Rudyard Kipling - Man of Exceptional Thoughts
November 03, 2019
Rudyard Kipling, in full Joseph Rudyard Kipling, (born December 30, 1865, Bombay [now Mumbai], India—died January 18,
1936, London, England), English short-story writer, poet, and novelist
chiefly remembered for his celebration of British imperialism, his tales and poems of British soldiers in India, and his tales for children. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907.
Kipling’s
father, John Lockwood Kipling, was an artist and scholar who had considerable
influence on his son’s work, became curator of the Lahore Museum, and is described presiding over
this “wonder house” in the first chapter of Kim, Rudyard’s most
famous novel.
His mother was Alice Macdonald, two of whose sisters married the highly
successful 19th-century painters Sir Edward Burne-Jones and Sir Edward Poynter, while a third married Alfred Baldwin and
became the mother of Stanley Baldwin,
later prime minister.
These connections were of lifelong importance to Kipling.
Much of his childhood
was unhappy. Kipling was taken to England by his parents at the age of six and was left for five years at a
foster home at Southsea, the horrors of which he described in the story “Baa Baa, Black
Sheep” (1888). He then went on to the United Services College at Westward Ho,
north Devon, a new, inexpensive, and inferior boarding school. It haunted
Kipling for the rest of his life—but always as the glorious place celebrated in Stalky & Co. (1899) and related stories: an unruly paradise in which the
highest goals of English education are met amid a tumult of teasing, bullying,
and beating. The Stalky saga is one of Kipling’s great imaginative
achievements. Readers repelled by a strain of brutality—even of cruelty—in his
writings should remember the sensitive and shortsighted boy who was brought to
terms with the ethos of this deplorable
establishment through the demands of self-preservation.
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