Rudyard Kipling born 1865-1936

About:

Born in Bombay at the height of the British Raj, Rudyard Kipling was the son of an artist and one of the prodigiously successful MacDonald sisters, whose progeny or spouses dominated mid-nineteenth century British culture. He was brought up blissfully in the pampered existence of a child of the British Colonial powers in India, learning Hindustani as his mother tongue, until the age of five when he was sent, with his three year old sister, back to Britain to be brought up British. The foster family they lodged with was brutally disciplinarian and Kipling and his sister suffered a very unpleasant few years (until his mother removed them). Kipling, however, attributed the growth of his literary imagination to the lies he learnt to tell to avoid the beatings.

He was sent to the military school at Westward Ho!, where his lack of sportsmanship and poor eyesight ensured that Kipling’s life did not improve significantly. It was decided that as he would not be bright enough to gain the scholarship he would need to afford to go on to Oxford University, he would be better placed returning to India, to a post secured for him by his father. At this point life began get better. He was delighted to be back in India, and being placed as a journalist with the Civil and Military Gazette meant he could indulge his major talent, writing. As well as his journalism he began to write poetry, or what he termed ditties, and as these became more and more popular he began to be commissioned more for these and his short stories than his factual pieces.

In 1889 he returned to London, via a long journey through the United States, and continued his prolific output of writing. One of his projects involved a collaborative novel with an American writer and publisher Wolcott Balestier, whose sister, Carrie, he married two years later, in the midst of a flu epidemic, the bride being given away by Henry James. Half way through their honeymoon the newly-weds discovered that they were ruined when their bank failed. They returned to Carrie’s home state of Vermont and set up home in a small cottage near the Balestier family estate. In spite of the poverty they were remarkably contented in this period and along with three children, Kipling produced much of his most famous work, including the two Jungle Books.

The combination of bad feeling toward the British resulting from the British Guianan crisis in 1895 and a dispute with his brother-in-law led the Kiplings to decide to return to England. Kipling was by now a highly successful and internationally famous novelist and became thought of by many as the Laureate of the Empire (George Orwell called him “the prophet of British Imperialism”). This was partly to do with what on the surface of his writing appeared to be a wholehearted acceptance of the desirability of British Colonialism, in particular the poem The White Man’s Burden (1899) and partly to do with his often almost ambassadorial travels abroad, particularly to South Africa where he became a close friend of figures such as Cecil Rhodes.

Having rejected the Poet Laureateship and a knighthood, Kipling was awarded, and accepted, the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907. He was the first British writer to be awarded the prize and at 42 he still remains its youngest recipient. Having retired to Sussex to escape what had become an almost modern celebrity, Kipling’s output began to diminish in the years after he was awarded the Nobel Prize. He still offered great support to the British Cause in the First World War and indeed was one of the few to warn prophetically of the horrors approaching in 1935. He died in 1936 and his ashes were buried in Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey.