The Man Who Would Be Kipling: The Colonial Fiction and the Frontiers of Exile

The Man who would be Kipling The Colonial Fiction and the Frontiers of Exile

Andrew Hagiioannu

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The Man who would be Kipling

10.1057/9780230287815 - The Man Who Would Be Kipling, Andrew Hagiioannu

10.1057/9780230287815 - The Man Who Would Be Kipling, Andrew Hagiioannu

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The Colonial Fiction and the Frontiers of Exile Andrew Hagiioannu

10.1057/9780230287815 - The Man Who Would Be Kipling, Andrew Hagiioannu

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The Man who would be Kipling

© Andrew Hagiioannu 2003

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2003 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–2029–X hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hagiioannu, Andrew, 1967– The man who would be Kipling : the colonial fiction and the frontiers of exile / Andrew Hagiioannu. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 1–4039–2029–X 1. Kipling, Rudyard, 1865–1936—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Kipling, Rudyard, 1865–1936—Political and social views. 3. Kipling, Rudyard, 1865–1936—Homes and haunts. 4. Politics and literature—Great Britain. 5. Literature and society—Great Britain. 6. Imperialism in literature. 7. Colonies in literature. 8. Exiles in literature. I. Title. PR4857.H27 2003 828.809—dc21

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Preface

vi

Acknowledgements

viii

Part I India: Writing Under Western Eyes 1 The Sentence for Mutiny: ‘In the Year ’57’, Plain Tales from the Hills, and the Rhetoric of the Punjab 2 Borderline Fictions and Fantasies: The Man who would be King, The City of Dreadful Night, and other Allahabad Writings

3

34

Part II America: Out of Empire 3 American Fiction: The Day’s Work, US Imperialism, and the Politics of Wall Street 4 Mowgli’s Feral Campaign: The Jungle Books and the Americanisation of Empire

61 96

Part III South Africa and Sussex: An Estranged Homecoming 5 By Equal War Made One: The Scramble for Social Order in The Five Nations 6 Strange Deaths in Liberal England: Traffics and Discoveries, Media War, and the Machineries of Social Change 7 Kipling’s Tory Anarchy: Puck of Pook’s Hill and the Politics of Misrule Conclusion: The Edge of Evening

165 179

Notes

184

Bibliography

209

Index

216

v

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117 136

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Contents

In the deserts of the heart Let the healing fountain start, In the prison of his days Teach the free man how to praise. W.H. Auden, ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’ (1939) In these famous lines on the death of Yeats, Auden imagines the memory of the poet scattered among his admirers in a hundred cities, to be exposed to ‘unfamiliar affections’ and ‘punished under a foreign code of conscience’. It is an unsettling vision of literary celebrity that seems to recall the mythical dismemberment of Orpheus, the greatest musician and poet of them all, torn asunder by the ravenous Thracian women and thrown into the pitiless waters of the Hebrus. The landscape of Auden’s poem, however, is distinctly modern, with the imagery of statues, public spaces, airports, suburbs, and prison-houses intimating the dread mundanity and political nightmare of pre-war, fascist Europe – the ‘dark cold day’ of Yeats’ journey into posterity. Troubled by the uncertain destiny of Yeats, Auden finds some comfort in the example of Rudyard Kipling. Time, he suggests, has ‘pardoned’ Kipling’s intolerable political views because it worships language and ‘forgives / Everyone by whom it lives’. Perhaps again recalling the role of Zeus in the Orphean myth, Time supposedly elevates the poet of empire above the reproachful scene of modern Europe, setting him in the constellations to sparkle above a troubled civilisation. Conscious of the vagaries of Time, this study aims to reflect the complexity of Kipling’s response to the historical and cultural environments that informed his work. It locates his writings – including a range of familiar and less familiar works – in the historical setting of the various cultures in which he lived and wrote, covering his time in India, America, South Africa and England. The volume thus deals with the first half of Kipling’s career, from 1886 – the year of his first serious literary enterprise – to around 1906, the high point of English Liberalism and the beginning of a crucial period of political reform in the nation and the empire. These were formative years, encompassing the long period of colonial and international residence that so powerfully informed his vi

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Preface

vii

work – the period that saw the publication of the writings he collectively termed, with some degree of irony, his ‘“Imperialistic” output’.1 These years saw Kipling engaging with the political and rhetorical complexities of Raj governance in northern India, the economic and social upheavals of a rapidly urbanising America, and the movements of retrenchment and reform at home and abroad following the war in South Africa. For Kipling, the publication of the Puck stories in 1906 concluded this imperial phase, and hence my readings of the Puck tales – the last works discussed in his autobiography – conclude the present study, with the later writings forming the subject of a planned second volume. My purpose in writing this book is to lend depth of shading and subtlety to the understanding of Kipling’s cultural and historical experience, adding new coverage and critical analysis to areas of his life, politics, and writings unduly neglected in the past. For example, his transfer to Allahabad during those Indian years is an episode familiar to biographers, but the effect of this move upon his literary work has been overlooked in a number of critical studies. Similarly the move to Vermont, which is arguably even more integral to his writings, has received scant attention in regard to its impact upon such popular works as the two Jungle Books. In the later chapters, my focus upon the cultural impact of new technology and the media highlights the essential political and historical allusion of Kipling’s Edwardian writings. The title, ‘The Man who would be Kipling’ is, of course, adapted from the title of the author’s famous tale of imperial greed and violence, ‘The Man who would be King’. The alteration of the last word is intended to suggest the problem of identity always implicit in the author’s work, the feeling that he is a man of many parts, often unrecognisable to himself and constantly on the move. In the pages that follow, this feeling of self-alienation emerges as a key theme of Kipling’s tales, dramatised in recurring depictions of alienated narrator-figures, and culminating in the fractured English identity and forebodings of exile reflected in the later, Edwardian stories. It is arguably in those Sussex tales that Kipling most powerfully mines the ‘deserts of the heart’ described by Auden – and perhaps in those tales that the ‘healing fountain’ starts.

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Preface

I should like to express my gratitude to the many people who have supported my long labours in this project: firstly to William F.T. Myers, a much-valued teacher, colleague and friend, whose insights into Kipling and the complexities of history have had an important influence upon my own critical outlook and methods. Bill’s comments on various early drafts of this material were invaluable, as were the astute and meticulous observations of Professors Martin Stannard and Greg Walker, two of my most stalwart friends and colleagues. I should also like to acknowledge the kind assistance of Dr David Bradshaw and Professors Christopher Ricks, J.P. Parrinder and Clare Hanson, each of whom has been generous in their support and encouragement. Any errors and limitations in this volume are, of course, entirely my own. The award of a Visiting Fellowship at St John’s College, Oxford (summer 2000) provided a valuable time of reflection and research in the writing of this book, and I am grateful to the Fellows of the College for the warm welcome that made this visit so memorable for me. Particularly warm thanks are due to Dr John Langton, whose expert advice (and much-appreciated loan of books) contributed significantly to the analysis of Englishness and landscape in the later parts of my study. Among the many other friends who have offered their time, energy and encouragement, I should like to thank Michael Davies, David Salter, Lucy Faire, Chris Watts, Philip Gordon, Terry Cavanagh, and Richard Ashton. John and Margaret Parkinson have also been close companions throughout, and, as one of John’s former students, I have long benefited from his kindness, wit and literary sense. I should also like to thank Lisa Keane and Jon Stevens for their kind hospitality and friendship during research visits to London. And last, but most certainly not least, warm thanks and much love to Matthew, Theresa, and Katie Young, whose support has been unfailing and deeply appreciated. Various institutions have contributed financially and materially to this project, including the British Academy, which funded my doctoral studies and thereby introduced me not only to Kipling, but also, in the shape of numerous research grants, to the many libraries and archives that would eventually form the mainstay of my research, including the British Library and India Office Collection, and Special Collections at viii

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Acknowledgements

the University of Sussex. The Budget Centre Research Committee of the University of Leicester supported additional visits to these libraries, including a period of study at Kipling’s former home, Bateman’s (for which the permission of the National Trust to examine works in Kipling’s library is greatly appreciated). My thanks are due to the staff of each of these libraries and special collections, particularly Dorothy Sheridan, Bet Inglis, Joy Eldridge, and everyone connected with the Kipling Archive at Sussex. The librarians of the Bodleian, St John’s College, and the University of Leicester were also extremely helpful, patient and conscientious in dealing with my various queries and requests. Portions of Chapter 1 were first published in The Review of English Studies, volume 51, number 201 (February 2000), and now appear in revised form with the permission of Oxford University Press. This study is dedicated to my parents, who have been a constant source of inspiration, and a lifelong example of East–West compatibility – of the kind, I suspect, that has some bearing on the contents and concerns of this volume. Andrew Hagiioannu, 2003

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Acknowledgements ix

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India: Writing Under Western Eyes

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Part I

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The Sentence for Mutiny: ‘In the Year ’57’, Plain Tales from the Hills, and the Rhetoric of the Punjab

Kipling’s earliest memories were of the colours and scents of daybreak in the Bombay fruit market.1 He was taken there each morning by his Indian ayah (nursemaid) – a Portuguese Roman Catholic from Goa – and his Hindu bearer, Meeta. Sometimes they would pause at a temple and the child, exempted by age from the restrictions of caste, would follow his native guardian into the holy place. There he would silently ponder the ‘dimly seen, friendly Gods’,2 hypnotised by the shapes and forms of this secret Indian world. Writing his autobiography, Something of Myself, in his final year, Kipling overlaid the narrative with allusions to the problem of knowledge and perception, the question of what it means ‘to know’ India and to know oneself – the foreign country of one’s past. The opening figure of speech – ‘Looking back from this my seventieth year [ . . . ]’3 – immediately intimates visual sensory experience in that evocative first word, ‘Looking’, while the perceptual overtones of the metaphor anticipate those stories of ‘dimly seen’ friendly gods and tantalising visions of hidden native worlds. But as the title of his memoirs suggests, these impressions are only a fragment, a partial perspective – merely ‘something’ of his life and experience. Kipling would later describe himself as a writer of the Punjab, explaining that his knowledge of India was confined almost exclusively to that province.4 In what follows, the origins, character and scope of that knowledge will be traced to the political texts and traditions of the colonial Punjab. It is an unfolding picture of India that leads from the scene of the Bombay market to college studies in Carlyle and, later, the political lore of the northwest frontier, mediated through the 3

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India: Writing Under Western Eyes

scholarship of colonial statesmen and historians. But, as these early memories suggest, Kipling’s experience of an unfolding visible world – of ‘strong light and darkness’5 – began in those early Bombay years, largely under the tutelage of native Indians. John Lockwood and Alice MacDonald Kipling had stepped ashore at Bombay’s Apollo Pier in May 1865, only eight months before Rudyard was born. Lockwood had recently been appointed Professor of Architectural Sculpture in the School of Art at Bombay. His new bride was an artistically inclined, quick-witted woman, who would later achieve fame in Lahore and Simla as a hostess. She was the daughter of George Browne Macdonald – a Weslyan Minister – and Hannah Jones, who together raised a family of eleven children. One of Alice’s five sisters was Georgiana, who was married to the painter, Edward Burne-Jones. Kipling’s only recollection of his mother during those early years was that she sang beautiful songs at the piano, and ‘would go out to Big Dinners’.6 It was left to Meeta to entertain Rudyard with stories on the hot afternoons, returning him briefly to his parents before bedtime with the injunction, ‘Speak English now to Papa and Mama.’7 By sheer effort of will, the child would utter broken phrases of English, ‘haltingly translated out of the vernacular idiom that one thought and dreamed in’.8 Bombay was to Kipling a place of alternating light and dark, tranquillity and foreboding. It was a place where Arab dhows floated serenely on pearly waters, and where ‘the menacing darkness of tropical eventides’ lulled him into mysterious imaginings.9 This was an India different from the colourful, daybreak world of the marketplace – a landscape of dark mysteries and hidden dangers. It was the land of the Towers of Silence, where – close to the family home on the Bombay Esplanade – the Parsee dead lured the circling vultures down to the rim of the building.10 When the Tower vultures one day dropped the severed hand of a child in the garden of the house, his mother forbade him to speak about it. Kipling wanted ‘to see that child’s hand’. As always, it was the duty of his ayah to explain. The familiar sights and sounds of Kipling’s Indian childhood were suddenly swept away when, aged five and three respectively, Kipling and his sister, Trix, were sent to board at Southsea, Hampshire. There was nothing unusual in children being boarded out from India in this way, but the circumstances of Kipling’s lodging at Southsea were less common. Lockwood and Alice had neither met, nor received any personal recommendation concerning Mrs Holloway – the owner of Lorne Lodge, the place Kipling came to know as the ‘House of Desolation’ – but had simply selected her on the basis of an advertisement.

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4

Lorne Lodge, Kipling recalled bitterly, was an ‘establishment run with the full vigour of the Evangelical as revealed to the Woman. I had never heard of Hell, so I was introduced to it in all its terrors.’11 Under the religious direction of the woman who styled herself ‘Aunty’, spells of solitary confinement were imposed for indiscretions such as ‘spilling a drop of gravy at dinner, forgetting to put a slate away, or “crying like silly babies” when she read them letters from Bombay’.12 Rudyard played a lonely game to pass the hours of confinement in the basement, making a circle around himself with a coconut shell on a red cord, a tin trunk, and a piece of packing case, which ‘kept off any other world’. The magic of the game, he explained, lay in ‘the ring or fence’ that he took ‘refuge’ in.13 This late memory of refuge was surely inflected with an awareness of his adult exile – in the embattled ideals, freemasonry, and political circles of his final years. In 1877, Kipling was suddenly removed from Lorne Lodge by his parents and admitted to the United Services College (USC), which was an institution established only four years earlier at Bideford Bay, Devon, consisting of a row of bleak lodging houses by the shore of the Bay at the little seaside resort, Westward Ho!. USC had been founded on a shoestring by a group of retired Army and Navy officers in order to provide an affordable education, along public school lines, for the children of parents in the services. Despite the military ethos of the school, swimming was the only physical pursuit in which Kipling showed any aptitude.14 He played Rugby, but due to his poor eyesight, was ‘not even in the Second Fifteen’. Photographs taken during these years show him sporting a moustache and looking more like man of forty than a boy of twelve or thirteen. The only student in the college to wear spectacles (earning him the nickname ‘Giggers’ or ‘Gig-lamps’), and with a growing love of books – in English, Latin and French – he was clearly destined for a career outside the military. French, he observed, was ‘not wellseen at English schools in my time, and knowledge of it connoted leanings towards immorality’.15 Perhaps it was these ‘connotations’ that caused one of the Masters at USC, Mr Pugh, to suspect him of homosexuality – a fact that Kipling only learnt about many years later in India. Pugh, he fumed, was ‘an absolutely tactless Malthusian’ and ‘a most unsavoury man’.16 It was at USC that Kipling fell into the company of two like-minded, precocious friends, L.C. Dunsterville and George Beresford – the originals of Stalky and M’Turk in Stalky & Co. (1899).

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The Sentence for Mutiny 5

6

India: Writing Under Western Eyes

Early in 1882 Kipling was informed by the Head of the College that, a fortnight after the summer holidays, he would be leaving England to work as sub-editor on the Anglo-Indian newspaper, the Civil and Military Gazette, in Lahore. Kipling was returning to India, the place of his birth, and to his parents, but he was still overwhelmed by familiar fears of rejection: ‘For – consider! – I had returned to a Father and Mother of whom I had seen but little since my sixth year. I might have found my Mother “the sort of woman I don’t care for”, as in one terrible case that I know; and my Father intolerable.’17 Despite these worries, his mother ‘proved more delightful than all my imaginings and memories’, and his father, ‘a humorous, tolerant, and expert fellow-craftsman’.18 He was introduced in the Punjab to an expatriate circle with strongly held political views and an equally strong sense of its own group identity. The Punjab supplied his need to identify with like-minded colonials, a fixed political programme, and a working agenda. It also allowed him, under the paternal-authoritarian ideology of the province, to recapture that fantasy of freedom and cross-cultural wanderings he associated with his childhood in Bombay. As soon as he landed at Bombay, Kipling observed with relief that his English years ‘fell away, nor ever [ . . . ] came back in full strength’.19 He threw himself freely and completely into colonial life. In Something of Myself, he was forthright about the extraordinary privilege he enjoyed as a young Anglo-Indian gentleman in colonial India: ‘I gave myself indeed the trouble of stepping into the garments that were held out to me after my bath, and out of them as I was assisted to do. And – luxury of which I dream still – I was shaved before I was awake.’20 His early letters home, to friends and family, illustrate how tempting was the prospect of freedom and power to the new arrival in India.21 Aged nineteen, he explained his political views – by then unfashionable – to his liberal-minded cousin, Margaret Burne-Jones: But (and here you will think me wrong perhaps) never lose sight of the fact that so long as you are in this country you will be looked to by the natives round in [sic] you as their guide and leader if anything goes wrong. Therefore comport yourself as such. This is a solemn fact. If anything goes wrong from a quarrel to an accident the natives instantly fly to a European for “orders”. If a man’s dying in the road they won’t touch him unless they have an Englishman to order ’em. If there’s a row in the city the native policeman will take his orders

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Learning in Lahore: the rule of imperial writing

The Sentence for Mutiny 7

That curious slip of the pen – natives round in you – betrays the consciousness of shared humanity beneath the conventional rhetoric of native dependency. At the Punjab Club, however, he was immersed in a society dedicated to upholding the ‘sober truth’ of English superiority. Kipling came to regard the Club as the ‘whole of [his] outside world’,23 and, because of his reliance upon it, soon felt the full force of the discipline exercised by its membership. Two years earlier, shortly after his arrival in the country, he had been hissed at by members of the Club, who accused his newspaper of backing down under government pressure in its long-term agitation against the Ilbert Bill:24 ‘It is not pleasant to sit still when one is [seventeen] while all your universe hisses you.’25 He had learnt swiftly and sharply that the Punjab was a politically conservative province, with veritable powers of excommunication over those who wavered from the common paternalist creed. Kipling criticism often associates the sparse narrative style of the early Indian stories with the author’s early years as a journalist in India between 1883 and 1889.26 According to this view, the early stories collectively known as the Plain Tales are characterised – as the name implies – by a certain vividness of expression, a tautness and toughmindedness of formulation redolent of the journalistic context in which they first appeared. The formal directness of the typical Plain Tale is generally focused in the persona of a firm, bullish narrator, who introduces the story with such robust, cynical salvos as: ‘After marriage arrives a reaction, sometimes a big, sometimes a little one; but it comes sooner or later, and must be tidied over by both parties if they desire the rest of their lives to go with the current.’27 Similarly, another opening: ‘To rear a boy under what parents call the “sheltered life system” is, if the boy must go into the world and fend for himself, not wise.’28 While Kipling’s journalistic work certainly influenced his fiction in powerful and permanent ways, the characteristics of the Plain Tale, with its typical epigrammatic formulations and memorable epigraphs, can also be considered the literary counterpart of an ethos of government he absorbed in the colonial Punjab, where rhetorical directness was associated with administrative assurance, and succinct language considered the proper medium of British rule. Indeed, Kipling’s lifelong dedication to the genre of the short story, not to mention his lifelong policy of textual excision and compression, surely owes something to this early experience. As late as 1936, he outlined an uncompromising

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from the first wandering white man he sees and so on ad infinitum. This is only the sober truth.22

India: Writing Under Western Eyes

editorial policy towards his own work, in which he would ‘consider faithfully every paragraph, sentence and word, blacking out where requisite’, usually to find on re-reading that his manuscript would ‘bear a second shortening’.29 The roots of this narrative economy are found in the political ideals he embraced soon after returning to Lahore, where he began to witness at first hand the exigencies of British authority. As he explained, in the midst of this huge political work, the Punjab writer had an administrative task to perform: What I mean is that the population out here die from purely preventable causes; are starved from purely preventable causes; are in native states hideously misgoverned from their rulers’ own folly and so on. [ . . . ] You see, if once you set the ball a[-]rolling you can generally get two or three men infinitely better than yourself with twenty years’ experience to help it along. They only want the prodding and therefore it is your bounden duty, for the performance or nonperformance of which your conscience holds you answerable, that you keep your pen-point sharp and clean and try all you know to get a style that commands attention and the power of writing faciley [sic]. It mayn’t be literature (there’s ample time for that in the next world, where one of the delights of Paradise will be printing your poems on rubbed rough edged paper and reading laudatory reviews of ’em in the Celestial Intelligencer) but it may save men and cattle alive and lead to really tangible results.30 With a curious mix of adolescent pride and self-effacement, Kipling considers his literary ambitions to be far less important than the achievement of practical results in the running of the land, subordinating his aspirations as a writer of fiction and poetry to the ideals of the Indian Civil Service, and considering himself, as a journalist, a key component of the Anglo-Indian political machinery. His comments to Burne-Jones invoke many of the recurrent themes and motifs of his time in the Punjab: the valorisation of men with twenty years of firsthand experience, the disavowal of literary and intellectual pretensions, the disbelief in the capacity of Indian rulers for proper government, and, typically, a lightly sardonic portrait of the gilded hereafter – a celestial paradise reserved exclusively for aesthetes and dilettantes. In the vaunting of imperial work and the damning of artistic vanity, Kipling suggests a literary aesthetic rooted in the running of the land. Perhaps most significant of all is the encomium on the ‘sharp and clean’ pen-point, which draws directly from the traditions and the writings of the British

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Punjab, where the trope of the powerful writer evokes the special juridical and administrative characteristics of rule in the province. It is worth pausing here to consider the impact upon Kipling’s work of his Punjab forbears and contemporaries. The officials and historians of Kipling’s province consistently acknowledge the importance of one political figure and method of government in the history of the Punjab – that figure being the first Governor of the province, John Lawrence, who administered the so-called ‘non-regulation’ system after the Punjab’s annexation in 1849.31 The notion of shared responsibility and sharp, ‘clean’ penmanship derives largely from the legal and administrative framework of this system, and was taken up keenly by the writers and officials of the late Victorian Punjab. The Bengal official and historian, L.S.S. O’Malley, offers a stirring account of the flexibility of government in the non-regulation province. Under Lawrence, he explains, a radically abridged version of English law allowed each administrator a high degree of personal responsibility with a minimum of detailed knowledge and protocol: Personality was not obscured or overlaid by routine but had full play. All were ready to take the initiative and accept responsibility. There was, therefore, much personal government, but it was by no means a substitute for government by law. One of John Lawrence’s maxims was “Do a thing regularly and legally if you can do it as well and vigorously in that way as irregularly and illegally.”32 These values of personal initiative and responsibility reverberate through the young Kipling’s comments to his cousin on the governing instincts and obligations of the Englishman, as do the half-ironic endorsements of irregular and illegal conduct, which find their counterpart in the unofficial methods celebrated in the Indian stories – perhaps most famously in Kim (1901), where British operations along the NorthWest frontier involve a network of vaguely disreputable, if likeable, characters. In the context of the educational reform and liberal policy that dominated Anglo-Indian thinking in the nineteenth century, this celebration of Lawrence and the non-regulation system represents nostalgia for an earlier, paternalistic phase in the Punjab’s history. With its commitment to personal authoritarian influence, the non-regulation system expressed the conservative instincts of a province only recently incorporated into the empire. Considering themselves an embattled ruling minority responsible for the administration of a fractious and

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The Sentence for Mutiny 9

war-like frontier, the old hands of the province were deeply troubled by the progressives and reformers of the period. They were generally hostile to the project of native education associated with such figures as Thomas Macaulay and his brother-in-law, Charles Trevelyan, who were officials steeped in the moral and philosophic optimism of the early Victorian age. In his famous Minute of 1835, Macaulay framed the mantra of Victorian liberalism in India, arguing for the creation of a stratum of English-educated Indians who would serve as ‘interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern – a class of persons Indian in blood, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect’.33 As Eric Stokes suggests, such boundless faith in the merits and the governing value of European learning and literature reflects the utilitarian influence on political philosophy in the governance of India.34 After the Mutiny of 1857,35 it was difficult for the officials of Kipling’s province and generation to accept the progressive ideal in good faith. They were haunted by the spectre of rebellion, and longed for the reassuring paternalism of the Lawrence school, seeing in the non-regulation system a means of cutting away the accumulation of restrictive intellectual, textual, and legal clutter that accompanied liberal reform. As O’Malley explains, the non-regulation system seemed to institute the direct authority and influence of the official in its very formulation, adopting specific juridical and textual methods for implementing the ideal of personal government. Eliminating ‘formalities and technicalities’, a legal code drafted by Sir Robert Montgomery and Sir Richard Temple conflated the ‘several systems of Indian law’ into a series of instantly comprehensible directives: ‘every other consideration was made subordinate to the necessity for making justice cheap and quick, sure and simple’.36 If the sure and simple approach was good enough for Lawrence and his non-regulation ruling caste, it was apparently good enough for the scholar administrators of the Punjab, who seem to have woven the juridical maxim of concision and clarity into the very form and texture of their writings. They lay constant stress upon the importance of abridgement and simplification, idealising radically summarised accounts of local custom and the qualities of flexibility and personal responsibility. The preservation of British rule is retrospectively attributed to the capacity to summarise and simplify at the level of language, granting formal directness – and its exponents – almost mythical status in the province. In O’Malley’s The Indian Civil Service, the legal complexities of the regulation provinces are contrasted with Lawrence’s Punjab, and are blamed for uprisings against English rule including the

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10 India: Writing Under Western Eyes

Santal Rebellion of 1855.37 Even more directly, the non-regulation system is celebrated for the decisive political and military advantages it offered two years later during the Mutiny: ‘it is no exaggeration to say that the saving of India was in a large measure due to the Non-Regulation system in the Punjab’.38 Sparse rhetoric and radical abridgement had become, to many, the sine qua non of colonial representation, and although by the time Kipling arrived in the province in 1883 the customary administrative latitude enjoyed by the region had become little more than a memory, the name of John Lawrence became a serious rallying call among a number of commentators who sought a return to the rugged methods of the old province. Foremost among these campaigners was S.S. Thorburn, district officer of the Punjab, who, in 1886 – the year that Kipling began the newspaper series ‘Plain Tales from the Hills’ – published Musalmans and Moneylenders, urging that the government ‘partially revert to the “paternal” system of the early Lawrence school’.39 Thorburn warned that by granting the Indian ‘peasantry’ individual rights in land, and elaborating the legal system until it was ‘profitably comprehensible only to the superior intelligence of money-lenders and legal practitioners’,40 the government induced borrowing and the voluntary alienation of land rights in settlement of debt. The process stood, he argued, to provoke widespread disaffection among exploited Indians and eventually rebellion against the English. Rejecting the arduous rhetoric he associated with the modern bureaucracy, Thorburn stripped away the complexities of his own historical approach, adopting a textual form appropriate to the rugged methods of rule he advocated in the Punjab. In this respect, his work was a radical departure from the highly intellectual and positivistic modes of scholarship operating elsewhere in India. Anti-technological, antiprogressive, and anti-liberal, his writings have more in common with Thomas Carlyle than with the utilitarian school of polity represented in India by James and John Stuart Mill. As the widespread adulation of John Lawrence suggests, heroes and hero-worship were highly prized in the colonial Punjab, rendering Carlyle’s work, with its admiration for the strong man ruling alone, an appropriate philosophical counterpart of the political programme in the region. To Carlyle, literature was a ‘quarrel’, an ‘internecine duel’,41 providing a martial view of the written word in keeping with the rugged methods and rhetorical systems of non-regulation government. Philosophies, ideas, and beliefs must, he argued, ‘fight’ for acceptance in a dissolute and heterodox age, conquering ‘nothing which does not deserve to be conquered’42 – a view

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The Sentence for Mutiny 11

irresistible to the officials of the Punjab, whose European intellectual traditions were suitably abridged both for the material and intellectual subduing of another land. Carlyle’s influence will be considered later. At this stage, it is important to note that the values of sparse and combative prose – and Carlylean hero-worship – are evident in Thorburn’s heroic portrayal of Lawrence, who matched strong words with an uncompromising, authoritarian rule: John Lawrence, who barely wrote a redundant word, literally wore his eyes to blindness by pen-driving. In his statue on the Mall in Lahore he stands with a pen in one hand and a sword in the other and asks the Punjabis, ‘By which will you be governed?’ Though the symbolism intended is evident, the effect is unfortunate, as giving too high a place in administration to the power of the pen.43 Regretting the undue emphasis on the value of penmanship in colonial administration – which, in the case of Lawrence, he considers highly inappropriate to the memory of a man who ‘barely wrote a redundant word’ – Thorburn offers the classic trope of written and practical authority in the Punjab. Like Kipling, he regards the sword and the pen as equal and mutually defining concepts: the pen should be used with the thrusting, martial intensity of the sword, while the military power represented by the sword should be infused with the intellectual acumen and guile represented by the pen. Thorburn and the conservative civilians of the province employed the myth of the straight-talking Lawrence and the narrative economy of the non-regulation system against the modern phenomenon of centralisation and ‘machine rule’, which had gradually absorbed the Punjab since the 1860s. By 1866, a regulation code of civil procedure had been extended to the province, and a Chief Court established at Lahore – changes that, as Thorburn apocalyptically phrased it, attracted a ‘locust-swarm of pleaders’.44 He painted a grim picture of the frontier under regulation government: ‘mapped, registered, and assessed’, with ‘500 subordinate courts administering laws and rules adapted from every statute book in Europe’.45 Beneath this criticism of machine rule lay an attack on utilitarian concepts of representative government, which enjoyed a resurgence in the late nineteenth century – most popularly in the writings of William Wilson Hunter. Eminent administrator, member of the Viceroy’s council, and compiler of the Imperial Gazetteer (a statistical survey of the Indian empire), Hunter inherited the classic utilitarian commitment to rational and well-ordered systems of political philosophy, investing his

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12 India: Writing Under Western Eyes

own historical approach with the full complement of European intellectual resources and methods. In his 1872 work, Annals of Rural Bengal, he draws upon the diverse findings of anthropology, jurisprudence, philology, and evolutionary theory to provide a rigorous intellectual framework for knowing, and ultimately controlling, India. His commitment to statistical inquiry highlights the gulf in methodology between his own approach and the work of Thorburn: In the absence of machinery for discovering the pressure of the population, we are liable at any moment to be rudely awakened to the fact that the blessings of British rule have been turned into curses; and, as in the case of the Santals before their rising, that protection from the sword and pestilence has only intensified the difficulty of subsistence. Statistics form an indispensable complement of civilisation; but at present we have no reliable means of ascertaining the population of a single district of rural Bengal, the quantity of food it produces, or any one of those items which as a whole render a people prosperous and loyal, or hungry and seditious.46 Rugged modes of government, of the kind associated with the Punjab, Sind, and the North-West Frontier province, are dismissed by Hunter as ‘systems of non-inquiry’, ill-equipped to undertake the sophisticated work of scholarship required for the accurate documentation and surveillance of the country.47 By contrast, Annals of Rural Bengal asserts the political ideal of a comprehensively mapped, surveyed, and effectively subordinated India, mirroring a highly structured and centralised vision of government in its own expansive scholarship. Much as Thorburn’s work adopts a methodology in keeping with the uncluttered authoritarianism he advocates in the Punjab, the form and methodology of Hunter’s Annals of Rural Bengal reflects the programme of comprehensive surveillance it recommends to the government of India. As a hugely ambitious study, drawing upon a limitless range of disciplines and methods, Annals of Rural Bengal is a formal testimony to the possible scope of British rule, which Hunter associates with a copious knowledge of all areas of Indian culture and history. Compendious knowledge translates, ultimately, into a massive programme of surveillance, achieved through the impersonal machinery of statistical enquiry, which is ultimately supplemented by a tendentious reading of Indian history that appears to validate liberal policy. For example, when he discusses the racial intolerance of ‘Sanskrit literature subsequent to the Vedic hymns’,48 Hunter, on the one hand, displays his detailed knowledge

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The Sentence for Mutiny 13

of Indian antiquity, while, on the other, denouncing the moral failings of that literature and implying the comparative racial enlightenment of his own European history and milieu. Similarly, when he examines, through Sanskrit literature, the origins of racial distinctions amongst ‘Brahmanized Aryans’, suggesting the likelihood that ‘the Greeks and Persians were sprung from errant Kshatryas who had lost their caste’,49 he attributes to the British a knowledge of Indian history superior to the knowledge of the Indian peoples themselves, while at the same time implying the mutual origins of the two cultures in a common GrecoPersian stock. This justification of British commonality with the Aryan caste, is typical of the racial muddle characteristic of Hunter’s thinking, which invokes an indigenous caste system to assert a measure of equality between the races of the governed and the governing peoples. The Indo-Aryan he saw as a proven, able ruler over the dumb, toiling masses of Indian ‘aborigines’, and was therefore, he suggests, fit to accept a measure of responsibility under the British.50 In answer to the opponents of educational and political reform, he cited the evidence of India itself, whose Aryan rulers had once refused to ‘share their light with the people who dwelt in darkness [the “aborigines”]’51 and had consequently fallen victim to successive waves of conquest. Such, he implied, was the fate in store for those who advocated ‘systems of non-inquiry’, refusing to harness European political methods and scholarship in the empire. Hunter’s work typified the evangelical faith in education and enlightenment that inspired an earlier generation of English liberals and utilitarians in India. It was Trevelyan who, following the example of Macaulay, sought to calm the restless spirit of Indian nationalism by employing the Indian middle classes in ‘acquiring and diffusing European knowledge, and in naturalising European institutions’.52 The conflict between the Raj utilitarians and the men of action was thus largely influenced by the philosophical and political confrontations of the early to mid-nineteenth century. Much as Carlyle’s admiration for strong, authoritarian leadership was attractive to Kipling’s mentors in the Punjab, the scholar-statesmen of the regulation provinces, including William Wilson Hunter, were drawn towards the more rigorously analytic approach of the two dominant figures of liberal philosophy and polity in British India: James and John Stuart Mill. It was the influence of each of these thinkers – both of whom were immersed in Indian affairs through their work for the East India Company – that led to the systematic overhaul of the legislature and the eventual demise of the rough methods of the Punjab and the non-regulation system.

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14 India: Writing Under Western Eyes

In A System of Logic Ratiocinative and Inductive (1843), John Stuart Mill’s attack on ‘erroneous inference from sense’ and his ‘complete reliance’ upon the general proposition reflects the classic utilitarian emphasis upon the use of dependable data and logical analysis.53 His definition of logic as ‘the science of science itself’,54 lends his philosophy a broad range of reference, which extends to politics, administration, and the legislature in Considerations On Representative Government (1861). In conformity with his belief that complex systems, whether intellectual or political, are understood and organised in terms of their underlying patterns of ‘simple laws’ rather than by their ‘direct study’,55 Mill argues that government is a ‘comprehensive science’, following universal ‘principles and rules’ that can be extended to diverse societies. In the colonies, for example, English systems of legislation and financial policy ‘require modifications solely of detail, to adapt them to any state of society sufficiently advanced to possess rulers capable of understanding them’.56 This belief in the universal appropriateness of European systems of thought was at loggerheads with the popular interpretation of the non-regulation system in the Kipling’s province, which was thought to allow the adjustment and even the suspension of English law according to Indian customs and beliefs, valuing direct experience and influence more highly than elaborate theorising and protocol. Kipling arrived in India at the height of reform, when, in the hands of political theorists and historians such as Hunter, this utilitarian legacy of government as a science, and European learning and literature as the key to colonial rule, had triumphed both intellectually and politically. With the enactment in 1860 of the Indian Penal Code, the draft of which had received the blessing of John Stuart Mill,57 there followed an aggressive spate of legislation and an immense pressure towards the centralisation of authority,58 which left the conservative civilians of the Punjab isolated and nostalgic for the days of John Lawrence. Kipling’s early fiction was, to a large extent, a renunciation of modern variants on the utilitarian theme of impersonal and indirect rule – attacking the utilitarian legacy at the deepest levels of language and rhetoric. His work evokes the ‘non-regulation’ ethos of the pre-Mutiny Punjab, in which the values of personal experience and influence are conveyed in a prose style uncluttered by European philosophical and theoretical assumptions. On the only recorded occasion where he wrote directly about Lawrence and the Mutiny, it is notable that he associated Lawrence with Carlyle, celebrating the hero of the Punjab in the language and style of the most influential thinker of the Victorian age. Carlyle’s influence upon the Victorian literary culture was immense,

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The Sentence for Mutiny 15

and is reflected in the writings of major writers including Robert and Elizabeth Browning, Tennyson, Dickens (who dedicated Hard Times to the author) and Ruskin. Kipling too read his work from a very early age. During his schooldays at the USC in Devon, Sartor Resartus (1831) was a favourite text, which he frequently discussed with his schoolmates, Dunsterville and Beresford. In his autobiography, he recalls summer holidays spent away from USC in the care of ‘three dear ladies’,59 Mrs Winnard and Misses Mary and Georgina Craik, who were immersed in literary society and had known Ruskin and Carlyle. Georgina, he noted with awe, wrote novels ‘on her knee, by the fireside’ beneath two clay pipes once smoked by the author.60 Later, Kipling developed a close friendship with Charles Eliot Norton, a distinguished Harvard professor and editor of Carlyle’s letters and autobiography. Norton was, Kipling confessed, ‘the only man except my father and Uncle Ned [Edward Burne-Jones] whose disapproval or advice sways me’.61 In late 1894, Norton sent Kipling two volumes, edited by himself, of Carlyle’s correspondence: Correspondence between Goethe and Carlyle (1887) and Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson (1883). Commenting on the latter, some of which he had read before, Kipling observed that Carlyle ‘could not have lived up to the tone of ten consecutive pages, in private life, without being slain by the nearest stranger. It shows Emerson’s character more sweet and wholesome than ever by contrast.’62 Nevertheless, despite these subsequent reservations, Kipling’s knowledge of Carlyle enabled him to make sense, not only of the paternalistic authoritarianism and Lawrence-worship of the Punjab, but also of his own need to develop a narrative style appropriate to the non-regulation system and the ethos of personal government he observed in his Anglo-Indian counterparts. As soon as he arrived in the province, he saw in action the values of hard work and personal productivity that he had absorbed from Sartor Resartus: Be no longer a Chaos, but a World, or even Worldkin. Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it, in God’s name! ’Tis the utmost thou hast in thee: out with it then. Up! up! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might. Work while it is called Today, for the Night cometh, wherein no man can work.63 The final words of this passage, quoted from John 9.4, were inscribed above the fireplace of Kipling’s home in Vermont, and were later echoed

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16 India: Writing Under Western Eyes

in the title of his American volume, The Day’s Work (1897). Carlyle’s work ethic – crucial to Kipling’s writing and the practical aspirations of his early years in India – has a special significance for the creative artist, whose literary productions create ‘Worlds’ or ‘Worldkins’ from the whirlpool of life and history. In Past and Present (1843), Carlyle ridicules the assiduous but dull historian – ‘Dryasdust’ – who produces ‘mountains of dead ashes, wreck, and burnt bones’.64 History should rather, he claims, be transcribed as ‘an ever-living, ever-working Chaos of Being, wherein shape after shape bodies itself forth from innumerable elements’.65 In Carlyle’s eccentric historiography, the author marshals these disparate forces, reflecting their dynamism in a ‘living’ prose that is persuasive and powerful rather than scholarly or precise. But there was another side to Carlyle’s celebration of the vital craft of the writer – his perception of the enervating futility of work. This was the Carlyle of Reminiscences (1881), who, after berating the appalling result of building renovations to his writing room, turned with equal despair to his own authorial craft, lamenting the years of ‘abstruse toil, obscure speculations, futile wrestling, and misery’ that his books had cost him.66 This perception of the anguish and futility of human endeavour led him to declare, in the same volume, that ‘all human work is transitory, small in itself, contemptible. Only the worker thereof and the spirit that dwelt in him is significant.’67 Kipling, it seems, recognised the appropriateness of this ambiguous work ethic to his own writing and imperial experience, where the dedication to order, duty, and discipline was matched by the despairing sense of futility experienced by the officials, governors, and military men of the empire. His writings abound in portraits of Englishmen driven to distraction, crushed by the realisation of their work’s ultimate meaninglessness. Likewise, Kipling also reflected the Carlylean perception of the author’s cosmic futility, dramatising the problem of knowing India, and of writing meaningfully, ‘productively’ about its culture and peoples. India seemed inexpressible, a place outside the compass of European thought and rationality – a place calculated to expose the magnitude of the Englishman’s insignificance. It was ancient, unchanging, and impenetrable – utterly impervious to the civilising work of the educators and reformers. In the Punjab, he made it his business to know the practical men of empire – and to convey the loneliness and hardship that dogged their efforts in the running of the land. At the club in Lahore, he fraternised with men who excelled in the Carlylean virtues of hard work and ‘productivity’. These were, he suggested, disciplined and experienced

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The Sentence for Mutiny 17

workers, who were employed, quite literally, in the shaping of the material and political features of the land: ‘picked men at their definite work – Civilians, Army, Education, Canals, Forestry, Engineering, Irrigation, Railways, Doctors, and Lawyers’.68 Like his father, who completed ‘twice as much work as other men’ simply because he knew the people of the country,69 they employed their personal knowledge of India in a professional and political capacity that was frequently, as Kipling termed it, ‘unofficial’. However, this personal approach was, he suggested, threatened by administrative centralisation, which widened the gulf between coloniser and colonised: In this country everything is done by personal influence – the personal influence of the Englishman. Only our government doesn’t recognize the fact and goes centralizing and centralizing at Simla until the District officers – the little kings of the counties – are reduced simply to machines for compiling statistics and lose touch with the people. A man who has the confidence of the natives can do anything whether he is Civilian or Unofficial.70 By identifying so strongly with Carlyle, who believed that government ‘cannot be treated mechanically’,71 Kipling readily sympathised with the conservative attack on machine rule. Equally, he discovered here an approach to history, language, and creativity that was irreverent towards accepted standards and conventions, questioning the intellectual and philosophical norms that dominated the British enterprise in India. As he went on to explain: ‘under the piles of reports and statistics [ . . . ] runs wholly untouched and unaffected the life of the peoples of the land’ – a renunciation of the textual and rhetorical framework of British government that influenced the form, methodology, and style of his own writings.72

Revolutionary letters: ‘In the Year ’57’ After little over three years in the Punjab, Kipling’s reputation as a writer rested largely upon the volume of light satirical verse, Departmental Ditties and the Plain Tales series running in the Civil and Military Gazette (CMG). The ‘Departmental Ditties’ had first appeared in the CMG, and Kipling had produced the first collected edition of the verses on the presses of the newspaper in 1886. This first edition of Departmental Ditties was presented as a mock-official docket, tied with a red ribbon and addressed to ‘All Heads of Departments and all Anglo-Indians’ from

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18 India: Writing Under Western Eyes

‘Rudyard Kipling, Assistant, Department of Public Journalism, Lahore District’. As the format suggests, the poems were a ‘literary amuse-gueule for sweaty civil servants to take on their holidays’.73 The first print run totalled a mere 500, and despite Kipling’s claim that it was ‘a foul thing to look on and fouler to read’, the collection was engaging enough to win him praise in the Times of India and the Bombay Gazette. More impressively, the poems were reviewed enthusiastically in Longman’s Magazine by the influential literary critic and poet Andrew Lang, who suggested that Kipling’s best work ‘was worthy of Bret Harte’.74 As a young writer working on a newspaper that served a local community of only seventy, excluding military personnel,75 Kipling was justifiably proud to have achieved this small degree of celebrity. As he wrote to his Aunt Edith: ‘I have made my mark – I say it with all the modesty that a youngster who has had a fill of butter can say so.’76 Although the Plain Tales had been appearing in the CMG since November 1886, they were yet to be reprinted in a single volume. During 1887, while negotiating a reprint of Departmental Ditties with the Calcutta firm Thacker Spink, Kipling also offered the Plain Tales for publication in a single volume (for which he originally proposed the drab title ‘Punjab People Brown and White’). Replying with the news that their edition of Departmental Ditties had almost sold out, Thacker Spink accepted the stories, which appeared later that year as Plain Tales from the Hills. In the midst of these developments, Kipling continued with his regular work for the CMG, providing articles on political events, current news, and the various conferences and social occasions that filled the lives of Anglo-Indians in the Punjab. For most of his Indian years, he was careful to keep a record of his work for the newspaper, diligently compiling scrapbooks of press cuttings, which later formed an important part of the Kipling Papers willed to the National Trust by Kipling’s daughter, Elsie, and now housed in the Library of the University of Sussex. In one of these scrapbooks Kipling pasted a lengthy, unsigned article entitled ‘In the Year ’57’, which appeared in the CMG in two parts on May 14 and 23, 1887. ‘In the Year ’57’ was never subsequently re-published by Kipling, but he clearly acknowledged his authorship of this semi-fictional piece several years later when he recalled attempting to write a story of the Mutiny based upon his study of a ‘file of John Lawrence’s ordinary office letters for the month of June 1857’.77 Ironically, his admission that the task was ‘an exceeding big job and one altogether beyond [his] scope’ became the theme of the ‘story’,78 which is not so much concerned with the historical events of 1857, as with

