Rudyard Kipling was an English writer and journalist known for his novels, poetry, short stories, and children’s fiction, much of which concerned the themes of empire while expressing support for British imperialism. Kipling was born on December 30, 1865, in Bombay (modern Mumbai), in British India. His father, John Lockwood Kipling, was an artist and museum curator; his mother, Alice, was a writer and poet. Kipling’s childhood in India informed the rest of his life, and he defined himself as Anglo-Indian. When Kipling was five, his parents sent him and his sister to England for schooling at a Portsmouth boarding house called Lorne Lodge, which the siblings referred to as the “House of Desolation.” Kipling was regularly beaten and subjected to humiliating punishments, enduring, in his words, a “calculated torture” only heightened by his previously pampered life in Bombay. After six years of “Hell…in all its terrors,” Kipling’s parents sent him to United Services College, in Westward Ho!, Devon. He remembered the school fondly, memorializing his time there in the semi-autobiographical novel Stalky &amp; Co. A fulsome library helped to foster his early writing efforts, and soon he had become “irretrievably committed to the ink-pot.”
Kipling’s family could not afford to send him to university, so he returned to India in 1882, when he was 16, and took a job in Lahore at the Civil and Military Gazette, a local newspaper. In the following years, Kipling became astoundingly prolific: between November of 1886 and June of 1887, he published 39 short stories in the Gazette. A colleague later wrote that Kipling, in his white summer wardrobe, “resembled a Dalmatian dog more than a human being, for he was spotted all over with ink in every direction.” By 1889, he had published seven collections, earning a reputation for inventive short stories focusing on the interactions between English colonists and native Indians, and ranging in narrative from grand adventure (“The Man Who Would Be King”) to the paranormal (“The Phantom Rickshaw”). He next set his sights on London, arriving in 1890 and immediately experiencing a meteoric ascension: as described by his biographer, C.E. Carrington, “there had been nothing like his sudden rise to fame since Byron.” Much of this newfound notoriety derived from Kipling’s distinctive focus on working-class colonial characters—often soldiers and sailors distinguished by their cockney speech—a type exemplified by the narrator of his popular poem “Gunga Din.” In 1892, he married Caroline Balestier, an American; while abroad on honeymoon their bank failed, and, financially strained, the couple canceled their return to London, settling instead in a countryside cottage in Vermont.
Here, with “sunshine and a mind at ease,” Kipling produced some of his most popular works, including the two Jungle Books. In 1896, however, indignant at increasingly hostile Anglo-American relations and a highly-publicized quarrel with Caroline’s brother, Kipling packed up the family and returned to England.
The next year, he published the poems “Recessional” and “The White Man’s Burden,” the latter of which coincided with the Philippine-American War and urged the United States to colonize the Philippines. These are Kipling’s most infamous works, and they reflect the increasingly extreme politics that marked his writing as his career progressed. Both poems espoused a racialized Christian imperial mission, urging “The White Man” to carry, by military force, “civilization” to the “lesser breeds without the Law.” Largely reviled today, the poems polarized opinion when they were released, but their message was welcomed by Britain’s foremost imperialists—including Cecil Rhodes, diamond magnate of South Africa and a notorious white supremacist. In 1898, the Kiplings vacationed in South Africa, where Rhodes gifted them a house on his estate. Doted on by Rhodes and the other politicians of Cape Colony, Kipling wrote poetry and prose supporting the British effort in the Boer War (1899-1902). It was during this time that he wrote his most famous and critically-acclaimed novel, Kim, set in a complex portrait of India that emphasizes its cultural, geographical, and sensory diversity. A year later, in the wake of his daughter’s death from pneumonia, he released his best-known work of children’s tales, Just So Stories. In 1907, Kipling won the Nobel Prize for Literature; he was its first English-language recipient, and the youngest ever.
Throughout the first decade of the new century, Kipling’s political commentary increased. He was an outspoken polemicist against Germany, a role he happily retained upon the outbreak of World War I, when he was hired to write propaganda for the British government. Germans, claimed Kipling, were subhuman savages, and any young man who failed to join the war effort was an embarrassment. His own son, John, was repeatedly rejected by the army due to his poor eyesight, but Kipling exploited his connections to find him a place in the Irish Guards. John, only 18, was killed on his first day in combat, last seen blindly stumbling across the battlefield.
Kipling was devastated by the loss of his son, and his poem “Epitaphs of War” includes the line “If any question why we died / Tell them, because our fathers lied.”
By the end of World War I, Kipling’s reputation as a jingoistic “Poet of Empire” had crystallized. As liberal opinion shifted, his critical popularity declined, his output ebbed, and he became progressively isolated and bitter, while his politics grew only more vociferous. An adamant opponent of Home Rule, he denigrated the Irish people and their literature; he was also a vehement critic of Bolshevism, and, in the 1930s, of European fascism, both of which he viewed as threats to English sovereignty. In 1936, aged 70, Kipling died at his home in Sussex. His critical reputation continued to decline after his death, although scholarly debate over the interpretation and value of his work carried on. In a 1941 essay, T.S. Eliot attempted to rehabilitate Kipling, describing him as a writer “impossible wholly to understand and quite impossible to belittle,” while denying that he ever “held a doctrine of race superiority.” George Orwell refuted Eliot in an essay of his own, labeling Kipling a “jingo imperialist” who was “morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting” and had “sold out to the British governing class, not financially but emotionally.” It was this sincere belief in the truth of his own opinions, and his association with the imperial elite, that Orwell identifies as the distinguishing quality of Kipling’s oeuvre. Unlike many of his literary contemporaries, writes Orwell, Kipling had “a sense of responsibility, which made it possible for him to have a world-view, even if it happened to be a false one.”