Rudyard Kipling

Joseph Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay in December 1865, the son of John Lockwood Kipling, an English art teacher and museum curator newly posted to the Jeejebhoy School of Art, and Alice Macdonald, whose sisters married into a remarkable web of late-Victorian connections (one became the mother of Stanley Baldwin, another the wife of the painter Edward Burne-Jones). His earliest years in India were unusually happy — he spoke Hindustani with the servants more fluently than English with his parents — and the rupture, when it came at age six, was correspondingly absolute. He and his three-year-old sister were sent to England in 1871 and boarded with a Mrs. Holloway in Southsea, a Calvinist landlady who beat him, locked him in a cellar, and made him wear a placard reading LIAR through the streets. He spent six years in what he later called the House of Desolation before his mother, alerted by his deteriorating eyesight and incipient breakdown, finally came back from India to retrieve him.

He returned to British India in 1882, at sixteen, as a journalist on the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore. The seven years he spent on Indian newspapers were his real education: he travelled the subcontinent, filed reportage on famines and durbars, and on the side produced the comic verse of Departmental Ditties (1886) and the densely observed stories of Plain Tales from the Hills (1888). By twenty-four he was famous; by twenty-six he had moved to London and was being compared, more or less seriously, to Dickens. Barrack-Room Ballads (1892), which included "Gunga Din" and "Mandalay," made him a household name and the unofficial laureate of the British soldier.

He married Carrie Balestier, the sister of an American friend, in 1892 and moved to her family's hometown of Brattleboro, Vermont, where he built a house called Naulakha and wrote his most enduring books: The Jungle Book (1894) and its sequel, the Just So Stories (eventually published in 1902), Captains Courageous (1897), and most of Kim (1901), the novel about an Irish orphan in the Great Game between Russia and Britain in central Asia that is, by general agreement, his masterpiece. A bitter quarrel with his brother-in-law drove the Kiplings back to England in 1896, where they settled eventually at Bateman's in Sussex. The Nobel Prize in Literature came in 1907; he was forty-one, the first English-language laureate and still the youngest writer ever to receive it.

The imperialism is not a separable detail. "The White Man's Burden" (1899), addressed to the United States on the occasion of its annexation of the Philippines, is a frank summons to colonial rule as moral duty; the racial categories underlying it run through much of his other work, including books — Kim, the Jungle Book stories — that are also genuinely sympathetic to the peoples they describe. He was a Tory imperialist who became, after 1900, an increasingly hardline one, hostile to Irish Home Rule, to women's suffrage, and to the postwar settlement. His only son John, who was severely myopic and had been twice rejected by the army, was commissioned through Kipling's personal intervention with Lord Roberts and was killed at the Battle of Loos in September 1915, aged eighteen, six weeks after arriving in France. Kipling spent the rest of his life on the Imperial War Graves Commission, drafting many of the inscriptions, and writing — in "Common Form" — If any question why we died, / Tell them, because our fathers lied. He never quite reconciled the imperial creed with what it had cost him. He died of a perforated ulcer in January 1936 and was buried in Poets' Corner. Reading him honestly means holding the craft and the politics in view at the same time.