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The Sentence for Mutiny 19

the historiographical and hermeneutic issues arising from the attempt to write about the Mutiny.79 ‘In the Year ’57’ opens in the modern-day setting of an Indian records office, with the narrator, a historian or journalist who can safely be regarded as Kipling, reading and delivering various speculations and comments on a file of letters written by Lawrence and his fellowadministrators at the height of the Mutiny. The fictional scenario of an editor/historian sorting through a mass of intractable sources is itself highly reminiscent of Sartor Resartus, in which an ‘editor’ – Carlyle – comments on the writings of an imaginary philosopher, Professor Teufelsdröckh. This narratorial device enables Kipling not only to document occurrences in Lawrence’s office, but also to comment upon the specific terms of the correspondence, the mechanisms of the administration, and, even more significantly, the type of language and expression deployed by Lawrence and his men. The piece opens with the almost stock deprecation of the Babu, the educated Indian keeper of the collection, who, Kipling suggests, has little respect for the sacred papers: The file was nearly a foot thick, and as fresh in appearance as if it had just been put into the record-room. “All that is worth keeping of the Mutiny papers” said the Babu. “Proceedings of the Government of the Punjab – July ’57 – selected.” There was obviously little sentiment about the Babu. As he slapped the file down on the table, there showed on the rim of a fat white docket the initials “J.L.”.80 Responding to the Babu’s nonchalance – and, implicitly, the patronage of educated Indians by liberal reformers – ‘In the Year ’57’ launches a defence of hero-worship in the Punjab, attacking the ‘dark’ forces that would erase both the memory and the mythological status of John Lawrence: Nothing written by John Lawrence’s strong hand should ever fade, and it seemed quite natural, therefore, that the rugged characters should be black and fresh as ever. The ink he used must have been better than the ink-powders of a degenerate to-day.81 More significant than the permanence and ‘freshness’ of Lawrence’s prose is its stylistic roughness, which is portrayed as a textual quality appropriate to the rugged methods of the non-regulation system. The narrator is constantly awe-struck by Lawrence’s brusque, untidy written

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20 India: Writing Under Western Eyes

style, in which real names are substituted for ‘scratchy scrawly’ initials,82 and the conventions of orderliness and strict coherence are sacrificed to higher political requirements. Lawrence’s flouting of grammatical consistency is not only legitimised by the narrator, but also celebrated as an expression of personal authority, inviting an association between robust leadership and authorial self-will. The figure who signs himself ‘J.L.’ writes ‘illegibly’, but, the narrator wryly remarks, ‘he had his hands full just then’. J.L. ‘dates his dockets very carelessly; but, as he is saving a Province, he may perhaps be forgiven’.83 As the sheets ‘tumble out’ and ‘flutter onto the floor’, Kipling remarks on the futility of the historian’s task: The file opened slowly and fell apart into more than a hundred and fifty letters – blue, white and yellow – stacked in any order, and all bearing the date of the month of July. It was impossible to observe method in dealing with the mass. One was forced to dip as into a luckybag. [ . . . ] What a hopeless muddle it all is – this long ridge of papers that show, without the gloss of print, the very bed-rock, and base of the storm-tossed administration.84 Given the legalistic climate of the 1880s, this rather belaboured rejection of conventional scholarship can be attributed to Kipling’s awareness of the language, learning, and politics assaulting the traditions of the province. The political implications of these repeated interpretive provisos – concerning the problem of sorting this tangled mass of documents, and the element of blind chance in the work of historical research – were self-evident to a readership aware of the influence of utilitarian philosophy and the writings of administrator historians upon modern policy. In fact, Kipling goes on to ridicule the scholarly contribution to the political debate in his description of a document addressed to Lawrence at the height of the crisis by a Lieutenant Raverty of Bombay – an expert on the Pushtoo language and the tribesfolk of Afghanistan. Suggesting that the British Army recruit Afghan warriors to assist in its onslaught against the mutineers at Delhi, Raverty submits a design for their uniforms comprising ‘a neatly written letter enclosing two very clever water-colour sketches of two ruffians, who appear to be cross-bred between Pathan and Zouave’ [emphasis added].85 His ‘femininely delicate hand’ and his penchant for water-colours are quite contrary to the penmanship of the ‘Mutiny men’,86 and, in conjunction with his Bombay origins, imply not only Kipling’s insistent association between textual forms and political values, but also his defence of the

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The Sentence for Mutiny 21

22 India: Writing Under Western Eyes

Follows a glimpse of a city in the South [Delhi], tinged with fire and crumbling to rubbish under the blows of a sun-smitten, sicknessstricken army. To this succeeds a quiet city in the extreme North [Lahore], very quiet and very strong, a buttress of defence guarded by clear-eyed men who speak slowly, and whose words carry far across the din between north and south.88 Directly associating power over India with the power of words, and the commanding use of words, the vision of the quiet city builds to the dramatic final moment of ‘In the Year ’57’ when Kipling, like Thorburn, quotes from the statue of Lawrence: ‘Will you be governed by the Pen or by the Sword?’89 The overt literary and philosophical allusions of Kipling’s narrative provide a clear answer to Lawrence’s question. As already suggested, the ‘problems’ of legibility and interpretation encountered by Kipling’s narrator recall the ‘editorial difficulties’ encountered by the narrator of Sartor Resartus, for whom the writings of Professor Teufelsdröckh are ‘boundless, almost formless [ . . . ] a very Sea of Thought; neither calm nor clear’.90 Additionally, the ‘heroic’ treatment of Lawrence’s untidy written style recalls the celebration of Mohammed in Heroes and Hero-Worship (1841). Carlyle’s admiration for Islam and the Koran (a controversial admiration in nineteenth-century England), was a perfect literary antecedent to the respect for Islam cultivated among the civilians of the Punjab, whose population was, and remains today, predominantly Muslim. Considering him one of the great heroes of world history, and Carlyle commends Mohammed’s rugged upbringing, and the virile simplicity with which he founded a faith and wrote the Koran. Indeed, Carlyle’s respect for the Koran, like Kipling’s admiration for the correspondence of Lawrence, centres upon its rough-hewn prose and dishevelled form: It is the confused ferment of a great rude human soul: rude, untutored, that cannot even read; but fervent, earnest, struggling vehemently to utter itself in words. With a kind of breathless intensity he strives to utter himself, the thoughts crowd on him pellmell: for very multitude of things to say, he can get nothing said. The meaning that is in him shapes itself into no form of composition, is stated in no

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representational norms of his own corner of India against the intrusions of outsiders – especially the scholar-statesmen of the regulation provinces.87 Like O’Malley, Kipling believed that British India was saved in 1857 by the far-travelling words of these Mutiny men:

The Sentence for Mutiny 23

Kipling might well have had these words in mind when he wrote of Lawrence’s correspondence, which is similarly a tumbling, unsequential mass of prose. Without ‘method or coherence’, the writing of Lawrence is ultimately, like the Koran, the ‘confused ferment of a great rude human soul’. Kipling’s assertion that ‘[t]he letter is incomplete . [ . . . ] Everything is incomplete, fragmentary, jumbled, leading nowhere’ reads like a direct echo of Carlyle’s opinions on Mohammed and the Koran,92 associating the rugged, inchoate textuality of Lawrence’s administration with the virile spirit and language of the founder of Islam. ‘In the Year ’57’ therefore involves multiple points of cultural reference; invoking the Anglo-Germanic scholarship of Carlyle, while at the same time invoking Islam and the Indian empire. Another association also emerges. In its advocacy of hero-worship and reverence for the strong, able governorship of Lawrence, ‘In the Year ’57’ recalls Carlyle’s admiration for the rugged, uncomplicated leadership of Abbot Samson of the monastery of St Edmundsbury. Carlyle writes in Past and Present: With iron energy, in slow but steady undeviating perseverance, Abbot Samson sets to work [ . . . ] . His troubles are manifold: cunning milites, unjust bailiffs, lazy sockmen, he an inexperienced Abbot; relaxed lazy monks, not disinclined to mutiny in mass: but continued vigilance, rigorous method, what we call the ‘eye of the master,’ work wonders. The clear-beaming eyesight of Abbot Samson, steadfast, severe, all-penetrating, – it is like Fiat Lux in that inorganic waste whirlpool; penetrates gradually to all nooks, and of chaos makes a kosmos or ordered world!93 In his own, peculiar province, the abbot Samson too has a band of ‘mutinous’ men to keep down; the ‘lazy monks’ of St Edmundsbury. The ‘eye of the master’, the steadfast, severe, all-penetrating gaze of Samson restores order to the inorganic whirlpool of the abbey. Kipling similarly imagines the steadying, all-pervasive gaze of Lawrence restoring order after the Mutiny: It is no longer the rush of an evil dream that we are looking at, but a length of great living frieze, where the figures are fixed for the

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sequence, method, or coherence; – they are not shaped at all, these thoughts of his; flung out unshaped, as they struggle and tumble there, in their chaotic inarticulate state.91

24 India: Writing Under Western Eyes

Apart from the stylistic echoes, in the compound words and dramatic imagery of ‘In the Year ’57’, Kipling also includes a direct reference to Carlyle’s historiographical techniques, and to the title of one of his best-known works, commenting: ‘after a while, as one turns the letters over[,] the sense of the distance that separates the affable, eloquent, impartial, educated Present from the hard-pressed, brutal and sternly practical Past, dies away’.95 Ultimately, the failure of a systematic, ‘theoretical’ approach to the historical material in Kipling’s text is legitimised by the formal and grammatical inconsistencies of Lawrence’s own correspondence, dashed off in a moment of crisis for a higher, practical purpose. Qualities of personal adaptability and responsibility exemplified in the civil service of the Punjab are re-duplicated in the fluid and digressive style of Kipling’s article and in the implicit devaluation of theoretical principles and scholarly ‘regulations’.

The Plain Tales and the Punjab tradition In his newspaper work for the CMG, Kipling frequently expressed the pragmatic, paternalistic ethos of the Lawrence school. For example, on a visit to the state museum in an early report on the opening of the Mohindar College in Patiala – an educational facility initially founded in 1875 to foster scholarship and enlightenment in this supposedly ‘backward’ native state – Kipling dwelt upon the lavish interior of the Patiala Palace, relishing the opulent detail of the extravagant objects accumulated by the former Maharajah. The Maharaja’s method of purchasing expense trifles was, he suggested, ‘peculiar and expensive. Walking into a shop, he would take “all on that side of the counter”, or all in the shop, as his royal fancy moved him, and, after his decease, his purchases formed the Patiala Museum.’96 The realisation that these dazzling, jewel-encrusted exhibits were now ‘being spoilt with neglect’ was, he observed, a ‘little depressing’.97 Here, supposedly, was an example of native extravagance, indulgence and carelessness that boded ill for the progressive, educational project of the College.

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moment as they slide by, in strenuous, labouring attitudes – strong, hopeful, despairing, agonized, or coldly and bitterly masterful, as Fate has laid their burdens upon them [ . . . ] . One face recurs and recurs; and on that face there is no outward sign of trouble, nothing but determination and sleepless vigilance.94

Similarly, in an article on the railways of the Lahore district he berated the Macaulayites of the province with a scathing remark on English educational ventures: ‘At the Punjab College they teach Milton and Chaucer – and if report be true, squabble over these worthies at times – and other branches of learning may be studied at the high schools, but nobody seems to give any instructions in railway work.’98 It seems that if anything was to be taught to the native population, it was the rudiments of useful, practical work, for, as he exclaimed on another occasion, they ‘talk too much and do too little’.99 Nevertheless there were assignments for the CMG that forced Kipling to reconcile himself with the inspectoral, reformist agenda of Hunter. On one occasion, the incidence of typhoid required him to investigate the conditions of hygiene and sanitation in the production of Lahore’s milk supply. He inspected the cow-byres with the meticulousness of a government official, calculating the size of each byre, the density of cattle, and the depth of accumulated dirt on the floor of each lot (ten inches of ‘blue and putrid’ slime in one instance). He concluded the article with the plea that every byre be relocated to some place ‘where it is possible to exercise efficient and intelligent control over it’.100 Generally, however, Kipling was drawn to those experiences and provinces that seemed to challenge the assumptions of Raj perception and knowledge – sometimes lying quite literally outside the frontier limits of British jurisdiction. For example, in his coverage of the Afghan question, which concerned the Amir of Afghanistan’s loyalty or otherwise to the British government. The Afghan question was an issue of diplomacy that preoccupied the Punjab in the late Victorian period, and was central to the ongoing Anglo-Russian power struggle unfolding in Central Asia (the political scenario that inspires Kim). In his first major assignment for the CMG, Kipling was despatched in 1885 to cover the Rawalpindi conference, a historic meeting between the Viceroy, Lord Dufferin and the Amir, Abdur Rahman. The British purpose in the durbar (conference) was to impress the Amir with the spectacle of civil and military achievement, winning his approval and Raj fealty. Kipling’s attitude to the official paraphernalia of the conference is characteristically ironic. Amid the scene of ‘dust and confusion’, preparations had descended into farce: ‘drenched coolies are decorating the station, with mournful bunting and depressed laurel boughs [ . . . ] The red cloth is weighted with an unromantic brick, lest it should take unto itself wings.’101 Looking for signs of the Amir’s approval at the scene of the culminating military display, he observes that ‘no muscle on his face shows any kind of emotion’.102 Abdur Rahman is ‘not to be spoken lightly to, so

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The Sentence for Mutiny 25

that it is impossible to say for certain what he thinks’.103 If the display had been calculated to awe and impress, it had failed to register clearly upon the Afghan ruler, merely inspiring Kipling’s awe at the formidable composure of the Amir, whose inscrutable countenance he imagined screening a world of secret political intrigues and despotic powers. Kipling’s fascination with Amir continued during – and for some while after – his time on the Indian newspapers. Two years later, he interviewed a dentist, Dr O’Meara, who had recently been summoned to Kabul to perform surgery upon Abdur Rahman. O’Meara had achieved great importance as a man who had crossed the frontier, fixed the teeth of a despot, and survived. He appeared to have become an expert on Afghanistan, and to have developed a special fondness for Kabul, which he declared ‘a nice spot to spend a holiday in’.104 Quite apart from the specific details of the dentist’s adventure, throughout their conversation Kipling is equally interested in O’Meara’s management of the interview, focusing upon the dentist’s extremely selective dispensation of facts about his experiences. The dentist seems to relish the discursive privilege his secret knowledge confers, waving away eager inquiries about the trip: ‘ “Did you see anything startling in or about Cabul?” “Never mind what I saw beyond what I’m telling you. You cannot govern Afghanistan like India.” ’105 He grows increasingly imperious as the conversation unfolds, admonishing the young reporter for wanting to know too much, and finally, rather grandly, declaring the interview at an end. Effectively the discursive or narrative control of the dentist during the interview recalls the absolute government of the Amir, a figure who knows ‘everything that is going on’, and who is ‘feared as much as any man in the world, in his own jurisdiction’.106 This fascination with ‘oriental despotism’ is a hallmark of Kipling’s writings, which often imagine unsettling resemblances and continuities between the governance of the British and the despotism of men such as the Afghan ruler. Arguably such patterns of resemblance and continuity account for the alternating attitudes of desire and revulsion focussed in some of Kipling’s most unsettling early encounters with native culture – for example, on his tour of the famous historical sites of Rajasthan. Purchasing the appropriate guidebooks for his visit, he eventually discards them in the face of the ‘obscene’ phallic architecture and symbolism of the Tower of Victory at Chitore – a structure built to commemorate a historic princely triumph in the region. He is seized with sexual loathing and terror in the ‘mighty maze’ of the Tower, the ‘slippery sliminess’ of whose walls testify to the endless visitation of ‘naked men’.107 With brusque irony, Kipling switches to the third-person

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26 India: Writing Under Western Eyes

to describe his feelings: ‘He desired no archaeological information, he wished to take no notes, and, above all, he did not care to look behind him, where stood the reminder that he was no better than the beasts that perish.’108 He was however, not so appalled by the Tower as to resist a later return by moonlight – a venture that recalls O’Meara’s paradoxical eagerness to revisit Afghanistan: ‘though I was in a hurry to come out, I should like to go again’.109 This ambivalent response to eastern culture, with its implication of epistemological crisis and failure, recurs on Kipling’s visit to China in 1889. Enchanted by the intricate beauty of Chinese art and sculpture, he is equally transfixed by his inability to comprehend the culture that inspired it. Surveying the religious objects of a canton curio shop – ‘the nameless devils of the Chinese creed’ – he declares the Chinese race ‘not human’.110 The perceived antiquity and otherness of Chinese culture seem to dwarf the social and artistic framework of Kipling’s perceptions. After experiencing the disorientating spectacle of Chinese art, architecture, and society, British imperial governance seems merely ‘the talk of children in the streets who have made a horse out of a pea-pod and match-sticks, and wonder if it will ever walk’.111 These typical newspaper articles suggest that Kipling’s ideas of native India and British governance were anything but ‘plain’. Indeed, the hermeneutic and existential concerns of such writings suggest the complexity of many of the tales in Kipling’s first collection. Indeed, the pun on the word ‘plain’ in the title ‘Plain Tales from the Hills’ intimates the sophistication of Kipling’s attitude to Raj governance: on the one hand, the word refers to narrative simplicity, and on the other, to the annual summer transfer of the government between the lowland plains and the hills (of Simla), indicating the propinquity in Kipling’s mind between the tangible evidence, the location of material power, and its manifestation in the forms and textures of Raj writing. Such clues to the hermeneutic and political concerns of Kipling’s early journalism – particularly reflected in works such as ‘In the Year ’57’ – enable many of the Plain Tales to be placed in their proper intellectual and cultural contexts, suggesting, rather ironically, the extreme sophistication of a sequence of stories that collectively denounce sophisticated rhetoric and political theory. For example, in ‘The Conversion of Aurelian McGoggin’, Spencer, Comte, and scientific positivism are denounced by a narrator who boasts that his own story is a ‘Tract’, and that ‘Making a Tract is a Feat’,112 satirising a European tradition of pedagogy and dramatising the appropriation and ‘reinvention’ of those traditions in British India. The story depicts a loss of continuity between

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The Sentence for Mutiny 27

the intellectual – and textual – culture of the colonies and the European industrial communities ‘where there is nothing but machinery and asphalt and building – all shut in by the fog’.113 In this respect, by describing the mental breakdown of a young civilian, Aurelian McGoggin, who exasperates the older officials of the Club with science and political theory – a habit that recalls the badgering of the Mutiny men by Lieutenant Raverty – the story finds an ideal trope for the discontinuity with European intellectual culture in the aphasia (loss of speech and memory) that seizes McGoggin. For his devotions to Spencer and Comte, he should, we are told, have had his bottom smacked by his Mamma – and implicitly it is the texts of a European intellectual elite that are ‘silenced’ by McGoggin’s mental collapse.114 The loss of memory and speech – the construction of an expatriate identity on the basis of an extremely selective approach to the literature, science, and philosophy of Europe – is an essential aspect of ‘In the Year ’57’, which dramatises the hybrid intellectual forms of writing and culture in British India. The irony of the claim that the Plain Tale is ‘a tract’ relies upon the deeper truth that Kipling and the Raj shared the problem of ‘speech’ with McGoggin – when confronted with the dislocations of learning, literature, and language inevitable to the colonial situation. Of all the Plain Tales, ‘In the House of Suddhoo’ mounts the most direct attack on the utilitarian passion for ‘code-making in the abstract’,115 telling the story of an Anglo-Indian official who is implicated in a case of extortion by an obscure section of the Indian Penal Code. Called upon by an old Indian friend, Suddhoo, to ensure that the magic rituals occurring in his house – for which he pays extravagant sums to one of his tenants, the seal-cutter – are not breaking the ‘law of the sirkar [government]’,116 the civilian finds himself hamstrung by that legal system, divided by his loyalties to the household and the Penal Code: Now, the case stands thus. Unthinkingly I have laid myself open to the charge of aiding and abetting the seal-cutter in obtaining money under false pretences, which is forbidden under Section 420 of the Indian Penal Code. I am helpless in the matter for these reasons. I cannot inform the police. What witnesses would support my statements? Janoo refuses flatly, and Azizun is a veiled woman somewhere near Bareilly – lost in this big India of ours. I dare not again take the law into my own hands, and speak to the seal-cutter; for certain am I that, not only would Suddhoo disbelieve me, but this step would end in the poisoning of Janoo, who is bound hand and foot by her debt to the bunnia [merchant].117

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28 India: Writing Under Western Eyes

Effectively, the narrator of the story is an old style Punjab administrator, who knows the people, befriends them, and enters into the details and personal details of their lives. But in this hopeless final situation, Kipling ironically suggests that the official is thwarted by modern jurisprudence and legal complexity – the baffled victim of a Penal Code hostile to hands-on, paternal government. The closing depiction of legal futility and frustration seems to echo the political analysis of Punjab writers such as Thorburn, with the deadlock of Suddhoo’s household recalling the legal and economic impasse described in Musalmans and Money-lenders: distinct social types – bunnia (moneylender), landlord, tradesman, trader, civil servant, prostitute, and so on – are linked in an exploitative relationship inadvertently cultivated by the law courts and the inflexible operations of the legal code. Again, Suddhoo’s failure properly to administer the affairs of the house seems to recall Thorburn’s contemporary account of the ‘systematic exploitation of the hereditary simpletons . . . of the province’.118 Like Thorburn’s propertied ‘simpletons’, Suddhoo is described by his tenants as an ‘old child [ . . . ] as senseless as a milch-goat’, unaccustomed either to the ownership of a house, or to the legal responsibilities that his rights in property bring: ‘What does Suddhoo know of your laws or the lightening post?’119 To emphasise the point, we are reminded that he never sleeps in the house, preferring to remain either on the roof or in the street, except when he used to visit his son at Peshawar, where he ‘slept under a real mud roof’.120 Kipling critics, who often read ‘In the House of Suddhoo’ as a vaguely gothic or supernatural tale, have largely overlooked these references to the issues of property and jurisprudence.121 In fact, Kipling originally entitled the story ‘Section 420 IPC’, invoking Fitzjames Stephen and the utilitarian code-makers of India, whose legacy he associated with machine rule and the empowerment of a new and potentially dangerous class of ‘semi-educated’ Indian – represented in the story by the seal-cutter, who ultimately turns the legal system to his advantage. Each of these stories, then, recognises the essentially textual character of colonial authority – of a close relationship between juridical systems, the verbal textures of historical writings, and the narrative structures of the Plain Tale itself. The rhetorical strategy of ‘plainness’ was the means by which Kipling evoked the non-regulation system of the preMutiny Punjab, opposing the influence of utilitarianism, and pointing the way out of the colonial crisis described in Suddhoo’s tale. Equally it denied access to the reassuring ‘certainties’ of racial theory, scientific language, and widely accepted systems of political philosophy.

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The Sentence for Mutiny 29

Paradoxically the Plain Tale suggests the multiplicit origins – by way of European pro-Islamic and authoritarian polity – of Kipling’s singular approach to narrative, which, in the case, for example, of Kim (1901), goes some way towards explaining the tension between what he regarded as the ‘nakedly picaresque and plotless’122 structure of the novel, and the direct intervention in India that this naked plotlessness allows the hero. It is the rejection, as it were, of grammatical consistency – reflected in his extraordinary facility for disguise – that makes Kim the ‘Little Friend of all the World’,123 which, in the Punjab, meant the kind of personal influence and power of observation that Kipling and the non-regulation governors desired throughout India. Kim was written ten years after those early speculations on the Mutiny men and the suffocating strictures of the Penal Code – long after Kipling had left India – but it remains richly steeped in the lore of the colonial Punjab. Indeed, the two great epistemological streams of British Indian polity – the utilitarian supervisory system and the hands-on pragmatism of the Lawrence school – seem to coincide here in the shadowy figure of Creighton and his colleagues in the Survey Department. The prize awarded to Kim at St Xavier’s – a copy of The Life of Lord Lawrence for his achievements in mathematics124 – directly evokes the paternalistic ethos of the legendary frontier governor, with the detail of Kim’s mathematical prowess foreshadowing the purely technical aspect of his future Survey work. But what is the nature of British technical proficiency in the novel, and how far might it be said to be reconciled with the paternalist ethos? In the early parts of the story, the Curator of the Lahore Musuem introduces Kim’s mentor, Teshoo Lama, to the treasure trove of ancient texts and modern translations by which ‘European scholars [ . . . ] have identified the Holy Places of Buddhism.’125 As the Lama ‘helplessly’ turns the pages of the books, Kipling intimates the discomfiture of the scholar with the heart of the Lama’s creed: ‘I do not know. I do not know’,126 the Curator sadly replies to the holy man’s plea for the location of the River of Life. The Lama, Kipling suggests, heralds experiences and meanings outside the scholar’s frame of reference – a fact that lends some irony to the symbolism of the Curator’s gift to the holy man: a new pair of spectacles that seems to imply the clarity, precision, and reliability of the scholarly venture: ‘they be Bihar – crystal – and will never scratch’.127 In turn, the Lama reciprocates with the gift of a Chinese pen-case of ancient design, the symbol of workmanship and wisdom – indeed, as Kipling’s earlier response to Chinese art implies, an oriental ‘penmanship’ outside the hermeneutic frontiers of his experience and civilisation.

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30 India: Writing Under Western Eyes

Kim’s irregular frontier work further troubles the epistemologies of the English. Late in the novel, he seizes a basket of maps, letters, documents and survey instruments from a Franco-Russian expedition in the Himalayas. Gathering up the letters and documents for the information of Colonel Creighton, he discards the equipment, throwing the instruments – a ‘superb prismatic compass’ and a ‘shiny’ theodolite128 – off a mountainside, where they fall two thousand feet into the unperturbed, mist-covered forest below. This symbolic episode, where the instruments of geography and cartography are swallowed by the vast geology of India, ‘vanishing’ noiselessly into the distant depths of the Himalayan pine forest, again throws the machinery of conventional surveillance into the immeasurable gulfs and distances of ancient India – a landscape as impenetrable as the heart of the Lama’s creed. In such episodes, the rationality of the Indian survey intertwines with the occult sensibility of figures such as Lurgan Sahib, a figure fully attuned to the mystical and mesmeric dimension of Kipling’s India. Training and testing Kim, the Sahib induces the hallucination of a broken vessel reforming itself, shaking his protégé’s existential assumptions as powerfully as the Himalayan gulfs. Kim reasserts his ‘Anglo-Irish’ self by sheer force of will, and, in a gesture that seems to reassert the dependability of European knowledge and learning, seeks refuge in the mental recitation of the multiplication table in English.129 Perhaps in Kim, an older and wiser Kipling softened his aversion to systematic, liberal governance – much as, for example, he softened the usual satire of Bengali official in the figure of Hurree Chunder – nevertheless the novel retained the flavour of existential crisis that troubled the Plain Tales and his other early writings. In their depiction of the colonial experience, his Indian stories invite the question posed repeatedly by the hero of the novel: ‘And what is Kim?’,130 undermining any simple association of authority with a unified self-knowledge or epistemology. Here Kipling broaches the ambivalence of colonial authority, which, as Homi Bhabha suggests, derives from the distorted appearance of statements of cultural superiority in the conditions of the empire.131 To be a writer in Victorian India was to exert a powerful influence upon administrative policy, but only at the cost of denying the normative constructs of European thought and representation that lay beneath the act of writing itself. What Patrick Brantlinger terms the ‘imperial gothic’ has its roots in this deliberately unsystematic representation of English power.132 Grammatical inconsistency is the outcome of the adaptation of discursive, textual, and juridical formulations in the empire – typified, for instance, in the endless code-making and re-drafting of the legislature by

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The Sentence for Mutiny 31

the India House Utilitarians. The colonial situation is thus one of Lurgan-like ‘occult instability’,133 but the ghosts, deliriums, and dark alleys of the imperial imagination also liberate the colonial official from the regulated uniformity – and restriction – of metropolitan society and governance. For this reason, in that early tale of Indian rebellion, the tangled paper trail of Lawrence and the Mutiny men is perceived as the bulwark of Punjab paternalism: the loosening of textual constraints is tantamount to the lifting of metropolitan embargoes on personal power. Perhaps also for this reason, the Plain Tales are deeply suspicious of texts, attributions, and sources. They are scattered with references to lost works and doubtful authorships. In ‘Wressley of the Foreign Office’, the writer of the ‘best book of Indian history ever written’ sinks five packing cases of his magnum opus to the bottom of a hill-tarn.134 In ‘Lispeth’ an Englishman writes a book on ‘the East’ that makes no mention of his near-death experience and the native woman who saved his life. The closing story, ‘To be Filed for Reference’ tells of the suppressed memoirs of an English scholar, McIntosh Jellaludin, who – like many of his real-life contemporaries – scandalises the Anglo-Indian community by marrying an Indian woman and converting to Islam. In ‘Thrown Away’, the journalist-narrator conspires in the ‘concoction of a big written lie, bolstered with evidence’ to cover up the truth of a suicide case. Stories are told ‘from the outside – in the dark – all wrong’.135 In ‘Thrown Away’, the narrator seizes the pen and weaves a story to protect the innocents of India and the mother country from the awful truth of a young civilian’s death. This seizing of the pen and vigorous re-writing of history is the corollary of Kipling’s fear that the letters of the Mutiny men have ‘faded’ – that the Raj (like the mother country) has succumbed to the corrosive forces of a ‘degenerate today’. Anxieties of this sort prompt fantasies of power not only over native Indians, but also over the common run of imperialists uninitiated into the dangerous, labyrinthine complexities of Raj discourse. For example, the story ‘Pig’ tells how the hero, Nafferton, pursues a personal vendetta against a bureaucrat, Pinecoffin, who once sold him an unsatisfactory horse. Nafferton mangles Pinecoffin in the machinery of government by forging official requests for information on the indigenous pig population. The government of India, Kipling wryly observes, is merely an elaborate network of modish surveillance projects: ‘Our government is rather peculiar. It gushes on the agricultural and general information side, and will supply a moderately respectable man with all sorts of “economic statistics,” if he speaks to it prettily.’136 The mockery of Pinecoffin’s diligent research on ‘the Primitive Pig, the Mythology of the

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32 India: Writing Under Western Eyes

Pig, and the Dravidian Pig’ recalls Kipling’s contempt for Lieutenant Raverty and Aurelian McGoggin.137 Beneath the hatred of the theorist and bureaucrat – the social type William H. Whyte later christened ‘Organisation Man’138 – it is possible to discern Kipling’s deepening hostility to the metropolitan conception of civic order. The message of ‘Pig’ is that some men serve the system, while others impose their will upon it. The character of Strickland, who makes his debut in the Plain Tales, reflects just this authoritarian formulation: his authority and expertise are represented not simply as power over the East, but also over the West. Strickland possesses knowledge and techniques of surveillance unattainable to the office-bound flunkies of the police department, who consider him a ‘doubtful sort of man’.139 Much has been written about Strickland’s alleged powers over the East, but little has been said about his capacity and willingness to fool his English colleagues by his methods. This aspect of Strickland makes him an especially appealing figure to Kipling. By refining his powers of surveillance to the point of perfection, going ‘deeper than the skin’,140 Strickland scandalises these putative ‘ordinary Englishmen’, becoming occult and invisible to the metropolitan system he supposedly represents. It seems here that imperial ideology imposes disciplinary values not just upon the East, but also upon the proponents of its narrow epistemologies and classifications. Characters like Strickland focus this paradox of imperial surveillance, belonging to a colonial community where it is considered that ‘everything in a man’s life is public property’,141 the property of one’s ‘respectable’ colleagues in Club and Police Department. As Memmi suggests, such exposure feeds hostilities towards both native culture and the mother country, whose searching eye is perceived everywhere. This is surveillance that ‘nativises’ the coloniser, bringing him under metropolitan jurisdiction and censure, placing him – vis á vis the mother culture – in the position of the colonised. (It is as if, instead of the abject prisoner, the inspector in Bentham’s Panopticon meets the powerful, knowing gaze of his peers.) At the heart of these stories is the protection of the Punjab community from the wider Raj – and ultimately from the mother country. They attempt this, as in the case of Strickland, by a sort of counter-surveillance, a disciplinary exercise so extensive that it encompasses India and the English in one panoramic sweep. For this reason, the tales advocate not simply knowledge of native society – through the techniques of surveillance, disguise, and so forth conventionally emphasised by literary and cultural critics – but also knowledge of England as an estranged culture, a ‘colonised other’.

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The Sentence for Mutiny 33

Borderline Fictions and Fantasies: The Man who would be King, The City of Dreadful Night, and other Allahabad Writings

By mid-1887, the Plain Tales had been appearing for several months in the CMG, and Departmental Ditties was running to its third edition. Kipling had begun to enjoy what modest degree of success India afforded a young, ambitious writer, and he was clearly pleased with the attention his writings had begun to receive in wider Anglo-Indian circles. If circumstances looked promising, they were nevertheless about to change dramatically. Late in the year he moved to Allahabad, the capital of the North-West Provinces, to work on the ‘big-sister paper’ of the CMG, the Pioneer. Then ‘a power in the land’,1 the Pioneer was a politically influential newspaper with an all-India circulation vastly outstripping the tiny readership of the CMG – a readership whose solidarity he had valued so highly.2 It was established in 1865 by Kipling’s employer, George Allen as ‘a mouthpiece for conservative and business opinion’,3 and over the years had cultivated a sound rapport with officialdom at Calcutta. For diplomatic reasons, Allen was careful to keep in line young firebrands like his headstrong new recruit from the Punjab. Kipling was free to rattle off criticism of the Indian National Congress, which held its third annual conference in Allahabad in December 1888, but when he launched salvos against senior figures including the Commander-in-Chief, Lord Roberts, whom he accused of making military appointments that ‘verged on nepotism’, Allen was furious.4 For a writer who had thrived on the ‘decent obscurity of the far end of an outlying province, among a specialized community who did not interest any but themselves’, the strictures of the Pioneer were hard to 34

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accept.5 To compound matters, Allen spent several months of the year in his bungalow adjacent to the office, and enjoyed calling by to ‘give the boys a hand’. As Kipling explained: ‘when one has been secondin-command of even a third-class cruiser, one does not care to have one’s Admiral permanently moored at a cable’s length’.6 He later suggested that his ‘Admiral’ received a knighthood for keeping such a tight rein on the newspaper. Kipling might ordinarily have turned to local native culture for uplift, but he found the Hinduism of Allahabad ‘strange air and water’. Hitherto his life ‘had lain among Muslims’,7 and he had long harboured the suspicion of Hinduism that was a hallmark of Punjab colonials. Recoiling from the religious life of the holy city, he described the partially burned corpses from the ghat (riverside pyre) floating down the Ganges and becoming stranded on a jutting point of the local Fort. They were prodded onwards by an unfortunate local ‘expert’ with a pole. ‘In Fort Lahore’, he wryly observed, ‘we dealt in nothing worse than ghosts.’8 The founding of the Indian National Congress, whose members were largely Hindu,9 doubtless heightened Kipling’s resistance to the religious culture of Allahabad. Established with the support of the government in 1885, the Congress was initially a non-militant organisation led by the retired civil servants, Sir Surendranath Banerjee and the ornithologist, Allan Octavian Hume. In 1888, Hume wrote to the Governor of the North-West Provinces to explain that the Congress was regularly opposed by ‘a tiny knot of Anglo-Indians, mostly officials, whose organs [were] the Englishman (a Calcutta newspaper), the Pioneer, and the Civil and Military Gazette’.10 If Kipling was alienated in this new and strange city, at least on the literary front he could see the possibilities of his appointment to the allIndia newspaper. In addition to his normal duties, Allen had offered him the editorship of The Week’s News, a planned weekly edition of the Pioneer ‘for Home consumption’.11 It was merely ‘a re-hash of news and views’, but would include a regular portion of serialised fiction, syndicated matter bought from agencies. Seeing, as he phrased it, ‘sight of means to do ill deeds’, Kipling made a shrewd proposition to Allen: ‘Why buy Bret Harte, I asked, when I was prepared to supply home-grown fiction on the hoof?’ Free to write without the word-limits of the CMG, he felt like the hero of Browning’s poem, ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’, the Carmelite novice commissioned to paint the blank walls of his monastery, who throws himself wholeheartedly and excitedly into the task, unveiling his murals with the cry: ‘Tis ask and have, Choose for more’s ready!’12

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Borderline Fictions and Fantasies 35

Quoting Lippo Lippi’s exhilarating words, Kipling invited an important and highly revealing parallel with Browning’s poem. In ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’, the Renaissance artist is portrayed as a likeable rogue – a concupiscent monk stopped in his tracks on a dubious night-walk through Florence. Caught in the torch-glare of a zealous official, and compelled to account for his presence on the streets, Lippo Lippi explains that he is only ‘flesh and blood’, regaling his questioner with the tale of his mortal failings, his peremptory renunciation of the world – ‘all at eight years old’ – and his inability to follow religious and scholarly diktat: All the Latin I construe is ‘Amo,’ I love! For Browning (and for Kipling), Lippo Lippi is a joyful soul and a rebel. However, when he unveils his powerfully realistic paintings to the admiring monks, the Prior proclaims the life-like pictures the work of the devil – a disappointment that undercuts that first exhilarating cry of artistic freedom. In this respect, Lippo Lippi reflects the dilemma of Kipling’s professional life: teeming with ideas, and with an outlet for his work in The Week’s News, he nevertheless meets with disapproval from his immediate superiors, who rein him in sharply on the journalistic and political side. Accustomed to the freedom he had enjoyed as ‘50 per cent of the editorial staff’ on the CMG,13 he now found himself under the watchful eye of the authorities, and began to experience feelings of vulnerability, powerlessness, and rage. He responded by publishing furiously in The Week’s News, finding an imaginative outlet for the violent emotions provoked by the limitations of his new life. As will be suggested, Allahabad stirred Kipling’s memories of Mrs Holloway and Lorne Lodge, inspiring the figure of Punch in ‘Baa Baa, Black Sheep’, whose sufferings reflect the alienation of the adult colonial, and whose furious rebellion against authority reflects his anger at politics beyond the Punjab. To Kipling, the cautious editorial policy of the Pioneer had come to embody all that was dispiriting about modern India: it was boring, pseudo-official, and politically compliant. Allen saw that his young editorial charge was in no mood to compromise, and so, considering him ‘safer on the road’, despatched him to the native states to write a series of reports on ‘mines, mills, factories and the like’.14 As a Punjab writer, Kipling was glad to leave his desk and rove the desert in search of the ‘real’ India – a place invisible to the officials of Allahabad.15 As Lippo Lippi ventured into night-time Florence, so Kipling ventured into the Native States in search of worlds unfamiliar to daylight society. In a letter recalling these travels, he enthuses about the ‘good clean life’ of the desert and – in a piquant allusion to mass communications – the pleasure of forgetting ‘the newspapery, telegraphic world without’.16

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36 India: Writing Under Western Eyes

Borderline Fictions and Fantasies 37

When I came out of the wilderness, having touched the edge of the Great Indian Desert, and seen many wonderful and awful things, I found the railway stations blazing with my name [ . . . ]. If you had your name placarded up and down 2,200 miles of line and written big in every newspaper in India and were yourself invited to dinner parties for people to look at and ask “how do you write those – er – things?” you wouldn’t feel happy.17 Choosing the desert over the dinner party and the Maharajah over the ‘large-bore’ official of the uncongenial, ‘well-appointed’ Allahabad Club,18 Kipling imagined himself outside the range of an ignominious, corrupt Anglo-Indian society. Tramping across through the Princely States in the journalistic persona of the ‘wandering savage’, he found refuge from the winds of political change sweeping through the Indian cities.

Wild imaginings: the Great Indian Desert Despite his venture into the desert, and his dismay at the emblazoned railway hoardings, Kipling’s writings were now firmly a part of the informational, technological and commercial network evoked by their marketing – and even by their cover-art. Wheeler & Co.’s Indian Railway Library was pitched squarely at urban, middle-class readers, and was soon reproduced in facsimile editions for a London audience (advertisements for products such as cod liver oil and Pears Soap dominated the back pages of the English editions). Viewing commercial success, however earnestly he pursued it, as somehow an affront to the standards of ‘decent obscurity’ he had absorbed in the Punjab, he retreated into a literary landscape that flaunted the muscularity of the frontier in the face his progressive, politically circumspect colleagues. Particularly after the move to Allahabad, he created in his works textures, attitudes, and ‘strategic locations’19 hostile to the urbane society to which he now belonged, developing a double-edged fantasy of control over the wilderness and avoidance of his ‘own people’. He had begun to locate himself on the borderline between the pre-modern imperial wilds, and the mapped and documented culture of the modern empire.

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Despite his growing literary fame, which he had laboured long and hard to achieve, he despised the world of metropolitan celebrity and market value he had now entered. Returning to the office after that first trip to Rajasthan, he was shocked to see his name emblazoned across the railway hoardings:

The tour of Rajasthan he undertook shortly after beginning work on the Pioneer reinstated the ‘wonderful and awful’ vision of the East familiar to the conservative imperialists but anathema to progressives. In 1894, William Lee-Warner argued that books on the native states were, by definition, books on ‘India under Home Rule’.20 In this light, the articles Kipling wrote for the Pioneer were coded attacks on self-government, peddling images of native depravity discomfiting to the ‘respectable’ community he was beginning to address in and beyond Allahabad. Describing the ‘Hat-marked Caste’, the few Anglo-Indians living and working in the native states, he relished their lack of interest in the outside world – particularly Simla, the administrative capital: ‘Oh Simla! That’s where you Bengalis go. We haven’t anything to do with Simla down here.’21 Invisible to Whitehall, they were ‘a bigger and more large-minded breed’.22 Freedom from surveillance was almost as attractive as the simple equation of Eastern barbarity, sensuality, and sumptuousness. With Tod’s Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan (1829) in hand, Kipling set about supplying the Pioneer with brutal, atavistic tales of princely intrigues and blood-feuds.23 In Jeypore, he described the rule of Jey Singh, founder of the city: He was a traitor, if history speak truth, to his own kin, and he was an accomplished murderer, but he did his best to check infanticide; he reformed the Mahometan calendar; he piled up a superb library and he made Jeypore a marvel.24 After Jey Singh came a successor ‘lightened by all the lamps of British Progress’, who ‘converted the city [ . . . ] into a big, bewildering, practical joke’.25 Progressive movements were a threat to the freedom and privilege colonials enjoyed in these political backwaters – feasting from silver platters and sleeping under the stars. He described his days in the Great Indian Desert to Margaret Burne-Jones: I railed and rode and drove and tramped and slept in King’s palaces . . . and saw panthers killed and heard tigers roar in the hills, and for six days had no white face with me, and explored dead cities desolate these three hundred years, and came to stately Residences where I feasted in fine linen and came to desolate wayside stations where I slept with natives upon cotton bales [ . . . ].26 As the ‘home of a thousand legends and the great fighting pen of India’,27 Rajasthan was a place of ‘forgetting’, where he could escape the

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38 India: Writing Under Western Eyes

world of white faces and newspapers, embracing the war-like, but ‘clean’ life outside the modern city. It restored the colonial fantasy of princely power ‘as it was in the days of Harun al Raschid’28 – romantic, primitive, and absolute. Such was Kipling’s answer to the cultivated society of Allahabad. The theme of escaping the city and facing the wilds dominates his writings from this period – for example, the tale, ‘The Man who would be King’, which Kipling narrates in the ubiquitous persona of the roving, desert-bound journalist. At the beginning of the story, the narrator recalls an encounter with a roguish adventurer – a ‘Loafer’ – on a train journey across the Indian Desert. Recognising the man as a fellow Mason, he agrees to carry a coded message to the Loafer’s companion at the Marwar Junction. In the meantime, learning that two men are impersonating journalists in the hope of bribing local Indian rulers with threats of scandalous exposure in the newspapers, he also notifies the authorities of the men’s presence in the Native States. The two men, Daniel Dravot and Peachey Carnehan, later visit the narrator to declare their intention of founding a Kingdom in Kaffiristan. Conscious of the dangers of the venture, but still smarting from their derision of that earlier betrayal, he agrees to provide Dravot and Carnehan with the books, maps, and local knowledge they require to carry out the plan. From the outset, then, he is divided in his loyalty to the Loafers and his duty to the official, ‘telegraphic world’. When Peachey returns to the narrator’s office several years later, he learns how, after winning power by a combination of violence and cunning, the two men discover, supposedly, that Kaffiristan has retained a knowledge of freemasonry dating back to the time of King Solomon. Exploiting this shared ritual, they draw upon the motley, misremembered ceremonies of their Lodge to encourage the belief that they are gods and thereby extend their power. The fraud is, of course, ultimately exposed, and the two men are condemned to death. Daniel is thrown from a bridge, while Peachey is crucified, only to survive the punishment and be sent home, crippled and insane, with the ‘dried withered head’ of his friend in a bag to ‘remind him not to come again’.29 He finds his way back to the newspaper office, where, after placing Daniel’s head upon the desk – still wearing its gold crown – he tells the story to his only friend, the journalist. Read in the light of Kipling’s move to Allahabad, the depiction of a harrowing relationship between the rogue empire and the newspaper office takes on special significance. (It is worth noting that the meeting on the train and the carrying of the encrypted message is based on an actual event that befell Kipling during his journey in the Native

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Borderline Fictions and Fantasies 39

States.)30 Perhaps the most discernibly ‘autobiographical’ parts of the story are those concerning the narrator’s weariness with his desk-work, recalling Kipling’s boredom with the routine editorial duties of The Week’s News. In the office, a frenzy of news – foreign and local – clamours for his attention: ‘the telephone bell is ringing madly and Kings are being killed on the Continent’,31 while, in the hot weather, he must report the ‘deaths of men and women that [he knows] intimately’ with anodyne, prefabricated phrases: ‘It is [ . . . ] with deep regret we record the death, etc.’32 At the centre of all this, the editor is a hapless manager of meaning, dragged hither and thither by the lure of the desert and the law of Whitehall. His disillusionment with the routine business of reporting and the minutiae of newspaper production is evoked by his sardonic preamble to Peachey’s story: One Saturday night it was my pleasant duty to put the paper to bed alone. A King or courtier or a courtesan or a Community was going to die or get a new Constitution, or do something that was important on the other side of the world, and the paper was to be held open till the latest possible minute in order to catch the telegram.33 In the opening pages of the story, the narrator has left this ‘telegraphic world’ behind to venture into the Native States – ‘the dark places of the earth, full of unimaginable cruelty, touching the Railway and the Telegraph on one side, and, on the other, the days of Harun al Raschid’.34 Despite alleged depravity of these Princely Kingdoms, he nevertheless considers them – much as did Kipling – places of rest and refuge from the culture of the telegraph and the train: When I left the train I did business with divers Kings, and in eight days passed through many changes in life. Sometimes I wore dress-clothes and consorted with Prices and Politicals, drinking from crystal and eating from silver. Sometimes I lay out upon the ground and devoured what I could get, from a plate made of leaves, and drank the running water, and slept under the same rug as my servant. It was all in the day’s work.35 This sybarite existence was very real, and very tempting to Kipling. But he also recognised its destructiveness, evoking its temptations and terrors in the Masonic alliance between the journalist and the men who would be kings.

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40 India: Writing Under Western Eyes

Although the narrator forms a friendship with Dravot and Carnehan, they are men whose ambitions and desires exceed the limits of his ‘newspapery’ world: ‘They certainly were too big for the office. Dravot’s beard seemed to fill one half of the room and Carnehan’s shoulders the other half, as they sat on the big table.’36 They have begun to find British India too small for their ambitions and desires: Carnehan continued: ‘The country isn’t half worked out because they that governs it won’t let you touch it. They spend all their time in governing it, and you can’t lift a spade, nor chip a rock, nor look for oil, nor anything like that, without the government saying “Leave it alone, and let us govern.” Therefore, such as it is, we will let it alone, and go away to some other place where a man isn’t crowded and can come to his own. We are not little men [ . . . ].37 When he first meets Peachey, the narrator describes him as ‘a wanderer and vagabond like myself’, and, as fellow-masons and impersonators of journalists, clearly Daniel and Peachey recognise the journalist as a ‘brother’ vagabond. In this strange alliance, Dravot and Carnehan rehearse for the narrator a drama of colonial authority without the discursive limits – self-censorship and surveillance – of the newspaper office. It is as if by associating with them he sustains the mysterious pleasures of his oriental sojourn long after returning to the mundane, stifling world of the press. This is why he serves them so willingly. They are men whose ambition, unlike the machinery of the office, is not held in abeyance for news of ‘something [ . . . ] important on the other side of the world’.38 Kipling enjoys the joke of Daniel and Peachey’s authority. Nothing is sacred to them. Even the rituals of their Masonic Lodge are raided and bowdlerised for the purposes of governing the Kingdom: ‘I wasn’t such a fool as not to see what a pull this Craft business gave us. I showed the priest’s families how to make aprons of the degrees [ . . . ] and [we] did what we could to make things regular.’39 There are even impious echoes of Ayran race theory (à la William Wilson Hunter) in their policy of recruiting native administrators: ‘Dravot gives out that him and me were gods [ . . . ]. Then the Chiefs come round to shake hands, and they were so hairy and white and fair it was just like shaking hands with old friends.’40 This ‘Cockney’ school of ethnology evokes a certain kind of imperial power, contemptuous of the telegraphic world and its ideologies. Nevertheless, what begins as an irreverent dalliance with the ‘politics of Loaferdom’ develops into a nightmare of colonial violence. Irrepressible,

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Borderline Fictions and Fantasies 41

primitive desires are what secure the Kingdom for the Kipling’s adventurers, but they are also its undoing. The red colour associated with Daniel throughout the story – notably by his glowing beard and the ruddy gold of his crown41 – is the colour of anger, sex, blood and war. And as his Kingdom grows, so does his lust for power and honour. He chews on his beard ‘in great hunks’ while declaring the greatness of his reign and imagining himself receiving a knighthood.42 Proclaiming themselves the ‘sons of Alexander, and Past Grand Masters in the Craft’, Dravot and Carnehan pledge to make of Kaffiristan a ‘country where every man should eat in peace and drink in quiet, and specially obey us’.43 It is a ploy that almost succeeds – but for Daniel’s longing for a wife, which explodes the myth of their divinity. Kipling sustains an attitude of horrified amusement in recounting the exploits of Dravot and Carnehan, which adds to the disorientating moral scenario envisaged in the story. Even this terminal folly seems, in the context of Daniel’s other monstrous ambitions, a touchingly quotidian reminder of his humanity. In the opening sentences of the story, Kipling suggests that the tale will touch upon the grey areas of colonial life and political thinking. He does so in what appears to be a superfluous account of the horrors of travelling by Intermediate class: ‘There are no cushions in the Intermediate class, and the population are either Intermediate, which is Eurasian, or native [ . . . ] or Loafer, which is amusing though intoxicated.’44 The striking point about this passage is the manner in which he employs the term ‘Intermediate’ to refer not just to the class of ticket and carriage, but also, ironically, to the people travelling in the carriages – including, of course, the narrator and his companion. He uses the term in this manner when remarking that during the hot weather, ‘Intermediates are taken out of the carriages dead.’ As ‘Intermediates’, Kipling suggests, this alliance of would-be kings is liable to meet a similar, ignoble end. They are ‘Intermediate’ in respect of the imperialist cultures they represent in the story, from the rapacity of the Loafer-Kingdom to the respectability of the newspaper office. The phrase also evokes the journalist’s role as an intermediary throughout the tale. He serves as these two imperial cultures when, at Marwar, he passes the Masonic code from Daniel to Peachey, and finally mediates between the broken figure of Peachey and the wider world. The writer’s part in the destiny of the fallen Kings is highly prescient insofar as Kipling would later assume the role of imperial counsel and spokesman for the real-life entrepreneurs, politicians, and empire-builders like Cecil Rhodes. In return for his knowledge of geography – the Encyclopedia Britannica, travel books and maps – Dravot and Carnehan

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42 India: Writing Under Western Eyes

offer the narrator ‘the reversion of a Kingdom – army, law-courts, revenue, and policy all complete’.45 But when he puts his office at their disposal, he worries, significantly, that they might burn it down.46 In this fateful collusion between the writer and the adventurer, Kipling dramatises the difficulty of sustaining the pre-modern, imperial fantasy in the age of the telegraph and the train. For Kipling, the imperial writer is at the mercy of bureaucrats and officials who would not be kings – who would rather be loyal servants of the telegraphic world. But if he throws in his lot with the imperial adventurer, he is implicitly a broken man, following at the heels of the fallen king – a ‘rag-wrapped, whining cripple’.47

The colonial city If Kipling was pinioned in this way, he was determined to do as much damage to his political adversaries as possible. Behind such nightmarish stories lurked the problems of Allahabad, and he focused these troubles sharply in a series of newspaper articles on the Indian cities. As Ulf Hannerz suggests, cities are the epitome of complex culture, where meanings are mixed, matched, and organised across a range of social strata and sub-groupings. But what is evident about the picture of urban culture in these articles is the reluctance to admit this complex, global dimension of the imperial city.48 Take, for example, the picture of Calcutta in the newspaper sketches first published in the Pioneer and later reprinted as The City of Dreadful Night, the title of which Kipling borrowed from James Thomson’s poem. In the nineteenth century, as Hannerz explains,49 Calcutta was the centre of the ‘Bengal Renaissance’, a cultural, intellectual, political transformation led by figures such as the Eurasian poet, Henry Derozio and, later, Rabindranath Tagore. In its possibilities for ‘cultural interface’, Hannerz likens the Indian capital to other artistically and culturally vibrant cities like Vienna and San Francisco. Hannerz’ Calcutta is a place of ‘openness [ . . . ] towards the outside’ and interaction between ‘wider international and regional systems’.50 In The City of Dreadful Night, however, Kipling subverts this reading of Calcutta’s openness and cultural vibrancy, focussing exclusively upon the vice trade and those instances of illicit exchange transacted in the brothels, gambling haunts and opium dens of the city. Although Kipling recognises the grand industrial and commercial achievements of Calcutta in its grand architecture, shops, and products, he considers them merely a pale imitation of their metropolitan originals. Calcutta

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Borderline Fictions and Fantasies 43

reminds him of his ‘lost heritage’ in London – the ‘roar of the streets, the lights, the music, the pleasant places [ . . . ] and a wilderness of pretty, fresh-coloured Englishwomen, theatres and restaurants’.51 Condemning the fraudulence and ‘false hopes’ of Calcutta, he descends, as he phrases it, ‘deeper and deeper still’ into the city to explore its secret sexual economy.52 In so doing, he applies the language of commerce and cultural exchange to an extremely narrow, anti-social range of ventures – the sort of business that the author must be chaperoned by a policeman to witness. The real Calcutta does not do business with the Englishman: it is a ‘great, growling beast of a city’,53 a debauched offspring of the civic idea ‘shut to Europeans – absolutely’.54 As the policeman explains: ‘if you come here alone, the chances are that you’ll be clubbed, or stuck, or anyhow, mobbed’.55 Profoundly suspicious of Calcutta’s openness to new ideas and values, Kipling turns his attentions to liberalism and policies of native selfgovernment, ridiculing the contribution of the Bengal Legislative Council to the running of the city. The ‘ferocious stench’ of refuse, bad water, and sewage is taken by Kipling as metaphor of the corruption of the Council and the city. It identifies the Indian middle classes of Hannerz’ vibrant Calcutta with disease and decay – ‘the essence of corruption that has rotted for the second time – the clammy odour of blue slime’.56 Why, he asks, let them vote at all? They can put up with this filthiness. They cannot have feelings worth caring a rush for. Let them live quietly and hide away their money under our protection, while we tax them till they know through their purses the measure of their neglect in the past, and when a little of the smell has been abolished, let us bring them back again to talk and take the credit of enlightenment.57 The stench ‘damns Calcutta as a City of Kings’58 – a phrase loaded ironically with monarchical overtones that recall the rule of Dravot and Carnehan. When he first sees Calcutta, Kipling experiences the ‘feeling of caged irritation’59 – as if the city refuses to yield to his power. ‘[S]hut to the European’, Calcutta arouses in Kipling an intense desire to overpower and control it. In a flash of brutally honest reflection, he confesses the ugliness of his thinking: Then a distinctly wicked idea takes possession of the mind: ‘What a divine – what a heavenly place to loot!’ This gives place to a much worse devil – that of Conservatism. It seems not only wrong but

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44 India: Writing Under Western Eyes

Borderline Fictions and Fantasies 45

Kipling’s need to possess the city is, as he puts it, devilish, and his comments are the ‘reflections of a savage’.61 But these Dravot-like, voracious qualities are what he pits against the ‘pleasant’ façade of the city. In the rhetoric of looting, he toys with the notion not just of power over the city but of the power to violate it, smashing its progressive culture and resolving the anguish and alienation it provokes in him. Kipling saw an alternative to this open, complex city in the work of the private companies who made and administered their own little ‘towns’ under the Raj. Leaving Calcutta, he travelled southeast to Jamalpur, the headquarters of the East India Railway. In the articles comprising ‘Among the Railway Folk’, which immediately followed the piece on Calcutta in The City of Dreadful Night, he saw this station-town as a city in its own right – ‘for station in the strict sense of the word it is not’.62 Jamalpur was an entirely self-enclosed, self-sufficient environment: ‘The railway folk, like the army and civilian castes, have their own language and life, which an outsider cannot hope to understand.’63 After the reformist politics of Calcutta, he admired this pseudo-city for having ‘neither Judge, Commisioner, [nor] Deputy’ and being wholly ‘devoid of law courts [ . . . ] District Superintendents of Police, and many other evidences of an over-cultured civilisation’.64 The Company had taken the materials of the city – its culture, technology, and industry – and planted them in the ‘wet, woolly warmth of Bengal’, away from the dry heat that has ‘ruined the temper of the good people of Calcutta’. Jamalpur, Kipling suggests, is a fertile, light-filled, life-giving enterprise, free from the grime and stench of the great imperial city. It is ‘specklessly and spotlessly neat’,65 calmer than an ‘English manufacturing town’. Even the ‘roaring, rattling workshops’ have the ‘air of having been cleaned up [ . . . ] and put under a glass case’. This town under a glass case – metaphorically sanitised and scaled down to a comfortable size – is under the absolute power of the Company, which ‘does everything and knows everything’.66 In Jamalpur no man ‘can be violently restrained from going to the bad if he insists upon it, but in the service of the Company a man has every warning; and a judiciously arranged transfer sometimes keeps a fellow clear of the down-grade’.67 At the neighbouring mining-town of Giridih, he discovers that the moral influence of the Company extends to the reform of ‘an old Mutineer’ who, when he relaxes, ‘boasts of the Sahibs he has killed’.68 In this detail, Kipling suggests, on the one hand, the power of the Company’s

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a criminal thing to allow natives to have any voice in the control of such a city’.60

influence for the good, and on the other, a hint of danger beneath the cultured, glass-domed precision of its rule. Wondering why the old man is ‘glad enough to eat the Company’s salt now’, he is told that he must visit the mines before he will understand. The reason for the old man’s ‘reform’, and the fatted contentment of the Jamalpur and Giridih Englishfolk, is that they ‘work like horses and are happy’.69 Work is what dissipates the energies of evil and discontent – a lesson he learns by descending, Dante-like, into the coal pit – a ‘Hall of Eblis [ . . . ] filled with flitting and passing devils’.70 In this infernal imagery – ‘then a devil – a naked devil – came in with a pitchfork and fed the spouting flames’ – Kipling intimates the redemptive power of the Company’s work-ethic, its power to tame the ‘great growling beast’ of complex India. Kipling concluded the original English imprint of The City of Dreadful Night with a short essay on the production of opium, which ‘yields such a splendid income to the Indian Government’.71 He enjoyed the irony of this official economic stake in the disreputable pastimes of cities at Home and abroad. On his tour of Calcutta, the owner of an opium den had treated him to a private demonstration of the art of smoking the drug: ‘ “No business tonight – show how you smoke opium.” “Aha! You want to see. Very good, I show. Hiya! You” – he kicks a man on the floor – “show how opium smoke.” ’72 Kipling’s minute interest in the manufacture and marketing of the drug – and his defence of the trade in a letter to his uncle, Alfred Baldwin73 – are evidence that he appreciated the benefits of this terrible commerce to the empire. Trade that transformed native populations into willing, docile labour was profitable in every respect to the Government. And, by way of infuriating his liberal opponents, Kipling was happy to explain the workings of the Ghazipur factory, focussing apparently nonchalantly upon ‘the actual manufacture and manipulation of the cakes’.74 In fact the language of the essay is far subtler than this comment implies. It operates on a number of levels, suggesting firstly the great beauty, the poetry of the manufacturing process. Kipling tries to follow the delicate actions of the ‘cake-maker’: He takes half pancakes and fixes them skilfully, picking now firstclass and now second-class ones, for there are three kinds of them. [ . . . ] He now takes up an ungummed pancake and fits it carefully all round. The opium is dropped tenderly upon this, and a curious washing motion of the hand follows. The mass of opium is drawn up into a cone as, one by one, the Sirdar picks up the overlapping portion of the cakes that hung outside the bowl and plasters them

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46 India: Writing Under Western Eyes

Borderline Fictions and Fantasies 47

The actions of the cake-maker – and the factory as a whole – are described sensually, with a strange love for the process. Kipling allows this notion to play very ironically against the official, Government terminology of the piece. Every single thing in Ghazipur, he explains, is ‘locked, and every operation is conducted under more than police supervision’.76 No one ‘trusts anyone in Ghazipur. They are always weighing, testing, and assaying.’77 People are even ‘forbidden to wander about the river-front of the factory in search of remnants of opium’ on the shards of discarded opium pots.78 The factory is, in other words, a fortress of supervision, containment, and control. But, as if writing against this culture of mistrust and endless assaying, Kipling ‘smuggles’ into the prose of the article a series of sly sexual references, which evoke the unofficial, illicit desires the government polices in the factory (but, of course, services in the trade). All the signing and counter-signing guarantees the ‘virginity’ of the goods, and if any of the pots are ‘tampered with’, a statement is taken from the man in charge of the consignment.79 The drug is the ‘Perfect Flower’, whose purity is ‘about as valuable as silver’.80 If ‘adulteration’ is detected, the ‘sinful pot’ must be removed from the batch at all costs.81 In this barely noticeable, playful rhetorical game, Kipling enjoys intimating the involvement of the Government in the affairs, so to speak, of the night. This ironic complicity is evoked in the opening sentence, which describes the factory as ‘an opium mint[,] as it were, whence issue the precious cakes that are to replenish the coffers of the Indian Government’.82 The metaphor of the crown mint, with that arch qualifying remark, ‘as it were’, sets the tone for the roguish phrase, ‘replenish the coffers of the Indian Government’, which belongs more to the world of Bill Sykes and the Artful Dodger than to Her Majesty’s exchequer. Richard Sennett suggests that the modern city is the great architectural manifestation of Protestant self-denial, fear of pleasure, and discontent with nature – ‘the inability to believe that whatever is, is sufficient’.83 This mortal terror of worldliness, Sennett explains, motivates the design of urban spaces that neutralise long perspectives on time and distance. The design of the modern city expresses the ‘search for refuge in a secular society’ – an age-old message of self-mortification and self-mastery. Sennett terms this the émigration interieure.84 The Egyptian symbol for

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against the drug for an outside coat. He tucks in the top of the cone with his thumbs, brings the fringe of the cake over to close the opening, and pastes fresh leaves upon all.75

the city, he reminds us, is the image of a perfect circle enclosing a grid – an image of containment contrary to the open-ended, sharing city of Hannerz’ theory. Kipling’s response to the colonial city in the essays of The City of Dreadful Night draws upon such metaphors of openness and closure, but refuses to settle for a comfortable rhetoric of control. Even Jamalpur has its mutinous, hellish meanings, which subvert the sanitised metaphor of the city beneath a glass case.

Paper tombs: the rebel understudy and the effigy of empire In the story, ‘On the City Wall’, Kipling tells how an Englishman, the narrator of the tale, unwittingly assists in a nationalist plot to free an imprisoned revolutionary, Khem Singh. The narrator is initially sceptical about the prospects of Indian independence, asserting confidently that the country will ‘never stand alone’.85 Irked by the chatter of a land ‘full of educational and political reform’,86 he gestures complacently towards ‘the line of guns that could pound the City to powder in half an hour’.87 The city, it seems, is another fortress of control and surveillance, in which nothing escapes the attentions of the government. There is, however, a suggestively concupiscent side to the narrator that draws him away from the civic authority depicted at the heart of the city. He spends his time in the company of the Indian courtesan Lalun, whose salon is set resolutely on the city wall and is not just a place of sexual, but also of political intrigue. Lalun, and her Englisheducated lover, Wali Dad, have conspired with influential nationalists in forming a plan to free Khem Singh on the night of the Mohurrum mourning-festival, an event with enough potential for Hindu–Muslim confrontation to distract the authorities. But when the Mohurrum explodes into violence, Wali Dad – whose opinions on religious fanaticism ‘would have secured his expulsion from the loosest-thinking Muslim sect’88 – forgets his part in the plot, takes up the chant of the Muslim crowd ‘Ya Hasan!, Ya Hussain!’ (in honour of the heroes of the Mohurrum), and throws himself into the fighting with an oath.89 Meanwhile, Lalun seduces the narrator into performing Wali Dad’s part in the plan, urging him – being ‘more than a friend’ – to convey a frail, mysterious old man out of the city by the Kumharsen Gate. At the end of the tale, recalling a mischievous prophecy by Lalun, the narrator ruefully observes that he was, after all, duped into playing the part of Vizier (court official) in her revolutionary drama. It is worth pausing to note that this theme of nationalist conspiracy was highly topical in the Allahabad of 1888, where the Indian National

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48 India: Writing Under Western Eyes

Congress was scheduled to hold its annual conference at the end of the year. Although Kipling was characteristically dismissive of the conference in those articles he published in the Pioneer, in the language and symbolism of ‘On the City Wall’ he gave full rein to his appetite for rebellion, creating parallels with nationalist conspiracy that undermine the conviction of absolute English power. ‘On the City Wall’ is headed with an epigraph from the Bible that immediately raises doubts about the genuine extent and moral value of this power. Taken from the book of Joshua, the verse quoted by Kipling – ‘Then she let them down by a cord through the window; for her house was upon the city wall, and she dwelt upon the wall’ (Joshua 2.15) – refers to the sheltering of Israelite spies by the prostitute Rahab before the taking of Jericho by Joshua’s men. In the Biblical story, Rahab allows the Israelite spies to escape from the authorities by lowering a rope from her window. Following the instruction of the spies on the eve of the attack, the prostitute gathers her family together and identifies her home by tying a scarlet cord at the window. During the destruction of Jericho, Rahab and her family are led out of the city and spared the sword in recompense for the help she gave the spies. After razing Jericho, Joshua places a curse upon anyone who attempts to rebuild the city (Joshua 6.24–25). It is difficult to read this epigraph in any other way than against the conviction of English moral or political authority. In Kipling’s story, the prostitute is re-cast as an Indian seductress; the spies, implicitly, are represented by the nationalist conspirators, and the man lifted up to – rather than lowered from – ‘Rahab’s’ window is the revolutionary fighter, Khem Singh. As the narrator hauls Kehm Singh into the window with a red silk waist-cloth (which recalls Rahab’s scarlet cord in the Bible story) he sets himself squarely, if unknowingly, in the ‘Israelite’ camp. As surely as it saves Rahab’s family from the wrath of Israel, that red cloth gains impunity for the Englishman and absolution for his accidental part in the conspiracy: ‘I had no suspicions, for Lalun had only ten minutes before put her arms round me.’90 In such playful echoes of the Bible story, Kipling exonerates the salon and his ‘other’ colonial life on the fringes of reputable society – his life ‘on the city wall’. The idea is made explicit in the narrator’s cutting remark on European sexual morality: ‘In the West, people say rude things about Lalun’s profession, and write lectures about it, and distribute the lectures to young persons in order that Morality may be preserved.’91 As the tale unfolds, the cupidity and guilelessness of the narrator create parallels with that other revolutionary manqué in the story, Wali Dad.

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50 India: Writing Under Western Eyes

Lalun’s house was upon the east wall facing the river. If you fell from the broad window-seat you dropped thirty feet sheer into the City Ditch. But if you stayed where you should and looked forth, you saw all the cattle of the City being driven down to water, the students of the Government College playing cricket, the high grass and trees that fringed the river bank, the great sand-bars that ribbed the river, the red tombs of dead Emperors beyond the river, and very far away through the blue heat-haze a glint of the snows on the Himalayas.93 The warning of a sheer and deadly drop from the window seems to anticipate the disruption and violence of the Mohurrum festival. It also perhaps associates that danger with the ‘borderline’ position of the narrator and his Indian friend. From their treacherous window-seat, the two men enjoy the panorama of monuments unseen by the college boys absorbed in their orderly cricket match – the red tombs of longdead emperors and the formidable mountain ranges barely visible through the distant haze. In these tightly-wrought opening lines, Kipling’s narrator intimates a certain longing for the lost glories of Mogul India, the days of ‘consistent’ men,94 Indian fighters who would ‘administer the country in their own way – that is to say, with a garnish of Red Sauce’.95 Far from celebrating the effectiveness of the Supreme government in dealing with such men, he regrets it: ‘There is no outward sign of excitement, there is no confusion; there is no knowledge. When due and sufficient reasons have been given, weighed and approved, the machinery moves forward, and the dreamer of dreams [ . . . ] is removed from his friends and following.’96 The narrator is sceptical enough about what he terms ‘the great idol called Pax Britannica’ to experience a certain pleasure in seeing it aflame like Jericho. Haunting the city wall – the passionate, pleasurable and volatile world of Lalun – he is attracted to men and women of vitality, and repelled by the quietly efficient operatives of the Raj. Even the city itself longs for carnage at the impending festival: its citizens wait in eager expectation of a violent Mohurrum,97 and the British Infantry and Native Cavalry are ‘all pleased, unholily pleased, at the chance of what

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Both characters are Freemasons, both are entranced by Lalun, and both are lovers of literature and writers of poems. Wali Dad lies in Lalun’s window-seat for ‘hours at a time’,92 and it is the prospect from this window-seat that is described by the narrator at the beginning of the tale:

they called “a little fun” ’.98 There was, the narrator explains, ‘joy in the hearts of all the subalterns’ at the prospect of taking on the rioters.99 However, if Kipling’s narrator is unembarrassed about the instinct (as he perceives it) to fight and to kill, he regrets that these impulses have been transformed into mere theatre by the civic authorities. During the festival the route taken by the crowd bearing the Tazias (‘Gilt and painted paper representations’ of the tombs of the prophets, Hasan and Hussain, ‘heroes of the Mohurrum’),100 is carefully choreographed by the civic powers – ‘rigorously laid down beforehand by the police’.101 These Tazias are, as the narrator elsewhere phrases it, ‘fakements’,102 offering a pertinent contrast with the genuine Mogul tombs he perceives from the window-seat. Similarly, his use of the term ‘red sauce’ evokes the fakeries of the theatre, with red sauce being the classic stage substitute for blood. As the promised violence breaks out, it nevertheless seems unreal to the narrator: the riot scene is a veritable pantomime in which, forbidden to use cartridges or unsheathe their swords, the soldiers link arms to a chorus of music hall song to drive the rioters indoors, while the men from the Club arrive in full evening dress to lend a hand.103 Earlier in the tale, Wali Dad berates the English education that compels him to quote from the great Victorian novelists, echoing Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby in condemning himself as a ‘Demnition Product’.104 The revolutionary refers here to the favourite exclamation of the character, Mr Mantalini, the incurable tragedian who fakes his suicide ‘for the seventh time’. (Kipling perhaps also had in mind a more general reference to the theatrical enterprise of Vincent Crummles in Dickens’ novel.) The comical fraudulence of Mantalini, who teeters precariously on the brink of true catastrophe, reflects the liminal scenario of ‘On the City Wall’, which blurs the distinction between the Tazia-like representation of power and the genuine violence that underlies the paper ritual and performance. Falling for Lalun and performing Wali Dad’s part in the drama, it seems that the narrator is himself a theatrical ‘product’, grand Vizier in some huge imperial pantomime whose scenery is as flimsy and exotic as the paper tombs of the Mohurrum festival. However, wandering the streets in the aftermath of the riot he stumbles across a genuinely shocking scene: Most of the streets were very still, and the cold wind that comes before the dawn whistled down them. In the centre of the Square of the Mosque a man was bending over a corpse. The skull had been smashed in by a gun-butt or bamboo-stave.

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52 India: Writing Under Western Eyes

The ironic quotation from the Bible – echoing the words of Caiphas to the Sanhedrin, before the crucifixion – and the music hall song of the soldiers are a profoundly disturbing juxtaposition. At this moment of the story, the theatrical metaphors and stage props fall away. This is the reality that haunts the empire: the hard, unscripted act of violence that refuses to obey the rules and the choreography of political power. Around the time that Kipling wrote ‘On the City Wall’, the pioneering sociologist, George Semmel had begun to argue that urban society was founded upon ‘the extent and combination of antipathy’,106 with the ‘reciprocal positions’ of urban citizens being laid down by the representation of competing, anti-social factions: deviants, paupers, criminals, and so forth. It is a picture of urban containment that accords with the choreography of heroes, villains, and violence in Kipling’s tale. As K.T. Erikson puts it, ‘Deviant forms of behaviour, by marking the outer edges of group life, give the inner structure its special character and thus supply the framework within which the people of the group develop an orderly sense of their own identity.’107 ‘On the City Wall’ demonstrates Kipling’s awareness of how the ‘inner structure’ and ‘special character’ of the city are reinforced by the riot and revolution, but, as the deformed Biblical wisdom of Petit suggest, the tale refuses to evoke an ‘orderly sense’ of colonial identity, exposing the underpinnings – the stage-props – of this imperial pantomime. Two articles Kipling published in the CMG seem to have inspired the account of the Mohurrum festival in ‘On the City Wall’.108 In the second of these, ‘The City of the Two Creeds’, he considers the tranquillity of Lahore unwelcome. It is ‘almost dullness’,109 provoking the desire for ‘conflict’ and ‘dissipations’,110 which the city has given up ‘under the benign influence of a native municipality and the education of the university’.111 The boredom spreads beyond the city: ‘[b]eyond the city walls lay civilization in the shape of iced drinks and spacious roads’.112 Following the move to Allahabad, he was plunged headlong and irrevocably into this ice-cool civilisation, longing for the ‘dissipations’ outlawed by a tedious municipality. Considering himself virtually ‘in England’ now that he had left the Punjab,113 he turned again to his

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‘It is expedient that one man should die for the people,’ said Petit grimly, raising the shapeless head. ‘These brutes were beginning to show their teeth too much.’ And from afar we could hear the soldiers singing ‘Two Lovely Black Eyes’ as they drove the remnant of the rioters within doors.105

childhood – the traumas of the boarding house at Southsea – to express his alienation from Allahabad. Literary critics and biographers commonly read the harrowing tale, ‘Baa Baa, Black Sheep’ as a thinly veiled autobiographical story of Kipling’s boarding experience in England, where the author and his sister are represented by a young boy and girl named Punch and Judy. In the story, the children are placed in the care of the sadistic Aunty Rosa – Mrs Holloway at Lorne Lodge – who sets about ‘disciplining’ Punch with the aid of her malicious son, the Southsea ‘Devil-Boy’, Harry. In this respect, earlier scholars are perfectly justified in reading this tale autobiographically. But it is important to ask why – with all its anguished concerns – the story occurred to Kipling in Allahabad. The answer perhaps lies in the feelings of isolation – both professional and political – he experienced in this ‘foreign’ city, ‘bullied’, as he saw it, by the sinister, all-seeing government powers working the machinery of the Pioneer. Towards the middle of 1888, Kipling moved into the home of Alexander and Edmonia Hill as a paying guest. They remembered him writing the story there in a fever of anguish and indignation.114 In the tale, the supervisory, metropolitan fears of Allahabad are focused in the figures of Aunty Rosa, the evangelical, hell-fire hurling keeper of the boarding house, and her bullying son, Harry: ‘Harry was at once spy, practical joker, inquisitor, and Aunty Rosa’s deputy executioner.’115 Aunty Rosa and young Harry embody all the powers of surveillance and arbitrary authority Kipling could neither understand nor accept in the North-West Provinces: ‘Harry had a knack of cross-examining him as to his day’s doings, which seldom failed to lead him, sleepy and savage, into half-a-dozen contradictions – all duly reported to Aunty Rosa next morning.’116 Punch finds himself, like Kipling on the Pioneer, suddenly and humiliatingly demoted to a lowly position in the affairs of the house: There was no special place for him or his little affairs, and he was forbidden to sprawl on sofas and explain his ideas about the manufacture of this world and his hopes for the future. Sprawling was lazy and wore out sofas, and little boys were not expected to talk. They were talked to, and the talking to was intended for the benefit of their morals. As the unquestioned despot of the house at Bombay, Punch could not quite understand how he came to be of no account in this his new life.117 Deemed by Aunty Rosa ‘unfit to trust in action as he was in word’,118 the scrupulous surveillance of Punch recalls the watchfulness of

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Kipling’s employers in Allahabad. The moral guidance involves total visibility to the omniscient religious authority Aunty Rosa preaches to the children. One of Harry’s favourite tortures is to force Punch to ‘pray to God for a new heart’. Woken up in the dead of night and made to pray, ‘Punch would get out of bed with raging hate in his heart against all the world, seen and unseen.’119 The connection in Kipling’s mind between these memories and his feelings of ‘raging hate’ in Allahabad are intimated near the beginning of the story, where he contrasts the sufferings of a lonely child with those of an adult: When a matured man discovers that he has been deserted by Providence, deprived of his God, and cast without help, comfort, or sympathy, upon a world which is new and strange to him, his despair, which may find expression in evil-living, the writing of his experiences, or the more satisfactory diversion of suicide, is generally supposed to be impressive. A child, under exactly similar circumstances as far as its knowledge goes, cannot very well curse God and die. It howls until its nose is red, its eyes are sore, and its head aches.120 The child, he suggests, is mute in the face of adversity, and by superimposing the memories of childhood suffering onto his present-day anguish, Kipling equates such feelings of muteness with his mature experience of Allahabad. As he suggests, in a curious but meaningful phrase, the circumstances of the alienated adult and the child are ‘exactly similar’. The epigraph to the tale – ‘When I was in my father’s house, I was in a better place’121 – echoes Jesus’ description of his God’s many mansions in John 14.2, merging the Biblical allusion with an echo of As You Like It, where Touchstone regrets his arrival in the enchanted forest: ‘Ay, now I am in Arden, the more fool I. When I was at home, I was in a better place’ (II.iv. 15–16). For the retinue of the exiled duke in As You Like It, Arden is a place of political hardship, but also of joyful release from civic and courtly constraints, where characters discover their true selves in a primitive world of folklore, fertility rituals and festivities. The Shakespearean echo captures perfectly the ambivalence of Kipling’s attitude to his new life in Allahabad: he had taken the position at the high price of political exile from a ‘usurping’ imperial court. The alien political and cultural affairs of his this strange new home raised spectres of betrayal he identified with Lorne Lodge, which

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54 India: Writing Under Western Eyes

were deeply etched in his adult psychology. In ‘Baa Baa, Black Sheep’, Judy is beguiled by the flattery of Aunty Rosa. As she explains to her brother: ‘Aunty Rosa likes me more than she does you. She says that you are a Trial and a Black Sheep, and I’m not to speak to you more than I can help.’122 Steeped in reverence for the ‘family square’, for Kipling this was a terrible, unforgettable episode of betrayal, evincing the reality of political intrigue and injustice in the memory of infant treachery. The story of Punch’s misadventures invites further parallels with Kipling’s time in Allahabad. Escaping from the gaze of Aunty Rosa during his walks with Uncle Harry, Punch explores the world outside the boarding house: Uncle Harry [ . . . ] seldom spoke, but he showed Punch all Rocklington, from the mud-banks and the sand of the back-bay to the great harbours where the hammers were never still, and the marine store shops, and the shiny brass counters in the offices where Uncle Harry went once every three months with a slip of blue paper and received sovereigns in exchange; for he held a war pension.123 These travels occur, as Kipling would have phrased it, ‘under exactly similar circumstances’ to those that inspired his post-Allahabad ventures among the railway towns, coalfields, and factories of the Raj. These were places where, just as in his memories of the Rocklington harbours, ‘the hammers were never still’ and the sovereigns of the empire were made and exchanged between the true men of empire. When Punch learns to read, he finds he can escape Lorne Lodge at will, passing ‘into a land of his own, beyond reach of Aunty Rosa’.124 Tracing the line from his childhood to his adult self, Kipling suggests that literature is a means of escape from political tyranny as urgent and all consuming as the imaginative exploits of the alienated infant. Why, then, did Kipling choose the strange identity of Punch to express this unenviable renegade status? Punch – a favourite rebel of the Victorians – is aggressive, primordial, and primitive. He is also the archetypal victim, the anti-hero whose intolerance and violence are nevertheless accepted, even cherished, by his audience. Punch allows them to experience vicariously the primordial pleasures of defying the civil code, which he achieves by beating his wife and child, a policeman, and ultimately the devil. Misshapen, sinister, and incorrigibly violent, he is the perfect exponent of borderline fiction – the figure who goes to hell in a handcart without remorse.

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But in this story, Kipling is focused intently on the question of remorse. He knows the tragedy of Punch, the figure so brutalised that he wishes to maim and kill: ‘ “I shall burn this house down, and perhaps I’ll kill you. I don’t know whether I can kill you – you’re so bony – but I’ll try.” [ . . . ] Black Sheep held himself ready to work his way to Aunty Rosa’s withered throat, and grip there till he was beaten off.’125 It is only possible for Punch to wish to kill others after he has been driven to the point of killing himself. He evolves a profoundly ironic method of suicide: A knife would hurt, but Aunty Rosa had told him a year ago that if he sucked paint he would die. He went into the nursery, unearthed the now disused Noah’s Ark, and sucked the paint off as many animals as remained. It tasted abominable, but he had licked Noah’s Dove clean by the time Aunty Rosa and Judy returned.126 Noah’s Dove, bearer of the Biblical olive branch, and a timeless symbol of peace and reconciliation, offers little hope to the tormented Punch. Kipling wishes us to see this Punch, the raging homicide – the writer who rages against Indian nationalism and the peace of the Indian city – as a brutalised child, scarred by abuse and the inhumanity he has begun to accept as the common lot for himself and for others: ‘when young lips have drunk deep of the bitter waters of Hate, Suspicion, and Despair, all the love in the world will not wholly take away that knowledge; though it may turn darkened eyes for a while to the light, and teach faith where no Faith was’.127 Whether in his excoriations of the imperial cities and the National Congress, or in his stories of wayfarers and self-made kings, Kipling is frank about the ‘waters of hate, suspicion, and despair’ from which he has drunk as a colonial. It is in this ambivalent consciousness of himself as the victim and the perpetrator of punishment – the primordial Punch who assaults the policeman while bearing the pain of the superhuman, civilisationdefying strength he arrogates to himself – that Kipling seems to voice the anxieties of his imperial background, a colonial upbringing steeped in the violence suppressed under the social and moral code, which he embodies in the character of Aunty Rosa. But if the conservative imperialist in Kipling is represented by the figure of the folk-hero, Punch, that figure also underlines the muteness, the irrelevance of Kipling’s rage and fury. After the curtain falls, Punch is no more than a stage prop, a puppet whose furious energy leaves no mark whatsoever on his surroundings. His violence has no more power to harm or destroy the

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56 India: Writing Under Western Eyes

civil code than the theatrics of the Mohurrum riot or the ‘fakements’ of Lalun’s revolution. He is always under orders, the controlling hand of English authority denounced and feared in the boarding house. Punch is misshapen by the blows that life has dealt him as the imagined villain of the piece. He is the misunderstood, primordial self that Kipling sought to protect in the fantasy, borderline locations of the empire.

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Borderline Fictions and Fantasies 57

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Part II

America: Out of Empire

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American Fiction: The Day’s Work, US Imperialism and the Politics of Wall Street

Kipling emerged from ‘that furious spell of work’ on the Pioneer Weekly towards the end of 1888. Buoyed by those favourable reviews, he decided it was time to make his mark in London. Up to this point, he had published ‘one book of verse; one ditto prose; and [ . . . ] a set of small paper-backed railway bookstall volumes embodying most of my tales in the Weekly’.1 Selling the copyright in the railway volumes to A.H. Wheeler & Co. (the firm controlling the Indian bookstalls) and the rights in Plain Tales from the Hills and Departmental Ditties to the Calcutta firm Thacker Spink, he raised the funds for a long journey home via the Far East and the United States accompanied by his friends, Alex and Edmonia Hill. Before leaving Allahabad he arranged to supply the Pioneer with a series of articles on his travels. These were published in the newspaper throughout 1888 and were later collected in the twovolume edition, From Sea to Sea (1899–1900). The trip with the Hills introduced Kipling to America – Edmonia was a native of Pennsylvania – and it was a visit that doubtless inspired his longterm fascination with and residence in the country. This part of the study focuses upon Kipling’s American years and writings, exploring how the author’s time in the States altered his imperial values and influenced a range of works, from the tales collected in The Day’s Work (1897) to those of the two Jungle Books (1894–1895). On many occasions, Kipling adopted the conventional Victorian attitude of disdain for American democracy, echoing, for example, the opinions of Dickens. But, while Dickens returned to London after his American visit, Kipling made his home in the States – drawn inexorably towards this vibrant, expanding nation, recognising the auguries of its future industrial and imperial power. 61

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The great social and political transformations of 1890s America irrevocably transformed Kipling’s imperial vision, stimulating experiments and new developments in the form and substance of his stories. Perhaps the most significant of these new developments was the dramatisation of the author/narrator as a transatlantic mediator, a figure who resolves the tensions between the emerging American empire and the politics of the Old World. In order to chart the emergence of this transatlantic voice, it is worth reflecting upon the circumstances leading up to Kipling’s time in the States, which followed his trip with the Hills, and a subsequent brief residence in London, where he came under the spell of another American, Wolcott Balestier. It was with Balestier that he collaborated upon a strange, hybrid novel of American and British-Indian adventure, The Naulahka (1892). Setting sail from India on 9 March, Kipling’s outward journey took him to Rangoon, Singapore, and Japan, and then across the United States before embarking for England. Landing at San Francisco on 28 May, he travelled to Washington, Philadelphia, Boston, and New York, where, at Elmira, he interviewed his hero, Mark Twain. Twain later recalled the visit of a mysterious Anglo-Indian, whose name, at the time, meant nothing to him: ‘I believed that he knew more than any person I had met before, and I knew that he knew I knew less than any person he had met before – though he did not say it and I was not expecting that he would.’2 The interview was nevertheless a heady experience for the 23-year-old Kipling, who deported himself ‘reverently, as befits one in the presence of his superior’.3 Kipling landed at Liverpool on 4 October 1889, from where he headed directly to London. Despite the arrangements he had made before leaving India, he had so ‘muddled and mismanaged’ his financial affairs that he found himself short of funds. Reluctant to call on his London relatives for help, he decided to take cheap lodgings above the restaurant of William Harris, ‘the Sausage King’, on Villiers Street, the Strand. At this time the Strand was ‘primitive and passionate in its habits and population’.4 Kipling’s rooms at Embankment Chambers – neither ‘over-clean nor wellkept’ – were at the centre of this vibrant, colourful scene. From his window he looked across the street, through the fanlighted entrance and up to the stage of Gatti’s Music-Hall. Evenings spent in Gatti’s supplied him with the inspiration and much of the local detail for the Barrack-Room Ballads, which soon began to appear in W.E. Henley’s Scots Observer. To go from having a servant and being shaven while he slept, to living in a garret above a sausage-and-mash shop might have seemed a demotion. But Kipling enjoyed the vitality of Villiers Street life. He also

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62 America: Out of Empire

relished the prospect of making his way on limited means, structuring his daily routine around his limited budget. Each morning he purchased, for tuppence, ‘as much sausage and mash as one could carry from breakfast to dinner’.5 He would then smoke a pipe, sort his mail, and sit down to write. His working garments added to the eccentricity of his London appearance: he wore a loose blue serge suit buttoned high to the throat, over which he draped a recently acquired Japanese dressing gown. He finished off the outfit with a pair of monkey-skin slippers and an Egyptian fez of rich scarlet, which he wore tipped nonchalantly to the back of his head. Crossing London’s social boundaries and boroughs in these early days, Kipling led a double-life reminiscent of his Indian years, rubbing shoulders by turns with the social elite and the riotous crowds of Charing Cross and Gatti’s. When he had done his day’s work, usually around 4 pm, he crossed town to dine ‘with nice people who did not eat sausage for a living’.6 These were his friends and relatives in Kensington: chiefly his Aunt Georgie and the three ‘dear old ladies’, Mrs Winnard and the Craik sisters. The other source of hospitality was the growing list of editors and publishers anxious to woo the ‘new Dickens’, including Frederick George Macmillan, who ran the Macmillan firm, and Mowbray Morris, who edited the company’s in-house journal, Macmillan’s Magazine. Having agreed terms with Frederick for the publication of his books, he decided it was appropriate to publish his stories in Morris’ journal. Soon after meeting Kipling, Morris wrote to a friend that his new young contributor was ‘a most amusing companion’, though ‘apt to be unnecessarily frank, rather what the French call brutal’.7 In August 1889, after complimenting Kipling’s work in the Saturday Review, Andrew Lang had urged Sampson Low, the English agents of Wheeler & Co., to publish all six of the Indian Railway books in London. Kipling was now the talk of Lang’s circle at the Saville Club, an elite group of critics and authors including Walter Besant, Edmund Gosse, and George Saintsbury. To the Club, he was the latest ‘standard bearer’ in a literary campaign against the Aesthetes, Socialists, and Feminists of radical London.8 Although Kipling adhered scrupulously to his policy of ‘never directly or indirectly criticis[ing] a fellow craftsman’s output’, a clue to his likely opinion of a contemporary such as Wilde is found in letter of 1882 from Trix, who, after meeting the celebrated author at a dinner party, wrote disapprovingly to his brother: ‘he is a dish I love not, and I don’t think you would either. To look at he is like a bad copy of a Roman bust of a very decadent Roman Emperor, roughly modelled in suet pudding.’9

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64 America: Out of Empire

I consort with long haired things In velvet collar-rolls, Who talk about the Aims of Art, And ‘theories’ and ‘goals’, And moo and coo with womenfolk About their blessed souls.11 As the ‘centre of a vibrant, embryonic mass democracy’, London seemed to him a den of ‘Indian nationalists, unthinking socialists, [and] “new” women’.12 These were all dealers in ‘pernicious varieties of safe sedition’, who ‘derided my poor little Gods of the East, and asserted that the British in India spent violent lives “oppressing” the native’.13 Collaborating with these intellectuals was a ‘mixed crowd of wideminded, wide-mouthed Liberals, who darkened counsel with pious but disintegrating catch-words, and took care to live very well indeed’.14 In such company, Kipling wished again to meet an ‘Army man / Set up, and trimmed and taut, / who does not spout hashed libraries / and think the next man’s thought’.15 Instead he met Flo Garrard, an old flame indisposed – on account of an ongoing lesbian affair with an artist – to return his affections. Despite the initial optimism of his life on Villiers Street, he was becoming increasingly morose and introspective: ‘Once I faced the reflection of my own face in the jet-black mirror of the window-panes for five days.’16 When that fog cleared, he looked out of his window towards a figure across the street: ‘Of a sudden his breast turned dull red like a robin’s, and he crumpled, having cut his throat.’17 He was no longer so taken with the ‘shifting, shouting brotheldom’ of the Strand. The encounter with Garrad intensified Kipling’s feelings of despair, and, amid the ‘promiscuous confusions’ of his London entrée,18 he suffered a complete mental and physical breakdown. The ‘staleness and depression’ came over him as he attempted to write his first novel, The Light that Failed (1891). The Light that Failed tells the story of an imperial artist and journalist, Dick Heldar, who returns to London with the purpose of establishing his name and marrying a long-time object of his sexual attentions. Unfortunately, he goes blind on account of a laceration of the optic nerve, aggravated by the strong light of the desert and too much fine work. It is possible to discern in the account of Dick’s failing powers the gamut of personal, political, and sexual frustrations Kipling experienced

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Kipling could not hide his disappointment at London intellectual society. Soon after arriving, he wrote in the poem ‘In Partibus’:10

in London. Throughout the story, Dick’s return to London is not simply chastening but, frankly, castrating. London destroys (the aptly named) Dick, takes away his manhood, his power, and his art. It is, for Kipling, a place of slavery to mammon – ‘the damnation of the cheque book’,19 which compromises the artist’s work even before the laceration of the optic nerve does its worst. London is the haunt of decadents, lesbians, and crooked entrepreneurs, each of whom demands, as it were, Dick’s pound of flesh. The red-haired girl with green eyes – the lesbian companion of Dick’s beloved Maisie – presides over his humiliating, unconsummated sexual advances, and, metaphorically, his thwarted relationship with the home country. Whatever the weaknesses of The Light that Failed – and they are many – the notion of Dick’s blindness is significant as a trope for the anxieties of the colonial’s return to London. The Freudian overtones of Dick’s blinding – though certainly not intended by Kipling – are irresistible. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud regards nightmares of blindness as the classic trope of the unconscious for castration, which resonates powerfully with the overwhelmingly sexual line upon Dick’s physical and emotional collapse. Ultimately Heldar’s despair translates into colonial violence. Upon hearing of Dick’s blindness, his friend Torpenhow (recalling happier times when Dick gouged out the eyes of an Arab during hand-to-hand combat in Egypt) remarks: ‘D’you remember that nigger you gouged on the square. Pity you didn’t keep the odd eye. It would have been useful.’20 This hateful comment reflects the instinctive, intimate relationship between the Dick’s loss of England and his violence abroad. It suggests that what Dick has suffered – his humiliation or castration – can be alleviated by humiliating, subjugating, castrating, and killing others, which is what he finally attempts in the novel. Dick takes a steamer back to the east and, as it were, belatedly reclaims that ‘nigger’s’ eyes, alleviating his alienation by rattling off a few rounds of machine-gun fire into the brown belly of the native masses: ‘Hrrmph!’ said the machine-gun through all its five noses as the subaltern drew the lever home. The empty cartridges clashed on the floor and the smoke blew black through the truck. There was indiscriminate firing at the rear of the train, a return fire from the darkness without and unlimited howling. Dick stretched himself on the floor, wild with delight at the sounds and the smells. ‘God is very good – I never thought I’d hear this again. Give ’em hell. Oh, give ’em hell!’ he cried.21

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Sated by the sounds and smells of killing, Dick regains the position of power ‘stolen’ from him by metropolitan culture. If he were not soon to be felled by a sniper’s bullet, no doubt he would return to London with all his original hauteur. As it is, he is ‘dead in the death of the blind, who, at the best, are only burdens upon their associates’.22 Dick’s colonial violence intrudes upon London society early in the story when, in a sexually threatening episode, he runs his hands over the portly, ‘weak-hearted’ figure of an unscrupulous literary agent: ‘This thing’s soft all over – like a woman.’ [ . . . ] Dick walked round him, pawing him as a cat paws a soft hearth-rug. Then he traced with his forefinger the leaden pouches underneath the eyes, and shook his head. ‘You were going to steal my things – mine, mine, mine! – you, who don’t know when you may die. [ . . . ] [I]f you worry me when I have settled down to work with any nonsense about actions for assault, believe me, I’ll catch you and manhandle you, and you’ll die. You haven’t got very long to live, anyhow.23 Dick’s brutally homophobic ‘handling’ of the agent seethes with the sexual and political confusion of Kipling’s London sojourn. The poor critical reception of the novel, which came to be known as ‘The Book that Failed’,24 perhaps reinforced his belief that, like Heldar, he needed to escape London to recapture the essence of the frontier. It was increasingly apparent where he would find that frontier experience. Early on in London, Kipling had met Wolcott Balestier, the American agent for the New York publishing firm of Lovell and Co. Balestier introduced Kipling to his sister, Carrie, with whom Kipling struck up an immediate friendship, while Wolcott became Kipling’s closest male companion in London. In the summer of 1890 the two men began co-authoring The Naulahka, which drew upon their respective Indian and American experiences. An imperial adventure that Lord Birkenhead thought ‘perhaps the worst [book] Kipling ever had a hand in’,25 the story tells how a politically ambitious American, Nicholas Tarvin, attempts to further his career by convincing a railroad chairman to build a station at the small, High Plains town of Topaz. Tarvin’s girlfriend, Kate Sheriff – a fiercely independent ‘New Woman’ – does not share his political ambition. Rejecting his marriage proposal, she travels to Rajasthan to work as a medical missionary in the princely state of Rhatore. Unable to relinquish Kate – or his political aspirations – Tarvin follows her to India. While staying close to his lover, he plans to obtain from Rhatore a priceless jewelled necklace, the Naulahka, to present to the feckless,

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66 America: Out of Empire

diamond-loving wife of the railroad chairman, hoping she will persuade her husband to build in Topaz. Ultimately Kate discovers that life in India is ‘not a girl’s work’,26 and returns to America with Tarvin, basking in ‘a woman’s complete contentment with the fact that there was a man in the world to do things for her’.27 If the New Woman is changed by the colonial wilds, so too is Tarvin. Realising the ‘petty larceny’ of his methods in obtaining the Naulahka, he must choose between the necklace and Kate: the ‘great green emerald pierced him, he thought, with a reproachful gaze’.28 He abandons the Naulahka in a final selfless act. No documentation exists to establish with any certainty the distribution of labour in writing The Naulahka.29 Balestier certainly wrote the opening American chapters, though he must have also contributed significantly to the later Indian parts. For all its problems and weaknesses, the novel looks forward to the Vermont phase of Kipling’s career. As an Anglo-American collaboration, it sets the tone of Kipling’s later transatlantic fictions. Nicholas Tarvin, the American who ‘rip[s] up half a state’ to win what he covets in India,30 is morally improved by contact with the East and the empire – a notion of cross-Atlantic sympathy and alliance crucial to Kipling’s Vermont writings. Kipling’s emotional and mental state remained delicate during 1891. Towards the end of the year he decided to stop working and travel – ‘to get clean away and re-sort myself’.31 He embarked on a 24,000 mile journey, visiting South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and finally, for the last time ever, India, where he hoped to spend Christmas with his parents. Shortly after arriving in Lahore, however, he learned of the death of Balestier from typhoid. He returned immediately to England, and little more than a month after Wolcott’s funeral, married his friend’s sister, Carrie, in a ceremony described by Henry James as ‘a dreary little wedding with an attendance simply of four men’.32 After a short stay at Brown’s Hotel in Mayfair, the couple embarked on a honeymoon trip around the world. However, in Yokohama the journey was cut short by more bad news – the loss of almost £2000 of their savings in the collapse of the New Oriental Banking Corporation. The newly established Thomas Cook’s travel group bailed out the couple by refunding the full price of their tickets, allowing them to gather up what few possessions they had and retreat to the Balestier family home at Brattleboro, Vermont. Coming so close to financial ruin on the eve of his arrival in Vermont was perhaps a salutary reminder of the dangers of ‘solid wealth’.33 America was now the lynchpin world

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68 America: Out of Empire

From Villiers Street to Vermont Kipling’s move to America might seem at first surprising. In the nineteenth century, the United States was busy consolidating its identity after empire and, on many occasions, in direct opposition to British culture. As John Carlos Rowe argues, despite westward expansion, the destruction of native culture, and the Mexican and Spanish–American wars, the United States has proven remarkably coy about its imperial origins.34 Edward Said makes the separate though related point that there was no time-honoured tradition of Orientalist work to back US imperialism at the turn of the century. Despite its attractions to a range of American writers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, direct contact with the orient was confined to a small number of literary authors, Bible students, missionaries, and a few military men.35 Though the nation’s imperial interests extended offshore into China, Hawaii, the Caribbean and Central America, it is fair to say that the idea of empire as a driving historical motive was discomfiting to the States. Empire needed to be wrapped in the language of self-realisation, freedom, free trade and liberation from an oppressive internal or occupying force. As Said suggests, American foreign policy has subsequently evolved a public discourse ‘anxious to depict the country as free from taint [and] unified around one iron-clad major narrative of innocent triumph’.36 Kipling, then, chose to live in a nation uncomfortable with the intellectual, historical and political repertoire of his writing. This is a decision to which little importance has been attached by previous critics and biographers, but it is surely crucial insofar as the Vermont stories frequently concern issues of migration, translation, and the learning of cultural codes. The two Jungle Books, for instance, portray the Jungle Law as a code that Mowgli must learn in order to rule the Free People (an epithet that recalls the American origins of the tales). During his time in America, Kipling became acquainted with high-powered Washington politicians such as the Assistant Secretary of State, John Hay, senator Henry Cabot Lodge, and the future President, Theodore Roosevelt. Like Kipling, Hay and Cabot Lodge were convinced of the need for imperial dialogue and co-operation between Britain and America. Roosevelt was less warmly Anglophile, but after a circumspect

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economy, but it was a nation steered, so Kipling believed, by men like Nicholas Tarvin, with all that character’s near-maniacal ambition and volatility.

initial meeting, Kipling struck up a long-term friendship with the Civil Service Commissioner and rising Republican politician. Kipling’s friend, the American historian and autobiographer, Henry Adams, had introduced him to this circle of conservative politicians during a visit to Washington in 1895. Shortly after this visit, Adams observed that Rudyard had ‘grown rather thick with our little Washington gang’.37 Arguably, though, it was Adam’s brother, the economist Brooks Adams who best captured the political spirit of the Hay–Adams circle, balancing the belief in American economic and military power with a commitment to Anglo-American co-operation. Significantly, Adams published his views in journals such as McClure’s Magazine and Atlantic Monthly, which were, of course, the American publishers of Kipling’s tales. If he had failed to notice Adam’s essays in these journals, he certainly knew his work, The Law of Civilisation and Decay (1895), which is listed in the inventory of books in Kipling’s library at Bateman’s. A later work, America’s Economic Supremacy (1900), offers a powerful summary of Adams’ views on British imperial decline and the rise of American empire: [T]he United States must shortly bear the burden England has borne, must assume the responsibilities and perform the tasks which have within human memory fallen to the share of England, and must be equipped accordingly.38 Although an ardent imperialist, Adams was nevertheless concerned with the effect of this economic supremacy upon the internal stability of America, which faced massive industrial expansion, the rapid growth of the cities, and the rise of labour politics. For Kipling, as for this Washington circle, the repercussions of the Gilded Age – particularly, industrial expansion and the emergence of organised labour – were issues that demanded a firmly imperial handling and polity. In the America of the 1890s, Kipling encountered a culture and a people entering a decisive phase in their history – a period that contributed significantly to the national identity and global power of the nation in the next century. This was the age where industrial development meant free scope for the investor and, as the works of writers like Mark Twain illustrate, heightened critical consciousness of the entrepreneur’s status in modern culture. It was the age in which Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Frick, and Carnegie made their millions and acquired an unprecedented influence upon the political affairs of the country. This was also the period in which manipulators of the stock exchanges such as Jay Gould

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and Jim Fisk prospered, issuing ‘watered’ stock in companies, and wasting no opportunity to fix the markets against the interests of competitors. A combination of factors led to this ascendancy of capital. Immediately after the Civil War, around $7,000,000 was contributed to the economy by returning veterans looking for goods on which to spend their savings and pensions.39 The ongoing construction of the railroads stimulated a demand for the steel that, due to new manufacturing processes, was cheaply available for the first time. Steel-making generated a greater demand for coke, and the scene was set for Carnegie and Frick, railroad man and coke processor, to establish their industrial empires. In many respects, the rural tradition of the country gave rise to a political system barely equipped for the transition to an industrial epoch. In 1860, 60 per cent of the population worked on farms; even by 1900, the figure remained a significant 37 per cent.40 Whatever the gradual demographic changes, the outlook was predominantly rural, heightening tensions between the expanding urban centres and the agrarian communities of the West and the South. Moreover, the large numbers of foreigners that flocked to the towns confirmed the impression that the political agitations of the cities were somehow ‘un-American’, allowing the industrialists carte blanche in the suppression of trade unionism. The slums and factory districts grew, as conditions of employment continued to deteriorate. Organisations such as the Order of the Knights of Labour and the American Federation of Labour, both of which rose to prominence in the 1880s, did little to challenge the dominance of the industrialists, adopting a cautious line on workers’ rights and discouraging strike action. A more militant labour movement, the American Railway Union, faced the united resistance of employers and the intervention of federal government, which sent troops against strikers and imprisoned its leader, Eugene Victor Debs.41 The most powerful response to the hegemony of Wall Street came, predictably, from the West and the South, where the Farmers’ Alliance sought to represent the interests of rural America against Eastern capitalism. The Alliance – and later the Populists – took an aggressive stand against high finance, industry, and urbanisation, focusing their anger upon the railroads and the preferential treatment offered to business corporations by the rail system. When, in the 1870s, the promise of cheap land, abundant harvests, and the availability of credit transformed the Great American Desert into a place of opportunity for pioneering farmers, they borrowed heavily from the industrial East.

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Capital was poured into the West from cities such as Boston and New York, and mortgages on Western lands became desirable investments. After huge losses of cattle in the winter of 1886–1887, and ten years of subsequent crop failures beginning with the summer of 1887, business optimism waned and the free-flowing credit dried up. Added to this, the value of wheat declined dramatically in the early 1890s, reaching its lowest point in 1894.42 Capitalism and all the trappings of industrial development were perceived by the farmers to be the root cause of the collapse. They committed themselves to a political movement and a form of political rhetoric that drew upon the rural and Biblical traditions of the West and the South. By the time of the Omaha Convention of 1892, the year of Kipling’s arrival, the newly formed People’s Party had transformed the beliefs of the farmers and the Farmers’ Alliance into a viable mechanism for change at national level. Uniting the old agrarian movements and nominating General James B. Weaver for President of the United States, the Convention marked a turning point in the evolution of American labour politics. The Populists went on to form the ‘largest third party movement in the history of the United States’.43 The consolidation of the American labour movements was arguably the most dramatic feature of the US political landscape during these years. Prompted by this rapid expansion of the markets in the post-Civil War period, industrial development led to mass immigration, the establishing of the cities, and a widening gulf between modern industry and the older, essentially agrarian structures of pre-War society. Vermont, where Kipling settled in 1892, felt the impact of these changes in the destruction of the farms and the emergence of a social group termed by the economist, Thorstein Veblen, the ‘leisure class’, whom he identified by their ‘conspicuous consumption’ – the use of surplus capital for the accumulation of prestige.44 From the privileged vantage point of Vermont, Kipling berated the effects of this economic expansion, scorning the wealthy city folk who bought ‘pleasure farms’ around Brattleboro.45 Though his suspicion of American consumer culture has something in common with Veblen’s critique, Kipling nevertheless shared a certain economic status with the leisure class. As an outsider he sympathised with the American workingman, but as a conservative imperialist he also advocated an essentially paternalistic model of capitalist economics. Whenever he supported the protest against western capital – which he certainly did in a number of stories – he was driven into an ideological corner by his prejudice against organised labour and the non-white underclass of the new world.

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Kipling shared the popular discontent with the cities. They were ugly, vast and lawless. Landing at San Francisco on his first visit to the United States in 1889, he witnessed the murder of a Mexican in the Chinese quarter,46 and saw ‘a Chinaman who had been stabbed in the eye and was bleeding like a pig’.47 He concluded that that ‘[t]he white man in a lump is bad’.48 He blamed the reckless profiteering of investors and industrialists for what he saw: [A] certain defect runs through everything – workmanship, roads, bridges, contracts, barter and sale and so forth – all inaccurate, all slovenly, all out of plumb and untrue. So far the immense natural wealth of the land holds this ineptitude up; and the slovenly plenty hides their sins unless you look for them. Au fond it’s barbarism – barbarism plus telephone, electric light, rail and suffrage but all the more terrible for that very reason.49 Despite the attack on urban culture, the great western themes of agrarian resurgence were so controversial to Kipling that he wrote very little on the countryside. What he did write on this topic is discernibly paranoiac. For example, in Something of Myself he describes his surroundings in Vermont: It would be hard to exaggerate the loneliness and sterility of life on the farms. The land was denuding itself of its accustomed inhabitants [ . . . ] . What might have become characters, powers, and attributes perverted themselves in that desolation as cankered trees throw out branches akimbo, and strange faiths and cruelties, born of solitude to the edge of insanity, flourished like lichen on sick bark.50 Swirling about, as he saw it, in the small-town Brattleboro gene pool – the lichen grows on sick, disfigured bark – he was haunted by phantoms of miscegenation and murder. Two articles he wrote at the time, ‘In Sight of Mount Monadnock’ and ‘Leaves From a Winter Notebook’, dwell alternately upon the beauty and the destructiveness of the landscape, each associating the countryside with mental disturbance and death.51 This was a far cry from the agrarian optimism of the Populists, whose candidates invoked the fertile American landscape in their campaigns against the arid and uncompassionate leaders of industry. Compare Kipling’s account of Vermont to the gilt-edged agrarianism of William Jennings Bryan, who, in his campaign for bimetallism, exhorted the countryfolk:

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You come to us and tell us that the great cities are in favour of the gold standard; we reply that the great cities rest upon our broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country [ . . . ] . [W]e will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them: You shall not press down upon the brow of labour this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.52 The open prairies of Bryan’s speech are places of social, economic, and spiritual growth. The cities were built upon the moral and material achievements of the farms. For Kipling, however, Vermont had none of the redemptive qualities of Bryan’s rural America. On the contrary, it was irredeemably mad, bad, and dangerous to dwell upon, like the lonely thoughts of the Brattleboro crowd. Kipling later became embroiled in his own personal conflict with the folk of Brattleboro,53 which only increased his alienation. In Populism, America had a powerful, if bigoted,54 lobby against the corporate interests driving American politics. The Populists evolved new narratives of cultural identity rooted in this earthy, emotive idiom of the rural West and South. L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz is perhaps the best-known example of the rural response to the towering, though ultimately futile, emerald cities. Working by turns as a journalist, chickenfarmer, travelling salesman, and window dresser, its author was well qualified to document the hardships of life in the mid-West. In 1890, he added yet another casualty to his long list of business failures, closing Baum’s Bazaar, the general store he had run for two years in South Dakota territory. In the Oz stories he wrote between 1900 and 1920, Baum delighted in exposing the fraudulence of consumer culture – the mirrors, pulleys, green spectacles, and so on, that were the source of the Wizard’s power. As a supporter of the Farmers’ Alliance and a committed socialist, he imagined a utopia in which the fertile Kansas prairie desired by Dorothy – Kansas was the home of the Populist Party – could be reached by the simple realisation that the seductions of consumer culture and the trappings of the Emerald City were, in the words of the Great Oz, ‘humbug’.55 Kipling seems, by contrast, to have relished all those ropes, pulleys, and machines lampooned in the wire-pulling of Oz – particularly where they denote the sort of authoritarian power, wealth and prestige enjoyed by the false wizard. The most glaring – and ideologically

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unmitigated – example of this unspoken agreement between worker and wire-pulling capitalist occurs in the only novel of Kipling’s American years, Captain’s Courageous, which tells the story of the moral reform of its central character Harvey Cheyne, the spoilt child of an American railroad magnate. When he falls from a luxury ocean liner, Cheyne is rescued by the crew of a cod-fishing schooner, the We’re Here, and is gradually taught the virtue of hard work and honest living through his employment as a wage-earning fisherman. The fishermen of the Grand Banks celebrated in Captain’s Courageous represented an America ‘that was already beginning to fade’,56 and it is in Kipling’s handling of their economic struggle – represented in the novel by the uncertain future of the We’re Here and the outmoded schooners of the Grand Banks – that the novel strikes a jarring note. It is ultimately the consolidation of the Cheyne plutocracy that secures a happy ending: Harvey’s millionaire parents, shadowy and unsympathetic for the most part, finally emerge as keen philanthropists with a newfound interest in Widow’s Funds, Orphan Societies, and the future of the fishing industry. As for Harvey’s companions, buffeted by the waves of progress, Mr Cheyne’s wealth saves the day when his line of tea-shipping schooners – running from San Francisco to Yokahama (where Kipling himself had come so close to ruin) is signed over to Harvey. The novel ends with Harvey appointing his friend Dan from the We’re Here to a berth on the new line, and employing the ship’s cook as his personal servant. As with Twain’s Huckleberry Finn – which it echoes at various points – the novel attempts to reconcile the brash individualism of modern, capitalist culture with old-style camaraderie and commitment. It is not so much this compromise that is troubling, as the manner in which Kipling glorifies Harvey’s inheritance. After the ponderous progress of the schooners, we are treated to a glimpse of new money and technological wizardry as his father dashes across the states by private railcar to meet his son. When the car arrives, Harvey – in a flash of vulgar display that obviously meets with the author’s approval – shows off his private railcar to the poor fishermen:

Harvey laid the glories of the ‘Constance’ before them without a word. They took them in equal silence – stamped leather, silver doorhandles and rails, cut velvet, plate-glass, nickel, bronze, hammered iron, and the rare woods of the continent inlaid. ‘I told you,’ said Harvey; ‘I told you.’57

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This gloating, we are told, ‘was his crowning revenge’ – presumably upon those who had saved him and then had the temerity to doubt his family fortune. The culminating railcar journey celebrates modern technology and its capacity to cover, cross, and subdue a whole landscape and nation. It celebrates, moreover, technology commandeered by munificent capital, which Kipling imagines subsidising the life of the schooners. For this reason, he sees no problem in Harvey’s final authority over Dan. Harvey is ultimately both the companion and ‘Master’ of his employee – a relationship foretold by the ship’s cook, who, in the final pages of the novel comments: ‘Master – man. Man – Master [ . . . ]. You remember, Dan Troop, what I said? On the We’re Here?’58 Towards the end of the nineteenth century, commerce, investment, and technology – the business of the Cheynes in Kipling’s novel – were fast becoming the basis of America’s imperial power. Conrad’s Nostromo famously depicts American financiers as empire-builders, with shadowy investors such as Holroyd busy funding railroads and expanding US interests in the turbulent republics. Nostromo is usually considered the first major critique of US imperialism by a European author. However, Stevenson’s South Sea Tales also have much to say about American empire and its economic energies. For example, the genie in the tale, ‘The Bottle Imp’, starts its journey in Nob Hill, the wealthy quarter of San Francisco, where it promises untold riches to the Pacific Islander, Keawe – for the price of his soul. Similarly, in ‘The Isle of Voices’, the evil wizard, Kalamake, terrifies the people of Hawaii – a perpetual object of US colonial designs – with his power to turn seashells into bright shining dollars. Kipling’s attitudes recall this body of writings (he knew Stevenson’s work intimately), demonstrating a similar understanding of the modes of consumer culture and the ‘leisure class’ that fed the economy of American expansion. Such enthusiasms were, it seems, a lingua franca for dealing with empire. Consumer culture is, here, far more than a superfluous gesture towards western civilisation, rather it is a way of addressing affairs from inside contemporary culture, conferring permission to speak in a society obsessed with the dollar. Kipling’s aim, however, was to extend the romance of English culture to ‘barbarian’ capitalists, keeping the lid upon the economic thrust of US expansion. Victorian Britain had long evolved romantic mythologies to rationalise the underlying economic motives of empire. In 1890s America, Brooks Adams read literary history in the context of the gradual ‘elimination of courage’ – the heroic terrain of Walter Scott – from urban, industrial society: ‘The effect of the “industrial revolution”, which began about the date of Scott’s birth, was to raise a timid social stratum

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to the position of a ruling caste.’59 Kipling’s texts, much as those of Adams or, for that matter, Twain, can be read as an attempt to reverse this trend, infusing an essentially urban consciousness with the frontier spirit necessary for imperial expansion. This is why, as Brantlinger writes, ‘imperialism offers a swashbuckling politics in a world in which neither epic heroism nor chivalry is dead’.60 For conservatives like Brooks Adams, modern bureaucracy was the progenitor of this ‘timid social stratum’, promulgating socialism and depleting the individuating mythologies crucial to empire – the nationalist narratives of personal election and autonomy, the sanctity of the family, and the rights of the pioneer and entrepreneur. His friend, Rudyard Kipling, had plenty of such narratives to replenish the American stock. He offered the myth of cultural depth – English antiquity, class privilege, hierarchy – the Conradian ‘romance of illusion’.

Labour, capital, and the day’s work Kipling’s collection, The Day’s Work (1897), offers an intriguing insight into the various issues so far discussed, for it applies concepts of England, Englishness, and empire to the American political landscape. Literary critics and biographers have largely neglected the historical dimension of this volume; however, as its title suggests, the tales directly and consistently concern the popular issue of the relations between labour and capital. More specifically they attempt to reconcile labour with capital by mythologising the subordination of the workforce to the workplace. This is achieved by presuming the consent of workers, post factum, as dialogue, critical consciousness and engagement with capital: the train drivers, farmers, engineers submit to the day’s work because they are independent, informed and free-thinking enough to choose to subject themselves to the industrial entrepreneur. To add the necessary coloration, the tales wrest the issue of organised labour – the major political development of modern America – from its proper US setting, resolving the problems of industry and finance under the mythology of Old-World imperial duty. The tale, ‘Bread upon the Waters’, illustrates Kipling’s sophisticated, yet ultimately conservative, handling of the political issues paramount in the expanding US economy – most notably employment rights and the relations between labour and capital. It tells the story of a Chief Engineer’s revenge upon his former employers, a transatlantic shipping line owned by the unscrupulous Holdock, Steiner, and Chase. When the Engineer, McPhee, refuses to sail in accordance with a profitable but

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dangerous schedule imposed by the Board, he is sacked after twenty years’ loyal service. McPhee throws in his lot with a rival shipping magnate, McRimmon, owner of the Black Bird Line. McRimmon’s reluctance to paint his ships – he prefers to spend the money on proper maintenance – sets his operation in contrast with the rogue enterprise of Holdock, Steiner and Chase, who purchase a cheap freighter, the Grotkau, and cheaply convert it into the flagship of their line. Set to sea with a crack in its propeller that ‘ye could ha’ put a penknife to’,61 manned by an overworked, underfed, discontented crew, the Grotkau is the epitome of rogue entrepreneurialism, and for this reason is ultimately the downfall of Holdock, Steiner and Chase. When, as McRimmon predicts, the Grotkau founders, he claims the salvage money for the wreck after persuading the crew to abandon the ship, and strategically positioning McPhee to tow the derelict ashore. The plot appears simple enough – the humble, homely Engineer is avenged on the evil Boardroom, and is better off to the tune of twenty five thousand pounds. But the handling of the theme of capital is far more ambivalent. Firstly, there are Biblical overtones of the name of McRimmon. The name derives from two Biblical stories with a direct bearing on the plot (the title of the story is, of course, also drawn from the Bible). The first of these is the story of the murder of Saul’s son, IshBosheth, by the sons of Rimmon. After killing Ish-Bosheth to ‘avenge’ Saul’s attempt on the life of King David, the sons of Rimmon present his head to David, expecting a reward. David has them executed for killing ‘an innocent man in his own house’.62 This Biblical reference alone qualifies the apparent celebration of revenge and financial reward in the story. But it is further qualified by echoes of another Bible story – the story of Naaman the Syrian, who, after promising the prophet Elisha that he will serve no gods but the Lord, asks pardon in advance for bowing down in the House of Rimmon when attending the king in his worship.63 This parable of spiritual compromise intimates the potential for corruption in McPhee’s alliance with McRimmon: it is potentially a case of kneeling to false gods. The danger of McPhee’s new money is suggested from the outset. After receiving his reward, McPhee shakes hands in ‘a new and awful manner – a parody of old Holdock’s style when he says goodbye to his skippers’.64 His wife is equally affected, taking a sudden pride in her hatrack, worth ‘thirty shillings at least’, and sending out dinner invitations on writing paper ‘almost bridal in its scented creaminess’.65 In the presence of her recently appointed servant, she is seen to ‘swell and swell under her garance-coloured gown’. Her friendship with Mrs Holdock,

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whom she invites into her home to talk ‘scandal’,66 further suggests the pitfalls of high society for the McPhees. This is why McRimmon is represented as such an ambivalent friend and employer. McRimmon is a vicious anti-Semite, with his own bitter reasons for crippling Steiner’s company. There is, he believes, ‘more discernment in a dog than a Jew’,67 and, at the moment of triumph over Steiner, he confesses to having waited ‘fourteen years to break that Jew Firm’. Known as the ‘blind devil’, the ‘screech’ of his voice and the ‘chuckle[s] and whistle[s] in his dry old throat’68 intimate that – despite his patronage of McPhee – McRimmon is animated by pure, unremitting hatred. Kipling knew the seductiveness of anti-Semitic conspiracy theory to the anti-monopoly lobby in the States, and it could be argued that by attributing such anti-Semitic sentiments to the morally doubtful character of McRimmon, he challenges or discredits them. While this reading is consistent with the scriptural overtones of the name, McRimmon – these overtones being thoroughly Jewish and directed explicitly against hatred and revenge – it seems not to be the whole story. The fact is, Kipling allows McRimmon to win the corporate battle, and more importantly, he allows his ‘devilry’ to animate McPhee’s homely purpose. Without McRimmon – who is shrewd enough to calculate and conspire against the owners of the Grotkau by paying off their crew to abandon the ship most opportunely for McPhee – the little man, the humble Chief Engineer, is lost. And this is the outcome we are meant to fear most of all. He tolerates this corruption supposedly for the sake of McPhee – comfortable, kindly, and humane – qualities that make conscionable, or at the very least, painfully inevitable the hate, fear, and racism of McRimmon. This is the ethical problem of the story, and it is one that occurs elsewhere in Kipling’s fiction: while uncomfortable with political injustice, he tolerates it for some supposedly higher, happier purpose. In ‘Bread upon the Waters’ this higher, happier purpose is sustained in the innocent, philanthropic nature of the McPhees, which is reasserted in the epilogue to the story. As socialites, they balance ‘conspicuous consumption’ with philanthropic duty: when they celebrate McPhee’s retirement with a pleasure cruise, Janet finds ‘a very sick woman in the second-class saloon, so that for sixteen days she lived below, and chatted with the stewardesses at the foot of the second-saloon stairs while her patient slept’.69 Meanwhile, McPhee remains a passenger ‘for exactly twenty-four hours’ before the engineer’s mess ‘joyfully took him into its bosom’.70 The company, the tale wryly concludes, was ‘richer by the unpaid services of a highly certificated engineer’.71 The ironic use of

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the words ‘richer’ and ‘unpaid’ – like the philanthropic impulse of Janet McPhee – is surely Kipling’s way of precluding a purely economic reading of the day’s work. By celebrating work as an economically and politically unmotivated concept – inspired by common humanity, decency, and duty – he places it beyond the analytical reach of Eugene Debs, Thorsten Veblen or Henry George, equally influential opponents of the unchecked capitalist enterprise. The tale suggests that McPhee needs neither Charles Reade (whom he reads religiously) nor Reade’s radicalism. Nor should he be too much troubled by the capital indicted in his favourite work by Reade, Hard Cash (1863). In the age of organised labour and US socialism, ‘Bread upon the Waters’ embraces parts of the anti-capitalist argument, but ultimately urges the engineer to depend upon the industrialist, however morally questionable. What is more – and in this respect the story appears to go a step further than the ‘philanthropic’ exoneration of high finance in Captain’s Courageous – Kipling is thoroughly aware of the implications of this argument for his own writing. This is implied by the awkward presence of the narrator, a hack writer, in the money-driven culture of the tale. In the initial stages of the story, the narrator is unaware of McPhee’s reward, and baffled by the ‘unexplained glory in the air’ during dinner. He feels as though he is ‘watching fireworks without knowing the festival’.72 Employed in the past by Holdock, Steiner and Chase to write a pamphlet on cabin ventilation that earns him ‘seven pounds ten, cash down – an important sum of money in those days’,73 he is caught between the charmed circle of their new life and the humiliations of the old. Troubled by the changes to his friends, he is on the outside, poised awkwardly between the scenario of the Boardroom and the homely riches of the McPhees. The scenario bears more than a passing resemblance to the uncomfortable mediating role of Kipling as an apologist for McRimmon. It is a discomfiture reflected in the mocking account of the narrator’s work for Holdock – a pamphlet on cabin ventilation composed ‘in the Bouverie–Byzantine style, with baroque and rococo embellishments’.74 If he prostitutes his talents to business, he supposedly retains enough critical distance from the enterprise to tip the balance in favour of good men – men like McPhee. Thus while alluding to the trials and temptations of the McPhees – to radicalism, revenge, corporate intrigue and corruption – the tale ultimately envisions the perfectibility of the industrial-capitalist environment they inhabit. It is worth noting how significantly this idea figured in the US imperial enterprise. The industrial expansion of the Gilded Age produced, as writers like Twain recognised, endless victims – largely

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among the immigrant, African-American, and rural populations, whose exploitation needed to be negotiated, suppressed, or explained away. Kipling’s intimacy with the industrial and social conflicts of the day accounts for much of the subterranean complexity of these stories, for they reflect the unusual powers of romance and irony needed to face down the challenge of organised labour. Whatever the double-edged quality of the tales regarding US capital and high finance, the overriding fantasy, as we have seen, is of an uncritical labour force, compliant to the needs, the market and the workplace. The obedience ultimately implicit in this defence of the day’s work is evidenced in the first appearance in these writings of what was to become a favourite metaphor – the trope of worker as machine, or some other efficient, non-human component in the industrial mechanism. Stories like ‘A Walking Delegate’ and ‘.007’ (Ian Fleming used the title for the codename of James Bond) refigure workers as horses and trains, so perfectly reconciled to the structural hierarchies of the workplace, that they are indistinguishable from it. ‘A Walking Delegate’ finds Kipling even more clearly maligning US labour politics. Set in a Vermont farmyard among a community of talking horses, it tells how a militant horse from Kansas (home of the People’s Party, and the banner Populist state) infiltrates the peaceful pastures of the farm and begins to upset the Vermont horses with his socialist propaganda.75 The rhetoric of his campaign against ‘invijjus distinctions o’ track an’ pedigree’ parodies the language of tumbleweed Populism: [W]e take our stand with all four feet on the inalienable rights of the horse, pure and simple – the high-toned child o’ nature, fed by the same wavin’ grass, cooled by the same rippling brook – yes, an’ warmed by the same gen’rous sun as falls impartially on the outside an’ the inside of the pampered machine o’ the trottin’-track, or the bloated coupe-horses o’ these yere Eastern cities. Are we not the same flesh and blood?76 In 1892, as presidential candidate of the People’s Party, General James B. Weaver took his stand on the same ‘inalienable rights’, offering justice for ‘the weak as well as the mighty’.77 There are echoes of other Kansas Populists in the horse’s language. Mary Lease protested, in a speech reported in the Kansas City Star, that ‘[t]he great common people [ . . . ] are slaves, and monopoly is master. The West and South are bound and prostrate before the manufacturing East’.78 Grant Otis promised, in a public letter of 1890, that ‘[w]hen the American people shall [ . . . ] organise for

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work as we organise for war! Then will we behold PROSPERITY such as the world has never witnessed’.79 The resignation of Kipling’s horses to urban culture is a far cry from the agrarian politics of Bryan – the Populist and Presidential Candidate, whose 1896 address to the Democratic Convention exalted the nation’s ‘broad and fertile prairies’. Muldoon, the ex-car-horse described as ‘any colour you like that is not white’,80 outlines the pleasures of city life in a distinctly African-American idiom: ‘On de Belt line’ [the New York cable car] we don’t reckon no horse wuth his keep ‘less he can switch de car off de track, run her round on de cobbles, an’ dump her ag’in ahead o’de truck what’s blockin’ him . [ . . . ] I don’t advertise myself fer no circus-horse, but I knew that trick better than most, an’ dey was good to me in de stables, fer I saved time on de Belt – an’ time’s what dey hunt in N’york’.81 Muldoon’s New York – ‘dey was good to me [ . . . ] for I saved time on de Belt’ – is, of course, a picture of racial and industrial contentment that would have been unrecognisable to anyone who read the newspapers in 1890s America. The country was deep in depression; the cities were racked by strike action, and the workforce was dividing along lines of race and ethnicity. In his capacity to unite American labour and create a formidable union presence, Eugene V. Debs, stood out as the chief threat to corporate interests. Though he later claimed that the tale referred to ‘a kind of populist not confined to America’,82 Kipling’s manuscript is less coy about its target, naming the delegate as the leader of the American Railway Union (ARU).83 It was Debs who argued, in tones redolent of the yellow horse, that ‘[t]he highest eloquence springs from the lowliest sources and pleads trumpet-tongued for the children of the abyss’.84 Following the prison sentence imposed for his part in the Pullman Palace dispute, Debs became a hero of the Left: the Chicago Evening Press declared him a ‘victorious soldier returned fresh from conquests’.85 Clearly when Kipling ended the story by having the Vermont workforce beat the Kansas horse to a pulp, he took a different view, celebrating the violent, anti-democratic response of the US government to the Pullman Palace dispute of 1893. The dispute began with members of Debs’ newly founded ARU striking at the works of the Pullman Palace Car Company, Chicago. When, to support the strikers, the ARU boycotted Pullman cars and the trains pulling them, the government accused the union of acting in restraint of trade and interfering with the delivery of the mails.

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Troops were sent against the strikers, the boycott was broken, and as the leader of the ARU, Debs was imprisoned for six months. Not only did Kipling’s hatred of Debs and the ARU provoke this scurrilous tale, but a consistent attempt in his writings to thwart American socialism by peddling empire to the leisure class. Imperialism, he argues, is the focusing narrative of national identity – a provider of social stability in a fractious, reforming age. He had long assumed this in the colonies, but at the turn of the century, it became the official argument for the expansion of Western powers. In Britain during the early 1900s, Joseph Chamberlain declared social equality the great reward of expansion under the programme later known as ‘social imperialism’. In terms of our understanding of imperialism and its modes of representation, the significant feature of these writings is the concerted attempt to force the American case to fit the facts of empire, battening the imperialist argument onto a recalcitrant social field. As Robert H. Weibe argues, 1890s America was radically uncertain of its social direction. In the transition from a community-based to an urban-industrial society, the anti-monopoly argument – a basic assertion of community self-determination – appealed to a diverse range of political figures and parties, from Henry George to Henry Adams. But, as Weibe remarks, between the industrial capitalist and the opponents of high finance, there were no clear-cut terms of conflict or argument: ‘the two camps never even found a common ground for debate; in fact, neither really sought to communicate with the other’.86 Such an insecure environment was vulnerable to manipulation by organisations such as the Ku Klux Klan, which preyed upon the small-town bigotries of a nation confronted by extensive urban-industrial development. The Klan is, of course, an extreme example of how extremists exploit popular social and political anxieties. But just as there was much in Kipling’s work to support the agrarian, community-based values of the labour movement, there was also much of the intolerance and racism – not to mention the paraphernalia of the fraternal lodge – rife in contemporary politics and, later, the Klan. The consent of the labour force – the country’s socialist lobby – to the industrial system required ever more elaborate strategies to represent the workplace as an opportunity for self-realisation and fulfilment. The elaborate occult language of the early trade unions is an example of the vulnerability of the age to narratives of exclusive social belonging, portraying a standing army of outsiders and political others – from immigrants and foreigners to capitalists – eager to rob the livelihood of the American working man. In the story ‘.007’, which is unhealthily

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obsessed with the freemasonry of American labour, Kipling explores the complex ceremonial language of the Brotherhoods (the biddable forbears of union socialism in the 1890s) which he turns deftly to the advantage of the industrialist. In this story, the worker is a machine – a railway engine – whose sole aspiration is to haul a heavy load and be admitted into the Brotherhood. The small engine, .007, is forced, inauspiciously, to prove his worth by deputising for a huge, brash machine, the Mogul. The name of the arrogant Mogul suggests the usual sideswipe at conspicuous consumption, and there is a discernable snigger at the inventory of goods thrown across the tracks when he crashes: For there lay, scattered over the landscape, from the burst cars, typewriters, sewing-machines, bicycles in crates, a consignment of silverplated imported harness, French dresses and gloves, a dozen finely moulded hardwood mantels, a fifteen-foot naphtha-launch, with a solid brass bedstead crumpled around her bows, a case of telescopes and microscopes, two coffins, a case of very best candies, some gilt edged dairy produce, butter and eggs in an omelette, a broken box of expensive toys, and a few hundred other luxuries.87 Those of his readers lucky enough to own such goods would have enjoyed the joke. But if the tenor of the passage replicates the stock, anti-capitalist component of American politics, the allegory remains – recalling Weibe’s comments on the diffuseness of the anti-monopoly argument – fundamentally committed to the capitalist system and the distributional hierarchies of labour required for the day’s work. The point is that the people who are the true subjects of the allegory – the workforce – will certainly never have enjoyed gilt-edged dairy produce, silver-plated harnesses, and so forth. Nor does Kipling wish them to. The trick is to get them to produce these luxuries in the full knowledge that, in so doing, they are subsidising the extraordinary social inequality about which the tale is so frank. The answer to this age-old problem is found in the freemasonry of the workplace. .007 is initiated into the consumer culture of the Mogul by initiation into a Brotherhood, a secret society marked by internal hierarchies and degrees that mystify labour, transforming it into a priesthood with special disciplinary powers to punish and reward. In this way, the unwitting .007 – a trope for the worker worthy of Marinetti’s fascist ‘art’ – is hailed by the values of the market, the gilt-edged capital of the leisure class. He is declared in the end a ‘full and accepted Brother of the

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Amalgamated Brotherhood of Locomotives’, admitted to the ‘Degree of Superior Flier’ by the Purple Emperor, the Master of the Lodge.88 It is important to understand that these Brotherhoods were a historical reality in nineteenth century America. They were the quaint, conservative precursors of militant organisations such as the ARU – not given, of course, to militant action of the sort witnessed at Chicago in the Pullman Palace dispute. Eugene Debs was, in his early career, a charter member of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen at Terre Haute, serving under the Grand Master, Joshua A. Leach. The Brotherhood was ‘primarily a benevolent association’,89 a sort of temperance society concerned with the moral vigour of its members. It ‘rarely if ever expressed any hostility towards railroad owners and managers’, and had as its motto: ‘Benevolence, Sobriety, Industry’.90 The Brotherhood championed the dignity of work and social order, emphasising, in the words of one Grand Master, the ‘high moral position of manliness’.91 A younger, less militant Debs argued, in the Locomotive Firemen’s Magazine, that it was the duty of the Brotherhood to ‘give to railway corporations a class of sober and industrious men [ . . . ] men who will be in the direct interests of their employers’.92 The ethos of solidarity with the industrialist satisfied the need for a socialist organisation without teeth. Debs left the sober politics of the Brotherhoods well behind him in his later career. Kipling evidently wished he had not. This is why he is so painfully content with the deference of fishermen to railroad magnates, likewise the good fortune of the McPhees, or the hauling of luxuries by the rookie engine.

