sold the rights to his six volumes of stories for £200 and a small royalty, and the Plain Tales for £50; in addition, from The Pioneer, he received six-months' salary in lieu of notice. He decided to use this money to make his way to London, the centre of the literary universe in the British Empire. On 9 March 1889, Kipling left India, travelling first to San Francisco via Rangoon, Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan . He then travelled through the United States writing articles for The Pioneer that too were collected in From Sea to Sea and Other Sketches, Letters of Travel. Starting his American travels in San Francisco, Kipling journeyed north to Portland , Oregon; on to Seattle , Washington; up into Canada, to Victoria and Vancouver , British Columbia ; back into the U.S. to Yellowstone National Park; down to Salt Lake City; then east to Omaha, Nebraska and on to Chicago , Illinois; then to Beaver, Pennsylvania on the Ohio River to visit the Hill family; from there he went to Chautauqua with Professor Hill, and later to Niagara Falls , Toronto, Washington, D.C., New York and Boston . In the course of this journey he met Mark Twain in Elmira, New York, and felt much awed in his presence. Kipling then crossed the Atlantic , and reached Liverpool in October 1889. Soon thereafter, he made his début in the London literary world to great acclaim .
Career as a writer
In London, Kipling had several stories accepted by various magazine editors. He also found a place to live for the next two years. In the next two years, and in short order, he published a novel, The Light that Failed; had a nervous breakdown; and met an American writer and publishing agent, Wolcott Balestier, with whom he collaborated on a novel, The Naulahka (a title he uncharacteristically misspelt; see below ). In 1891, on the advice of his doctors , Kipling embarked on another sea voyage visiting South Africa , Australia , New Zealand and once again India. However, he cut short his plans for spending Christmas with his family in India when he heard of Wolcott Balestier's sudden death from typhoid fever , and immediately decided to return to London. Before his return, he had used the telegram to propose to and be accepted by Wolcott's sister Caroline ( Carrie ) Balestier, whom he had met a year earlier, and with whom he had apparently been having an intermittent romance. On 18 January 1892, Carrie Balestier ( aged 29) and Rudyard Kipling (aged 26) were married in London, in the The wedding was held at All Souls Church, Langham Place. Henry James gave the bride away.
Settled in the U.S, and seemed content there until four years later, when a quarrel his wife had had with her brother resulted in a messy law suit and intense media interest . Kipling was horrified by the publicity and returned the family to England, thus continuing the restlessness that had remained with him since childhood. He would always be on the move, looking for somewhere to settle down. But he never quite succeeded in finding a country that lived up to his expectations .
After The U.S , South Africa became the next land he felt able to transfer his affections to. The Boer war had just begun, and Kipling, never a man to shirk his imperial responsibilities, threw himself whole heartedly into the fray. He enthusiastically supported the British claim to the territory, and proclaimed that the Dutch settlers must be subdued.
At this point in Kipling’s career, the political enthusiasms/ obsessions that would contribute greatly to his falling out of favour with the British Public began to become prominent themes in his work.
Kipling lived outside Capetown from 1900-08, and during that period again produced a great deal of work, much of it far more ‘Imperialist ‘ than anything he had written before. During this time the public’s love affair with Kipling ended, a trend that was hastened by the increasing harshness of his views . He became a much caricatured figure in the press, whilst the public became tired of constant exhortations. Kipling left South Africa in disgust when the Liberals came to power in Britain , and, as he saw it, destroyed all that had been gained in the Boer war. Until the end of his life, Kipling’s world view would be distorted by the paranoid belief that conspiracy and betrayal were everywhere in public life.
World War One proved a bracing diversion for the embittered Kipling, who had long predicted that Germany ’s rivalry with Britain would result in conflict, and who positively revelled in patriotic occasions. He urged his son John to join up, even using his influence to secure the boy a commission. Tragedy ensued when John Kipling disappeared in action only a month after his arrival.
My Boy Jack – Author Rudyard Kipling and his wife search for their 17-year-old son after he goes missing during WWI. (TV 2007)
Kipling saw the subsequent settlement at Versailles as another betrayal, mocking the sacrifices of the fallen allies.
For his remaining two decades, he endured constant pain and discomfort from a series of misdiagnosed stomach ailments. In his autobiography Something of Myself (1935) , Kipling makes no mention of his years of suffering, just as he also avoids mention of the other tragedies in his life. He continued to write, and to develop his art, right up until the end of his life.

Peak of his career

The first decade of the 20th century saw Kipling at the height of his popularity . In 1907 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The prize citation said: "In consideration of the power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas and remarkable talent for narration which characterize the creations of this world-famous author." Nobel prizes had been established in 1901 and Kipling was the first English language recipient. At the award ceremony in Stockholm on 10 December 1907, the Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, C. D. af Wirsén, praised both Kipling and three centuries of English literature.
"Book-ending" this achievement was the publication of two connected poetry and story collections: Puck of Pook's Hill and Rewards and Fairies in 1906 and 1910 respectively. The latter contained the poem "If—". In a 1995 BBC opinion poll, it was voted the UK's favourite poem. This exhortation to self- control and stoicism is arguably Kipling's most famous poem.
Many have wondered why he was never made Poet Laureate. (A poet laureate is a poet officially appointed by a government and is often expected to compose poems for State occasions and other government events . In the United Kingdom the term has for centuries been the title of the official poet of the monarch , since the time of Charles II )Some claim that he was offered the post during the interregnum of 1892-96 and turned it down. At the beginning of World War I, like many other writers, Kipling wrote pamphlets which enthusiastically supported the UK's war aims.

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 perforated duodenal ulcer ( perforeeritud kaksteistsõrmiksoole haavand ) on 18 January 1936, two days before George V, at the age of 70. His death had in fact previously been incorrectly announced in a magazine, to which he wrote, "I've just read that I am dead. Don't forget to delete me from your list of subscribers.
Rudyard Kipling was cremated and his ashes were buried in Poets ' Corner , part of the South Transept of Westminster Abbey.
In 2010, the International Astronomical Union approved that a crater on the planet Mercury would be named after Kipling - one of ten newly discovered impact craters observed by the MESSENGER spacecraft in 2008-9.
Many older editions of Rudyard Kipling's books have a swastika printed on their covers associated with a picture of an elephant carrying a lotus flower . Since the 1930s this has raised the possibility of Kipling being mistaken for a Nazi -sympathiser, though the Nazi party did not adopt the swastika until 1920. Kipling's use of the swastika was based on the Indian sun symbol conferring good luck and well-being; the word derived from the Sanskrit word svastika meaning "auspicious object ". He used the swastika symbol in both right- and left-facing orientations, and it was in general use at the time. Even before the Nazis came to power, Kipling ordered the engraver to remove it from the printing block so that he should not be thought of as supporting them. Less than one year before his death Kipling gave a speech to The Royal Society of St George on 6 May 1935 warning of the danger Nazi Germany posed to the UK.

The Jungle Book

is a collection of stories by British Nobel laureate Rudyard Kipling. The original publications contain illustrations, some by Rudyard's father, John Lockwood Kipling. The tales in the book (and also those in The Second Jungle Book which followed in 1895, and which includes five further stories about Mowgli ) are fables, using animals in an anthropomorphic manner to give moral lessons. The verses of The Law of the Jungle, for example, lay down rules for the safety of individuals, families and communities. Kipling put in them nearly everything he knew or "heard or dreamed about the Indian jungle."[2] Other readers have interpreted the work as allegories of the politics and society of the time.[3] The best -known of them are the three stories revolving around the adventures of an abandoned "man cub" Mowgli who is raised by wolves in the Indian jungle. The Jungle Book, because of its moral tone, came to be used as a motivational book by the Cub Scouts , a junior element of the Scouting movement . This use of the book's universe was approved by Kipling after a direct petition of Robert Baden -Powell, founder of the Scouting movement, who had originally asked for the author's permission for the use of the Memory Game from Kim in his scheme to develop the morale and fitness of working - class youths in cities. Akela, the head wolf in The Jungle Book, has become a senior figure in the movement, the name being traditionally adopted by the leader of each Cub Scout pack.

Kim (novel)

Kim is a picaresque novel by Rudyard Kipling. It was first published serially in McClure's Magazine from December 1900 to October 1901 as well as in Cassell's Magazine from January to November 1901, and first published in book form by Macmillan & Co. Ltd in October 1901. The story unfolds against the backdrop of The Great Game, the political conflict between Russia and Britain in Central Asia . It is set after the Second Afghan War which ended in 1881, but before the Third, perhaps in the 1890s.
The novel is notable for its detailed portrait of the people, culture, and varied religions of India. "The book presents a vivid picture of India, its teeming populations, religions, and superstitions, and the life of the bazaars and the road.
Kim (Kimball O'Hara) is the orphaned son of an Irish soldier and a poor white mother who have both died in poverty. Living a vagabond existence in India under British rule in the late 19th century, Kim earns his living by begging and running small errands on the streets of Lahore. He occasionally works for Mahbub Ali, a horse trader who is one of the native operatives of the British secret service . Kim is so immersed in the local culture, few realise he is a white child , though he carries a packet of documents from his father entrusted to him by an Indian woman who cared for him.
Kim befriends an aged Tibetan Lama who is on a quest to free himself from the Wheel of Things by finding the legendary 'River of the Arrow '. Kim becomes his chela, or disciple, and accompanies him on his journey. On the way, Kim incidentally learns about parts of the Great Game and is recruited by a British officer to carry a message to the British commander in Umballa. Kim's trip with the Lama along the Grand Trunk Road is the first great adventure in the novel.
By chance, Kim's father's regimental chaplain identifies him by his Masonic certificate, which he wears around his neck and Kim is forcibly separated from the Lama. The Lama insists that Kim should comply with the chaplain's plan because he believes it is in Kim's best interests and the boy is sent to a top English school in Lucknow. The Lama funds Kim's education and Kim remains in contact with this Holy Man he has come to love throughout his years at school. Kim also retains contact with his secret service connections and is trained in espionage while on vacation from school by Lurgan Sahib , at his jewellery shop in Simla. As part of his training, Kim looks at a tray full of mixed objects and notes which have been added or taken away, a pastime still called Kim's Game, also called the Jewel Game. After three years of schooling, Kim is given a government appointment so that he can begin his role in the Great Game. Before this appointment begins however, he is granted time to take a much-deserved break. Kim rejoins the Lama and at the behest of Kim's superior , Hurree Chunder Mookherjee, they make a trip to the Himalayas . Here the espionage and spiritual threads of the story collide, with the Lama unwittingly falling into conflict with Russian intelligence agents . Kim obtains maps, papers, and other important items from the Russians working to undermine British control of the region. Mookherjee befriends the Russians under cover , acting as a guide and ensures that they do not recover the lost items. Kim, aided by some porters and villagers, helps to rescue the Lama.
The Lama realizes that he has gone astray. His search for the 'River of the Arrow' should be taking place in the plains, not in the mountains , and he orders the porters to take them back. Here Kim and the Lama are nursed back to health after their arduous journey. Kim delivers the Russian documents to Babu, and a concerned Mahbub Ali comes to check on Kim. The Lama finds his river and achieves Enlightenment. The reader is left to decide whether Kim will henceforth follow the prideful road of the Great Game, the spiritual way of Tibetan Buddhism, or a combination of the two. Kim himself has this to say: "I am not a Sahib. I am thy chela."