. (JOSEPH) RUDYARD KIPLING 1865-1936
December sees the 141st anniversary of the birth of the most quintessential English writers. A man whose popularity has waxed and waned but is still regarded after Shakespeare as the best writer in the English language and is certainly, after Shakespeare, the most quoted writer. An English icon whose poem If http://oldpoetry.com/opoem/2940-Rudyard-Kipling-If---- is regularly chosen as the most popular poem in the English language.
Yet Kipling was not born in Britain and English was not his first language. He was born in Bombay and was raised to speak fluent Hindi and, until the age of 7 or 8, could only speak English haltingly.
Kipling's father was John Lockwood Kipling, an artist and had gone to India to teach at the Bombay School of Art and at the time of Rudyard's birth was living the comfortable life of a member of the British Raj. Rudyard was raised by a native Aya who taught him to speak Hindi as she herself spoke it. He mixed with local tradesmen and made regular visits to the nearby Crawford market where he communicated in Hindi and only spoke English when in the company of his parents. He also heard and loved the local tales and legends from his nurse at bedtimes. Tales which he would later embellish and tell to his own children.
At the age of 5 or 6 Rudyard was sent by his parents to boarding school in England (Southsea and Westward Ho), a land he found both physically and emotionally cold and barren after his early years in the heat and hubbub of Bombay. He was not a good sportsman and was bullied by his contemporaries and so he found refuge in reading, usually by candlelight, which caused severe eye damage and meant that in later life he was rarely seen without thick glasses.
At the age of 16 he returned to his beloved India and his parents who were by now living in Lahore and, thanks to his father's influence, he obtained a job on the Lahore Civil and Military Gazette. This was no sinecure and Kipling took a very active part in the newspaper work. Putting in long hours as reporter, critic and sub-editor whilst still a teenager. This is probably where he found the inspiration for his poem six serving men.http://oldpoetry.com/opoem/70987-Rudyard-Kipling-I-Keep-Six-Honest-Serving-Men Yet he also found time to write short stories and very quickly gained a reputation as one of the finest storytellers. Kipling said of his reporting and stories that they came from the "separate sides of my head". He was brought up a pampered British Colonialist but his stories were normally about local characters and written from their point of view, a viewpoint he shared for the most part. Following an illness at the age of 19 for which he was treated with massive doses of opium (smoked) he wrote a story depicting drug addiction with amazing realism since, although he avoided the temptation, he knew of the drugs effects. [This was in his short story THE GATE OF THE HUNDRED SORROWS ]
Kipling's short stories proved so popular that a number of collections were published. He published 6 in one year in 1889 at the age of 23 and they were all met with critical acclaim. The following year he decided to quit his job so as to earn a living from his fiction writing and returned to England where he found his name and reputation were already well known and he was feted by the literary society of the time as the new Dickens. He also spent some of his time visiting the music halls, especially Gattys, and this can be seen in the style of many of his later poems such as Mandalay. http://oldpoetry.com/opoem/841-Rudyard-Kipling-Mandalay
However he was not happy and felt out of place in Britain, a feeling which to some extent forms the basis for his poem Chant Pagan, http://oldpoetry.com/opoem/20573-Rudyard-Kipling-Chant-Pagan and a few years later he succumbed to the wanderlust and packed his bags to move on. He visited Italy, Cape Town, Australia, Lahore and returned back to London where he amazed everyone by marrying a friends sister (Caroline Starr Balestier) in 1892 and moving with her to her home in the small town of Battleborough in Vermont USA. It was on these journeys that he wrote the poem M'Andrew's Hymn (published in verses 1889-1896) http://oldpoetry.com/opoem/840-Rudyard-Kipling-M-Andrew-s-Hymn
The following year his first child Josephine was born and he took great delight in telling her stories that were later to become the Jungle Book. Once again he was experiencing "separate sides of my head" living in the real world of a successful business man and the child's world of The Jungle Book telling tales to his daughter. Soon he had another daughter Elsie (1896) and a son John (1897).
John and Elsie
Kipling found he could relate so well to young children both in his family life and his writing that he became even more popular as a children's writer than he had been as a short story writer less than a decade before. One of his principal delights at that time was in answering Josephine's typical childish questions with tales that he made up full of elements from the tales he had learned as a child. He had a tendency to do this with a rhythm and delivery he must have learned in his visits to the music halls since it made such a profound impression on his daughter that if he didn't repeat each story with the same style of delivery then she would immediately protest and, if it was a bed-time story, would not go to sleep. She insisted that the tales were told just-so.
On a visit to New York both Kipling and Joanne became seriously ill. Unfortunately Joanna died, a fact that was withheld from Kipling until he recovered himself, by which time his best beloved, his name for Joanna was buried.
Kipling no longer felt able to remain in America where he had been so happy and once again returned to England. He purchased Bateman's which was to be his home for the rest of his life. The first thing he did was to write up the tales he had told to Josephine to be published under the title that reminded him of her. The Just So Stories.
At this time Kipling's patriotic fervour and his sincere belief that the empire could be a force for good came into full play and he became a staunch admirer and friend of Cecil Rhodes and his style of commercial imperialism. When the Boer war broke out in Africa Kipling gave his support to Kitchener and it was at this time that he became branded as a militarist following his reports of incidents in the war and the publication of more of his poetry including The White Man's Burden http://oldpoetry.com/opoem/8806-Rudyard-Kipling-The-White-Man-s-Burden . Yet once again there appeared what he still called the "separate sides of my head" when amidst all the military outpourings he produced one of his greatest books Kim.
At the turn of the century Kipling began to see a threat of Germany taking over British colonial areas and forging her own empire and was a constant thorn on the establishments side advocating strengthening the military to counter what he saw as the German threat. Kipling by now a Nobel Laureate (1907) was too important to ignore but so much of a problem did he pose to the government of the day that there were constant efforts to silence him but not even the offer of a Knighthood and the Poet Laureateship could dissuade him and he declined the offers.
When his vision was vindicated at the outbreak of World War 1 Kipling gave his services as a public speaker and a recruiter. So effective were his exhortations that there were calls for him to allow his 17 year old son to enlist.
In fact John had already tried to join both the Army and the Navy but had been turned down on account of his poor eyesight. However the public pressure and the pressure from John himself persuaded Kipling to talk to his friend lord Roberts with the result that John gained a commission in the Irish Guards. Shortly after he arrived at the front line in 1915 John was reported missing and Kipling spent many months badgering the authorities for news of his son. This is clearly the source of the poem My Boy Jack . When the death was finally confirmed it broke Kipling's heart and he never again wrote with the clarity and power of his earlier life. He did compile a history of the Irish Guards and detailed precisely all their casualties in the war. He also wrote his autobiography published in 1834 two years before his death.
Kipling lived through two more decades before his death on 18th January 1936 but his popularity during that period declined drastically and his name was linked with the deaths of the soldiers he had done so much to recruit at the start of the war. Although his popularity has grown again he is still in the minds of many tarnished with the problems of empire. Problems that he had tried in some measure to overcome himself. But regardless of his reputation politically his literary genius can not be denied both as a poet and a story teller he is still one of the greats.
NOTE
My sources for this are legion as I have been aware of ,and learning about, Kipling for very many years.
Adding your comment:
I read that. Honestly I did! 
Thanks for the OP link. Great job! 
smiles ~cheeky~