The English dream: servants of the cheque book In Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison explains the exclusion of AfricanAmericans from US cultural history: Here [in the US] with its particular formulations, and in the absence of real knowledge or open-minded inquiry about Africans and African-Americans, under the pressures of ideological and imperialistic rationales for subjugation, an American brand of Africanism emerged: strongly urged, thoroughly serviceable, companionably ego-reinforcing, and pervasive. For excellent reasons of state – because European sources of cultural hegemony were dispersed but not yet valorized in the new country – the process of organising American coherence through a distancing Africanism became the dominant mode of a new cultural hegemony.93

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The ‘Africanism’ of Captain’s Courageous (‘Africanism’ is Morrison’s term for the suppression of black-American culture in US literary history) bears witness to the Americanisation of Kipling’s politics after Vermont. His depiction of the ship’s cook makes sober reading in the light of Morrison’s comments. The cook onboard the We’re Here is portrayed as a ‘most disconcerting nigger’ who exerts a sinister influence over the crew by voodoo ceremonies and divination: he ‘grunted and muttered charms as long as he could see the ducking point of flame’.94 If the cook’s friendship with Harvey recalls Huck’s friendship with Jim in Huckleberry Finn, Kipling is intent upon scotching the liberal reading of Jim’s black experience, relegating black Americans to the lowest divisions of a social order predicated upon white capital. Just as the crew of the We’re Here finally serve the corporate venture, so the cook assumes his unalterable place in the scheme – as a high-class servant to young, white Americans. The question of racial inequality is entirely avoided, stifling the most obvious voice of protest against US imperialism. As W.E.B. DuBois once commented, ‘we black men seem the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness’.95 Elsewhere Kipling simply avoids the African-American presence, reinforcing the ‘coded language and purposeful restriction’ of a nation with, as Morrison puts it, ‘racial disingenuousness and moral frailty at its heart’.96 In the light of his reverence for clannish – if not, perhaps, Klannish – fraternities and brotherhoods, this racist element of his thinking forms a discomforting counterpart to his anti-socialist, antimonopoly argument, lending his writings some allegiance with rightwing, extremist ideologies. In his defence, this is a charge that can be levelled at parties across the political spectrum – not least the major socialist party of the 1890s, the Populists. There is, of course, no evidence whatsoever that Kipling ever consciously sympathised with racial supremacists of any nationality or political persuasion, but it is important to understand the incipient racism nevertheless present in his writings – texts shot through with the cultural anxieties of the period, and to this extent culpable in fomenting the social, political, and racial phobias exploited by extremist parties and organisations. Morrison’s comments on the dispersed but latent forms of European hegemony seem particularly appropriate to any reading of Kipling’s faltering admission into US literary history. The chance of selling Raj paternalism to United States was slim to non-existent. Nevertheless, this was Kipling’s ambition, and the fact that he could countenance the idea, in the light of the nation’s ambivalence about its own colonial past, implies the durability of those Old-World formulations described

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by Morrison. Significantly Kim won the lifelong admiration of Twain, despite his subsequent hatred of English and US imperialism – ample demonstration, if any were needed, of the seductiveness of imperial selfimagining even to America’s most critically self-conscious writers. In Vermont, Kipling’s notion of India was adapted to the transatlantic scheme, supplying political myths appropriate to America’s anxieties and needs. For example, this ‘American’ India is infused with meditations on financial corruption, the most pressing topic in US politics at the time. Many of the tales show English characters coping with economic hardship, the temptations of wealth, conflicts of interest, and other monetary distractions from their day’s work. In so doing, they project the US social drama onto an English imperial landscape, offering the rhetoric of discipline and duty as a corrective to the unbridled capitalism of the States. Through this landscape of probity, the mother country teaches America its imperial manners, the self-sacrificial mission of ‘The White Man’s Burden’, and this image of diligent feudal service becomes, in turn, a metaphor of social containment, discipline, and control for the younger nation. Frequently this agenda – however conscious or otherwise on Kipling’s part – strains the idealisation of mother culture to breaking point. Some of the stories about England he wrote in Vermont rank among his least convincing, registering a profound unease with the home country that is only heightened by the attempt to romanticise English discipline and duty. In a letter to Henley he outlined his objections to American society: Don’t spare the rod in your criticisms of anything. This ’ere is the land where “everything goes” and the lawlessness leaks into the books as it does into all the other things. Only, there’s no force at the back of the incessant posing to be free – only common people doing common things in the cheapest and most effective way for immediate results.97 The attitude recalls a stereotype of American anarchy endemic in Victorian society, which is typified in works such as Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewitt and, later in the century, Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet. Kipling, however, becomes increasingly self-conscious about his moralising tone. He launches into an ironic salvo on moral decency and censorship: I believe in the critic, right or wrong so long as there is a critic and a canon. I believe in the Saturday Review, the Spectator, the Athenaeum, and all the Quarterlies. I believe in Mudie,98 in the British Nation, in

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American Fiction 87

Notwithstanding his doubts about America, Kipling could not genuinely muster the outrage parodied in the letter. If the invocation of the critic and the canon recalled the literary conservatism of Lang and the crowd at the Saville Club, the joke about Torquemada and the Inquisition indicate a characteristic unwillingness to play the part of the dictator or the bore. Kipling nevertheless thought it possible to intimate to his American readers the overabundance of ‘authority and decency’ he found in the British Empire, where standards of workmanship, law, and personal honesty reigned supreme. He had begun to work this seam a few years before in The Naulahka, where, meeting families that have long ‘administered the fortunes of India’, Tarvin finds the English disinterested in the rich necklace, and fascinated by his ‘lively belief in the possibility of getting something out of the land beside a harvest of regrets’.100 In The Day’s Work, the Anglo-Indian civilians of the story, ‘William the Conqueror’, are stoically unconcerned with money or domestic comforts. Martyn’s ramshackle bungalow, furnished with unmatching chairs ‘picked up at sales of dead men’s effects’, is a poor return for his ‘six hundred depreciated silver rupees a month’.101 The empire is the world of honest, unremunerated labour, untroubled either by the radicalism or the capitalism of the American cities: Thus did people live who had such an income; and in a land where each man’s pay, age, and position are printed in a book, that all may read, it is hardly worth while to play at pretences in word or deed.102 ‘William the Conqueror’ is set during the 1876–1878 famine in Bombay, Madras, and Mysore, where five million Indians died from starvation. In his eagerness to celebrate the role of British officials in the relief operation, Kipling refused to consider the possibility that imperial rule exacerbated famine by uprooting ancient systems of agriculture and food distribution. What he celebrates instead are white men and, in a concession to the feminist lobby, ‘new women’, faithfully serving the imperial ideal, bringing comfort to Indian children and salvaging political order from the wreckage of the east.

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Mrs Grundy, in the Young Person, and in everything else that sits on the head of talent without form or rule. I believe in Torquemada and the Inquisition; in everything Doctor Johnson said about anybody and in all things that have authority and decency to back ’em. For they are necessary, and now I know why.99

The story was first published in the Christmas edition of Edward Bok’s Ladies’ Home Journal, which was then an outlet for feminist opinion.103 ‘I think’, Kipling wrote to Bok, ‘the story ought to give your women readers a little notion of a woman’s life where life is rather trying’.104 It tells how Miss Martyn, nicknamed William the Conqueror, insists on helping her brother during the relief operation in the South, and in so doing, falls in love with his colleague, the energetic, virile, Scott. William is a female who can ‘look men slowly and deliberately between the eyes’,105 and as a New Woman ‘conquers’ not only the heart of her lover, Scott, but also overcomes the prejudices of a fiercely masculine society. Ultimately, however, she does not forgo the white woman’s burden Scott represents, remaining – like Kate Sheriff – a figurehead of maternal responsibility, who mothers orphaned children while serving colonial power. When Kipling received the proofs of the story from Bok, he was delighted with the illustrations by William Ladd Taylor. Nevertheless, he mischievously noted that the artist was ‘a bit wide of things’ when it came to the topography of British India. Taylor had drawn William as ‘a Baltimore girl and a very pretty one and the scene in Arizona where she watches the little Mexican babies curvetting round one of the men who surveyed the Southern Pacific is beautiful to behold’.106 Nevertheless, Kipling conceded, ‘[m]y “American” stories when they come out will probably be just as English as the pictures are TransAtlantic’. Kipling was right to suggest that his American stories would share this transatlantic quality; ‘a man’, he explained, ‘can’t jump off his shadow’. As surely as Kipling viewed America through the lens of empire, the transatlantic scenario redefined what the empire meant to him, Americanising the Raj themes of imperial duty and sacrifice. Elsewhere in The Day’s Work, the corporate lobby is brought to heel by sober, industrious colonials. Decent workmanship must be guarded vigilantly against outside interests – usually those of unscrupulous financiers. In ‘The Bridge Builders’, Findlayson and Hitchcock labour not only to build a bridge, but also to protect the enterprise against profiteers, fending off ‘futile correspondences hinting at great wealth of commission if one, only one, rather doubtful consignment were passed’.107 The head workman, Peroo, is equally unswayed by profit. Although ‘worth almost any price he might have chosen to put upon his services’, his work is for the honour of the bridge, and he is paid ‘not within many silver pieces of his proper value’.108 Even the deity Ganesha adopts the language of the corporate lobby in his explanation of imperial enterprise:

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It is all for the profit of my mahajun’s – my fat money-lenders that worship me at each new year, when they draw my image at the head of the account-books. I, looking over their shoulders by lamplight, see that the names in the books are those of men in far places – for all the towns are drawn together by the fire-carriage, and the money comes and goes swiftly, and the account-books grow as fat as – myself. And I, who am Ganesh of Good Luck, I bless my peoples.109 Published alongside tales of the American railroads, Brotherhoods, and unions, it is not difficult to discern the economic and social overtones of these Indian stories. Kipling seems to have recognised the appeal of this imperial romance to a society bored by ‘the dead weight of material things worked up into gods, that only bored their worshippers more and worse and longer’.110 American culture was, he suggested, ‘still more or less connected with the English tradition and schools’, and he sensed an opportunity to consolidate that connection.111 In Blood, Class, and Nostalgia, Christopher Hitchens argues that in the late nineteenth century this intellectual connection was exploited by English intellectuals and politicians eager to establish the foundations of Anglo-American alliance. Keen to protect their remaining overseas interests against European rivals, the British cultivated a cultural rapport with America, which involved advocating all things English – historical, artistic, and hegemonic – to the States in return for ongoing American military and economic assurances.112 In this alliance, the British believed that their experience of empire supplied the cultural sophistication and political subtlety deficient in US society: ‘Americans were to supply the capital, and the British were to provide the class.’113 As Hitchens suggests, Kipling later played a key role in petitioning for America’s entry into the First World War. As far back as his time in Vermont, he had begun to register the importance and complexity of this Anglo-American exchange. In the story ‘An Error in the Fourth Dimension’, the bored American worshipper of material things, the son of a railroad magnate, renounces the country of his birth to begin a new life in England. In all his affairs, Wilton Sargent labours to be ‘just a little more English than the English’,114 and to this end he purchases a country estate, Holt Hangers, where he is taught by his servants each man’s ‘decreed position in the fabric of the realm’:115 If he had money and leisure, England stood ready to give him all that money and leisure could buy. The price paid, she would ask no

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questions. He took his cheque-book and accumulated things – warily at first, for he remembered that in America things own the man. To his delight, he discovered that in England he could put his belongings under his feet; for classes, ranks and denominations of people rose, as it were, from the earth, and silently and discreetly took charge of his possessions. They had been born and bred for that purpose – servants of the cheque-book.116 In New York, Wilton had lived as a recluse behind the forbidding walls of his country house, loathing his daily trip to the office ‘hanging on to a leather strap between an Irish washerwoman and a German anarchist’.117 But at Holt Hangers he discovers a sensibly organic society, versed in ancient principles of ‘class, rank and denomination’ handed down through the ages. The counselling of Wilton by the so-called ‘menials’ of Holt Hangers recalls the role of tutelage played by the fishermen in Captain’s Courageous, who similarly reign in the pleasures of an American millionaire. Grudgingly declaring Wilton’s adjustment to the life of the English gentry ‘creaseless’, the narrator is nevertheless convinced that Wilton will eventually betray his American origins: there is, he mischievously observes, ‘room for an infinity of mistakes when a man begins to take liberties with his nationality’.118 On a subsequent visit to Holt Hangers, he learns about the farcical events leading up to his friend’s arrest, criminal conviction, and ongoing civil dispute with an English railway company. Wilton, it transpires, has befriended a number of important scholars associated with the British Museum, intending to increase his knowledge of rare jewels, manuscripts, prints, paintings, and various other aspects of art, culture, and civilisation. Among those who come to ‘play with him’ is Mr Hackman, an expert in archaeology who, to the horror of the American, casts doubt upon the authenticity of a scarab in Wilton’s collection. Troubled by the possibility that the scarab is a fraud, Wilton rushes to fetch the jewel from his London chambers. In so doing he flags down the exalted ‘Induna’ of the Buchonian Railway, and is restrained by a guardsman while climbing aboard the train. After ‘slugging’ the guardsman, and, realising his mistake, compounding the offence by attempting to bribe him, Wilton is arrested and charged with assault. The case is settled with a fine, but the Buchonian Railway decides to pursue a civil action against Wilton, which, the narrator comments archly, generates a pile of correspondence ‘perhaps nine inches high’ that looked ‘very businesslike’.119

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In the midst of Wilton’s frustration with the Company, the narrator spitefully observes the ‘borrowed mask of indifference’ dropping from the American’s character. Wilton slips back into racial type, betraying the stereotypical character flaws of the worlds ‘Youngest People’ – the ‘rapid and purposeless flights of thought, the child’s lust for immediate revenge, and the child’s pathetic bewilderment, who knocks his head against the bad, wicked table’.120 This stereotype is focused in the story by the theme of the railroads. Kipling offers a resumé of the Sargent family’s ruthless dealings in America. Wilton’s father had ‘striven to wreck, before capture, the railways of his native land’, and, we are ominously told, ‘some touch of the old bandit railway blood’ still infects his son.121 Hastily constructed in the scramble westwards, America’s tracks are not ‘permanent-way’, the synonym applied to the English lines that pass through Wilton’s estate. The English tracks are, contrastingly, perdurable and peaceful additions to the rural landscape: the engines of the Great Buchonian Railway Company cross the English countryside ‘with a bee like drone in the day and a flutter of strong wings at night’.122 Hatred of the railroad companies was rife in 1890’s America, which lends the organic portrait of the Great Buchonian Railway (a company with an aptly ‘bucolic’ name) topical resonance. Behind Wilton’s need for Holt Hangers, Kipling suggests, lurks economic corruption, lawlessness, and political disorder, which only the calming influence of English society and culture can redress. In this respect, Wilton’s education at Holt Hangers seems to recall the Greco-Roman metaphor, with the impetuous child of America revisiting the lands of the Old World for edification and improvement. Even in the Anglo-American debate about the authenticity of the scarab – a sly reference to Wilton’s racial imposture – there is an apposite contrast between the impulsive American and his calm English companion, who has ‘a way of carrying really priceless antiquities on his tie-ring and in his trouser pockets’.123 Hackman, nonchalant about relics, sequesters them about his person with the hauteur of the gentleman-scholar on the Grand Tour, which, of course, was often the habit of adventurers like Lord Elgin. The gentleman’s pseudo-aristocratic poise is the crucial quality England offers America, dignifying imperial wealth and its place in the institutions of the mother country. If, however, Kipling accepts this stereotype, he does so with reservations and provisos, gently mocking the pompousness of the Company. When the Buchonian’s representatives discover that Wilton is an American, they make an ‘allowance’ for his action in flagging down the train, declaring it ‘every Englishman’s duty once in his life to study the

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great branch of our Anglo-Saxon race across the ocean’.124 They are, the narrator suggests, ‘as unable as Wilton’ to function meaningfully in this transatlantic scenario.125 Pressing Wilton to build a high wall capped with broken bottles around his estate, they threaten to take the case as far as the House of Lords. Given the strained diplomatic relations between Britain and America at the time, this barbed image of restraint is a parody of English diplomacy and power. It is a metaphor of failed diplomacy – the dogged, unimaginative pursuit of small matters; and the ponderous accumulation of administrative sludge. Published shortly before the Venezuela Crisis of 1895,126 which brought the nations to the brink of war, ‘An Error in the Fourth Dimension’ augured evil for Britain and the Englishman in Vermont. Wilton might have been driven from Holt Hangers, but the experience makes him more firmly and aggressively American – a notion Kipling stresses with the final portrait of the millionaire steaming proudly along the Hudson in his private yacht. It was only a short time before Kipling exhorted America to ‘take up the white man’s burden’, and these tales confirm that, for him, empire, like charity, begins at Home. The imperial formulations Morrison traces in American culture do not need explicit stating in such stories (even though they are explicitly stated in Captain’s Courageous) because they are already endemic to the quiet countryside of ‘An Error in the Fourth Dimension’, where rigid social definitions – of immigrants, the working class, women, and all political ‘subversives’ – are all in the day’s work. A companion story, ‘My Sunday at Home’, handles the same theme of Anglo-American misunderstanding, but this time with considerable frankness about the conflicts that lurk beneath the surface of the ‘ordered English landscape’.127 To another American gentleman, a doctor, the mother country seems a ‘paradise’, the most ‘sumptuous rest cure in his knowledge’.128 The doctor meets the narrator on a train, and, after enlarging upon the beauties of New York, looks out upon the ‘ordered English landscape wrapped in its Sunday peace’.129 It is a place of leisure and recuperation. In fact, he has come to visit a fellow-countryman who has ‘retired to a place called The Hoe [ . . . ] to recover from nervous dyspepsia’.130 How anyone in England ‘could retain any nervous disorder pass[es] his comprehension’.131 Nevertheless, his comments on Hardy’s fiction – ‘And so this is about Tess’s country, ain’t it? I feel just as if I were in a book’132 – suggest the illusion of his English dream, which is shattered by his encounter with a violent English labourer. Misinterpreting the guard’s announcement onboard the train: ‘Has anybody here a bottle of medicine? A gentleman has taken a bottle of poison (laudanum) by mistake’133 the American rashly administers an

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antidote to a ‘navvy’ who is merely drunk (the guard meant that someone had taken poison ‘away with ’im, in ’is ’ands’ and was now ‘wirin’ from Woking’).134 Convulsed with the pain, the navvy grips the American by the collar, fixing him to the platform until he can exact his revenge. The navvy accuses the American of being an anarchist and attempting to poison him: There’s justice, I tell you, in England; and my Union’ll prosecute too. We don’t stand no tricks with people’s insides ’ere. They gave a woman ten years for a sight less than this. An you’ll ’ave to pay ’undreds an ’undreds o’ pounds, beside a pension to the missus.’135 Ultimately the labourer’s threats come to nothing – because the honest locals, who rush to the doctor’s support, subdue him and call for the police. The story implies that the American owes the English thanks for their willingness to deal with such insolent, working-class villains. Kipling’s attitude to the navvy reflects the anxieties of an era witnessing the emergence of a cohesive working-class identity and an active labour movement.136 Faced with a choice between American ‘anarchism’, labour agitation, and aristocracy, he plumps unreservedly for the latter – a choice that always undermines his apparent sympathy with the working class. When, in the tale, the labourer assaults the local Squire, the villagers bring him to heel, attacking him with makeshift weapons: [T]he people of Framlynghame Admiral, so many as were on the platform, rallied to the call in the best spirit of feudalism. It was the one porter who beat the navvy on the nose with a ticket-punch, but it was the three third-class tickets who attached themselves to his legs and freed the captive.137 The narrator’s belief that the labourer’s social counterparts, the thirdclass travellers, will punish him for this social transgression, intimates a landscape of pastoral citizenship, which is essentially antagonistic to the claims of organised labour. Kipling must be given his dues for recognising, long before the Georgian preservationists and poets, that the mobilisation of imperial society against modern social and political challenges – represented here by socialism and the emergence of a wealthy, expanding United States – required a pastoral rhetoric fitted to the task of demonstrating England’s ‘immemorial civilisation’.138 This became the natural idiom of poets such as Edward Thomas, Rupert Brook, and Wilfred Owen.

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It was, of course, a mythology of Englishness tested, in Kipling’s own age, by the horrors of First World War. For C.S. Lewis, the landscape of ‘My Sunday at Home’ is so intently described that it overpowers the action.139 It seems, however, that if there is a disproportionate ratio of background landscape to foreground action, this is nevertheless part of Kipling’s meaning. Though it appears to celebrate the beauty and richness of England, ‘My Sunday at Home’ is all about protecting that beauty from foreigners and radicals – men and women who would ‘thrust an inexpert finger into the workings of an alien life’:140 And what a garden of Eden it was, this fatted, clipped, and washen land! A man could camp in any open field with more sense of home and security than the stateliest buildings of foreign cities could afford. And the joy was that it was all mine inalienably – groomed hedgerow, spotless road, decent grey-stone cottage, serried spinney, tasselled copse, apple-bellied hawthorn, and well-grown tree.141 The essential thrust of this passage is safety and shared integrity, the belief that one can camp in any field without being attacked, and that this is the Englishman’s birthright. Kipling celebrates England because he owns and feels safe in it (a notion that recalls Great Expectations, where Wemmick’s ‘castle’ is equipped with a drawbridge to seal him off from the dangerous, mercantile flux of the great city). Stripped of the undeniably great prose, the politics of the passage are undeniably crass. The Tory platform on law and order is the direct descendant of this imperialist ideology, which associates crude ideas of personal security with well-clipped hedgerows, inalienable rights in property, and protection from foreigners. There is nevertheless a curious air of exile, an odd theme of dislocation beneath this patriotic language. The narrator is ‘a man who sees his country but seldom’,142 and who loves it ‘with the love and the devotion that three thousand miles of intervening sea bring to fullest flower’.143 He is a drifter, content to abandon himself to ‘the current of Circumstance’.144 This aspect of the narration qualifies the reactionary tone of the tale, suggesting that the narrator is a nationalist only because he is not really of England, and that his values are, in fact, impartially cosmopolitan: ‘What should they know of England who only England know?’145 The drifter, the hostage of ‘Circumstance’, is a transatlantic figure, living imaginatively in two homelands yet finally belonging to neither. Kipling led such a transatlantic life in Vermont, brokering Raj imperialism

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to an American nation so troubled by its status as an imperial power that it persistently refused to acknowledge this element of its political identity. On a visit to Washington, where he viewed the ethnological exhibits in the Smithsonian, he explained to Theodore Roosevelt the ‘wonder of a people who, having extirpated the aboriginals of their continent more completely than any modern race had done, honestly believed that they were a godly little New England community, setting examples to brutal mankind’.146 Roosevelt, he remembered, made the ‘glass cases of Indian relics shake with his rebuttals’.147

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Mowgli’s Feral Campaign: The Jungle Books and the Americanisation of Empire

Kipling’s first child, Josephine, was born deep in the Vermont Winter of 1892, almost on the turn of New Year. The ring of sleigh bells echoing over the snowbound farms, the young family made shift against the cold and counted themselves ‘extraordinarily and self-centredly content’.1 With the troubles of Yokohama still in recent memory, there was a feeling of nervous expectation, of ‘stillness and suspense’,2 about that first American winter. With the snowfall rising to the level of the windowsill, Kipling took to his workroom and watched his pen ‘begin to write stories about Mowgli and the animals, which later grew into the Jungle Books’.3 Kipling had arrived in the New World, and was about to make a new start – not just as a married man and a father, but also as a writer. In what follows, the newness of that first Vermont experience is explored in the revolutionary aesthetic and political developments of the two Jungle Books. Arguably The Jungle Books illustrate most explicitly Kipling’s deepening interest in the form and transmission of stories – particularly in the social function of narratives, narrators, and storytellers. They are also richly allegorical stories, born in the transatlantic circumstances of that first American contact, and richly informed by the political and artistic repercussions of Kipling’s new status as an ex-colonial British resident in the States. Kipling’s memory of writing the Jungle Stories in the deep snows of America is an appropriately graphical picture, evoking the clean canvas and the virgin country, connecting the snowbound scene with the newly unfolding narrative – the virginal manuscript pages that bore the first imprints of Mowgli and the Free People. When he looked out across that 96

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lonely landscape, he saw the deserted, decaying farms of Brattleboro, long abandoned by the young and left in the hands of aging parents.4 The restlessness, striving, and social movement of modern America were plainly evidenced in such visible transformations. America was changing, and so – the Jungle Stories suggest – were the terms in which the imperial author thought and wrote. Here was a nation establishing the social pattern of its next hundred or so years, abandoning the settled rural culture of earlier times, and embracing a restive, mobile, and transient existence. These were the first stirrings of the so-called New Times, the age of decentralised labour and the powerful corporation, in which tactical alliances of social interest would take precedence over established community patterns.5 Such times demanded new ways of perceiving history, identity, and social belonging – central concerns of the Jungle Stories, and key factors in the form and conception of the tales. Responding to praise for the originality of the Jungle Stories, Kipling explained that the idea of beast tales seemed to him ‘new in that it is a most ancient and long forgotten idea’.6 He referred his correspondent, a Unitarian Minister, to the Jatakas (the stories of the Buddha’s previous incarnations), expressing his delight that the tales of the Sutra ended ‘always with the beautiful moral’. These tales, of which ‘there must be a couple of thousand [ . . . ] in various tongues’ were to Kipling as ubiquitous as they were ancient and unremembered. If the beast tale, with its beautiful, jewel-like moral, was a long forgotten form, it seemed to Kipling all the more appropriate and relevant for that. It was a form that implied a collective cultural memory, the custodianship of spiritual and moral ideas lost in the mists of time and progress. Spanning gulfs of history and civilisation, issuing its precious meaning to each new generation and culture, the beast tale seemed like a voice from some fabled innocent epoch, sounding a warning to contemporary Anglo-American culture. In writing The Jungle Books, Kipling thought not just about the East and its fables, but also of the modern civilisation denounced by his American friend, Brooks Adams; the civilisation of the ‘timid social stratum’, which had lost touch with its ancient myths and forms, and had in turn lost its appetite for heroism, romance – and empire. In the age of unrelenting urbanisation, declining rural community, mass immigration, and all the concomitant social conflicts of an expanding, multi-ethnic population, he sought to recover the roots of American culture in the raw values and aspirations of the frontier. The Jungle Stories recovered that common imperial spirit, building bridges to an imaginary scene of shared suffering, striving, and belonging.

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Writing the Jungle Stories in the changing landscape of Brattleboro, where he too was uprooted and exiled, Kipling began to reflect deeply upon notions of cultural bonding and affiliation. Mowgli was the figuration of an adaptive political identity and will, living by an imperial code whose hallmark was the questioning of species and caste-law, and the forging of new, unheralded alliances of interest.

Arctic circles: Anglo-American rivalry and the seal of empire In the first of two Arctic stories in The Jungle Books, ‘The White Seal’, Kipling tells the story of Kotick, a young albino seal who, after witnessing the slaughter of his fellow seals by fur traders, sets out to discover new lands ‘where no men ever come’.7 Attempting to persuade others to join him on his quest, he finds that ‘no one sympathised with him in his little attempt to discover a quiet place for the seals’.8 Kotick’s fellows are so preoccupied with the trivial details and luxuries of their summer months at Novastoshnah beach, where they enjoy ‘the finest accommodation for seals any place in all the world’,9 that they are unconcerned about the killing grounds and the fate of chubby, contented seals. The killing grounds are, they remind Kotick, a fact of seal life that have always existed and are ‘all in the day’s work’.10 The rookeries are a delightful parody of Western consumer culture, with the seals busy ‘house-hunting’, battling valiantly for the ideal summer home: ‘They fought in the breakers, they fought in the sand, and they fought on the smooth-worn basalt rocks of the nurseries, for they were just as stupid and unaccommodating as men.’11 Kipling’s portrait of the squabbling domesticity of Kotick’s parents, Matkah and Sea Catch, underscores the satire on political indifference and superficiality. Gruffly reproving his wife for arriving late at Novastoshnah – ‘Late as usual. Where have you been?’ – Sea Catch is quickly soothed by her cooing appreciation of a hard-won summer retreat: ‘How thoughtful of you. You’ve taken the old place again.’12The house-proud husband reminds her, snobbishly, that ‘[w]e must preserve appearances, my dear’. Kipling is concerned throughout the story to distinguish Kotick’s colonising quest from the sordid land-grabbing of the rookeries and the greedy business of the seal traders. The tale, the narrator explains, was first told to him by a small bird called Limmershin, a Winter Wren, who was blown onto the rigging of a steamer bound for Japan. This image of a delicate, storytelling bird mangled by the mechanisms of fast-moving,

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industrial society is surely Kipling’s way of confronting the destructiveness of the modern age. It also suggests that the human storyteller – as the friend of the Winter Wren and a passenger on the steamship – must make an important decision about his place in the age of transatlantic (or transpacific) commerce. The narrator takes Limmershin down to his cabin, where he warms and feeds him till he is fit to return to St Paul’s, and it is here that the grateful Winter Wren tells him the story of the Islands. Limmershin, the narrator explains, is a ‘very quaint little bird, but he knows how to tell the truth’,13 and this truth includes a disturbingly graphic account of the killing pens, to which the chief hunter, Kerick Booterin, drives Kotick’s friends and fellows: Kerick pointed out one or two of the drove that were bitten by their companions or too hot, and the men kicked those aside with their heavy boots made of the skin of a walrus’s throat, and then Kerick said: ‘Let go!’ and then the men clubbed the seals on the head as fast as they could. Ten minutes later little Kotick did not recognize his friends any more, for their skins were ripped off from the nose to the hind-flippers whipped off and thrown down on the ground in a pile.14 The descriptions of the Winter Wren and the seals’ plight are moving and deeply felt. Indeed, it is tempting to read the story as a presciently ‘green’ text, defending the Earth’s habitats and fauna against the ravages of international capitalism. However, the ambit of Kipling’s environmental critique remains unequivocally imperialist, anchored in overriding concerns for Anglo-American entente. For the topographical detail of ‘The White Seal’, Kipling drew upon the writings of his friend the American scientist, Henry W. Elliot, particularly the two works, The History and Present Condition of the Pribilofs Fishery Industries: The Seal Islands of Alaska (1881), and Our Arctic Province: Alaska and the Seal Islands (1886). The story is set on ‘the Island of St Paul, away and away in the Bering Sea’,15 which, as part of the Pribilof Islands, had been acquired by the United States in the 1867 purchase of Alaska from Russia. In History and Present Condition of the Pribilofs – a government report commissioned to discover the cultural status and economic value of the islands – Elliot wrote: The theoretical value of these interests of the government on the Pribilof islands, represented by 2,500,000 to 3,000,000 fur-seals, male and female, in good condition, is not less than $10,000,000 or

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100 America: Out of Empire

Kipling was well aware of his friend’s views on the strategic and economic profitability of US expansion into the North Atlantic, and it was surely this awareness of American interests in the Arctic regions that inspired his satire on the material concerns of the rookeries. Set in the fisheries of the Bering Sea, the story would have seemed highly topical and controversial in the 1890s, evoking an industry and region at the centre of conflict between Britain and America. The main source of the trouble was the so-called Bering Sea Dispute, which began in the mid-1880s when Canadian pelagic sealers, shipping from British Columbia, ventured into the open waters of the Bering Sea.17 In 1886, American cruisers began seizing Canadian vessels and charging their masters with violations of municipal law. Although the dispute was resolved in 1893 by an international tribunal, which ruled in Britain’s – or rather Canada’s – favour, it had done considerable damage to political relations in the North Atlantic,18 and in conjunction with the long standing Alaskan boundary dispute, continued to sour Canadian–American relations throughout the decade. In the manuscript version of this story, Kipling added a postscript to ‘The White Seal’ referring explicitly to the Bering Sea Dispute. The passage denounces the bickering of Britain and the United States over seal fishing rights near the island of St Paul’s, archly explaining that the ongoing depletion of the colonies will eventually leave the powers with nothing to bicker about.19 No doubt Kipling cancelled these closing lines because they explained the tale’s political reference too directly – as he wrote to Sarah Orne Jewett, reproving her for adding italics to the last lines of one of her reprinted stories: ‘I don’t like them. They explain things and I loathe an explanation.’20 The existence of this original postscript to ‘The White Seal’ nevertheless attests to the extent of Kipling’s interest in contemporary international debates and concerns. He surely perceived the Bering Sea Dispute as a case study in how Britain and America might resolve their political differences and unite under a joint Atlantic programme – with the author/narrator as a mediator in the process of reconciliation and benevolent Anglo-American governance. Thus the imperial narrator/storyteller – the confidante of the Winter Wren – is represented as the spokesman of nature, who sets the philosophy of careful custodianship against the ethos of exploitation and profit.

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$12,000,000; [ . . . ] this is a permanent principle invested here, which now nets the public treasury more than 15 per cent annually; a very handsome rate of interest, surely.16

Ultimately, after exploring the Pacific and consorting with the Deep Sea Viceroys – the wise and ancient creatures of the sea – Kotick finally discovers a place of long restful beaches, abundant fishing, and safety from the predations of humankind. But Kipling lends this discovery a melancholy air by leading the seal to those beaches in the wake of Sea Cow, the northern manatee, a creature so old and hoary that it was already extinct by the time the story was written.21 Sea Cow leads Kotick seal through a ‘dark tunnel’, a place of death, before he surfaces onto those beaches where no men come. It is, as Daniel Karlin suggests, an image of redemption ultimately compromised by the fate of the old Manatee, whose disappearance intimates the extinction of Kotick, his fellows, and his myth of imperial salvation. The imperial creature ends the story as an outcast, a refugee from a world deaf to the counsel of the Viceroys, the imperilled imperial statesman, of the deep. The attitude of custodianship also informs the other Arctic story, ‘Quiquern’, which tells a similar tale from a slightly different perspective. In ‘Quiquern’ the Inuit people face starvation because of the scarcity of seals, and must discover new hunting grounds in order to survive. When starvation sets in amongst the dogs and the people, the young Inuit, Kotuko, sets out in search of food for himself and his fellows under the guidance of his tornaq, the mythical ‘one-eyed kind of a Woman-Thing’22 believed to inhabit the rocks and boulders of the Arctic. Very ‘nearly crazy’ with cold and hunger,23 Kotuko imagines that the sound of the blood beating in his ears is the voice of the tornaq, who tells him to go north, where she will lead him to new hunting grounds. Kotuko sets out on the journey guided by a vision of Quiquern, a ‘phantom of a gigantic toothless dog without any hair, who is supposed to live in the far North, and to wander about the country just before things are going to happen’.24 The ‘Thing’ leads him to an island of abundant seals, which Kotuko and his female companion feed upon and carry to the village. Ultimately Quiquern is merely an illusion, produced by the distant image of two of Kotuko’s dogs, which earlier bolted under the madness of famine, becoming locked together at the harness. In the epigraph to the story, Kipling is careful to distinguish his imperial vision from the exploits of the white traders who destroy the traditions and the culture of the Inuit: The People of the Eastern Ice, they are melting like the snow – They beg for coffee and sugar; they go where the white men go. The People of the Western Ice, they learn to steal and fight;

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They sell their furs to the trading-post: they sell their soul to the white. The People of the Southern Ice, they trade with the whaler’s crew; Their women have many ribbons, but their tents are torn and few. But the People of the Elder Ice, beyond the white man’s ken – Their spears are made of the narwhal horn, and they are the last of the Men!25 This requiem for the People of the Arctic, with its images of an exploited underclass brawling amid the refuse of torn tents and broken spears, recalls Kipling’s walks in the Smithsonian and his comments to Roosevelt on the extirpation of native Americans. In ‘Quiquern’ he attacks the commercial exploitation of indigenous or ‘primitive’ societies, positing an imperial scheme that not only protects the interests of, but also learns from, native culture. The courageous exploits of the Inuit, the ‘last of the Men’, thus encapsulate the noblest ideals of Kipling’s paternalist vision – ideals lacking in the ruthless economic exploits of the North Atlantic traders. ‘No European’, the narrator pointedly remarks, could have followed Kotuko over the ‘ice-rubbish and sharp-edged cliffs’ that lay across his path.26 Kotuko belongs to the People of the Elder Ice, who are not only skilled in survival and hunting, but are also incomparably sensitive and dignified: They came of a very gentle race – an Inuit seldom loses his temper, and almost never strikes a child – who did not know exactly what telling a real lie meant; still less how to steal. They were content to spear their living out of the heart of the bitter, hopeless cold; to smile oily smiles, and tell queer ghost and fairy-tales of evenings; and eat till they could eat no more [ . . . ].27 Living ‘next door, as it were, to the very Pole’,28 Kotuko’s tribe, the Tununirmuit, are nevertheless increasingly exposed to the luxuries of the People of the South – steel knives, tin kettles, matches, and ‘coloured ribbons for the women’s hair’.29 Indeed, Kotuko’s father, Kadlu, exchanges the famous narwhal horn (in the epigraph) for such western products. These details suggest the vulnerability both of the Tununirmuit and of Kipling’s idealised view of their society. The Inuit believe innocently and implicitly in those ‘queer ghost stories and fairy tales’, and it is the childlike trust of Kotuko in the myths of his people – the tale of the tornaq – that saves them from starvation. However, in a final twist to the story, the narrator reveals that it is only through the Western trade

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Now Kotuko, who drew very well in the Inuit style, scratched pictures of all these adventures on a long flat piece of ivory with a hole at the end . [. . . ] [H]e left the picture-story with Kadlu, who lost it in the shingle [. . . ] and there a lake Inuit found it next spring and sold it to a man at Imigen who was an interpreter on a Cumberland Sound whaler, and he sold it to Hans Olsen, who was afterwards a quartermaster on board a big steamer that took tourists to the North Cape in Norway. When the tourist season was over the steamer ran between London and Australia, stopping at Ceylon, and there Olsen sold the ivory to a Cingalese jeweller for two imitation sapphires. I found it under some rubbish in a house at Colombo, and have translated it from one end to the other.30 Kotuko’s story has become a commodity, exchanged as a curio by tourists and sailors who know little of and care less for its value and meaning. To the fickle traders of the West, it is worth little more than fake sapphires, and is ultimately lost under a heap of trash in Colombo. Kipling here implies that, despite his admiration for Kotuko and the Inuit, the story has passed through the sweaty, indifferent hands of Western civilisation long before he ‘translates’ it, and must somehow adapt to the realities of commercial exploitation that have already overwhelmed this remote people. In this respect, he strives to balance his criticism of western trade with the realties of global economics, the means whereby ‘a kettle picked up by a ship’s cook in the Bhendy Bazaar might end its days over a blubber lamp somewhere on the cool side of the Arctic Circle’.31 Kipling suggests that in this network of global exchange the imperialist author is a ‘translator’ of languages, ideas, and values, rescuing paternal concepts of authority and discipline from the rubbish heap of progress. The translator is a cultural adept, who refigures cultural myths in endlessly resourceful and inventive ways, and, as if underlining this fact, the Arctic stories happily invert the sealing metaphor. In ‘The White Seal’, the anthropomorphised creatures of St Paul’s are the innocent victims of environmental predation; while in ‘Quiquern’ those same creatures are mere foodstuff, an exploitable resource for the Inuit. It is a refiguring of the animal trope that archly draws attention to the suppleness of the allegory, refusing, as it were, the ‘deep structures’ that might be thought to govern the values of empire and their representation.

