Rudyard Kipling 
Rudyard Kipling |
| Born: |
December 30 1865(1865--)
Bombay, British India |
| Died: |
January 18 1936 (aged 70)
Middlesex Hospital, London,
England [1] |
| Occupation: |
Short story writer, novelist, poet, Journalist |
| Nationality: |
British |
| Genres: |
Short story, novel, children's literature, poetry, travel literature |
Joseph Rudyard Kipling (December 30, 1865 –
January 18, 1936) was an English author and poet, born in Bombay, India, and best known for his works The Jungle Book (1894),
The Second Jungle Book (1895), Just
So Stories (1902), and Puck of Pook's Hill (1906); his novel,
Kim (1901); his poems, including Mandalay (1890), Gunga Din (1890), and "If—" (1910); and his many short stories, including "The Man Who Would Be
King" (1888) and the collections Life's Handicap (1891), The Day's Work (1898), and Plain Tales from the
Hills (1888). He is regarded as a major "innovator in the art of the short story";[2] his children's books are enduring classics of children's
literature; and his best work speaks to a versatile and luminous narrative gift.[3][4]
Kipling was one of the most popular writers in English, in both prose and verse, in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries.[2] The author
Henry James famously said of him: "Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete
man of genius (as distinct from fine intelligence) that I have ever known."[2] In 1907, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the first English
language writer to receive the prize, and he remains its youngest-ever recipient.[5] Among other honours, he was sounded out for the British Poet Laureateship and on several occasions for a knighthood, all of which he rejected.[6]
However, later in life Kipling also came to be seen (in George Orwell's words) as a
"prophet of British imperialism."[7] Many saw prejudice and militarism in his works,[8][9] and the resulting controversy about him continued for much of the 20th century.[10][11] According to critic Douglas Kerr: "He is still an author who can inspire passionate
disagreement and his place in literary and cultural history is far from settled. But as the age of the European empires recedes,
he is recognized as an incomparable, if controversial, interpreter of how empire was experienced. That, and an increasing
recognition of his extraordinary narrative gifts, make him a force to be reckoned with."[12]
Kipling's childhood
Rudyard Kipling was born on 30 December 1865 in
Bombay, British India, to Alice Kipling (née MacDonald) and (John) Lockwood Kipling. Alice Kipling (one of four remarkable Victorian sisters)[13] was a
vivacious woman[14] about whom a future
Viceroy of India would say, "Dullness and Mrs. Kipling cannot exist in the
same room."[2] Lockwood Kipling, a
sculptor and pottery designer, was the principal and professor of architectural sculpture at the newly founded Sir Jamsetji
Jejeebhoy School of Art and Industry in Bombay.[14] The couple, who had moved to India earlier that year, had met in courtship two years before at
Rudyard Lake in rural Staffordshire, England, and
had been so taken by its beauty that they now named their firstborn after it. Kipling's aunt, Georgiana, was married to the
painter Edward Burne-Jones and his aunt Agnes was married to the painter
Edward Poynter. His most famous relative was his first cousin, Stanley Baldwin, who was Conservative Prime Minister three times in the 1920s and 1930s.
[15] Kipling's birthplace home still stands on the
campus of the Sir J.J. Institute of Applied Art in Mumbai and for many
years was used as the Dean's residence. Mumbai historian Foy Nissen points out however that although the cottage bears a plaque
stating that this is the site where Kipling was born the fact of the matter is that the original cottage was pulled down decades
ago and a new one built in its place. The wooden bungalow has been empty and locked up for years. [16]
Of Bombay, Kipling was to write:[17]
Mother of Cities to me,
For I was born in her gate,
Between the palms and the sea,
Where the world-end steamers wait.
According to Bernice M. Murphy:[18]
"Kipling’s parents considered themselves `Anglo-Indians’ (a term used in the 19th century for British citizens living in
India) and so too would their son, though he in fact spent the bulk of his life elsewhere. Complex issues of identity and
national allegiance would become prominent features in his fiction." Kipling himself was to write about these conflicts as a man
of seventy:[19]
In the afternoon heats before we took our
sleep, she (the Portuguese ayah, or nanny) or Meeta (the Hindu bearer, or male
attendant) would tell us stories and Indian nursery songs all unforgotten, and we were sent into the dining-room after we had
been dressed, with the caution ‘Speak English now to Papa and Mamma.’ So one spoke ‘English,’ haltingly translated out of the
vernacular idiom that one thought and dreamed in.