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eroding the culture of the Tununirmuit that he learns of Kotuko’s exploits:

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In the twentieth century, it was largely the highly sentimentalised Hollywood adaptations of Alexander Korda and Walt Disney that popularised the Jungle Stories. But if Hollywood eliminated the blood, battle, and gore of Mowgli’s world, arguably Kipling had already himself begun to sentimentalise the imperial myth. Consider, for example, the story, ‘Rikki-tikki-tavi’. This is the well-known tale of a mongoose adopted by an English family in India whom it defends against attack by the evil cobras, Nag and Nagaina. Ultimately Rikki’s combative skills are employed to defend exactly the same hegemonic system – home, nation, and empire – celebrated elsewhere in Kipling’s American tales. As with most of these stories, the mongoose lives on a delicately etched frontier between wilderness and cultivation. He is both domestic pet: ‘rather like a little cat’, and wild animal: ‘quite like a mongoose in his head and habits’.32 The garden is his preferred habitat because he finds it, like himself, ‘only half cultivated’.33 This half-cultivation is crucial to all the stories, hinting at the facility to move to and fro between cultural environments. Rikki’s animal instincts, which are combative, territorial, imperialist, are translated, it seems, into a domestic fantasy acceptable to the conservative social order whose values – home, nation, and empire – he defends. The home of Rikki’s friends, the tailor bird and his wife, extends the trope of nestbuilding to the imperial venture responsible for the English presence in India: ‘They had made a beautiful nest by pulling two big leaves together and stitching them up the edges with fibres, and had filled the hollow with cotton and downy fluff.’34 When the cobras kill one of their babies, and threaten to kill a human child, that language of domestic security is mobilised forcefully in support of the mongoose, whose willingness to maim or destroy its enemies and their offspring is keenly celebrated. When Rikki discovers Nagaina’s eggs he knew that the minute they were hatched they could each kill a man or a mongoose. He bit the tops off the eggs as fast as he could, taking care to crush the young cobras, and turned over the litter from time to time to see whether he had missed any. At last there were only three eggs left, and Rikki-tikki began to chuckle to himself.35 Ultimately Rikki’s policing of the social fabric is the counterpart of the sadistic measures of exclusion and hierarchy asserted in ‘An Error in the

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Borderline heroes: the mongoose and the mendicant

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Darzee was a feather-brained little fellow who could never hold more than one idea at a time in his head; and just because he knew that Nagaina’s children were born in eggs like his own, he didn’t think at first that it was fair to kill them [ . . . ]. Darzee was very like a man in some ways.36 That final sentence, as if it were needed, underscores the reference to modern political affairs. The endearing Darzee recalls Teshoo Lama in Kim; dedicated to infinite compassion towards the human family, but ultimately heedless of the material concerns that preoccupy the ruling caste and its servants. Kim’s friendship with the Lama seems to bring Raj politics into an emotionally complex rapport with the Buddhist doctrines of peace and tolerance – the love, compassion, joy and equanimity known as the Buddha’s Four Immeasurable Minds. It is, of course, impossible to be truly a Buddhist imperialist, and perhaps this is why Kim is such a troubled soul. In that first meeting with the Curator, Kipling conveys the possibility of mutual understanding between the men of empire and the Lama. But it is an uncomfortable understanding, in which the Way is ultimately exposed to cold intellectual and political interest. Late in the novel, when a Russian spy snatches a sacred drawing of the Wheel of Life from the Lama, Kipling seems to contrast the roughness of the Russian with the kindness of the British Curator. However, as the narrative consistently implies, the intellectual curiosity of both men is ultimately rooted in cold matters of governance – as Macaulay famously suggested. The eventual manoeuvring of the Lama into acts advantageous to the Raj – for example, his kind-hearted subsidy of Kim’s training – only underlines the discomfiture of the Buddhist–Imperialist contact. Kipling often intimates the delicate nature of this rapport in resonant descriptive passages, such as the early description of the Lama and Kim on the Grand Trunk Road, the main imperial trading route through India. He seems to contrast here the values and demeanours of the two travellers, yet also to align them in a fleeting moment of verbal

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Fourth Dimension’ and ‘My Sunday at Home’. Without such willingness to fight and kill, human society would, Kipling implies, succumb to the complacent materialism of the rookeries or the misguided liberalism of Darzee, the tailorbird, who tries to dissuade the mongoose from killing young cobras:

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‘Now let us walk,’ muttered the lama, and to the click of his rosary they walked in silence mile upon mile. The lama, as usual, was deep in meditation, but Kim’s bright eyes were open wide. This broad, smiling river of life, he considered, was a vast improvement on the cramped and crowded Lahore streets.37 For Kim, it is possible to find spiritual fulfilment in this worldly traffic, which is to him a sacred ‘river of life’. The Lama, however, withdraws from the bustle of the Road, meditating on salvation from worldy affairs and desires. It is a scene that suggests the closeness of the two figures, yet also perhaps the drifting of the Lama into shadows and silence, with the faintest suggestion of eclipse under the political structures of the novel. Apparently sensitive to the Lama’s delicate position under the Raj, one reader wrote to ask Kipling what might happen to the old man after the ending of the book. Kipling replied: ‘I don’t see myself that the Lama died, nor do I see any sign of the old man’s dying. My own idea is that in the fullness of time we may learn how Kim went on with his somewhat unusual career.’38 For a writer who loathed explanations, this willingness to establish firmly the continued existence of the Lama perhaps indicates Kipling’s sympathy with the fears of his correspondent regarding the fate of compassion, joy and equanimity in this ‘somewhat unusual’ imperial alliance. Kim was originally conceived in Vermont, and has much in common with The Jungle Books, particularly with the tale, ‘The Miracle of Purun Bhagat’. This story tells how an Indian official, Purun Dass, strives for all the political prestige that the country can offer, becoming a Knight Commander of the Order of the Indian Empire for his services as Prime Minister of ‘one of the semi-independent native states’. Then one day, in a moment of longing for spiritual release from the affairs of the world, he renounces his position and returns to the hills, taking up the begging bowl and ochre-coloured dress of a Bhagat or holy man. Purun’s return to the hill country is portrayed as the reclamation of his birthright and tradition: Then Purun Bhagat smiled, for he remembered that his mother was of Rajput Brahmin birth, from Kulu way – a Hill-woman, always homesick for the snows – and the least touch of Hill blood draws a man in the end back to where he belongs.39

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adroitness – a sort of textual ‘grace note’ that applies the Lama’s favourite spiritual metaphor to the worldly affairs of the Road:

Obeying this ‘race-instinct’, Purun settles high up in the Himalayas, becoming the adopted Bhagat of a small village nestled further down the shear edge of the mountain upon which he lives. He is visited by the animals of the mountains and fed abundantly by the people of the village. This India is so unchanging that Purun’s impression is worn into the rock around him: a stone slab is ‘dented into a little hole by the foot of his brass-handled crutch’, and the place between the tree-trunks where his begging-bowl rests is ‘sunk and wore into a hollow almost as smooth as the brown shell itself’.40 The setting is one of permanence and plenitude, where ‘[t]he fields changed their colours with the seasons; the threshing-floors filled and emptied, and filled again; and again and again’.41 Over time, Purun wins the trust of the mountain creatures, sharing his food and fire with the monkeys, musk-deer, and black bear (Sona) of the Himalayas. In so doing, he earns a reputation among the villagers as a worker of miracles with ‘the wild things’, but, as the narrator suggests, ‘all the miracle lies in keeping still, in never making a hasty movement, and for a long time, at least, in never looking directly at a visitor’.42 When the mountainside threatens to fall upon the village during a heavy storm, Purun’s beast companions warn him of the coming disaster. Alarmed by the nervous chatter of the monkeys and nudged towards the door of his shrine by the barasingh (deer), he sees the ground opening beneath him as the ‘sticky earth smacked its lips’. Holding fast to the barasingh, he is led down to the village with the monkeys and the bear in tow. Rousing the village from sleep and ushering its people to safety he is ‘no longer a holy man, but Sir Purun Dass, K.C.I.E., Prime Minister of no small State, a man accustomed to command, going out to save life’.43 Purun’s miracle heralds a freedom to take up and to renounce alternative cultural positions. He has two distinct cultural identities, westernised politician and Indian Bhagat, each of which he apparently assumes and relinquishes by choice. But in this denouement, the doctrine of social tolerance and spiritual compassion forges an uncomfortable alliance with Raj authority and culture. We are told at the beginning of the story that his relinquishing of power is ‘a thing no Englishman would have dreamed of doing, for, so far as the world’s affairs went, he died’.44 Purun has enjoyed wealth, power, and the esteem and favour of ‘men and cities far and near’, but he lets those things go, ‘as a man drops a cloak he needs no longer’.45 These are the trappings of secular imperial culture, the ‘railways and telegraphs’, the schools and state dispensaries, and also, more scathingly, the superficial honours bestowed

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That day saw the end of Purun Bhagat’s wanderings. He had come to the place appointed for him – the silence and the space. After this, time stopped, and he, sitting at the mouth of the shrine, could not tell whether he were alive or dead; a man with control of his limbs, or a part of the hills, and the clouds, and the shifting rain and sunlight.47 However, like Kim’s besetting road, the world finally recalls Purun to its needs. Purun’s salvation – the saving of the village – is ultimately no more a miracle than the taming of the barasingh and the bear. It is a fact of executive authority intimated by the narrator in his resumed ‘official’ identity, Sir Purun Dass, K.C.I.E., ‘a man accustomed to command, going out to save life’. Purun’s spiritual self, which allows him to perceive the coming landslide and to win the all-important trust of the animals, cannot exist for Kipling without the executive authority implied by his official, Prime Ministerial self. Nevertheless, by virtue of his Zen-like consciousness, he is a multifaceted figure, offering more to humanity than a Raj culture whose learned institutions will never ‘do any good in this world or the next’.48 Purun Bhagat is that impossible cultural construct: a genuinely practising Hindu–Buddhist–Christian imperialist. In a draft passage cancelled from the final version of the tale, Purun’s statecraft under the English is portrayed as a carefree blend of mischiefmaking and seasoned political analysis.49 Elsewhere in the manuscript, his freedom from religious and caste scruples is strongly emphasised: the Bhagat contemplates throwing a statue of Kali outside his temple in order to save space,50 and tears the sacred Brahmins’ thread from his neck, asserting that markers of caste are hateful to a holy man.51 Kipling’s artistic decision to soften Purun’s temper was surely the right one. In the published version of the story, Purun achieves the impossible equanimity sought by Kipling, the ideal of political service with Zen-like spiritual compassion and love. Purun represents a figuration of values and beliefs irreconcilable with militarism and the realpolitik of empire. To appreciate how far the values of figures like Purun Bhagat and Teshoo Lama resisted imperial assumptions, consider, for example, the ‘engaged Buddhism’ of the Tibetan peace campaigner, Thich Nhat

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by learned institutions and the accolades of ‘English ladies in evening dress’.46 Passing the blanketed Lamas on pilgrimage from Tibet, his journey to the Himalayas echoes the spiritual journey of Kim. Purun supposedly shuns the cloak of worldly power, and comes close to that Salvation or ‘nirvana’ sought by Teshoo Lama:

Hanh, which mounted a serious challenge to American policy in Vietnam during the 1960s. Ghandi’s principle of non-violent resistance was equally informed by the religious traditions Kipling attempts to recruit to empire in the figure of the Bhagat or the Lama. The Nirvana or ‘Salvation’ attained by these Holy Ones is thus finally instituted and informed by imperial society. Similarly, in the Mowgli stories, the wolf-boy’s deliverance from human society asserts the liberties of the Jungle People – the Free People – in powerfully authoritarian, imperial terms. Kipling’s wolf-boy might seem the quintessence of cultural mobility, moving freely between the animals and the despised Man Pack, but it is surely significant that he finally leaves the Free People, returning to humankind to accept a steady job in the civil service as a Forest Ranger. Throughout the tales, his place in the official scheme is patterned and foreshadowed in the primitive, imperialistic values of order, division, and exclusion that pervade the Jungle scene, which are evoked in the atavistic metaphors of ‘blood’, ‘hunting’, ‘herds’, and ‘packs’ that animate the Jungle People. The Jungle Law, as taught by Baloo, encodes these primitive values in an elaborate, castelike diktat governing the social conduct of the Jungle. As will be seen, Mowgli often calls in question the authority of the Jungle Law – his very presence in the Jungle defies it – prompting the animals to rethink their values and mores. Always under the aegis of firm government, The Jungle Books suggest the possibility of assimilation, the loosening of concepts of race, culture, and, as it were, species designations.52

Red Dogs: the American peril It is generally accepted that Kipling drew upon the work of the AngloIndian official, W.H. Sleeman, for his information on wolf-child lore. One critic, Daniel Karlin, has noted in detail the resemblance of elements of Mowgli’s story to Sleeman’s research in ‘An Account of Wolves Nurturing Children in Their Dens’ (1852): a boy is reunited with his mother after a sojourn amongst the wolves, much as Mowgli is reunited with Messua; another boy returns to human society, but is regularly visited by his jungle acquaintances.53 Sleeman’s research is, of course, manifestly Orientalist, an amateurish dabble in anthropology and folklore steeped in Victorian race theory. Indians, he suggests, are close kin to the jungle in every sense: their civilisation – like Kipling’s Cold Lairs, the home of the Monkey People – is in constant danger of absorption into pre-Aryan darkness. Encoded in the formulation is the absolute necessity of stern British rule, which supposedly institutes the

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Mowgli’s Feral Campaign 109

frontier between native culture and the jungle. (Sleeman’s research was published shortly before the Mutiny, when British power looked increasingly insecure following uprisings in southern India. In this respect, his treatise on the wolf-boy reinforced racist stereotypes of native degeneracy reassuring to the Raj.) In the case of Mowgli’s close evolutionary and cultural cousins, the Monkey People, Kipling seems to have had some recourse – direct or otherwise – to the anthropological researches of his old friend William Wilson Hunter. In Annals of Rural Bengal (1872), Hunter offers various positivist readings of ‘aboriginal culture’, drawing upon ethnology, philology, and comparative literary analysis to explain the racial inferiority of the pre-Aryan castes of India. In Sanskrit literature, he observes, the ‘aboriginal’ Indians appear as ‘the Monkey Tribes’54 or ‘the RawEaters’, and are despised by the Aryan settlers for their primitive social forms and customs. The Monkey Tribes ‘respected not the lives of animals; some of them ate horse-flesh; others human flesh; others, again, fed on the uncooked carcass’.55 Modelled on such writings, Kipling’s Monkey people are ‘eaters of everything’, who handle ‘filth’ and leave their dead to the vultures. According to Baloo – a high caste Aryan bear – they ‘have no speech of their own, but use stolen words which they overhear when they listen, and peep, and wait up above in the branches’.56 The detail echoes the contempt of the Aryans for the men of ‘inarticulate utterance’ and ‘uncouth talk’.57 Kipling’s Jungle Stories retain the Orientalist formulations of Hunter and Sleeman, but extend their compass, intimating salutary forms of contact with potentially threatening social situations, political movements, and ideas. As the title, ‘The Jungle Book’ suggests, the written word, the ‘book’ – that ultimate token of civilised achievement and prestige – must be forced into parlance with the ‘jungle’ – the environs of darkness, fear, and instinct. Tribes, territories, castes, packs – the irreducible factors of empire – must be equipped for cultural commerce of the kind Kipling observed in the United States. This gives rise to fictions of cross-cultural exchange between various social groupings and demonstrative hostility to inflexible models of social hierarchy. For instance, in ‘Tiger! Tiger!’ we are told that Mowgli ‘ha[s] not the faintest idea of the difference that caste makes between man and man’.58 The quotation in the title of the story from William Blake’s most famous poem illustrates the extent of Kipling’s interest in egalitarian social ideas. Blake’s hostility to empire is well known, and in the context of nineteenth century America his support for US independence lends the quotation from ‘The Tyger’ further subversive implications for

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110 America: Out of Empire

Mowgli’s Feral Campaign 111

When the Potter’s donkey slipped in the clay-pit, Mowgli hauled it out by the tail, and helped to stack the pots for their journey to the market at Khanhiwara. That was very shocking, too, for the potter is a low caste man, and his donkey is worse. When the priest scolded him, Mowgli threatened to put him on the donkey, too [ . . . ].59 Mowgli similarly disrupts the caste system of the Jungle, flouting its most cherished prejudices. He forces the Jungle into parlance with the untouchable Monkey People, long excluded from the society of the higher, Brahminical animals. How far, though, does Mowgli carry these revolutionary principles? Let us consider the story, ‘Kaa’s Hunting’, where Mowgli comes most directly into contact with the Other, the Monkey People, whom he has been so diligently warned against by the Free People. Despite their ancient pledge to exclude the monkeys from the social fabric – to ‘put them out of their mouths and out of their mind’60 – the kidnapping of Mowgli forces the Jungle People to acknowledge the existence and power of the untouchables. It is the first occasion in living memory that the Jungle ‘ha[s] owned to being interested in the doings of the monkeys’.61 Mowgli is a cause of salutary social disruption here, breaking the circle of caste that binds the Jungle community. In the light of conventional European hostility to caste-law, we are clearly meant to perceive Mowgli’s impact on the Jungle as liberating. The kidnapping of the man-cub has the further merit of provoking a serious moment of soul-searching in Bagheera and Baloo, who are forced to admit the error, and the limits, of their ways. Baloo’s situation is reminiscent of some old-fashioned, imperial grandee, who has long discounted the possibility of radical upheaval, and must now deal with a revolutionary outbreak among the Monkeys (the Bandar-log). The Monkey-People, who clamour so desperately to be noticed in the Jungle, represent radicals – in Kipling’s parlance, socialists and democrats – the world over: ‘Their way is not our way. They are without leaders. They have no remembrance. They boast and chatter and pretend that they are a great people about to do great affairs in the jungle, but the falling of a nut turns their mind to laughter and all is forgotten.’62

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English power. Kipling’s story develops the theme of liberty, equality, and fraternity with Mowgli’s flouting of the social code. During one of his sojourns in the Ploughed Lands, his contempt for caste upsets the narrow-minded villagers:

When the Monkey Folk achieve their aim of recognition, Baloo is forced to approach Kaa, the rock python, for help in resolving the crisis. But what, we should ask, are the credentials of Kaa for this mission? He is no diplomatic negotiator: Kaa is the scourge of the Monkey Folk, a terrifying political ally feared by the Jungle and legendary among the Bandar-log: ‘Generations of monkeys had been scared into good behaviour by the stories their elders told them of Kaa; the night thief, who could slip along the branches as quietly as moss grows, and steal away the strongest monkey that ever lived.’63 Even Baloo and Bagheera are afraid of him, confessing that he knows more than they, and is ‘not of [their] tribe, being footless – and with most evil eyes’.64 The Rock Python is yet another of Kipling’s authoritarian figurations, the dictator with mystical, hypnotic powers over the rebellious masses. His strange hold upon the Jungle People recalls the mysterious, terrifying authority of General Maximus in Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906): ‘none of them knew the limits of his power [and] none of them could look him in the face’.65 Kaa’s fearful strength – ‘like a battering ram, or a hammer’66 – and his terrifying Hunger-Dance, which draws the helpless Monkey’s irresistibly into his gullet, are the symbols of a despotic power almost too frightening to imagine or wield. ‘Never more will I make an ally of Kaa’, exclaims Baloo after falling under the spell of the Hunger-Dance. And so conscious is Kaa of his own terrible powers – and fallibility – that he warns Mowgli: ‘Have a care, manling, that I do not mistake thee for a monkey some twilight when I have newly changed my coat.’67 Kaa’s role in the story suggests that a heavy price is paid for the cultural mobility and exchange represented by Mowgli. Complex social exchange must be underwritten, however regrettably or riskily, by the stern authoritarian power of the Rock Python. For Kipling, the claims of the Monkey People against the caste system must be recognised, but never allowed to undermine the Jungle Law. Mowgli’s eventual absorption into the colonial service – like Purun’s ‘de-conversion’ or Kim’s imperial work – is the final outcome of the game of cross-cultural exchange and social tolerance played out in The Jungle Books. There is nothing anti-imperialist about Mowgli’s cultural mobility. It is an aspect of Kipling’s highly sophisticated interpretation of the new imperialism, which translated empire into a global language adjusted to multi-ethnic, liberal-humanist concerns. These tales seem unmistakably the product of his American years, where the need to negotiate modern, multivalent democracy was most pressing. Despite his multiple orientations regarding ‘culture’, Mowgli is a purveyor of social discipline, whose Jungle ventures extend and reinforce the

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112 America: Out of Empire

hierarchies of imperial politics. His raison d’être, after all, is absolute command of the Jungle People. A story such as ‘Red Dog’ clearly reflects this stern political message, existing firmly within a tradition of American anti-communist propaganda. Kipling knew the anxieties of his friends, Henry and Brooks Adams, about the growing communist movement in America.68 In ‘Red Dog’, the Dekkan dholes (dogs) are pitched against Mowgli and the Free People in a final showdown for the Jungle. The Free People – the name is doubly significant in this setting – crush the Red Dog, but not before Kaa admonishes them: ‘Free People’, Kaa grunted. ‘Free thieves! And thou [Mowgli] hast tied thyself into the death-knot for the sake of the memory of the dead wolves?’69 In order to annihilate the communist pack, Kaa mobilises the Little People, the rock bees, who sting the dogs to death. It is, we are told, an extremely dangerous ploy; the bees are notoriously indiscriminate killers: ‘It is to pull the very whiskers of Death, but – Kaa, thou art, indeed, the wisest of all the Jungle.’70 The crucial point is that the support of the Little People – the volatile masses – is paramount in the fight against the Red Dogs. Recognising that communist propaganda aims to enlist the support of the Little People, Kipling meets the challenge with his own Tory line on the working classes, dramatising, in Mowgli’s friendship with the rock bees, the recruiting of workers to an imperial, anti-communist venture. In the final Jungle Story, ‘The Spring Running’, the circumstances of Mowgli’s return to human society underline this imperial commitment. He abandons the Jungle with the coming of the Time of New Talk – a fit of baying, revelry and fighting that deafens the animals to his command. New Talk is Kipling’s pregnant phrase for those political lobbies – democratic, socialist, communist, and feminist – drowning out the imperialist in modern society. Mowgli leaves the Jungle because, ultimately, he detests the disobedience of the animals in these New Times. Perhaps Mowgli’s discomfiture reflects Kipling’s own increasing disillusionment with the American political scene – he was soon to abandon the country in the wake of the Venezuela crisis and the conflict with his brotherin-law. Certainly it reflects the increasing complexity of global imperial relations, which put under extraordinary pressure the old rhetoric and values of empire. In imagining the exploits of Mowgli and the Jungle people, he responded to the social demands of these New Times, reconciling free economic and cultural exchange with stock, authoritarian values. The Jungle Books emphasise the written word, dramatising the author’s part, like Mowgli or Kim, in forming and negotiating cultural alliances. Throughout the tales, power thrives upon pluralism; the mobility and

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Mowgli’s Feral Campaign 113

displacement Kipling saw about him in Vermont. When he recalled the ancient forms of the Jatakas, he infused the ancient texts of moral custodianship with the warring, imperialistic adventures of the Jungle People. The language of cultural primitivism, allied to the dramatisation of culture as text – endlessly open to translation and adaptation – suffused the values of empire with the adaptability and nuance appropriate to changing world conditions. America had introduced Kipling to times of New Talk, and they were times that required new forms of storytelling – forms that addressed the social complexities of a transatlantic age.

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114 America: Out of Empire

South Africa and Sussex: An Estranged Homecoming

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Part III

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By Equal War Made One: The Scramble for Social Order in The Five Nations

After the Venezuela crisis and the lawsuit against Beatty Balestier, the atmosphere in Vermont seemed – as Kipling ironically phrased it – ‘to some extent hostile’.1 Reluctantly closing the American chapter of his life, he returned to England, leasing a house called The Elms, at Rottingdean, West Sussex. In 1897, aged 33, Kipling was elected to the Athenaeum, which he considered a ‘great but frightening honour’.2 Nervous on his first visit to the Club, he soon began to relax in the company of an old General, who, having lived a long and colourful life, was well informed on topics of interest to the author, whom he enjoyed correcting in the technical details of his stories. Recognising that life in India years had made him ‘grossly dependent on Clubs for [ . . . ] spiritual comfort’, Kipling also dined at the Carlton and the Beefsteak, which, in its varied company – ‘from the Bench to the Dramatic Buccaneer’ – was his personal favourite.3 Rudyard’s return to England coincided with dramatic events in the empire, events that prompted him to reconfirm the relationship between his writing and the work of imperial governance. These developments were to unfold in South Africa in the late 1890s, and to culminate in a costly, protracted war. Kipling had now settled permanently in Sussex, but he saw England increasingly through the aperture of South African colonial politics, envisaging a role for himself in the consolidation of British imperial holdings in the Cape. The final chapters of this study consider how the crises in the empire influenced upon Kipling’s conception of the artist’s political role, bringing him – as a pro-war propagandist – into contact with the machineries, social movements and media forms that shaped the modern world. These 117

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5

politically active and turbulent years strained Kipling’s artistic conception to breaking point, inspiring in various writings the notion of the Englishman – and often the artist figure – as an alienated revenant, disorientated by the social transformations of their imagined homelands. In what follows, Kipling’s artistic alienation and its political circumstances are explored in some of his finest stories of the Edwardian period, whose figures of haunting, loss, and estrangement foreshadow the fractured conception of English history in the volume, Puck of Pook’s Hill – Kipling’s final word on his ‘ “Imperialistic” output’ of the past.4 However, before issuing this final word on empire, there were the troubles of South Africa, the pressing need for political stability at home and abroad, and the seeming cornucopia of advances in science, technology and communications that drew him to the heart of Edwardian social crisis. Early in 1898, Rudyard and Carrie travelled to the Cape, where they met the prospector, administrator, and former president of the Cape Colony, Cecil Rhodes. When Rhodes asked him, ‘What’s your dream?’,5 Kipling told Rhodes that he was part of it, and was duly escorted around the peninsula by the most ambitious, wealthy, and powerful imperialist in British South Africa. While lamenting the ‘shortcomings of native labour’,6 Rhodes extolled the great beauty of the land, showing Kipling around his newly established fruit farms and the ‘wonderful old Dutch houses stalled in deep peace’.7 It was in the company of Rhodes that Kipling came to know South Africa. Rhodes built a house, the ‘Woolsack’ on his Groote Shcuur estate for Kipling’s use, and for six months each year from 1900 to 1907, Rudyard and Carrie would travel – with ‘a complete equipage of governess, maids, and children’ – to the ‘Paradise’ of the Cape. Over the next few years, these African visits would provide comfort and relief from the troubles about to befall The Elms. In 1898 on a winter voyage to New York, Rudyard and his daughter, Josephine fell ill with pneumonia. After coming close to death, Kipling rallied and gradually made a complete recovery. Josephine, however, was unable to fight the illness and died in early March aged 6. Because of his frail condition, Kipling was not told of the tragedy for a week, by which time his daughter had been cremated. His father recalled the scene at The Elms when they returned to England without Josephine: ‘The house and garden are full of the lost child and poor Rud told his mother how he saw her when a door opened, when a space was vacant at table – coming out of every green dark corner of the garden – radiant and – heartbreaking. They can talk of her, however, which is much, for Carrie has hitherto been stone dumb.’8

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118 South Africa and Sussex: An Estranged Homecoming

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On that first visit to the Cape in 1891, Kipling observed that ‘The dry, spiced smell of the land and the smack of the clean sunshine were health-restoring.’9 This was the land of mixed pine and eucalyptus groves, blossoming hydrangeas, and hot afternoons they now needed desperately and found at the Woolsack. The zebra, emus, llama, and lion kept on Rhodes’ estate fascinated Kipling’s children, Elsie and John. One winter the family adopted a sickly lion cub, Sullivan, which they gradually nursed back to health, handling him in ‘stout motorgloves’ as he drained the milky contents of a babies’ bottle. Leaving him in rude health, they learned that he later died after being put in a cage and fed inadequately thawed storage meats. Sullivan was honoured, Kipling observed, ‘among the many kind ghosts that inhabited the Woolsack’. If South Africa rekindled his spirits, it also occupied an increasingly significant position in his political thinking, which, after the Venezuela crisis, focused upon retrenchment, rearmament, and the consolidation of British holdings in the Cape and the East. Kipling was convinced that the future of the empire depended upon naval supremacy, which was a major factor in the reckoning of the United States in the Venezuela dispute.10 The channel squadron he described in a series of articles in The Morning Post (collected in A Fleet in Being [1898]) was to be the saving of England ‘when the Real Thing comes’.11 He rejoiced in the common tradition, ‘one thousand years old’,12 that bound together the hearts and minds of the fleet. These were the qualities that Kipling went on to celebrate in Stalky & Co. The cunning, defiance, and camaraderie of those days at the USC reassured him that the nation would show its true, swashbuckling mettle ‘when there [was] a really big row on’.13 It was soon to be given the chance with the outbreak of the Boer war in 1899. But in the event, the Stalkies; the ‘Cheltenham and Haileybury and Marlborough chaps’, whom Kipling hoped to see ‘let loose on the south side of Europe with a sufficiency of Sikhs’,14 were found sorely wanting. The political intrigue and incompetence surrounding the crisis in South Africa made a lasting impression upon Kipling’s work. The poor performance of the English troops against an ill-equipped army of Boer farmers permanently embittered him against those sections of government and public that either opposed or insufficiently supported the war. Even his own family was divided over the issue. On 1 June 1902, the day peace was signed in South Africa, his aunt Georgie hung a black banner from her window proclaiming: ‘We have killed and also taken possession.’15 Kipling rushed to the scene to save her from an angry

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By Equal War Made One

mob that had gathered around the house. In these turbulent days, Kipling was also at loggerheads with his cousin Margaret Mackail (formerly Burne-Jones) who was firmly opposed to the war, and who had begun to embrace Fabian Socialism. As a pro-war campaigner, he was set squarely in the camp of mercenaries and venture-capitalists, men like Leander Starr Jameson, Alfred Milner and, of course, Rhodes,16 who made no secret of his plan to turn Africa into a marketable asset from Cape Town to Cairo. The Jameson Raid of 1895 – Dr Jameson’s bungled attempt to topple the government of the Transvaal with an outnumbered detachment of British South Africa Police17 – was part of the Rhodes-inspired plot to capture the goldrich colony for the British empire. The Jameson Raid and the Venezuela crisis ‘emphasized Britain’s isolation, especially since there were clashes with powers not hitherto regarded as the country’s main rivals’.18 Easily defeated by Kruger, who earned a telegram of congratulation from the German Kaiser for his suppression of the raid,19 Rhodes and his men set about gerrymandering the English into military action against the Boers, alleging the oppression of non-Boer residents and native Africans in the Transvaal. In the Boer denial of the franchise to non-Boer settlers, the pro-war lobby found the casus belli it required. It is one of the great ironies of the war, and a sad indictment of the intellectual dishonesty of the pro-war camp, that imperialists who were no great lovers of democracy used the emotive issue of the franchise to justify an attack on the Transvaal. The task of defending the Randlords – men like Rhodes and his capitalist cronies – should have been unconscionable to a writer who had cavilled at US capitalism and ‘economic’ imperialism. But powerful settler figures were always an attraction for Kipling, and to him Rhodes was the archetypal frontiersman – a secular deity for the metropolitan age: ‘It was His Presence that had all the Power [ . . . ] And it seemed to me that home-keeping Englishmen would be among the last to feel the power of a man as inarticulate as He was.’20 J.A. Hobson was right to argue that the English had forfeited their justificatory, civilising pretensions by following Rhodes into war. With its shady roster of businessmen queuing up to assert the honour of aggravated robbery, the South African conflict was one of the darkest episodes of economic interest in the history of empire. As President Kruger later observed, it ‘made England’s name hated’ throughout Europe.21 The war, then, instantly aroused Kipling’s support. He saw it as the spark for social reform, imagining England ablaze with military zeal and dedication to the gospel of efficiency:

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120 South Africa and Sussex: An Estranged Homecoming

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The draft was fiercer than first anticipated, and with the first serious reversals of the conflict, the optimism turned to anxiety. His views on the English middle and upper classes, which he pejoratively termed the people of ‘the Island’, became increasingly unsympathetic as the war progressed. He believed that the Islanders were ‘bung-full of beastly unjustified spiritual pride [ . . . ] material luxury and overmuch ease’.23 They ‘went about despising things and people’, and had become, collectively, a ‘fatted snob’.24 In the early months of the fighting, he matched his remonstrance with a personal contribution to military preparedness, establishing a rifle-range and club in the village, where he oversaw the drilling of the hapless locals in preparation for the coming ‘Armageddon’.25 He later acquired a machine gun from South Africa and presented it to the rifle-club upon returning from his visit. While in the Cape, he kept a strict eye on the running of the rifle-club, issuing military-style instructions and regulations, which he despatched to Sergeant Johnstone, the Instructor at Rottingdean preparatory school, who oversaw the drill and administered the club’s affairs in his absence.26 Most of his efforts, however, were channelled into high profile, morale-boosting ventures in the Cape, giving speeches, touring cantonments and visiting wounded soldiers in hospitals. In early 1900 he served on The Friend of the Free State in Bloemfontein, a newspaper established by Lord Roberts after the military takeover of the town, providing articles that struck a note of encouragement and praise for the British troops, and offered a hand of conciliation to defeated Boers. As a war reporter on The Friend, Kipling visited the front, coming under fire at the battle of Karee Siding on 29 March 1900.27 If anything, the first reversals and casualties – ‘[a]bout half the men I ever knew seem to have been killed and the other half are wounded’28 – hardened his support for the war: he resolved to ‘sell [his] name for every blessed cent it would fetch’ to help the families of servicemen.29 The decision signalled a period of political involvement that was to have an impact upon the nature and critical reception of his work. The South African writings are often considered reactionary and narrow-minded. Lord Birkenhead argues that: ‘The rigidity of Kipling’s thinking and the unyielding nature of his prejudice were most pronounced during and immediately after the South African war.’30

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The war is having a splendid effect on the land and all fires will burn more brightly for the fierce draft that has been blown through them. Some day, indeed, it is not too much to hope, we may have an efficient army.22

The claim is supported by Ann Parry’s view that the poetry asserts the ideology of the radical right,31 and also by M. Van Wyk Smith’s belief that Kipling’s South African writings succumb to ‘the worship of a vast and ultimately nebulous panorama of imperial ideology’.32 It could, however, be argued that politicians, parties, movements, and lobbies across the political spectrum succumbed to an equally nebulous empireworship at the turn of the century. The South African war prompted a major revaluation of the relationship between social stability on the home front and in the empire, lending an imperial cast to the policies of the Liberal and Conservatives parties, and even to the manifestos of the Edwardian socialist and feminist movements. There was, in other words, a direct relationship between the scramble for Africa and the scramble for social order in England. The South African war focused this double agenda of imperial and national stability, mobilising and ordering the masses through emotive, and often pseudo-scientific, appeals to Anglo-Saxon supremacy and racial destiny. Kipling was certainly no eugenicist, but as a campaigner for national efficiency, keen amateur drill sergeant, and gun enthusiast, he was less scrupulous than he should have been about the ideological company he was keeping.

The new imperialism and the warring state Even in the highest political circles, the ubiquitous imperial theme acquired a ruthless edge. In 1897 Joseph Chamberlain refuted allegations of English military atrocities in Africa with the comment that ‘you cannot have omelettes without breaking eggs’. It was impossible, he explained, to ‘destroy the practices of barbarism, of slavery, of superstition, which for centuries have desolated the interior of Africa, without the use of force’.33 Profit was now the declared goal of empire: At the present moment there is no doubt whatever that the Transvaal offers a field for what I may call national investment. There are gold mines yet undiscovered. There are mines, in my opinion, of greater importance: mines of iron, mines of coal; there is a possible development, a certain development of agricultural industry. There is an opportunity for schemes of irrigation. All of these things require enormous capital [ . . . ].34 The economic theme is not only undisguised but is the main burden of Chamberlain’s 1902 celebration of the capture of the Transvaal. It was

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122 South Africa and Sussex: An Estranged Homecoming

By Equal War Made One

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You have got the black man to deal with. He is increasing. We have stopped his inter-tribal wars. We have stopped the de-population which has been going on. He will increase with great rapidity, and unless some way or other he can be settled in regular industry, he will create a danger and a difficulty of the first class.35 As the sentiment is memorably framed in the postscript to Kurtz’s report on the suppression of savage customs in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: ‘Exterminate the brutes’. For Chamberlain, Africans were a ‘difficulty’ – essential to the empire, but a nuisance nonetheless. For this reason, the population was to be thinned and controlled by heavy work. Hard labour of this kind was a eugenic policy in all but name, intended to rob native peoples of their lands and homes, and line the pockets of colonising entrepreneurs. The more the empire was forced into a diplomatic corner by men like Rhodes, the more extreme it became in its pledge to control every ungovernable element – racial and political – at home and abroad. Similarly, the less certain the reasons for war, the more intense were the measures for controlling the masses at home, for identifying and isolating the enemy within the state. The military failures of the campaign heightened these fears: England seemed to have overreached itself, to be staring at the prospect of imminent humiliation by an army of ill-equipped Dutch farmers. General Kitchener was dispatched southwards in a last effort to win the war and salvage the military reputation of the country. He achieved this by adopting a scorched earth policy, destroying the homes of suspected guerrilla fighters and detaining women and children in concentration camps – one of the terrible gifts of British imperialism to the twentieth century. In order to explain the poor showing of the troops in South Africa, social reformers pointed to the cities, and the physical deterioration, mental inactivity, and indifference to the empire associated with urban life. The widespread perception of social decay united a range of political parties in the quest for national efficiency and the establishment of what Sidney Webb termed ‘an Imperial race’.36 H.G. Wells put the eugenic case succinctly in Anticipations (1902): ‘[T]he nation that most resolutely picks over, educates, sterilizes, exports, or poisons its People

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followed by a campaign for the industrial development of the country by Anglo-Saxon settlers, all of which had a profound influence on Kipling’s writings. In the midst of all this glorious work, Chamberlain concludes:

of the Abyss [the unemployed]’ and ‘turns the greatest portion of its irresponsible adiposity into social muscle [ . . . ] will certainly be the ascendant or dominant nation before the year 2000.’37 For Wells, the South African war confirmed the need for a eugenic programme aimed at increasing the ‘muscle’ of the nation – a programme similar in effect to the right-wing policy of Arnold White, who urged the sterilisation of the unfit and the discouragement of breeding among the lower classes.38 In another example of this flirtation of radical politics with eugenics, Sally Ledger has recently outlined the attractions of imperialism and eugenic theory to the women’s movement in the early part of the century, acknowledging the disquieting possibility that ‘both feminism and socialism in some respects share the same intellectual subsoil as fascism in the twentieth century’.39 Reformist politics were frequently inspired by a fear of, and, paradoxically, admiration for Germany, whose programme of state socialism under Bismarck in the 1880s served as a model for British campaigns for national efficiency.40 Bernard Semmel argues that the South African war gave the impetus, in British politics, to a populist ideology known as social-imperialism,41 which allied the twin aims of expansionism and national reform, aiming, with the promise of jobs and improved living conditions, to win a broad base of support for the empire. In what has come to be known as the ‘squalid argument’, Joseph Chamberlain made a blunt connection between the prosperity of the nation and the possession of the colonies, reminding the working classes that peace and plenty depended upon the securing of foreign markets.42 It was this direct equation of colonialism with prosperity that gave rise to the deprecatory term ‘squalid argument’, which was a criticism of the narrowly economic focus of Chamberlain’s policy, and was coined, ironically, by Chamberlain himself, who feared that it would be a phrase likely to be used against him by the Opposition.43 His call for the formation of a National Party that would ‘put the country before the interests of any faction’ reflects the growing trend towards insularity and protectionism in wider international affairs.44 The ‘squalid argument’ can be viewed, ultimately, as a distillation of the social-imperialist message, placing the efficiency of the nation above other competing interests – whether internal or external to the state. From around 1903 Chamberlain and the Tariff Reform League were busy putting the their argument to the British working classes. The chief organs in the campaign were The Daily Express and the Daily Mail, which, though they met with resistance to taxes on foreign food imports, set about converting the masses to protectionism and imperial preference with the

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famous slogan: ‘Tariff Reform Means Work for All’.45 The press campaign was accompanied by a spate of music-hall tunes and a leaflet campaign involving cartoons, diagrams, and sheets of statistics aimed at arousing instincts of self-preservation and patriotism in the working classes. As Semmel explains, in the leaflets of the Tariff Reform League the foreigner is usually a ‘bloated “Herr Dumper” ’ who speaks in unhelpful phrases such as ‘hullo mein freindt’.46 Alternatively, he adopts the corporate shape of the American Beef Trust, the Chicago Meat Trust, or the American Hop Trust.47 Leaflet headlines such as ‘Your Wages in Danger’, and rabble-rousing challenges to the pride of workers: ‘We are being unfairly beaten by the foreigner. Shall we take it lying down?’,48 were calculated to drive home the ‘squalid argument’ with a minimum of attention to complicated issues of federation or concepts of ‘civilising’ responsibilities. Usually associated with Chamberlain and the tariff reformers, socialimperialist values appealed to a wide range of political parties. In the British Fabian Society, the South African war led the party to publicly support the empire and recognise the importance of colonial policy to the reform process – an imperial focus reflected in their 1900 election manifesto, Fabianism and The Empire. During the war, the leaders of the Fabians, Sidney Webb and George Bernard Shaw supported the action against the Boers and led a campaign for the formation of a party of ‘National Efficiency’ to address the pressing issues of urbanisation, overcrowding, and physical deterioration. Webb established a ‘brains trust’ for such a party, named the Coefficients, which included a number of eminent socialists, liberals, and conservatives committed to social reform and the rearing of Webb’s vaunted ‘imperial race’. Ultimately, as Ledger argues, the main thrust of eugenics was ‘the preservation and continuation of the English middle classes’.49 The extent of the political huddle around eugenic imperialism illustrates how desperately insecure the nation had become, and how willing to cast around in the refuse of empire for some vestige of social order. While Kipling also believed that the South African war had exposed the decadence of the English and had provided a much-needed lesson in the preparedness and efficiency of the nation, he avoided the racial, economic, and eugenic response that proved irresistible to so many imperialists and reformers at the time. His poems are not only indictments of English decline, but also, indirectly, of the conventional patriotic assumptions of reformist culture. In many respects, his writings of these years can be considered an attempt – though frequently compromised by his authoritarianism – to distinguish his own imperialist

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By Equal War Made One

values from those of the social imperialists and eugenic campaigners. Emphasising the role of the colonies in the war, and playing down the centrality of the ‘mother country’, he questioned the importance of the English to the empire and celebrated the ex-colonial retinue. In so doing, he challenged the narrowly commercial, scientific, and nationalistic remit of reformist culture and debate. The war raised the profile of the urban working classes and the temperature of debate concerning their place in the body politic.50 According to the logic of the eugenicists, they were fundamental to the empire, but they were also – because of their ‘philoprogenitiveness’ and inherited moral and physical defects – potentially dangerous to its longterm stability and good fortune. In Kipling’s poems, the military focus allows him to resolve this dilemma by acknowledging the social importance of the working classes, while directing them to the service of empire and organising them for war – even in times of peace. This social discipline was the purpose of the compulsory national service for which he campaigned aggressively in the early part of the century. For J.A. Hobson, the popular enthusiasm for the military was a disgrace – a menace to democracy that threatened the very fabric of English society. Culture, Hobson argued, was becoming increasingly jingoistic, a phenomenon encouraged by the debasement of art and politics. The cities – ‘congested, ugly manufacturing towns’ – were part of the problem: they discouraged ‘strong individuality of thought’ and cultivated the basest forms of pleasure and desire.51 The music halls were particularly guilty of debauching the masses, feeding the ‘the animal lusts of an audience stimulated by alcohol into an appreciative hilarity’.52 Kipling (like T.S. Eliot) is well known for embracing the culture of the music hall and the riotous military spectacle deplored by Hobson. He does so in the famous poem, ‘The Absent-Minded Beggar’, which was written to raise funds for the families of servicemen fighting in South Africa, and was published in the Daily Mail in 1899. The poem is significant for its focus on the urban background of the soldier, Tommy, and for its re-publication in various cheap formats associated with that urban culture: it was set to music, printed on kitchenware, and various other items of popular wartime memorabilia. In this respect, the military themes of the poem – the army as a sign of social discipline and motherculture efficiency – are juxtaposed disconcertingly against the background of urbanisation and mass culture troubling the middle classes. Because of its popular remit and fundraising purpose – not to mention its publication in the penny press – ‘The Absent-Minded Beggar’ is unapologetically direct in its methods. Kipling seems to have

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acknowledged this by speaking disparagingly of the poem and choosing not to publish it in his next volume.53 But the poem is also remarkably prescient in its realisation of the new level of political interest in the urban crowd. Moreover, in its playful handling of the theme of remembering and forgetting – ‘absent-mindedness’ – it communicates the awkwardness of recruiting the working classes to the pro-war campaign. The aim of ‘The Absent-Minded Beggar’ was the image of the people as army, marching together for the freedom of South Africa and – in a twist on military theme that allied the war to the business of social reform – the uplift of the urban poor. In this respect, the poem is a remarkably early instance of how the issue of social reform is allied to theme of empire and resolved in the metaphor of military order and power. Within this pro-war remit, Tommy – the ‘street-bred soldiery’ detested by White and his co-eugenicists – is nevertheless the hero. He is a creature of the city, and his pastimes are those of Hobson’s urban crowd: he is a drinker, a womaniser, and a habitual shirker of duties. But, Kipling argues, the nation should overlook these shortcomings. In fact, because the soldier is so ‘absent-minded’ – liable to forget his domestic responsibilities and duties – readers are called upon to support his family by contributing to the Daily Mail’s fund: When You’ve shouted “Rule Britannia,” when you’ve sung “God save the Queen,” When you’ve finished killing Kruger with your mouth, Will you kindly drop a shilling in my little tambourine For a gentleman in khaki ordered South?54 These opening lines suggest that the nation too is ‘absent-minded’, forgetful of Tommy’s social origins and troubles. It urges readers to remember that, There are families by thousands, far too proud to beg or speak, And they’ll put their sticks and bedding up the spout, And they’ll live on half o’ nothing, paid ’em punctual once a week, ’Cause the man that earns the wage is ordered out.55 While urging the nation to remember the urban poor, the poem thus ironically argues the case for absent-mindedness, absolving Tommy of the fault and reminding the nation of its forgetfulness – and fear – of the sufferings endured by Tommy’s urban crowd. In so doing, the poem demonstrates what Bhabha terms the ‘syntax of forgetting – or being

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By Equal War Made One

obliged to forget’ essential to nationalist ideology.56 The shilling in the tambourine relieves the social inequality that the giving calls to mind, becoming, ironically, a rallying call for the image of society mobilised as one: ‘Cook’s Son – Duke’s son – son of a belted Earl – / Son of a Lambeth publican – it’s all the same to-day!’57 In this way, the poem reminds the nation of what the middle classes most wanted to forget – the realities of class conflict and urban squalor – while simultaneously proclaiming the merits of forgetting those calamitous social divisions in time of war. This curious interplay of remembering and forgetting – or forgetting to remember58 – focuses anxieties about the new location of English power in the cities among Tommy’s urban crowd. But it also refuses to shy away from the spectre of what Bhabha terms the ‘archaic body of the despotic or totalitarian mass’.59 In this image of the mobilised nation, ‘the threat of cultural difference is no longer a question of “other” people. It becomes a question of the otherness of the people-as-one.’60 An important element of Kipling’s poem is its willingness to accept, and to domesticate, the ‘otherness’ of Tommy and his wife and children. They are certainly rowdy and dissolute, but ultimately subject to an imperial and military model of social authority higher than the state. In common with the majority of Kipling’s lower-class heroes, they are military folk, organised into a disciplined body politic whose energies are channelled into the empire. This is why the serviceman is allowed, in skewed imperialist ways, to contest English social structures: Me that ’ave been what I’ve been, Me that ’ave gone where I’ve gone, Me that ’ave seen what I’ve seen – ’Ow can I ever take on With awful old England again, An’ ’ouses both sides of the street, ‘An edges two sides of the lane, And the parson an’ ‘gentry’ between, An’ touchin’ my ‘at when we meet – Me that ’ave been what I’ve been.61 In the discomfiture of the soldier, there is an atmosphere of socialist commitment, but the ultimate questions of economic and social opportunity are deftly deflected into settled imperialist ventures. Where does the serviceman’s argument against the English ultimately lead? To a job in South Africa, working with a chastened Dutchman for the expansion of the empire:

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Kipling’s soldiers are as zealous for civilian life in the colonies as they are critical of England. It is no coincidence that ‘The White Man’s Burden’ – that paean to the US invasion of the Philippines – is nestled among poems of South African reconstruction and settlement in The Five Nations. The merit of post-war colonisation, Kipling suggests, is that the discontented serviceman shoulders that white man’s burden: if he desires a better standard of living he will, so the thinking goes, surely find it in the colonies. The military and the empire provide outlets for the social discontent, and, conversely, the hopes and aspirations of Tommy’s crowd. They are where the proper work and the clearest thinking are done. When, in March of 1900, he arrived in Bloemfontein to work on the The Friend of the Free State, Kipling was assured in an editorial welcome that, amongst the soldiers, drawn ‘from every quarter of the globe’, he would find ‘the actual physical fulfilment of what must be one of his dearest hopes – the close union of the greatest parts of the greatest empire in the world’.63 Joseph Chamberlain’s view of the troops in South Africa as ‘trustees of a federation’,64 finds an echo in many of Kipling’s Boer War poems. But more importantly, the colonials offer ‘the pure vision’, untroubled by the decadence of the mother country. For example, in ‘The Parting of the Columns’, an English serviceman sings the praises of his Canadian fellow-soldiers: ’Twas how you talked an’ looked at things which made us like you so. All independent, queer an’ odd, but most amazin’ new, My word! You shook us up to rights. Good-bye—good luck to you!65 The serviceman’s acknowledgement of kinship with the Canadians – ‘Our blood ’as truly mixed with yours – all down the Red Cross train’ – is a dramatic reminder of the affinities between the colonial contingents. The passage also implies a growing internationalism and an interest in the wider colonial picture – all ‘independent, queer an’ odd’ – that jarred with the patriotic and protectionist jargon of the penny-press, which, as Bernard Semmel argues, encouraged the suspicion among the working classes of foreigners and foreign competition, fomenting a strongly

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For I know of a sun an’ a wind, An’ some plains an’ a mountain be’ind, An’ some graves by a barb-wire fence; An’ a Dutchman I’ve fought ’oo might give Me a job were I ever inclined62

pro-English attitude to the empire. There was little in Chamberlain’s ‘squalid argument’ to arouse interest in what might be ‘independent’ or ‘amazin’ new’ either in the colonials or the minds of the working classes. Kipling’s soldiers, erstwhile residents of the ‘man-stifling towns’,66 had, by contrast, become citizens of the empire – harbingers of a colonial experience that to some extent at least disputed Britain’s dominant position over the empire. In ‘The Sin of Witchcraft’, a newspaper article attacking disloyal citizens in the Cape, Kipling argues that judgement on the rebels should be exacted by the colonies rather than the people of England: ‘for they too [the colonials] have known the life that is lived out between a horse and a verandah under hot blue skies’.67 These were the men Kipling admired – the real empire-builders whose knowledge of the colonies shamed the fraudulent imperialism of the mother country. The imperialists of the English cities were, he suggests, pale shadows of those men of the ‘hot blue skies’ – a view that finds its way into poems such as ‘The Return’, where the serviceman recalls the excitement of South Africa and the educating experience of life among ‘Men from both two ‘emispheres / Discussin’ things of every kind’.68 Disillusioned with ‘awful old England’, Kipling’s soldiers look to their colonial counterparts for guidance and renewal. Moreover, Tommy’s new-found enthusiasm for the colonies – for news of ‘Calgary, an’ Wellin’ton, an Sydney and Quebec; / Of mine an’ farm, an’ ranch an’ run, an’ moose an’ cariboo . . . ’69 – offered a telling contrast with the loyalty of the colonial soldier to his homeland. For example, in ‘Lichtenberg’, an Australian soldier sees in the South African landscape an almost perfect picture of home: And I saw Sydney the same as ever, The picnics and brass-bands; And the little homestead on Hunter River And my new vines joining hands. It all came over me in one act Quick as a shot through the brain – With the smell of wattle round Lichtenburg, Riding in, in the rain.70 It is no accident that the realisation comes to him ‘[q]uick as a shot through the brain’: in many respects, the national claims of Australia were no different to the claims of the Boer Republics, and the conflict might easily have been between Englishman and Australian. Hence,

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beneath the association of Sydney with Lichtenburg there is the faintest suggestion of an understanding between Australian and Boer, to the potential exclusion of the British. As Van Wyk Smith comments, many Australians questioned the British cause, and were drawn to the Boers for their mutual ‘love for and identification with the veld and wild places’.71 These sympathies exposed the fragility of the claims of the mother country upon either the lands or the military support of the colonies. Given the superior political judgement and military powers attributed to the colonials in The Five Nations, it was a support that the Island-English could ill-afford to lose, and one which appeared far more precarious than supporters of the ‘squalid argument’, with its pragmatic approach to the economy of the empire, might suggest. Even in ‘Our Lady of the Snows’, written to mark the Canadian preferential tariff of 1897, Kipling ends the poem with an assertion of Canadian autonomy in the petulant words of the ‘Lady’ (Canada) to her Mother: ‘Daughter am I in my mother’s house, / But mistress in my own!’72 Similarly, in ‘The Young Queen’, written to mark the inauguration of the commonwealth of Australia in 1901, the ‘Old Queen’ describes the nation as ‘Daughter no more but Sister’, pledging the Young Queen ‘her people’s love’.73 These were poems that, while celebrating the unity, also reflected the loosening of political relationships between the five nations: England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. It is worth noting Kipling’s influence on the Australian Republican poet, A.B. (Banjo) Paterson, whose criticism of ‘the narrow ways of English folk’ recalls the disillusionment of the soldier-returnee in The Five Nations. Kipling’s suspicion of the Island-English was attractive to writers asserting the distinct literary and political voice of the colonies. Paterson writes, in ‘Old Australian Ways’ (1902): The narrow ways of English folk Are not for such as we; They bear the long-accustomed yoke Of staid conservancy: But all our roads are new and strange, And through our blood there runs The vagabonding love of change That drove us westward of the range And westward of the suns.74 In terms of its style, metre, rhythm, and themes ‘Old Australian Ways’ directly echoes poems such as ‘Chant Pagan’ and ‘The Return’. Paterson’s

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By Equal War Made One

debt to Kipling clearly owes something to the latter’s shared concern for the ‘new and strange’ in both the landscape and the political views of the Five Nations. It should also be recognised that Kipling’s attention to the colonies – to their perspective, culture, landscape, and ‘poetic’ value – occurred at a time of indifference, even hostility, to emergent colonial nationalisms and literary traditions. Poems such as ‘Lichtenburg’ were a corrective to what A.G. Stephens described, in the Bulletin Story Book (1901), as ‘the grotesque English prejudice against things Australian, founded on no better reason than that they are unlike English things’.75 Again, the interest of Kipling’s servicemen in their colonial counterparts – ‘Think o’ the stories round the fire, the tales along the trek’,76 intimates the beginnings not only of a political, but also of a narrative tradition independent of the mother country. The Canadian writer, Sara Jeanette Duncan had urged the development of such an independent literary voice in her essay, ‘Colonials and Literature’ (1886).77 Returning to the relationship between Kipling’s views on the South African war and those, for example, of the right-wing imperialist and social reformer, Arnold White, it appears there was at least some similarity of opinion. Both advocated compulsory national service, the abandonment of hereditary privilege,78 the increase of naval power, and, later on, severe political measures to halt the progress of imperial Germany (White advocated a pre-emptive strike to destroy the German fleet.)79 Both criticised the exposure of young, poorly prepared, urban recruits to the war: ‘Sons of the sheltered city – unmade, unhandled, unmeet – / Ye pushed them raw to the battle as ye picked them raw from the street.’80 There is, however, no evidence that Kipling embraced the eugenic sympathies of White or his Liberal and Fabian Socialist opponents. Quite apart from the moral objections he might have held to this policy of social control, his inherited alienation from England as a colonial, and his suspicion of state power, made it impossible for him to accept the systematic manipulation of the social order by government scientists. The differences between the two are evident in their attitude to the colonisation of South Africa. White campaigned for the total dominance of the Anglo-Saxon race through a programme that would be, as he phrased it, ‘not altruistic, but selfish, not benevolent, but prudential’.81 This ruthless power was the natural counterpart of White’s eugenic approach to social problems at home. It was a short step from the view that the ‘philoprogenitiveness of an unsound proletariat is sheer decadence’,82 to the belief that by segregating the unfit – which

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included the street-bred soldiery, the unemployed, and recipients of charitable aid83 – the nation would purify its racial stock and extend its right to dominion over other less vigorous nations of the world. In Kipling’s poems, on the other hand, domination is strongly discouraged as a colonial policy. Instead he imagines a future of peaceful settlement and co-operation: Here, in a large and a sunlit land, Where no wrong bites to the bone, I will lay my hand in my neighbour’s hand, And together we will atone For the set folly and the red breach And the black waste of it all, Giving and taking counsel each Over the cattle-Kraal.84 Of course, such Anglo–Boer camaraderie meant colonisation to the African population. Chamberlain’s comments on the necessity of ‘thinning’ the black population were the inevitable counterpart of this settlement, and in this respect Kipling’s African dream ran perilously close to the eugenic imperial idea.85 It nevertheless rejected the supremacist views of figures like White, advocating a future of inter-racial brotherhood supported by the disciplined structure of the mother country. Edward Shanks makes the important point that none of Kipling’s poems celebrate British victories during the fighting.86 In this respect, they have little in common with the aggressively patriotic verse of, for example, Swinburne or William Ernest Henley. The day after war was declared, Swinburne urged the English, in ‘The Transvaal’, to ‘scourge these dogs, agape with jaws afoam, / Down out of life. Strike England, and strike home’.87 In his celebration of the unconditional surrender of the Boers, ‘The First of June, 1902’, he rejoiced in the prospect of the nation’s enemies ‘shamed and stricken blind and dumb as worms that die’.88 Similarly, in his collection, For England’s Sake (1900), Henley portrayed the war as a step towards the establishment of English racial supremacy in South Africa: ‘That, stung by the lust and pain of battle, / The One Race ever might starkly spread, / And the One Flag eagle it overhead!’89 The war would prove, as he announced in the final poem of the volume, that England was ‘Mother of mothering girls and governing men’.90 Because of his colonial sympathies, Kipling found it difficult to denounce the Boer settlers in this way, or to view their society as separate

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By Equal War Made One

from or inferior to the society of the mother country. To the colonialist – an instinctive opponent of metropolitan influence and the franchise – the Dutch settlers were rather admirable for their military prowess and hatred of the ballot box. Kipling’s first poem on the war, ‘The Old Issue’, published in The Times on 19 September 1899, illustrates this unusual, ambivalent attitude to the Boer position. It repeats the common allegation against the Boers – the denial of the franchise – but handles the opposition between Boer tyranny and English democracy extremely insecurely. The poem urges the English to rise against President Kruger in the same way their ancestors opposed earlier tyrant monarchs (specifically King John and Charles I): ‘Here is nothing new nor aught unproven,’ say the Trumpets, ‘Many feet have worn it and the road is old indeed. It is the King – the King we schooled aforetime!’ (Trumpets in the marshes – in the eyot at Runnymede!) ‘Here is neither haste, nor hate, nor anger,’ peal the Trumpets, “Pardon for his penitence or pity for his fall. “It is the King!” – inexorable Trumpets – (Trumpets round the scaffold at the dawning by Whitehall) ... ‘He hath veiled the Crown and hid the Sceptre’, warn the Trumpets, ‘He hath changed the fashion of the lies that cloak his will. ‘Hard die the Kings – ah hard – dooms hard!’ declare the Trumpets, Trumpets at the gang-plank where the brawling troop-decks fill!91 Edward Shanks considered this poem so confusing that it can be read as an inducement to Boer resistance.92 The error is an easy one to make, with the metaphors of monarchy and parliament merging Boer and British culture almost indistinguishably. In his cowed state at Runnymede, or his gloomy trek to the scaffold at Whitehall, Kruger is drafted into English history as the son of Henry II, from whom all the kings of England are descended. The South African war is thereby encoded metaphorically as a ‘civil war’, fought on English soil to defend freedoms wrenched ‘inch and ell’ from the monarchy: ‘Suffer not the old King: for we know the breed.’ In this way, Kipling plays upon the worst fears of Middle England, urging them to fight against Krugerism on the home front. However, the Parliamentarian theme involves a huge contradiction, evoking the democratic ideal and the redistribution of power sought by the opponents of Charles I. Kipling attempts to

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resolve this problem by suggesting that parliamentary democracy has lost its keen edge, conceding a voice to liberals and conciliators – ‘bondsmen bidding us endure / Whining “he is weak and far” ’, men who would undermine the Englishman’s Ancient Right ‘to live by no man’s leave’. Although the Old King acts ‘in Freedom’s name’, true freedom is for Kipling only bought with military might. It is this stern military agenda – the Ancient Right, as it were, to bear arms – that is threatened by the conciliators abetting Kruger: ‘He shall take a tribute; toll of all our ware / He shall change our gold for arms – arms we may not bear.’93 In this way, the poem attempts to settle social troubles on the home front by viewing the war as an opportunity to establish social models inherited from the empire. Whether in the romancing of Tommy and the urban crowd, or the fantasy of Ancient Right, the war militarises society and mobilises it for imperial service. From the outset, Chamberlain represented the South African war as a fight for the principles of western democracy: ‘[W]hen equal rights are assured to both the white races, I believe that both will enjoy the land together in settled peace and prosperity. Meanwhile [. . . ] we are advancing steadily, if slowly, to the realisation of that great federation of our race which will inevitably make for peace and liberty and justice.’94 The campaign in South Africa did little in the long run for that great federation – or for the egalitarian values he celebrated in that call to war.

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By Equal War Made One

Strange Deaths in Liberal England: Traffics and Discoveries, Media War, and the Machineries of Social Change

By focusing attention on urban deprivation, government incompetence, and the passing of well-mannered, aristocratic modes of politics, the South African war exposed social fissures that, for Kipling, demanded systems – mechanical, efficient, predictable – to reassert national stability and discipline. It is no coincidence that in a sequence of science-fiction stories begun in the early 1900s, and no doubt inspired by his reading of H.G. Wells,1 he fantasises about a global dictatorship policed by the Ariel Board of Control – a futuristic totalitarian power that employs sophisticated methods of travel, communications, and weaponry to subdue restless populations. This notion of technicalauthoritarian power with military leanings and know-how belongs very firmly to the period leading up to the First World War. It is a reflex of political change, and for Kipling places the technologies of the new century in a pivotal, organising role. The other important attribute of the Ariel Board of Control is its rapport with the media, which it services with reports on its global operations, and corresponds, via willing journalists and editors, with the world at large. Media technology had become a key theme in Kipling’s writings, which had begun to focus upon the role of the press in the social organisation of meaning. In those writings inspired by or set in South Africa, the focus on communications – the media machine, photographic imagery, early ventures in film, and experiments in wireless technology – runs parallel with the focus on the war. It is a development that changes the landscape of his writings, whether they evoke rural England, with its country houses, ancient tithe barns, and bubbling brooks, or the 136

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burnt grasslands of South Africa. Kipling’s work was now attuned to a mass-mediated, technically informed age, where traditional metaphors of social stability were no longer authoritative. His interest in the control of the press is illustrated by the little-known, uncollected story, ‘A Burgher of the Free State’. The story concerns a character called Allen, a Scottish settler in South Africa who now proudly considers himself a citizen (burgher) of the Orange Free State. Set in the early days of the war, it tells how, despite having ‘no special love for the English’,2 Allen refuses to trust the anti-English propaganda of the Transvaal Dutch, warning his fellow burghers that they are being drawn by the Republic into a fight they cannot win: ‘the State has been sold for a handful of Transvaal tobacco – and we’ll not get the tobacco’.3 Allen is referring here to the political agreement that eventually drew the Free State into the war in accordance with its alliance treaty obligations to the Transvaal. Allen lives in Bloemfontein, where Kipling was to work briefly as a journalist on The Friend of the Free State following the takeover of the town by the British army. Allen works as the master printer on the Bloemfontein Banner, which he has seen degenerate from a ‘leisurely medium’ for local reporting into ‘a purposeful, malignant daily under control of a German whose eyes, Allen said, were too close together’.4 It is a position that enables him to see at first hand the workings of antiEnglish propaganda in the first stages of the fighting: ‘Through many weary weeks he had heard nothing but appeals to God and the Mauser – had set up fathoms of it – had seen the advertisements give place to Government proclamations, and had wondered who paid for them.’5 The most significant proclamation, which returns to torment him after takeover of the newspaper, is ‘the proclamation’, issued to formally invite the Basutos to rise against the English. Kipling seems to have taken the existence of this document as a matter of fact, but was anxious ‘to make dead sure of the proclamation’ before publishing the story in Traffics and Discoveries.6 When he wrote to Lord Roberts to verify its existence, Roberts explained that he ‘don’t know where it is’, forcing him, extremely reluctantly, to leave out the tale. Kipling’s main concern in the story is to explore the complexity and the trauma of Allen’s moral compromise. But the tale also describes the capture and control of the pressroom by the army (under Roberts) and the military-backed Transatlantic Press Syndicate – an Anglo-American press corps reminiscent of Kipling’s coterie on The Friend. Demanding a copy of the incriminating proclamation, the Syndicate – ‘trained to the mastery of situations’ – nevertheless recognises at a glance ‘the pity

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the horror and the loneliness’ of the informer, even if he betrays their Boer–Germanic adversaries.7 When they finally receive the copy they require, they do so privately, out of the view of Allen’s colleagues, sparing his dignity and self-respect. The safeguarding of Allen’s dignity as a burgher is an important theme of the story, and it is perhaps creditable to Kipling that he urges his readers to sympathise with the ‘disloyal’ colonial citizen. It is, nevertheless, also a measure of his political naiveté that the narrator seems to place such trust in the Transatlantic Press Syndicate and its military backers. Kipling suggests that an elite corps can rule society with intelligence and sympathy, and that corps, acknowledging historical conditions, is notably transatlantic in its constitution, military in its ethos, and global in its reach – a thoroughgoing press-lobby for the Ariel Board of Control. The American role in the conquered pressroom is typically jaunty: ‘ “I’ve done a bully leader for today”, said Corbett, “Tisn’t often an American can lay down the law to a British annexation. Let it go in [ . . . ]. It’s your war, but its my fun.” ’8 Three continents, explains Kipling, wait upon the words of the Syndicate for the truth, and ‘in their hands lay the reputation of every combatant officer, but they took it lightly [ . . . ]’.9 It is left to the Englishman, Grady, of the Unlimited Wire, to meditate, melodramatically, upon the real cost of the war: ‘the vision of poor Hawke bleeding from the volley under the white flag was always with him’.10 Kipling apparently wishes to portray the Syndicate as an emotionally sympathetic enterprise, capable of responding sensitively to the dilemmas and difficulties of colonial life encapsulated in the downfall of Allen. Although the action of the tale occurs in a world far removed from the landscape of the Jungle Stories, it develops the same theme of a modern, mass-mediated empire governed by transatlantic values. In this new phase, the English must come to terms with the complexities of modern politics and the information age. The very first paragraph cleverly intimates the difficulties of decoding the popular wartime rhetoric. The story begins: From the little hill near Bloemfontein Old Fort you command ninety miles of country towards Kimberley; and when Kimberley besieged uses her searchlight you can see the wheeling beam as clearly as Israel saw the Pillar of Flame. If you are loyal you ascend the hill singing with your friends, and gloat over the ringed city. If you are disloyal you creep up without music, lie down among the boulders, hidden from the police, and whisper to fellow-disloyalists: ‘Kimberley’s all right.’11

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138 South Africa and Sussex: An Estranged Homecoming

The passage describes the siege of Kimberley by the Boers, and in so doing forces the reader to interpret the words, ‘loyal’ and ‘disloyal’, against the grain of English propaganda, imagining the concept of loyalty from the pro-Boer perspective. From this perspective, the English sympathiser hiding from the police is the ‘disloyalist’. Immediately after this, Kipling makes another apparently guileless, but actually very ironic, loaded remark: ‘Allen, of the Bloemfontein Banner, though he did not gloat, was loyal.’ The question is, loyal to whom and to what? In what follows, Kipling suggests that Allen’s colonial identity cannot be expressed or contained by the lazy dichotomy, loyal/disloyal. It does not adequately formulate his colonial position as a Scots burgher of the Free State. He is no friend of the English, though he does not gloat over Kimberley, and is loyal to his adopted country, though not to the Transvaal. This again is the colonial Kipling, the figure who does not fall in with the English idea, and who, for this reason, is ready to embrace the American lobby in the shape of the Press Syndicate. Kipling perhaps saw something of himself in the greybeard figure, Allen, who ‘loafs’ about the market square in his carpet slippers and black velvet smoking-cap, holding companionable ‘levees’ on his veranda denouncing the pro-German politicking of Hollanders in the Transvaal. In this respect, ‘A Burgher of the Free State’ is the work of a writer who understands the psychological trauma and the temptations of moral compromise. Allen, he explains, is a burgher of forty years’ standing. He has farmed the land he inherited from his Dutch wife, Katie, and since her death, which led him to sell the farm and return to his first trade as a master printer, has grown ‘accustomed to his seat in the Banner office’.12 Surrounded by his wife’s relations, who are ‘many, and of exceeding friendliness’, he has every reason to love ‘the land of his peace’.13 Allen’s colonial innocence, which gradually draws him into the pay of propagandists and power-mongers, is redolent of Kipling’s own service of authority in the war. In the country of the Randlords, he had struck a ‘bargain’ with political power – the Masonic alliance between the journalist and the rogue imperialist envisaged all those years ago in his Indian stories. Allen, Kipling suggests, is an ethical man, who sells his farm because he cannot bring himself to treat the ‘Kaffirs’ as ‘the Dutch treated them’.14 He takes, instead, a little tin-roofed cottage with a pleasant veranda and a pretty rose garden. In Allen’s questioning, critical temper, ‘the Scot in him died hard’.15 But, there is something parochial about the burgher, which puts him at the mercy of the sophisticated machinery of

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140 South Africa and Sussex: An Estranged Homecoming

Allen’s heart stood still. He had heard wild threats that, before long, the Basutos would be formally invited to rise against the English, but in Bloemfontein that talk was coldly received. They had, of course, employed Kaffirs to hold horses, dig trenches, bring up food and ammunition, in extreme cases to cover in advance and always to haul guns. But no responsible man contemplated openly putting the war on a direct black and white basis – calling upon the black to rise against the white. Much of the fighting had been, of design, been pitched between Zululand and Basutoland, that the two races from their hills might learn which was the power to be feared. That and the raiding of weak tribes was entirely fair, since all the world knew the English were using black troops from India and committing every horror.17 Whatever his earthy wisdom and (Scots) kindliness, Allen has begun to think in the intemperate, racist terms of his fellow burghers. At the end of the story a colonial soldier upbraids him for his mistake: What fools you Dutch are! You believe anything your predikants tell you. Here is our Army. Go and look at it. You were quick enough to kodak [photograph] our dead on the Natal side, and to sell them in the shops. If there had been natives you could have kodaked them. That is just like you Dutch – at one time so clever with your guns and your pom-poms, and then – just Dutch.18 What marks the colonial English from the Dutch in Kipling’s mind is not just their supposed kindness to native Africans, but their political sophistication and media fluency – their competence with the Kodak. For this reason he lauds the work of the Transatlantic Syndicate, with its subtle grasp of the lexical and humanitarian problems of colonial Africa, and its obedience to the military. This rapport between the military and the media is evoked in another war story, ‘The Comprehension of Private Copper’. It tells how a soldier, Private Copper, is held captive by a Transvaal burgher, who turns out to

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this modern, transatlantic, media-driven age. Despite his credentials as a Blackwood’s man and a reader of Carlyle’s French Revolution,16 the ‘sun and the soft airs’ and ‘the lazy black labour’ have, in the words of the story, wheeled him into line. He begins to believe the anti-English propaganda:

be an avid reader of the English pro-Boer newspaper, Lloyd’s Weekly News (also known as ‘Jerrold’s Weekly’). After looking his prisoner up and down, the Boer folds and re-pockets his copy of the newspaper, and begins to taunt Copper with quotations from its leader, outlining, for the benefit of the ‘poor uneducated Tommy’, Jerrold’s sociological critique of the war. Copper, he suggests, is ‘an ignorant diseased beast’ like the rest of his people, who knows nothing about history, and ought to be told what his ‘own working classes, the diseased, lying, drinking, white stuff that [he] come[s] out of are saying’ about the war.19 As he listens to the Boer’s re-hash of Lloyd’s leaders, he is reminded of the ‘offensive accent that the young Squire of Wilmington had used fifteen years ago when he caught and kicked Alf Copper, a rabbit in each pocket, out of the ditches of Cuckmere’.20 In the burgher’s patronising anatomy of working-class culture, he remembers being slighted by a snobbish young girl at a dance, who refuses to dance with a ‘poo-ah Tommee’.21 Provoked by these memories, the spurned, socially despised Alf, thinks of a way to trick and overpower his captor. Feigning a sprained ankle, he wheels around and knocks the Boer unconscious, heading back to camp with the prisoner and the copy of Lloyd’s in tow. The story ends with the prisoner sitting uncomprehendingly while Copper and his circle read through the newspaper, ridiculing the anti-war propaganda. Copper’s father, Kipling writes at the beginning of the story, was a Southdown shepherd, but five years’ army service ‘had somewhat blunted [Private Copper’s] pastoral instincts’. The army and the empire have changed him – taught him the ‘size and meanin’ of the game’ – and he now thinks of ‘the crushing answers he had never given to the young squire’, finding his ‘brain working with a swiftness and clarity strange in all his experience’.22 The outwitting of the Boer and the capture of the outlawed copy of ‘Jerrold’s Weekly’ are, for Kipling, evidence of Alf’s media interest and political intelligence – his ‘comprehension’. Contrary to the Boer’s impression of ‘poor Tommy’, Kipling suggests that the Private possesses the critical facility to engage with the politics of the anti-war press. Alf not only comprehends social history – and the meaning of words like ‘aristocracy’ – but also is willing to settle those old political scores in South Africa, identifying the Boer with the arrogant squire of his youth in England. This canny, literate ‘poacher’, Kipling gleefully observes, will not be so easily shifted from the Boer’s land: [W]hat I dis-liked was this baccy-priggin’ beggar, ’oo’s people, on ’is own showin’, couldn’t ’ave been more than thirty or forty years in the coun’ – on this Gawd forsaken dust-eap, comin’ the squire over

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142 South Africa and Sussex: An Estranged Homecoming

Copper’s politics in this passage focus Kipling’s interest in the media throughout the tale. This is, effectively, a story that imposes the military idea – in the shape of Copper’s critically astute circle – upon the politically troubling prospect of a free press, with all its radical, pro-Boer leanings. It evokes a metaphorical ‘capture’ of the media not so far removed from the military takeover of the Bloemfontein press in the former tale. Kipling recognises that Copper’s circle has legitimate quarrels with the English political system – much as Allen, the burgher of the Free State, has no special fondness for his Edinburgh days ‘at elbow-push of hungry equals’.24 But he wishes to project the grievances of the working-class soldier onto South Africa, imagining the Private politically and intellectually fulfilled in this campaign to topple the aristocracy of the shambuk [heavy whip]. The troubling, radical energies of Copper’s class – newly educated, enfranchised, and politically informed – are thus projected onto the landscape and the politics of the veldt. Perhaps for this reason the story ends with Alf and his companions quoting mischievously from ‘Jerrold’s’ or Lloyd’s Weekly News. As so often in his portrayal of the military, Kipling sides with the common soldier. He enjoys the theme of Copper besting a ‘large and perspiring staff of press censors’ to secure his copy of the forbidden newspaper (which he sells at the end of the story to his captain for the price of a cold beer). But, notwithstanding Copper’s literacy, intelligence and ‘comprehension’, Kipling is so sceptical about the free press that he imagines the Private fortuitously immune to its anti-war rhetoric. The regimental wag, Macbride, taunts his friend with ironic quotations from the Lloyd’s leader: ‘You’re the uneducated ’ireling of a calcallous aristocracy which ’as sold itself to the ’Ebrew financeer. Meantime, Ducky [ . . . ] you’re slakin’ your brutal instincs in furious excesses. Shriekin’ women an’ desolated ’omesteads is what you enjoy.’25 The taunt parodies the anti-Semitism and conspiracy theory rife in the anti-war press, but in dispelling the reports of ‘desolated ’omesteads’ it also suppresses the true horrors of the campaign in South Africa: ‘Ere’s Old Barbarity on the ramp again with some of his lady friends, ’oo don’t like concentration camps. Wish they’d visit ours. Pinewood’s a married man. He’d know how to behave!’26 The shrieking women and the concentration camps were aspects of the war Kipling clearly did not wish to take seriously,

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me. [ . . . ] Why, I caught ’im in the shameful act of tryin’ to start a aristocracy on a gun an’ a wagon an’ a shambuk! Yes; that’s what it was: a bloomin’ aristocracy.23

and – given the ruthlessness of Kitchener’s tactics – the sinister, sexual overtones of MacBride’s ‘joke’ indicate the extent of his insensitivity and deafness to critics of military policy. The writer who considered the most popular opponent of the camps, Emily Hobhouse, ‘unspeakable’,27 was the Kipling who would turn the newspaper office over to the army and the Transatlantic Syndicate, elevating them to a position of unimpeachable wisdom and good judgement. Copper’s social class had proven themselves during the war, but their political consciousness – their ‘comprehension’ – and their openness to radical ideology was also troubling to many conservatives. For this reason, the issues of reading and interpreting dominate the South African stories: they were written at a time when the mass media loomed large in the national enterprise, governing the representation of the war and organising various elements of the state – loyal and disloyal – into reassuring cultural and racial positions. Kipling had committed himself to mass culture – for example, in the publication of ‘The AbsentMinded Beggar’ – and he clearly understood the need to represent the war favourably and consistently. But there was always, just as in the poem, another side to his focus on the media, one less committed to organising and ‘comprehending’ affairs. In a number of other South African stories, meaning itself is called in question, offering a counternarrative to the politics of social control. To understand why this is so, it is necessary to recall Kipling’s life as propagandist during the war. It was a role that heightened his wariness of what is nowadays termed ‘information society’. Ulf Hannerz offers the following illuminating remarks on the challenges to meaning posed by this information culture: The media [ . . . ] are seen to be taking over from whatever may have been a reality outside them; messages bounce back and forth between them, taking on the leading part in constituting the environment of consciousness, a ‘hyperreality.’ But the media are also understood to be in the marketplace. Their messages are commercial and the very fact that technology has come to allow the externalisation of knowledge and culture to such a high degree facillitates commoditization. No longer are these latter so stably committed to the mind of the individual, who would thereby get some of his special aura, and no longer, either, is the individual so committed to them. The state also declines as an organization for the production and distribution of learning. This is the era of the transnational corporation.28

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If stories such as ‘Private Copper’ and ‘A Burgher of the Free State’ concern technologies of mass culture, they are also obsessed with the implications of these technologies for the distribution of power in society. (The Transatlantic Press Syndicate clearly foreshadows Hannerz’ era of the ‘transnational corporation’.) Further stories collected in Traffics and Discoveries reflect the social and ideological repercussions of mass communication and production, focussing the effects of these developments upon conceptions of the empire and the nation. In the strange tale, ‘Mrs Bathurst’, the narrator of the story introduces his friend, Inspector Hooper of the Cape Government Railways to a couple of old seafaring acquaintances, Mr Pyecroft and Sergeant Pritchard. Fuelled by the narrator’s cooling bottles of Bass on the drowsy afternoon, the conversation turns to events surrounding the disappearance of a serviceman named Vickery – also known as Click – whose obsession with a woman, Mrs Bathurst, seems to have led him to desert and, possibly, commit murder. Pyecroft and Pritchard remember Mrs Bathurst as an unforgettably attractive and kind young widow who ran a hotel in Hauraki, near Auckland. Both are mystified by her acquaintance with the much older Vickery, a married man with a daughter of fifteen whom they regard as an unlikely, somewhat sinister admirer. Although most of the tale is told by Pyecroft, Inspector Hooper supplies the final details of the story, explaining his discovery of two burnt corpses in a teak forest north of Bulawayo: ‘There’d been a bit of a thunderstorm in the teak, you see, and they were both stone dead and black as charcoal. That’s what they really were, you see – charcoal. They fell to bits when we tried to shift ’em.’29 From the distinctive tattoo marks still visible on one of the figures, the men assume one of the charred corpses to be the remains of Vickery, and the other to be implicitly those of Mrs Bathurst: ‘ “And to think of her at Hauraki!” [ . . . ] Oh, my Gawd!’30 Nevertheless, neither figure’s identity is satisfactorily established in the story. And, notwithstanding the aspersions cast on the scene by Pyecroft’s account of an unsettling, vaguely murderous obsession, the fire might indeed have been the accident of nature, the lightening strike, initially suspected by Inspector Hooper. When in the closing sentences, the Inspector reaches into his waistcoat pocket for clinching evidence of Click’s death in the forest (the distinguishing false teeth whose rattle earned Vickery his nickname) he brings his hand away ‘empty’, muttering vague sentiments of sympathy for the dead man’s companions ‘ . . . But, he was friend of you two gentlemen, you see.’31 It is an ambivalent gesture that frustrates any attempt to resolve the issue, typifying the teasing qualities that have long vexed readers of this tale.

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144 South Africa and Sussex: An Estranged Homecoming

C.S. Lewis thought the story so obscure that he believed Kipling had overedited it, unintentionally cutting out essential material. David Lodge, on the other hand, believed that Mrs Bathurst was a classic example of self-conscious narrative ‘indeterminacy’, in which the ambiguities of the tale subvert the basic structural principles of the detective story, achieving a ‘polysemous’ quality that recalls the ambiguity of the ‘acknowledged modern masters’.32 Although, as Lodge’s essay implies, it is perhaps useless to attempt to solve the mystery of ‘Mrs Bathurst’, the theme of cinematography is crucial to that mystery, and allows us to place the tale in the context of social, mechanical, and technological transformations that render such ‘indeterminacy’ historically significant. Vickery, we are told, earns his nickname because his false teeth click ‘like a Marconi ticker’.33 The detail links him inextricably with the early communications technology that plays such a horrifying part in his emotional disequilibrium. Recalling the days immediately prior to Vickery’s desertion, Pyecroft explains how, during the visit of Phyllis’s Circus to Cape Town, he accompanies Vickery to a ‘turn of a scientific nature’, an exercise in an early film called ‘Home and Friends for a Tickey’. Vickery, who has seen the film before, urges Pyecroft to watch the film closely, and to drop him a hint if anything in the footage strikes him. To the surprise of Pyecroft, the film features a short sequence of Mrs Bathurst emerging from a crowd on the platform of Paddington railway station and walking towards the camera: ‘ “Christ! There’s Mrs B.!” ’, he hears a serviceman gasp in the seats behind. This footage of Mrs Bathurst coming forward with a ‘blindish look in her eyes’,34 forms a recurring motif as they revisit the circus on five consecutive nights, following a regular pattern: ‘perhaps forty five seconds of Mrs B [ . . . ]. Then out walk – and drink till train time.’35 For Pyecroft, who is lured by the promise of free drinks, purporting to be just as eager to watch ‘the performin’ elephants’, the film is nevertheless an opportunity for ‘meetin’ old friends’. If (and the issue is by no means certain) Pyecroft’s interest in the film is innocent enough, it seems less so for Vickery, who takes to his seat with a look on his face that unnerves his companion: ‘It made me anxious. I can’t tell you what it was like, but that was the effect it had on me. If you want to know, it reminded me of those things preserved in spirits of wine. White an’ crumply things – previous to birth as you might say.’36 Pyecroft’s metaphor, with its undertones of sexual depravity and violence, only hints at the depths of evil he imagines in his ‘lunatic’ friend, but the story, of course, does little to clarify or confirm his suspicions.

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Listening to Pyecroft, the narrator witnesses the paraphernalia and the power of film dawning upon the protagonists in a spectacle of mingled, bewildering images: ‘cinematograph was what I was alludin’ to. London bridge with the omnibuses – a troopship goin’ to the war – marines on parade in Portsmouth, an’ the Plymouth Express arrivin’ at Paddin’ton.’37 As the images of embarkation suggest, the camera and the film reel had begun to emerge as powerful instruments of propaganda during the South African war, thrilling the crowds with whistlestop tours of London and images of military glory. Though the men affect an easy familiarity with such ‘tickey’ shows – ‘Seen ’em all. Seen ’em all’ – the tale suggests their discomfort with this strange medium. As Pyecroft, explains: ‘I used to think seein’ and hearin’ was the only regulation aids to ascertainin’ facts, but as we get older we get more accommodatin’.’38 When he first sees ‘Home and Friends for a Tickey’, he marvels at the footage of people moving about on a railway platform, but he is also troubled and disorientated by the workings of the camera: ‘Only – only when anyone came down too far towards us that was watchin’, they walked right out o’ the picture, so to speak.’39 As Mrs Bathurst comes into view, taking that same path towards the camera and then ‘melt[ing] out of the picture’, she comes to embody this uncanny filmic principle. In turn, the gaps and elisions of Kipling’s narrative replicate the workings of early, experimental film, with facts and details coming momentarily into view and then, like Mrs Bathurst, drifting teasingly out of the picture. In the dialogue between the narrator and his friends, Pyecroft, Hooper and Pritchard, Kipling suggests that the men are adrift in this cinematographic age. At the beginning of the story, the narrator drifts into a ‘magical slumber’, and is awoken just as ‘the hills of False Bay were [ . . . ] dissolving into those of fairyland’.40 The overtones of fraudulence and deception – not to mention ‘easeful death’ – are underlined by the echo of Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, where the poet slips into hemlock-inspired slumber, only to awaken and discover the vision of fairyland a ‘deceiving elf’. In such allusions to false scents and traps, the tale constantly warns against seeking the revelation suggested by the name of Pyecroft’s ship, the Hierophant (which derives from the Greek hieros, meaning ‘sacred’, and phainein, meaning ‘to show’). Similarly the detail that the narrator buys his beer from ‘the Greeks who sell all things at a price’ recalls the traditional Roman stereotype of Greek fraudulence – for example, Laocoon’s famous remark on the wooden horse, ‘I fear the Greeks, especially when they bear gifts’ (the Aeneid, 2.49), which finds its Christian parallel in St Paul’s famous observation that Cretans

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146 South Africa and Sussex: An Estranged Homecoming

are ‘always liars’ (Titus, 1.12). Pyecroft’s résumé of frauds performed on unwitting servicemen by their more wily counterparts, including his own near desertion at the hands of a confidence trickster who promised him land in British Colombia, not only intimates the problem of hermeneutic uncertainty that dominates the tale, but associates him with Vickery in the most direct and disturbing manner. Each of the men in the story is attracted to the irresistible figure of Mrs Bathurst, and each, implicitly, has entertained the notion of turning his back upon the social code, deserting upright company for the pleasures of what Pritchard, alluding to Pyecroft’s metaphors of foetal experimentation, terms the ‘bestial mind’.41 Kipling seems to associate the cinematographic world of Vickery and Pyecroft with moral doubt – a sort of collective psychosis, where conventional ideas of social responsibility no longer hold at bay that primordial self. It is an age in which things fall apart – or ‘to bits’, like the charcoal remains of the two figures in the teak forest. Hannerz’ remark on information anxiety – ‘When at times information appears “meaningless”, it may again be that this information is somebody else’s meaning’ – reads like an epigraph to ‘Mrs Bathurst’, which intimates some inscrutable, possibly sinister meaning outside the frame of the reader’s perception. Despite his fascination with modernity and modernisation, the dawning of the so-called information age provoked anxieties in Kipling’s writings. In the poem, ‘The Deep-Sea Cables’, he imagines the transoceanic telegraph lines as ‘blind white sea snakes’ lying upon the seabed – the ‘great grey level plains of ooze’ – with an ominous message of change for humankind. The poem depicts a moribund seabed of primordial struggle and evolutionary competition, in which the sea snakes kill off the slow-moving monoliths of an earlier political world, ushering in a new, unfamiliar epoch: ‘They have wakened the timeless Things / they have killed their father time.’42 ‘The Deep-Sea Cables’ ends with a discomfiting vision of what would later be termed the ‘global village’: ‘Hush! Men talk today o’er the waste of the ultimate slime / And a new Word runs between: whispering, ‘Let us be one.’

Motoring tales and the meaning of change Whatever Kipling’s inward fears about progress, they were outmatched by his enthusiasm for machinery and technical knowledge. His writings nevertheless reflect a certain Edwardian zeitgeist in seeking to imbue the modernising temper with a hazy mythology of ancient, incorruptible Englishness, which Kipling rooted in the settled landscape of rural

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Sussex. In 1902 he purchased a new home in the county, Bateman’s, at Burwash. As the local workmen converged upon the house to build walls, dig wells, and trim hedges and trees, he marvelled at their intimacy with the land and the depth of their ancestral pedigree: ‘they came of a smuggling, sheep-stealing stock, brought more or less into civilisation within the past three generations’.43 They were ‘artists and craftsmen’, but also ‘conjurors’ – diviners of water and the movements of the stars, with an implicit belief in magic and folklore.44 One workman, a ‘poacher by heredity and instinct’, was ‘more “one with Nature” than whole parlours full of poets’, and became Kipling’s closest counsellor in the legends and ways of the local district.45 Although Bateman’s put Kipling in touch with the past, it was, under his tenancy, about to be dragged into the future. He had first discovered the property by motorcar, travelling down the steep, narrow lanes that led to the house in his newly acquired Locomobile – an early, steamdriven vehicle that drove him to ‘the limits of fatigue and hysteria’ with its niggling mechanical faults. Kipling thought the Locomobile ‘a gay and meretricious swindle’,46 but acknowledged that it allowed him to buy Bateman’s at a comparatively low price (the seller considered the surrounding hills and the four mile trip to the railway station – on which had worn out two pairs of horses – distinct drawbacks and impediments to the value of the property). When Kipling explained to him the uses of the motorcar, the seller looked at the strange machine and remarked, ‘Oh! Those things haven’t come to stay.’47 Rudyard and Carrie immediately set about renovating their new home, installing electric lights and converting the ancient mill into a turbine. For this project they called upon the expertise of Sir William Willcocks, the designer of the Aswan Dam – ‘a trifling affair on the Nile’.48 Between supervising the cutting down of tress and the re-sloping of riverbanks, Kipling found time to replace the unreliable Locomobile with a new Lanchester, and to strike out on long motoring journeys through Sussex. ‘The chief end of my car’, he observed, ‘is the discovery of England.’49 This England was the ancient, organic countryside of the local workmen – a ‘fairy museum where all the exhibits are alive and real and yet delightfully mixed up with books’.50 In the motorcar, he could venture into this world at ‘no more trouble than the pushing forward of a lever’.51 Kipling’s travels into the past were part of a wider movement in Edwardian culture, which associated the ancient customs and ways of the countryside with the social well-being of the nation. It was a movement that belonged to the years immediately following the South

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148 South Africa and Sussex: An Estranged Homecoming

African war, and was largely inspired by the backlash against urban society following those early drawbacks in the military campaign. As Alun Howkins suggests, this ‘back-to-the-land’ philosophy enjoyed wide-ranging influence in the arts. It was commonplace in the music of Cecil Sharp and Vaughan Williams, and in the architecture of Philip Webb and Lutyens.52 It was also influential in the social sciences, where the rediscovery of the rural England won support in the highest political circles. In 1907, the government’s Chief Medical Officer, George Newman published The Health of the State, a medical survey demonstrating the linkage between physical well-being and standards of personal hygiene. The health of the human body was not the only thing Newman had in mind. He extended the thesis to the body politic and, beyond that, the empire: This little volume may [ . . . ] be looked upon in some sort as a missionary handbook, sent forth as a reminder that the physical health and fitness of the people is the primary asset of the British Empire, and the necessary basis of that social and moral reform which has for its end ‘the creation of a higher type of man.53 Embedded in Newman’s eugenic formulation is the popular conception of the empire as the signifier of the mother country’s health. In all this, there is no challenge to the underlying distribution of power – the economic and social causes of squalor – merely an argument for thrift, cleanliness, discipline, and other variations on the theme of ‘responsible citizenship’. (The scout movement was formed with similar personal standards in mind.)54 Fitness was a matter of ‘simple living, suitable dieting, and a sense of hygiene’,55 habits more easily adopted in the countryside than in the city: The effects of overcrowding must by this time be fairly well known. Small cubic space is bad and uninteresting in itself, but it also involves lack of ventilation and light, which bring in their train all manner of evils and various kinds of physical defects.56 The duty of the medical profession is thus to rediscover nature: ‘learning her secrets, her ways of doing things, endeavour[ing] to imitate her and work along the line of her laws’.57 The obstacle to this regeneration was the working-class household, whose filthy interiors were ruining the mother country’s imperial stock.