Kipling's India: map of British India with locations and years of Kipling's stays.
Click to enlarge.
Kipling's days of "strong light and darkness"[19] in Bombay were to end when he was six years old. As was the custom in British India, he and
his three-year-old sister, Alice ("Trix"), were taken to England—in their case to Southsea
(Portsmouth), to be cared for by a couple that took in children of British nationals living
in India. The two children would live with the couple, Captain and Mrs. Holloway, at their house, Lorne Lodge, for the next six
years. In his autobiography, written some 65 years later, Kipling would recall this time with horror, and wonder ironically if
the combination of cruelty and neglect he experienced there at the hands of Mrs. Holloway might not have hastened the onset of
his literary life:[19]
If you cross-examine a child of seven or eight on his day’s doings (specially when he wants to go to sleep) he will contradict
himself very satisfactorily. If each contradiction be set down as a lie and retailed at breakfast, life is not easy. I have known a certain amount of bullying, but this was
calculated torture—religious as well as scientific. Yet it made me give attention to the lies I soon found it necessary to tell:
and this, I presume, is the foundation of literary effort.
![James Jacques Tissot. The Gallery of H.M.S. 'Calcutta' (Portsmouth), 1876. Kipling, who had sailed with his family from Bombay to Portsmouth on a P&O paddlewheeler four years earlier, however, only remembered "time in a ship with an immense semi-circle blocking all vision on each side of her."[19]](http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en-commons/thumb/7/7c/200px-Tissot_HMS_Calcutta.jpg)
James Jacques Tissot. The Gallery of
H.M.S. 'Calcutta' (Portsmouth), 1876. Kipling,
who had sailed with his family from
Bombay to
Portsmouth on a
P&O paddlewheeler four years earlier, however, only remembered "time in a ship with an immense semi-circle
blocking all vision on each side of her."
[19]
Kipling's sister Trix fared better at Lorne Lodge, Mrs. Holloway apparently hoping that Trix would eventually marry the
Holloway son.[20] The two
children, however, did have relatives in England they could visit. They spent a month each Christmas with their maternal aunt
Georgiana ("Georgy"), and her husband, the artist Edward Burne-Jones, at their house,
"The Grange" in Fulham, London, which Kipling was to call "a paradise which I verily believe
saved me."[19] In the spring of 1877, Alice
Kipling returned from India and removed the children from Lorne Lodge.
Often and often afterwards, the beloved Aunt would ask me why I had never told any one how I was being treated. Children tell
little more than animals, for what comes to them they accept as eternally established. Also, badly-treated children have a clear
notion of what they are likely to get if they betray the secrets of a prison-house before they are clear of it.[19]
In January 1878 Kipling was admitted to the United Services College, at
Westward Ho!, Devon, a school founded a few years earlier to
prepare boys for the armed forces. The school proved rough going for him at first, but
later led to firm friendships, and provided the setting for his schoolboy stories Stalky
& Co. published many years later.[20] During his time there, Kipling also met and fell in love with Florence Garrard, a
fellow boarder with Trix at Southsea (to which Trix had returned). Florence was to become the model for Maisie in Kipling's first
novel, The Light that Failed (1891).[20] Towards the end of his stay at the school, it was decided that he lacked the academic
ability to get into Oxford University on a scholarship[20] and his parents lacked the
wherewithal to finance him;[14] consequently,
Lockwood Kipling obtained a job for his son in Lahore (now in Pakistan), where Lockwood was now Principal of the Mayo
College of Art[3] and Curator of the
Lahore Museum. Kipling was to be assistant editor of
a small local newspaper, the Civil & Military Gazette. He sailed for India on 20 September 1882 and arrived in Bombay
on 18 October 1882.
Kipling's England: map of
England with locations and years of Kipling's stays.
Click
to enlarge.
So, at sixteen years and nine months, but looking four or five years older, and adorned with real whiskers which the
scandalised Mother abolished within one hour of beholding, I found myself at Bombay where I was born, moving among sights and
smells that made me deliver in the vernacular sentences whose meaning I knew not. Other Indian-born boys have told me how the
same thing happened to them.
There were yet three or four days’ rail to Lahore, where my people lived. After these, my English years fell away, nor ever, I
think, came back in full strength.[19]
Early travels
George Craddock. 1880s.
Railway Station at Lahore,
India. Kipling arrived at the train station after a four day train journey from
Bombay in late October 1882.
The Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore, which Kipling was to call "my first mistress and most true love,"[19] appeared six days a week throughout the year
except for a one-day break each for Christmas and Easter.
Kipling was worked hard by the editor, Stephen Wheeler, but his need to write was unstoppable. In 1886, he published his first
collection of verse, Departmental Ditties. That year also brought a change of editors at the newspaper. Kay Robinson, the
new editor, allowed more creative freedom and Kipling was asked to contribute short stories to the newspaper.[3]
Meanwhile, in the summer of 1883, Kipling had for the first time visited Simla (now Shimla),
well-known hill station and summer capital of British India. By then it was established
practice for the Viceroy of India and the government to move to Simla for six
months and the town became a "centre of power as well as pleasure."[3] Kipling's family became yearly visitors to Simla and Lockwood Kipling was asked to design a
fresco in the Christ Church there. Kipling returned to Simla for his annual leave each year from 1885 to 1888, and the town
figured prominently in many of the stories Kipling was writing for the Gazette.[3]
My month’s leave at Simla, or whatever Hill Station my people went to, was pure joy—every golden hour counted. It began in
heat and discomfort, by rail and road. It ended in the cool evening, with a wood fire in one’s bedroom, and next morn—thirty more
of them ahead!—the early cup of tea, the Mother who brought it in, and the long talks of us all together again. One had leisure
to work, too, at whatever play-work was in one’s head, and that was usually full.[19]
Simla (now
Shimla), India, in 1865. Simla was a well-known
hill
station which Kipling visited every summer from 1885 to 1888. Christ Church is on the right.
Back in Lahore, some thirty-nine stories appeared in the Gazette between November 1886 and June 1887. Most of these
stories were included in Plain Tales from the Hills, Kipling's first
prose collection, which was published in Calcutta in January 1888, a month after his 22nd
birthday. Kipling's time in Lahore, however, had come to an end. In November 1887, he had been transferred to the
Gazette's much larger sister newspaper, The Pioneer, in Allahabad in the
United Provinces. His writing, however, continued at a frenetic pace
and during the next year, he published six collections of short stories: Soldiers Three, The Story of the Gadsbys,
In Black and White, Under the Deodars, The Phantom Rickshaw, and Wee Willie Winkie, containing a
total of 41 stories, some quite long. In addition, as The Pioneer's special correspondent in western region of
Rajputana, he wrote many sketches that were later collected in Letters of Marque
and published in From Sea to Sea and Other Sketches,
Letters of Travel.[3]
Samuel Bourne. 1870.
Railway Bridge across the Jumna at Allahabad. Kipling lived in Allahabad from 1887 to 1889 and likely crossed this bridge numerous
times.
In early 1889, The Pioneer relieved Kipling of his charge over a dispute. For his part, Kipling had been increasingly
thinking about the future. He sold the rights to his six volumes of stories for £200 and a small royalty, and the Plain
Tales for £50; in addition, from The Pioneer, he received six-months' salary in lieu of notice.[19] He decided to use this money to make his way to
London, the center of the literary universe in the British Empire.
G. A. Kale. c.1900. Kipling stayed at this palace in
Bundi,
Rajputana, as a correspondent for
The Pioneer and got inspiration for his book 'Kim' during his
stay.
On 9 March 1889, Kipling left India, traveling first to
San Francisco via Rangoon, Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan. He then
traveled through the United States writing articles for The Pioneer that too were
collected in From Sea to Sea and Other Sketches,
Letters of Travel. Starting his American travels in San Francisco, Kipling journeyed north to Portland, Oregon; on to Seattle, Washington; up into Canada, to Victoria and Vancouver, British Columbia; back into the U.S. to Yellowstone National Park; down to Salt Lake
City; then east to Omaha, Nebraska and on to
Chicago, Illinois; then to
Beaver, Pennsylvania on the Ohio River to visit
the Hill family; from there he went to Chautauqua with Professor Hill, and later to
Niagara, Toronto, Washington, D.C., New York and Boston.[21] In the course
of this journey he met with Mark Twain in Elmira,
New York, and felt much awed in his presence. Kipling then crossed the Atlantic, and reached Liverpool in October 1889. Soon thereafter, he
made his début in the London literary world to great acclaim.[2]
Career as a writer
The building on
Villiers Street off the
Strand in
London where Kipling rented rooms from 1889 to 1891. A century later, the building was completely
renovated and renamed
Kipling House.
London
In London, Kipling had a number of stories accepted by various magazine editors. He also found a place to live for the next
two years:
Meantime, I had found me quarters in Villiers Street, Strand, which forty-six years ago was primitive and passionate in its habits and population. My rooms
were small, not over-clean or well-kept, but from my desk I could look out of my window through the fanlight of Gatti’s Music-Hall entrance, across the street, almost on to its stage. The Charing Cross trains rumbled through my dreams on one side, the boom of the Strand on the other, while,
before my windows, Father Thames under the Shot Tower
walked up and down with his traffic.
In the next two years, and in short order, he published a novel, The Light That
Failed; had a nervous breakdown; and met an American writer and publishing
agent, Wolcott Balestier, with whom he collaborated on a novel, The Naulahka (a title he uncharacteristically misspelt;
see below).[14] In 1891, on the advice of his
doctors, Kipling embarked on another sea voyage visiting South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and once again India. However, he cut short his
plans for spending Christmas with his family in India when he heard of Wolcott Balestier's
sudden death from typhoid fever, and immediately decided to return to London. Before his
return, he had used the telegram to propose to (and be accepted by) Wolcott's sister Caroline
(Carrie) Balestier, whom he had met a year earlier, and with whom he had apparently been having an intermittent romance.[14] Meanwhile, late in 1891, his collection of short
stories of the British in India, Life's Handicap, was also published in London.
Marriage and honeymoon
On 18 January 1892, Carrie Balestier (aged 29) and Rudyard
Kipling (aged 26) were married in London, in the "thick of an influenza epidemic, when the undertakers had run out of black
horses and the dead had to be content with brown ones."[19] The wedding was held at All Souls Church,
Langham Place and Henry James gave the bride away.
The newlyweds settled upon a honeymoon that would take them first to the United States (including a stop at the Balestier
family estate near Brattleboro, Vermont) and then
onto Japan.[14] However, when the couple arrived in Yokohama, Japan, they
discovered that their bank, The New Oriental Banking Corporation, had failed.
United States
Taking their loss in stride, they returned to the U.S., back to Vermont—Carrie by this time was pregnant with their first
child—and rented a small cottage on a farm near Brattleboro for ten dollars a month.
We furnished it with a simplicity that fore-ran the hire-purchase system. We bought, second or third hand, a huge,
hot-air stove which we installed in the cellar. We cut generous holes in our thin floors for its eight inch tin pipes (why we
were not burned in our beds each week of the winter I never can understand) and we were extraordinarily and self-centredly
content.[19]
It was in this cottage, Bliss Cottage, that their first child, Josephine, was born "in three foot of snow on the night
of December 29, 1892. Her Mother’s birthday being the 31st and
mine the 30th of the same month, we congratulated her on her sense of the fitness of things ..."[19] It was also in this cottage that the first dawnings of the Jungle
Books came to Kipling:
My workroom in the Bliss Cottage was seven feet by eight, and from December to April the snow lay level with its window-sill.
It chanced that I had written a tale about Indian Forestry work which included a boy who had been brought up by wolves. In the
stillness, and suspense, of the winter of ’92 some memory of the Masonic Lions of my
childhood’s magazine, and a phrase in Haggard’s Nada the Lily, combined with
the echo of this tale. After blocking out the main idea in my head, the pen took charge, and I watched it begin to write stories
about Mowgli and animals, which later grew into the Jungle Books.[19]
With Josephine's arrival, Bliss Cottage was felt to be congested, so eventually the couple bought land—ten acres on a
rocky hillside overlooking the Connecticut River—from Carrie's brother Beatty
Balestier, and built their own house. Kipling named the house "Naulakha" in honour of Wolcott and of their collaboration, and
this time the name was spelled correctly.[14]
(Naulakha which means literally "nine lakh (or, nine hundred thousand) rupees", in Hindi, was a name applied to the fabled necklaces worn by queens in North Indian folk-tales;[22] Kipling translated it as a "jewel beyond price").
The house still stands on Kipling Road, three miles north of Brattleboro: a big, secluded, dark-green house, with shingled roof
and sides, which Kipling called his "ship", and which brought him "sunshine and a mind at ease."[14]
His seclusion in Vermont, combined with his healthy "sane clean life", made Kipling both inventive and prolific. In the short
span of four years, he produced, in addition to the Jungle
Books, a collection of short stories (The Day's Work), a novel (Captains Courageous), and a profusion of poetry, including the volume The Seven Seas. The
collection of Barrack-Room Ballads, first published individually for the
most part in 1890, which contains his poems Mandalay and Gunga Din was issued in March 1892. He especially enjoyed writing the Jungle Books—both masterpieces of
imaginative writing—and enjoyed too corresponding with the many children who wrote to him about them.[14]
Rudyard Kipling's America 1892–1896, 1899.
Click to enlarge..
The writing life in Naulakha was occasionally interrupted by visitors, including his father, who visited soon after his retirement in 1893,[14] and British author Arthur Conan
Doyle, who brought his golf-clubs, stayed for two days, and gave Kipling an extended golf
lesson.[23][24] Kipling seemed to take to golf, occasionally practising with the
local Congregational minister, and even playing with red painted balls when the
ground was covered in snow.[24][25] However, the latter game was "not
altogether a success because there were no limits to a drive; the ball might skid two miles down the long slope to
Connecticut river."[25] From all accounts, Kipling loved the outdoors,[14] not least of whose marvels in Vermont was
the turning of the leaves each fall:
A little maple began it, flaming blood-red of a sudden where he stood against the dark green of
a pine-belt. Next morning there was an answering signal from the swamp where the sumacs grow.
Three days later, the hill-sides as fast as the eye could range were afire, and the roads paved, with crimson and gold. Then a
wet wind blew, and ruined all the uniforms of that gorgeous army; and the oaks, who had held
themselves in reserve, buckled on their dull and bronzed cuirasses and stood it out stiffly to
the last blown leaf, till nothing remained but pencil-shadings of bare boughs, and one could see into the most private heart of
the woods.[26]
Kipling in his study in
Naulakha ca.
1895
In February 1896, the couple's second daughter, Elsie, was born. By this time, according to several biographers, their marital
relationship was no longer light-hearted and spontaneous.[27] Although they would always remain loyal to each other, they seemed now to have fallen into set
roles.[14] In a letter to a friend who had
become engaged around this time, the 29 year old Kipling offered this somber counsel: marriage principally taught "the tougher
virtues—such as humility, restraint, order, and forethought."[28]
The Kiplings might have lived out their lives in Vermont, were it not for two incidents—one of global politics, the other of
family discord—that hastily ended their time there. By the early 1890s, Great Britain and Venezuela had long been locking horns over a border dispute involving British
Guiana. Several times, the U.S. had offered to arbitrate, but in 1895 the new American secretary of state Richard Olney upped the ante by arguing for the American right to arbitrate on grounds of
sovereignty on the continent (see the Olney interpretation as an extension of the
Monroe Doctrine).[14] This raised hackles in Britain and before long the incident had snowballed into a major
Anglo-American crisis, with talk of war on both sides. Although, eventually,
the crisis would lead to greater U.S.-British cooperation, at the time, Kipling was bewildered by what he felt was persistent
anti-British sentiment in the U.S., especially in the press.[14] He wrote in a letter that it felt like being "aimed at with a decanter across a friendly
dinner table."[28] By January 1896, he had
decided, according to his official biographer,[25] to end his family's "good wholesome life" in the U.S. and seek their fortunes
elsewhere.
Josephine in the loggia,
Naulakha, ca.
1895
But the final straw, it seems, was a family dispute. For some time, the relations between Carrie and her brother Beatty
Balestier had been strained on account of his drinking and insolvency. In May 1896, an inebriated Beatty ran into Kipling on the
street and threatened him with physical harm.[14] The incident led to Beatty's eventual arrest, but in the subsequent hearing, and the resulting
publicity, Kipling's privacy was completely destroyed, and left him feeling both miserable and exhausted. In July 1896, a week
before the hearing was to resume, the Kiplings hurriedly packed their belongings and left Naulakha, Vermont, and the U.S.
for good.[25]
Devon
Back in England, in September 1896, the Kiplings found themselves in Torquay on the coast of
Devon, in a hillside home overlooking the sea. Although Kipling didn't much care for his new
house, whose feng shui, he claimed, left its occupants feeling dispirited and gloomy,
he nevertheless managed to remain productive and socially active.[14] Kipling was now a famous man, and in the previous two or three years, had increasingly been
making political pronouncements in his writings. He had also begun work on two poems, Recessional (1897) and The White Man's
Burden (1890) which were to create controversy when published. Regarded by some as anthems for enlightened and
duty-bound empire-building (that captured the mood of the Victorian age), the poems
equally were regarded by others as propaganda for brazenfaced imperialism and its attendant
racial attitudes; still others saw irony in the poems and warnings of the perils of empire.[14]
Take up the White Man's burden—
Send forth the best ye breed—
Go, bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait, in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild—
Your new-caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.[29]
The Torquay Inner Harbour, c. 1890. The Kiplings lived in Torquay from September 1896 to May 1897, in a house built on a hillside
above the cliffs.
There was also foreboding in the poems, a sense that all could yet come to naught.[30]
Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet.
Lest we forget - lest we forget![31]
A prolific writer—nothing about his work was easily labeled—during his time in Torquay, he also wrote Stalky & Co.,
a collection of school stories (born of his experience at the United Services College in Westward Ho!) whose juvenile
protagonists displayed a know-it-all, cynical outlook on patriotism and authority. According to his family, Kipling enjoyed
reading aloud stories from Stalky & Co. to them, and often went into spasms of laughter over his own jokes.[14]
Phillip Burne-Jones. 1891.
The Village Church, Rottingdean. Kipling and his family lived in
Rottingdean,
Sussex from 1897 to 1901.
In early 1898 Kipling and his family traveled to South Africa for their winter holiday,
thus beginning an annual tradition which (excepting the following year) was to last until 1908. With his newly minted reputation
as the poet of the Empire, Kipling was warmly received by some of the most powerful politicians of the Cape Colony, including Cecil Rhodes, Sir Alfred Milner, and Leander Starr
Jameson. In turn, Kipling cultivated their friendship and came to greatly admire all three men and their politics. The
period 1898–1910 was a crucial one in the history of South Africa and included the Second Boer
War (1899–1902), the ensuing peace treaty, and the formation of the Union of South
Africa in 1910. Back in England, Kipling wrote poetry in support of the British cause in the Boer War and on his next
visit to South Africa in early 1900, he helped start a newspaper, The Friend, for the British troops in Bloemfontein, the newly captured capital of the Orange Free
State. Although his journalistic stint was to last only two weeks, it was the first time Kipling would work on a newspaper
staff since he left The Pioneer in Allahabad more than ten years earlier.[14]
Kipling began collecting material for another of his children's classics, Just So Stories
for Little Children. That work was published in 1902, and another of his enduring works, Kim, first saw the light of day the previous year.
On a visit to America in 1899, Kipling and his eldest daughter Josephine developed pneumonia, from which Josephine eventually died.
Bateman's garden with house in the background. Rudyard Kipling lived in
Bateman's,
Burwash,
East Sussex from 1902 until his death in 1936
In the non-fiction realm he also became involved in the debate over the British response to the rise in German naval power, publishing a series of articles in 1898 which were collected
as A Fleet in Being.
Peak of his career
The first decade of the 20th century saw Kipling at the height of his popularity. In 1907 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The prize citation said: "in consideration of the power of observation,
originality of imagination, virility of ideas and remarkable talent for narration which characterize the creations of this
world-famous author." Nobel prizes had been established in 1901 and Kipling was the first English language recipient. At the award ceremony in Stockholm on
December 10, 1907, the Permanent Secretary of the
Swedish Academy, C.D. af Wirsén, paid rich tributes to both Kipling and three centuries
of English literature:[4]
First day cover issued by the Government of Sweden in 1967 honouring the
Nobel laureates of 1907 including Kipling. Kipling is shown on the right in the
blue
stamp and middle row right in the sketches.
The Swedish Academy, in awarding the Nobel Prize in Literature this year to Rudyard Kipling, desires to pay a tribute of
homage to the literature of England, so rich in manifold glories, and to the greatest genius in the realm of narrative that that
country has produced in our times.
"Book-ending" this achievement was the publication of two connected poetry and story collections: 1906's Puck of Pook's
Hill and 1910's Rewards and Fairies. The latter contained the poem "If—". In a 1995
BBC opinion poll, it was voted Britain's favourite poem. This exhortation to self-control and
stoicism is arguably Kipling's most famous poem.
Kipling sympathised with the anti-Home Rule stance of Irish Unionists. He was friends with
![James Jacques Tissot. The Gallery of H.M.S. 'Calcutta' (Portsmouth), 1876. Kipling, who had sailed with his family from Bombay to Portsmouth on a P&O paddlewheeler four years earlier, however, only remembered "time in a ship with an immense semi-circle blocking all vision on each side of her."[19]](http://www.answers.com/main/Record2?a=NR&url=http%3A%2F%2Fcommons.wikimedia.org%2Fwiki%2FImage%3ATissot%2520HMS%2520Calcutta.jpg)