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Newman’s project lends institutional authority to laissez-faire politics, discriminating against the working-class body – particularly the domestic failings of working-class women – and legitimising that discrimination with the rhetoric of empire. No aspect of the home escapes his attention. There is even a proper way to drink tea: ‘sparingly and sipped rather than quaffed off’.58 The advice is reminiscent of Mrs Beeton’s directives on domestic behaviour, and it would be fair to say that the text is riddled with similar conventions of middle-class etiquette. Newman belongs, in this respect, to the society that gave us the fish knife, whose only discernable function is to display the social standing of its fumbling nouveau riche user. (The fish knife distinguished bought silverware from the inherited plate of the effete aristocracy, demonstrating the discipline, thrift and hard-won status of its owner.) If it seems frivolous to argue that these staples of Victorian etiquette are a factor in Newman’s suspicions of working-class society, it is nevertheless important to recognise the urgency and the scope of the attempt to police the boundaries of the social order. Elsewhere Newman opines the twin evils of ‘an offensive privy’ and ‘a filthy cistern’,59 but in so doing attributes the failings of hygiene among the working classes to ‘not only their poverty but their ignorance and helplessness’ [my italics].60 The proviso goes to the heart of Newman’s politics, masking the basic economic reasons for the urban trouble. The land of well-trimmed hedgerow and sharp, clean air – Kipling’s England – threatened little in the way of significant social transformation, offering a comfortingly antiquated picture of the country’s timeless hierarchies and social institutions – including the institution of imperial expansion. Newman’s thesis typifies the formulations of control, discipline, punishment, and surveillance implicit in the Edwardian and Georgian political landscape, which are in turn reflected in idealised images of the countryside. As such, however, the values of social discipline are themselves derived from urban-industrial culture – hag-ridden by values of productivity, energy, and efficiency alien to the pre-modern England they invoke. This is why, as David Matless puts it, ‘campaigns for modern rurality go in tandem with campaigns for modern urbanity’.61 Commenting on the literature of the Council for the Preservation of Rural England (CPRE), Matless explains: A moral landscape emerges wherein structures are to embody moral principles and offenders are to be cleared out. Loudness, vulgarity, impertinence on the one side, dignity, composure and fitness on the

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Strange Deaths in Liberal England 151

Although the CPRE was established in the 1920s, it inherited the rural metaphors of an earlier age – along with the nationalist overtones of Newman’s countryside. In the literature of organisations like the CPRE, the politics of social control ran parallel with rural preservation. For this reason, as Matless suggests, the ‘higher’ social type – the ‘landscaped citizen’ – requires a ‘vulgar other, an anti-citizen’ in contrast to whom right social conduct and status are defined.63 In Newman’s work that anti-citizen is the semi-cultivated woman of the urban household. In other versions of the rural argument, the anti-citizen is closer to home: a middle-class ‘other’ who, knowing the value of nature and the traditional ways of the countryside, nevertheless rides roughshod over them – typically in a motor car: Whole ancient skilled occupations – hedging and ditching, the traditional treatment of beasts and growing things – are becoming lost arts in England. Behind the appearance of a feverish prosperity and adventure – motors all along the main roads, golf-courses, gardeners, armies of industrious servants, excursionists, hospitable entertainment of country house parties – we can discern the passing of a race of men.64 The work quoted here, C.F.G. Masterman’s The Condition of England (1909), makes a common case against conspicuous consumption, reading it as an offence against the landscaped citizenry, the feudal country of those untainted by the vulgar pastimes of new money. Masterman’s ‘race of men’ is another conspicuous borrowing from eugenic culture, designating those sons of Albion imperilled by industrialisation and mass production. His principal targets – the investors in urban mass culture, Fordist productivity – are the expanding middle class, whose wealth he believes alienates them from the countryside, and ultimately destroys its ancient customs and racial stock. This is why he fulminates against car owners: ‘Wandering machines, travelling with an incredible rate of speed, scramble and smash and shriek along all the rural ways. You can see them on a Sunday afternoon, piled twenty or thirty deep outside the new popular inns while their occupants regale themselves within.’65 The motorist was not simply destroying the countryside, but commodifying it, clamouring for the low raftered pubs that came to dominate the suburban society of

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other, provide a lexicon of architectural (and human) conduct for English landscape.62

Betjeman and Larkin. The car was an unwelcome display of ‘private ostentation in an age of public penury’.66 It ‘aggravated class feeling when these juggernauts tore at 10 mph down the narrow country roads, unpaved and unsuited to them, covering the hedges and all passers-by in a coat of white dust’.67 Such images of rampaging motorists recall Kenneth Grahame’s parody of the reckless gentry in the figure of Mr Toad, for whom ‘all sense of right and wrong, all fear of obvious consequences’ diminishes behind the wheel.68 Toad’s part in the venerable grandeur of country life at Toad Hall is ‘temporarily suspended’69 by his all-consuming passion for motorcars (and other inventions), which ultimately land him in prison, engineering an escape in the disguise of a washerwoman. It is easy to see, then, how Kipling courted controversy as the poet of the machine. In August 1904, the year he published Traffics and Discoveries, there were only 8500 motorists in the country.70 Kipling was among this proud number of ‘desperate pioneers’ who ‘took the first shock of public opinion’: Earls stood up in their belted barouches and cursed us. Gipsies, governess-carts, brewery wagons – all the world except the poor patient horses who would have been quite quiet if left alone joined in the commination service, and The Times leaders on ‘motor-cars’ were Eolithic in outlook.71 Importing a car into the countryside was inflammatory enough in this political climate, but associating it with the discovery of history and the stewardship of the countryside further heated the controversy. Kipling’s motorcar took him from the ‘Norman Conquest and the Barons’ War into Richard Jefferies’ country, and so through the Regency, one of Arthur Young’s less known tours [ . . . ] into Gilbert White’s territory.’72 It was the machine of the naturalist and custodian of wild England, recapturing the essence of the country parish and province – à la White’s Selborne and Jeffries’ Wiltshire. The controversy of this theme is reflected in the celebrated ghost story ‘They’ – a tale later recalled by Eliot in the Four Quartets. The story is narrated by a motorist who befriends the owner of a large mysterious house, a blind woman surrounded – so the narrator believes – with playful, contented children. On a return visit to the woman (he has no idea how he navigates his way to or from the house), he is called upon to fetch a doctor for a child in the village. When the infant dies, he realises that the blind woman’s playful visitors are ghosts, whom he is permitted to

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see because he has ‘loved and lost’ a child of his own. This unusual and beautifully written story was clearly inspired by the death of Kipling’s first child, Josephine. It also, however, involves extraordinary reflections on exile and alienation, drawing together various stands of contemporary culture – debates about economic privilege, machinery, and modernisation. In the relationship between the villagers and the motorist, Kipling dramatises the awkward social status of what he terms the ‘motor gentry’, weaving this concern into a deeper analysis of the narrator’s social belonging. Much as the landscape of C.F.G. Masterman is a social model inscribed with codes of conduct and belonging, the rural backdrop of ‘They’ is similarly imprinted with the theme of co-ordination – finding one’s direction and one’s place in the country. The narrator soon learns that the villagers frown upon his motorcar: Once beyond the signposts at the cross-roads I looked back, but the crumpled hills interlaced so jealously that I could not see where the house had lain. When I asked its name at a cottage along the road, the fat woman who sold sweetmeats there gave me to understand that people with motor-cars had small right to live – much less to ‘go about talking like carriage folk’. They were not a pleasant-mannered community.73 The idea of the interlacing hills shutting out the driver metaphorically evokes the exclusion of the motorist from the social fabric. The notion is emphasised in his strained commerce with the villagers. As her ‘divinely appointed superior’,74 he is appalled by the manners of his ‘rude, fat friend of the sweetmeat shop’.75 Contrary to the local prejudice against the motorist, he represents himself – much as Kipling would have done – as the custodian of ancient England. The countryside he discovers for the reader is poised, tranquil, and heraldic: I found hidden villages where bees, the only things awake, boomed in eighty-foot lindens that overhung grey Norman churches; miraculous brooks diving under stone bridges built for heavier traffic than would ever vex them again; tithe barns built larger than their churches, and an old smithy that cried aloud how it had once been a hall of the Knights of the Temple.76 As the purveyor of this Norman antiquity, the motorist is the guarantor of social stability in the face of social change. But he is by no means

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comfortable in the shimmering, elusive landscape of blind woman’s country. He wishes to ‘unearth’ this England for the community, but knows that the motorcar and the motorist are unwelcome in the countryside. The narrator’s tortuous navigation of the social order reflects Kipling’s need – despite the pangs of conscience – to discover a road to this peaceful place, nestling the machine in the countryside. It is also reassures men like Masterman that the machine and the motorcar were neither enemies of ancient England nor causes of socialist revolution. In this respect, Kipling’s pastoral motoring anticipates the work of H.V. Morton, whose In Search of England (1927) recruited the motor car to the quest for national identity, employing it to uncover the past. Later in the century, motoring ‘became styled as a modern practice in pursuit of an older England, serviced by the AA and a wide illustrated literature’.77 In order to appreciate Kipling’s difficulty in sustaining this view, it is worth reflecting upon the theme of infant mortality in the story. As a medical expert on the subject, George Newman considered infant mortality ‘a measure of social evil’78 (Newman’s italics). In ‘They’, the attempt of the motorist to rescue a dying child is controversial insofar as it represents motoring culture ‘philanthropically’. By reading this story in the light of Newman’s research, it is possible to appreciate how emotive and politically forceful the themes of motoring and the untimely dead would have appeared. There is a curious moment in the story where the driver worries about his car dragging him ‘into child-murder’. It is tempting to read this remark as an unconscious reminder of the social evils imputed to the motorist. If not in so many words associated with ‘child-murder’, car ownership was certainly synonymous with the ‘evil conditions’ of modern life berated by Masterman and Newman.79 Kipling’s handling of this theme reveals the underlying complexity and ambivalence of the social order he imposes upon the Sussex landscape. During the attempt to save the life of the dying child, Arthur, he stresses the important detail of the infant’s illegitimacy – the ‘small irregularity of his birth’.80 As he mournfully observes, ‘insurance offices [ . . . ] would not willingly insure such stray lives’.81 In fact, Dr Newman puts the death rate of so-called ‘illegitimate’ infants at ‘nearly twice as high’ as their ‘legitimate’ counterparts.82 However, Arthur would have been an exception to the rule in Sussex, then as now one of the most privileged and economically buoyant counties in England. As Newman demonstrates, between 1901 and 1905 the county was amongst the safest places in England to be born.83 Moreover, the cerebro-spinal meningitis that eventually kills the child is listed among the least

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common of infectious diseases during 1904, the year of the story’s publication.84 (The death rate was highest in manufacturing towns where overcrowding, disease and poverty were most common.) Arthur was, so to speak, an urban case, whose misfortune was nevertheless imaginatively transposed to Sussex and resolved in the privileged landscape of this traditionally conservative corner of England. In the final parts of ‘They’, it becomes clear that House Beautiful85 and its outlying estate are firmly in the grip of the modernisation that Masterman blamed for the decline of rural prosperity and tradition. Kipling imagines the blind woman dealing with her estate in the traditional style: ‘As I can’t read or write, I’m driven back on the early English tally for my accounts. [ . . . ] I don’t know what I should have done without tallies. An old forester of mine taught me the system. It’s out of date now for everyone else; but my tenants respect it.’86 One tenant, a farmer who goes by the inauspicious name of Turpin, does not. Turpin, we are told, is ‘getting some minerals – superphosphates’ to sprinkle on the land, ‘dragging the heart out of the farm’. In this final scene, Kipling attempts to resolve the lingering problem of the motorist’s social identity and value: he does this by introducing the pantomime villainy of the aptly named Mr Turpin. Forced to distinguish the machinery and mass productivity of the motorist from Turpin’s superphosphate technology, he contrasts their commitment to the commonwealth. The ‘highway robber’ squeezes money from the countryside, while the motorist cares for it, ministering to the needs of the villagers during Arthur’s illness. The social acceptance is reinforced by his burgeoning relationship with the owner of House Beautiful: ‘You’, the blind woman finally reassures him, ‘have the right’. It is this reassurance of social belonging that dispels his fear of shattering the peace of her estate ‘with the clatter of machinery’, spoiling her lawns, or being served a summons for trespass. Whatever the complexities of the social landscape, which are movingly and emotively described, the story ultimately defends the motorist’s ‘right’ – to own a car, to be a gentleman, to consort with the rich and powerful – which it invests with compassion, social concern, and philanthropic value: We conferred with the owners of great houses – magnates at the end of overarching avenues whose big-boned womenfolk strode away from their tea-tables to listen to the imperious Doctor [ . . . ] It was a long afternoon crowded with mad episodes that rose and dissolved like the dust of our wheels; cross sections of remote and incomprehensible lives through which we raced at right angles [ . . . ].87

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The zigzagging of the motorcar between these various communities and class structures is a powerful figuration of the mediating role assumed by Kipling as a member – ill at ease, but a member nonetheless – of the motor gentry. He perceives what Hannerz terms the new ‘social organisation of meaning’ in the culture of the time, and moves, in this intersecting, zigzagging journey, between ‘remote and incomprehensible’ lives, linking them to each other and to his own. Yet it is this admission of remoteness, alienation – the tenderness of the outsider – that lends the story its emotional impact. Kipling exonerates the motorist, but acknowledges the unconscionable aspects of his gentrification and his impact on the landscape. ‘They’ demonstrates the best and worst in Kipling: the extraordinary stylistic qualities and multivalent political conscience, but also instinctively the willingness to align himself with the privileged and powerful. Notwithstanding his contempt for the motorist, Masterman echoes the story in his evocation of unspoilt England: Here are deep rivers beneath old mills and churches; high-roofed red barns and large thatched houses; with still unsullied expanses of cornland and wind-swept moor and heather, and pine woods looking down valleys upon green gardens; and long stretches of quiet down standing white and clean from the blue surrounding sea.88 Masterman’s ancient panorama could be taken directly from Kipling’s tale, with the barns, mills, and churches sweeping down to the white cliffs and blue sea. Nostalgia of this kind informed the conflict between organicism and mechanism that dominated early to mid-twentiethcentury culture, for example, in the writings of D.H. Lawrence, who – despite his dubious interest in Italian Futurism – consistently campaigned against industrialisation and mass culture. The despairing late poem, ‘The Cry of the Masses’, with its hordes of mechanised ‘corpse-bodies’ who ‘trot trot trot [ . . . ] to work’ is one such indictment of the ‘factoryhand’ future. The sentiment is echoed in Women in Love, where the mine-owner Gerald Crich forces his workers to comply with a souldestroying regimen of mass production. Writers including Forster, Woolf, and Orwell were equally conscious of the threat to Englishness posed by urbanisation, consumer culture, and that mélange of middleclass ambition and anxiety, the suburbs. It was Kipling’s cousin, Stanley Baldwin, who invented the social project of home-ownership, which spawned the suburban society detested by these writers. Home-ownership was Baldwin’s response to the growing threat of communism posed by

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the economic depression of the 1920s. A home in the suburbs promised every man his portion of England – a piece of that ancient, tranquil countryside that most of the new home-owners had never known – except, of course, in the writings of authors like Kipling. Ironically, the tiniest houses were marketed as grand aristocratic fiefdoms, with ‘drawing rooms’, ‘maid’s rooms’, ‘entrance halls’, and so on. The middle class became, in effect, pseudo-aristocrats, and all these transformations – including the splendour of the longed-for home in the country – are anticipated in ‘They’. This last point is important because it suggests how far these tales prefigure the ideological complex of suburban development – a post-industrial phenomenon similarly marketed as the discovery of each man’s plot of true England, if only in the soulless uniformity of the housing estate. ‘They’ encompasses an important imaginative tendency in Kipling’s later works: he seems, as the empire gradually dissolves, to resolve urban social problems into a peaceful political imaginary encoded in rural Sussex – a garden of England where socio-economic contradictions receive an ideal solution. In his finest stories he reflects the awkwardness and the ideological tensions of the Sussex fantasy. Other tales handle the theme with far less sophistication. Take, for instance, ‘Steam Tactics’, in which the car-owner bullies Middle England into compliance with the needs of the ‘motor gentry’. The story describes the kidnapping of a policeman by a motorist who refuses to pay a speeding ticket. The idea is that the state exists solely to exploit honest, forwardthinking motorists: ‘We’re making quite a lot out o’ you motor gentry.’89 Kipling’s riposte to the scandal is predictable enough – a harum-scarum ride through Sussex that swaps the gentle overtones of English pastoral for a threatening mix of aristocracy and violence. The car is driven by a serviceman, lately returned from South Africa – current focus of nationalist feeling and jingoism – who jests about hanging, murdering, and treating the policeman as a ‘concentrated Boer’.90 (Such views are a reminder of the military-authoritarian notion that lurks beneath Kipling’s romancing of Sussex.) The message of the tale is that the motorist can tame the beast, rocket through the countryside, and return home in time for a hearty tea. The driver ultimately avenges himself on the government by casting the policeman adrift in the deer-park of Sir William Gardner, who, like the other aristocrat in the tale, Sir Michael Gregory, opens his gates to motorists. In this respect, the story travels the same route to the country house and the landowner navigated in ‘They’, but it does so with little moral sensitivity or self-questioning. Whereas in ‘They’ the haunting of House

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Beautiful troubles the authority of the narrator, in ‘Steam Tactics’ the narrator is monotonously in control, unequivocally approving of the kidnap, and intent upon bulling his way into the social order. Arguably it is in his ghost stories that Kipling best evokes the tensions of social reform and modernisation. In ‘Wireless’, for example, he tells the tale of an experiment in early radio technology conducted in a chemist’s shop by the nephew of its owner, old Mr Cashell. Visiting old Mr Cashell one evening, the narrator learns that his friend is confined to his bed due to a bout of influenza. He is nevertheless invited to stay and observe the experiment by Cashell’s assistant, Mr Shaynor. Throughout ‘Wireless’, Kipling is typically enthusiastic about the radio technology tested in the shop, explaining the science of induction, electro-magnetic fields, Hertzian waves, and the coherer – ‘a glass tube not much thicker than a thermometer, in which, almost touching, were two tiny silver plugs, and between them an infinitesimal pinch of metallic dust’.91 However, this idea of coherence, ‘almost touching’, acquires deeper literary and socio-political resonance when, just as the experiment begins, the chemist’s shop is the scene of a ghostly visitation by the spirit of John Keats, for whom Mr Shaynor acts, unconsciously, as medium. Early in the story, the narrator is unaware of the correspondence between the environment of the chemist’s shop and the poetry and life of John Keats. He observes, for example, the colourful lozenges and tinctures of the dispensary, and the wind-blown poultry and hare on the hooks of the Italian warehouse next door, but does not appreciate how the physical environment echoes Keats’ poem, ‘The Eve of St Agnes’: ‘The owl, for all his feathers was a-cold / The hare limped trembling through the frozen grass.’ For the moment, he is occupied enough with the sheer technical and medicinal details of the shop. Placed in charge while Shaynor enjoys a brief walk ‘round by St Agnes’ with his girlfriend, Fanny Brand (the Edwardian counterpart of Keats’ beloved, Fanny Brawne), he entertains himself by opening various glass-knobbed draws, tasting ‘some disconcerting drugs’, and manufacturing a ‘new and wildish drink’ involving cardamoms, ground ginger, chloric-ether, and dilute alcohol. When the chemist returns, the narrator notices the telltale signs of consumption in the rasping, bloody cough of his new acquaintance: ‘Shaynor clutched the counter, his handkerchief to his lips. When he brought it away I saw two bright red stains.’92 Dismissing the marks on the handkerchief, Shaynor fumbles for a Blaudett’s Cathedral Pastille and lights one of the benzoin cones beneath a ‘goldframed toilet water advertisement’ featuring the image of a girl who

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strongly resembles Fanny Brand. As the blue smoke spirals upwards, incense-like, towards the advertisement, he takes a glass of the narrator’s bubbling, port-coloured mixture, and falls into a deep sleep. It is at this point the tale takes a ghostly turn as Shaynor, still apparently resting, but with his eyes wide open and fixed upon the advertisement, begins to utter key lines from ‘The Eve of St Agnes’. Guessing that the chemist has never read Keats, the narrator looks on in a mixture of wonder and terror as Shaynor ‘drafts’ portions of the poem, scrawling, erasing, and reforming Keats’ lines on the ‘villainous notepaper’ of the shop: I looked over his shoulder, and read, amid half-formed words, sentences, and wild scratches: – Very cold it was. Very cold The hare – the hare – the hare – The birds [ . . . ] The head, moving machine-like, turned to the advertisement where the Blaudett’s Cathedral pastille reeked abominably.93 It is, the narrator suggests, a nerve-jangling business watching a chainsmoking semi-professional toying with some of the finest works of literary history: ‘my every sense hung upon the writing under the dry, bony hand, all brown-fingered with chemicals and cigarette-smoke’.94 As Shaynor progresses through the Keatsian oeuvre, he eventually broaches five lines of poetry considered by the narrator the ‘high-water mark’ of English letters – the lines about casements and desolate seas in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. The tension becomes unbearable for the narrator as the Keatsian poetry tumbles from Shaynor’s pen: ‘My throat dried, but I dared not gulp to moisten it lest I should break the spell.’ These lines, he explains, are ‘the pure Magic [ . . . ] the clear vision’,95 and Mr Shaynor ‘was playing hot and cold’ with them. Despite finding it an ‘interesting’ story, J.M.S. Tompkins ultimately thought that ‘Wireless’ suffered from a superabundance of detail and the intrusive speculations of a ‘too assertive’ narrator. It could, however, be argued that the value and meaning of the tale lie in this ‘surplus’ detail, particularly in the sort that conveys, as Tompkins puts it, the ‘underbreeding perceptible in Mr Shaynor’ and the contrasting cultivation of the assertive, Keats-loving narrator. Indeed, it could be argued that the portrait of the anxious, perspiring narrator, who is simultaneously horrified, perplexed, and desperate for the completion of Keats’ poetry, hints at a struggle to re-establish social boundaries

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initially assumed in the relationship between the central characters: ‘Go on! Ink it in man. Ink it in!’,96 Shaynor is urged by his anguished onlooker. At the beginning of the story, the narrator emphasises the humble social beginnings of Mr Shaynor, focusing at length upon the pride he exhibits in achieving his ‘professional status’. Indeed, it is only because Mr Cashell is bedridden that the two men exchange pleasantries. Although he is polite towards the chemist, the narrator cannot help noticing that his manners lack ‘the polish of the grocery and Italian warehouse next door’97 and in the tone of his narration there is a whiff of snobbery about Shaynor’s past: Little by little I grew to know something of his beginnings and his hopes – of his mother, who had been a school-teacher in one of the northern counties, and his red-headed father, a small job-master at Kirby Moors, who died when he was a child; of the examinations he had passed and of their exceeding difficulty; of his dreams of a shop in London; of his hate for the price-cutting Co-operative stores [ . . . ].98 Shaynor reads chemistry and natural science for pleasure: ‘For relaxation he seemed to go no farther afield than the romance of drugs – their discovery, preparation, packing, and export.’99 He has evolved ‘an interesting mental attitude to his customers’, which allows him to reflect on the contents of Christy’s New Commercial Plants while serving them politely and with ‘not a penny wrong at the end’.100 Shaynor is an instantly recognisable Edwardian type – the lower middle-class achiever, whose social position is inextricably linked with his professional training and certification. For J.B. Priestley, the Edwardian period was ‘an era of tension between extremes’, in which the expanding middle classes anxiously defended their position against an increasing section of lower-class society benefiting from social reform and career opportunity: ‘In the lower middle class respectability itself, often newly won, had to be guarded. There was a feeling that religion, the family, decency, social and political stability, the country itself, were all in danger.’101 Such anxieties were the reason for Shaynor’s hatred of the price-cutting Co-operatives and for his ambition to own a shop in London. He is a man of the ‘northern counties’, whose work distinguishes him from the humble fellows of Kirby Moors. In the light of these circumstances, the prosaic details of Shaynor’s professional life – a life suddenly elevated by his moment of poetic rapture – can surely be read as a comment on the social aspirations and

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fears of a mobile middle-class culture, suddenly communicating across gulfs and obstacles as formidable as those traversed by wireless technology. As Mr Shaynor exclaims, speculating upon the alleged powers unleashed by this newfangled ‘Marconi business’: ‘Nothing seems to make any difference, by what they tell me – storms, hills, or anything; but if that’s true we shall know before morning.’102 Both men, the tale ironically suggests, learn far more about the crossing of barriers and impediments than they bargained for. In the introductory poem to the story, ‘Kaspar’s Song in Varda’, Kipling warns that snobbery can crush the imagination and stifle genius. In the poem, the ‘three-dimensioned preacher’ despises the creatures of the earth and spurs his congregation onwards to heaven. But his doctrine means death to Psyche, the once-mortal goddess, whose rise from earth to heaven came to represent the progress of the soul in the postclassical arts – and, for Keats, the power of imagination: ‘Heaven is beautiful, Earth is ugly,’ The three-dimensioned preacher saith, So we must not look where the snail and the slug lie For Psyche’s birth . . . And that is our death!103 Kipling’s hymn to Psyche recalls, of course, Keats’ Ode to the goddess and his pledge to serve Cupid’s once-mortal lover as her earthbound, mortal poet: ‘Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane / in some untrodden region of my mind.’104 Keats’ lowly origins and his training as an apothecary made his earliest years a bitter struggle against the snobbery of the literary establishment. Reviewing Endymion for Blackwood’s, John Gibson Lockheart advised ‘Mr John’ to go ‘back to the shop [ . . . ] back to “plasters, pills, and ointment boxes” ’.105 Kipling suggests, in ‘Wireless’, that the culture of the ‘coherer’, the Hertzian wave, and the electromagnetic field was nevertheless dependent upon the ‘Mr Johns’ of this world. It was an age that meant social status and political power for professionals like Shaynor, whatever the ‘underbreeding’ perceptible in his early life or learning. Shaynor might ‘venture no farther afield than the romance of drugs’, but, the narrator adds, that pastime takes him ‘to the ends of the earth’. To the narrator the gold-framed picture of the girl is merely an ‘advertisement whose charms were unholily heightened by the glare from the window’.106 As he slyly comments, the woman in the picture had ‘seen fit to put on all her pearls before she cleaned her teeth’.107 Nevertheless, to Shaynor the advertisement is a ‘shrine’, sanctified with

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162 South Africa and Sussex: An Estranged Homecoming

Followed without a break ten or fifteen lines of bald prose – the naked soul’s confession of its physical yearning for its beloved – unclean as we count uncleanness; unwholesome, but human exceedingly; the raw material, so it seemed to me in that hour and in that place, whence Keats wove the twenty-sixth, seventh, and eighth stanzas of his poem.108 The sentiment follows the narrator’s comment that the image of the girl in the picture might, under certain special conditions of lighting, resemble Keats’ heroine, Madeleine – ‘as a vile chromo recalls some incomparable canvas’.109 Perceiving the similarity ‘by stretch of fancy’, he gradually overcomes his prejudice against the ‘vile chromo’, reconciling it with the poetic romance of his beloved Keats. Much as in ‘They’, the story casts the narrator as a mediator between remote social worlds, where ‘incomprehensible lives’ are bridged by some strange telepathy or agency of imagination. As if stressing the limits and problems of this communication, Kipling ends the story with a deftly ironic detail – the imperfection of young Mr Cashell’s wireless equipment. Failing to receive the proposed transmission from a station at Poole, he ‘eavesdrops’ instead on both ends of a failed wireless communication exchanged between ships off the Isle of Wight: ‘They’re trying to talk to each other. Neither can read the other’s messages [ . . . ].’110 The ships, like the figures in Kipling’s stories, receive only ‘a word here and there. Just enough to tantalize’. Despite these undertones of uncertainty, Kipling thought modernisation both inevitable and, on the whole, beneficial to the social order. He illustrated his point in concluding Traffics and Discoveries with ‘Below the Mill Dam’, an allegorical story based upon the installation of electricity at Bateman’s, in which the various parts of the converted Mill house, and the animal inhabitants of the barn, represent characters facing the dual realities of technological modernisation and social reform. The story centres upon the reluctance of the ancient water wheel to be converted into a set of turbines, to which purpose it quotes interminably from the Doomsday Book, berating engines, electricity, and all things uncomfortably modern. In the sentiments of the Wheel and his cohort, the pompous Grey Cat and the ‘genuine old English’ Black Rat, Kipling satirises the ‘Old Guard’, upper-class Tories like

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the incense-fragrance of the burning pastilles. It is, the narrator eventually realises, the inspiration for the sensual imagery of ‘The Eve of St Agnes’:

Arthur Balfour and the members of the ‘Souls’ club, including Lord Curzon, and Liberals such as Wilfred Blunt and Percy Wyndham.111 It is worth recalling here that in turn-of-the-century England hereditary peers still held the great proportion of Cabinet positions and enjoyed almost unrestricted power in the House of Lords.112 As was suggested, for Kipling the South African war had discredited the political complacency and elitism of Edwardian parliamentary politics, which he believed impeded the inevitable modernisation of the English system. As the lordly Grey Cat remarks on the coming of workmen, ‘local ruffians’, to the barn: A couple of them came in here last week with wires, and fixed them all about the walls. Wires protected by some abominable composition, ending in iron in brackets with glass bulbs. Utterly useless for any purpose and artistically absolutely hideous. What do they mean?113 Notwithstanding the bemusement of the Grey Cat, the workmen and their strange electrical implements are the driving force of Kipling’s society. In the story they find their analogue and impetus in the Waters of the sluice, who chivvy the Wheel, ‘Move on there! Keep on moving. Over. Get Over.’114 The wires and bulbs of the ‘local ruffians’ are the means by which the energies of the Waters will be harnessed for the social good. The Wheel is wise enough to know that the floods can fall upon him ‘without warning’. In Kipling’s sly comment on social revolution, the Wheel remembers how, some centuries earlier, the Waters lifted him from his bearings with the Cromwellian cry, ‘Take away that bauble!’ This reference to the dissolving of the Long Parliament in 1653 simultaneously suggests Kipling’s social radicalism and his authoritarianism, the paradox of which strongly informs the depiction of the Waters and the Wheel. The Waters mock the ignorant Wheel, showing off their technical acumen and productivity: Listen, old thing. Thanks to us, you are now actuating a machine of whose construction you know nothing, that that machine may, over wires of whose ramifications you are, by your very position, profoundly ignorant, deliver power which you can never realize, to localities beyond the extreme limits of your mental horizon, with the object of producing phenomena which in your wildest dreams (if you ever dream) you could never comprehend. Is that clear, or would you like it all in words of four syllables?115

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When the Mill is electrified, and the strength of the Waters increased by the construction of a dam, the Wheel finally delights in his work, welcoming the full force of the torrent: six months later, on a cold January afternoon, he is seen ‘kicking joyously in the first rush of the icy stream’.116 The Wheel, it transpires, has submitted to the Spirit of the Mill, and in his unbridled contentment with his work, speaks in a new voice, reconciled to progress and the necessity of his own obsolescence. In deference to the spirit of efficiency he is content to be replaced by a sparkling new turbine: ‘When the turbines are installed I shall go and live in them. What earthly difference does it make?’117 Nor do the Waters object to the ancient regimen heralded by the Spirit of the Mill, which channels and focuses them exclusively upon the work and the power of the social body. As for the Black Rat, he ends the story caught, killed, and mounted in glass case by the Engineer, who appreciates the rarity of his ‘genuine old English’ breed. The Cat – ever the cunning politician – returns to the scene after a period of diplomatic exile, impenitently praising the ‘Old Gods’ and taking the credit for preserving the Spirit of the Mill.118 It is a measure of Kipling’s breadth of imagination that, despite the narrowness and inflexibility of a tale like ‘Below the Mill Dam’, he could also reflect the problems and casualties of his radical right-wing agenda. The stories in Traffics and Discoveries were filled with the voices of the dead – not only of the African battlefields, but also of the English Downs. It was a theme that unsettled the message of social control emerging from the wreckage of the war. The England pictured in these tales was a foreign country to Kipling, and in the struggle to belong to the land he buried himself in a fantasy of Englishness. House Beautiful was a place of acceptance, but it was a place of danger, clasped eternally in the embrace of the dead and lost in the terrible isolation of its grief. Half in love with the place, the motorist nevertheless finally turns his back upon the house, returning to his machine and the reality of life outside the interlacing hills. This was the temper of Kipling’s ex-colonial life – lived out between historical romance and the forward motion of reform and modernisation.

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Kipling’s Tory Anarchy: Puck of Pook’s Hill and the Politics of Misrule

In the first few years after purchasing Bateman’s, Kipling threw himself into the life of the landed gentry, letting a few acres to tenant farmers and acquiring a small herd of cattle for the marketing of beef.1 Adjustment to the country life was not, however, frictionless. He soon fell out with his tenants, who taught him that farming was a ‘mixture of farce, fraud and philanthropy that stole the heart out of the land’.2 Turning his back on husbandry, he immersed himself in the history of Sussex, discovering the rich store of antiquity and legend buried in the Burwash soil. During the sinking of a well near Bateman’s, he was delighted to uncover a Jacobean tobacco-pipe, a Cromwellian latten spoon, and a small bronze fragment of a Roman horse bit. Cleaning out an old pond he added two Elizabethan quarts and a fearsome Neolithic axe-head to a fast-growing list of antiquities. When his cousin, Ambrose Poynter, suggested that he write a yarn about Roman times involving a figure named Parnesius, he was ‘interested’.3 Exploring the west fringe of his land, he found an old forge reputed to date back to the Phoenicians and Romans. Scratching beneath the surface of the surrounding soil, he found an old mule-track ‘laid down in Elizabethan times’.4 The track rose from this area and crossed Kipling’s fields, where it was known as The Gunway and popularly associated with the times and events of the Armada. The ‘Old Things’ of the Valley had, as Kipling puts it, glided into his life: ‘Every foot of that little corner was alive with ghosts and shadows.’5 Discovering the history of the land, excavating its relics and unearthing its legends, Kipling began to fix the patterns of his new life in England, 165

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searching for meanings and lines of continuity. He soon set to work on the tales that would be collected as Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906), beginning with a tale narrated by Daniel Defoe concerning his involvement in a conspiracy against King James II and his banishment from England. The Defoe piece was a failure – ‘a painstaken and meritorious piece of work [ . . . ] with about as much feeling to it as a walking-stick’.6 Quickly discarded, it was followed by an equally unsuccessful tale about Johnson and Boswell. Kipling was accustomed to false starts. These were times of ‘heavy written work, three-fourths of which was valueless, but for the sake of the possibly worth-while residue all had to be got through’.7 After such bouts of futile quarrying, Puck of Pook’s Hill gradually ‘set and linked itself’,8 beginning with a sequence of tales about Norman and Saxon England. Kipling commented on the workmanship of the stories: [S]ince the tales had to be read by children, before people realised that they were meant for grown-ups; and since they had to be a sort of balance to, as well as a seal upon, some aspects of my ‘Imperialistic’ output in the past, I worked the material in three or four overlaid tints and textures, which might or might not reveal themselves according to the shifting light of sex, youth, and experience. It was like working lacquer and mother o’ pearl, a natural combination, into the same scheme as niello and grisaille [methods of engraving and painting], and trying not to let the joins show.9 In this miniature portrait of the artist as craftsman, a gulf has opened up between the artisan and the market, or the author and his audience. The stories require, as he reluctantly admits, acceptance by children before they can be regarded properly as tales written for adults. Moreover, they are worked and re-worked into three or four overlaid ‘tints and textures’, whose complexity and ambivalence are increased by the hermeneutic proviso that they refract meaning according to ‘the shifting light of sex, youth, and experience’. Such a view of the writing process calls attention to its uncertainties: the author is responsible for the tales, but is nevertheless strangely surplus to their meaning – unsure of how personal and social factors influence the reading of the tales. In fact, he is merely struggling – against the natural incompatibility of his chosen colours, textures, and methods – ‘not to let the joins show’. How far do these comments illuminate our understanding of Kipling’s writings at the turn of the century? This curious self-portrait, which represents him labouring under the public glare for an audience whose

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readings are constantly changing and finely differentiated, seems to reflect Kipling’s attempt to negotiate, in aesthetic terms, his marginal position as a Tory imperialist in Liberal England (the awkwardness of the attempt is expressed by the quotation marks around the word, ‘Imperialistic’). Writing for readers who ‘may or may not’ grasp the nuances of his craft, Kipling was no longer the so-called ‘prophet of empire’, whose pronouncements entered the popular consciousness and influenced the affairs of state. If not in years, he was, in temper and politics, an old man in a new state. Puck of Pook’s Hill comprises a loose sequence of stories told to the children, Dan and Una, by various characters from history. These narrators are introduced to the children by Puck, who first appears to the children during their performance – to three cows in a meadow – of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.10 One of the more striking features of Puck of Pook’s Hill is the abandonment of chronology in the telling of the story of England to Dan and Una. The tales begin roughly at the Norman Conquest, and then reach back into Roman history, forward again into Tudor England and back again to the Medieval period. By plunging the country into the dark ages of warring Barons, scheming monarchs, valiant Romans, and Papist heresies – and unsettling the usual sequence of the historical narrative in the process – Kipling represents a historical drama appropriate to the complexity of his artistic self-portrait. It is a history that begins with conquest and colonisation and evolves in the ferment of rivalry between opposing colonial powers. The battles are fought over boundaries and frontiers now virtually unrecognisable to the children – for example, the northern frontier of the Roman Empire (Hadrian’s Wall) or the southern boundary of Norman England. But, for Kipling, these fortifications and their geopolitical boundaries are formative in the emergence of England and the meaning of what it is to be English. If these stories represent a quest for origins – what Foucault terms ‘the search for descent’ – then Puck of Pook’s Hill ‘fragments what was thought unified [and] shows the heterogeneity of what was thought consistent with itself’.11 As Kipling suggests, the historical England experienced by Una and Dan refracts their modern world in various unexpected ways. Although they have been read as ‘love-poems to England’, lessons in imperial discipline, and pageants of empire,12 the Puck tales are by no means conventional in their evocation of Englishness and empire – as at least one reviewer noticed at the time. The reviewer, Alfred Noyes, warned Kipling’s admirers to ‘beware of him’ lest, at any moment, he ‘turn and rend them’.13 Noyes discerned an uncomfortable allegorical

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meaning in the stories. Kipling hinted at this allegorical message in a letter to George Wyndham: ‘I swear I didn’t mean to write parables – much – but when situations are so ludicrously, or terribly, parallel what can one do?’14 For Kipling, these situational parallels were caused by the growing influence upon English politics of the Liberal Party, which he blamed for the ceding of South Africa, the denuding of the military, and the dissolution of the empire. Kipling accused the party of enfeebling the country by imposing new levels of state regulation and reforming areas of national life formerly excluded from government interference – most notably the relations between the family and the state.

Good families: companions and countrymen The family emerged in Liberal politics at this time as the battleground of English cultural identity. It was a major focus of reform, with the issue of parenthood (as the writings of George Newman illustrate) considered inseparable from the larger question of the nation’s social and imperial standing. In keeping with this linkage, conventional attitudes to the family were, depending upon political loyalties, either reasserted or redefined in terms of their wider impact upon the social and imperial structure, with conservatives claiming that mothers were directly responsible for the production of healthy offspring and the maintenance of a stable and secure family. However, in an age that saw an increasing number of middle-class women at work and, by 1911, a ‘surplus’ of over 1.1 million of unmarried females in the population, the traditional view of maternal responsibility was neither easily nor universally accepted.15 In more radical quarters, it was argued that the state should directly contribute to the making of the family, providing financial support that would enable mothers to raise children without the vagaries and the stigma of dependence on men’s wages. H.G. Wells was amongst the bestknown campaigners for such a liberating entitlement for women.16 As Susan Pederson argues, the demand for aid to the family was therefore the demand for the remuneration of specific gender roles, and the willingness to address gender relations directly and to call on the state to mitigate problems of female dependence identified family policy from the outset as a socialist or feminist crusade in Britain.17 In 1906 – the year that Puck of Pook’s Hill was published – Liberal election victory gave the edge ‘to those politicians and reformers who were convinced the relief of poverty and the “uplift” of working class family life would require some measure of state intervention’.18 The School Meals Act of

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that same year typified the new spirit of social legislation, and is often considered the founding moment of the welfare state. The ensuing decade saw the rapid extension of the social services sector, ongoing since the turn of the century, whereby special Boards took over the duties of the Privy Council or Home Office, and power was delegated to a ‘multiplicity of special local authorities’.19 The fivefold increase in the number of civil servants within the generation prior to 1914 is ‘one index of the new functions being performed by the modern State’.20 The three tales told by the Roman Centurion, Parnesius, have much to say about the social and imperial merits of strong familial bonds. What Kipling terms the ‘good family’ in these stories is a repository of Tory values. It is also, significantly, alienated from modern politics and uncertain of its status in the land. The first of the Roman stories, ‘A Centurion of the Thirtieth’, tells how Parnesius and his friend Pertinax fight to defend Hadrian’s Wall and save the empire from invasion by the Picts. Parnesius explains that as an English-born Roman, who grew up in Vectis, the Isle of Wight, he has never seen the capital of the empire: ‘I’m one of a good few thousands who have never seen Rome except in a picture.’21 (There is clearly a parallel here between the Anglo-Roman and the Anglo-Indian, both of whom were exiles from their ‘mother country’.) As Parnesius finds when he attempts to join the army: ‘The Roman-born officers and magistrates looked down on us British-born as though we were barbarians.’22 Since, in AD 364 Rome has ‘split the Eagle’23 into separate east and west provinces under the emperors Valentinian and his brother Valens (the story is set shortly after this event), it is the duty of Kipling’s cohort to relinquish their Roman loyalties and defend Britain, a declining outpost of the Roman order. Parnesius and Pertinax are ‘of the Old Stock’, whose first duty is ‘to the Empire’ – not to Rome.24 This analogy might have had disturbing implications for Kipling’s English readers. In terms of the imperial metaphor, the Romans are identifiably ‘British’, but, following the logic of Kipling’s allegory, their desertion of Rome represents the abandonment of Britain by subjects in the colonies, specifically Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa (the nations earmarked for imperial federation in the nineteenth century). The defence of the wall implies, therefore, dereliction of duty to Pax Britannica – and to the ‘Greater Britain’ widely celebrated at the height of the Victorian empire. As Parnesius’ father explains: There is no hope for Rome [ . . . ] She has forsaken her Gods, but if the Gods forgive us here, we may save Britain. To do that we must keep

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To put it mildly, Parnesius’ disloyalty to Rome rendered his defence of Britain an extremely ambivalent and discomfiting notion to the ‘popular’ imperialists invoked by Noyes. The first step in the defence of England is the disavowal of state power – the supremacy and the law of Rome. By his own admission, Parnesius is ‘not too fond of anything Roman’,26 nor does he know Roman history, as he explains to Una and Dan: ‘Aglia [the governess] never taught us the history of our own country. She was so full of her ancient Greeks.’27 Rome teeters ‘on the edge of destruction’, his father reminds him, because like Aglia it has become ‘large-minded’, too liberal.28 Over and against the large-mindedness of Aglia – and implicitly her radical and feminist cohorts in modern Britain – the stories set the social discipline of the family. In ‘A Centurion of the Thirtieth’, Roman law grants absolute authority to the father of the household. As the noisy children are firmly, if playfully, reminded: ‘Have you ever heard of a Father’s right over his children? He can slay them, my loves – slay them dead, and the Gods highly approve of the action!’29 Parnesius gently reminds the children of their subservience to the paterfamilias: [W]hen my Father spoke as he did, I kissed his hand, and waited for orders. We British-born Romans know what is due to our parents. ‘If I kissed my Father’s hand he’d laugh,’ said Dan. Customs change; but if you do not obey your father, the Gods remember it. You may be quite sure of that.30 The parallels with the Edwardian family continue in the picture of the Roman household: ‘Good families are very much alike. Mother would sit spinning of evenings while Aglia read in her corner, and Father did accounts, and we four romped about the passages.’31 Blessed with a governess, a wealthy Father, and a large, rambling house, the Roman family is the image of Edwardian respectability and privilege. In keeping with this domestic scene, Una takes a keen interest in the household, imploring Parnesius to tell her about his family while Dan, kept indoors to work on his Latin, arrives later to explain the matters of Roman history that puzzle his sister: ‘I didn’t know where Ak – Ak something was’.32 ‘Bath’, Puck explains, ‘where the buns come from.’33

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the Painted People back. Therefore, I tell you, Parnesius, as a Father, that if your heart is set on service, your place is among men on the Wall – and not with women among the cities.25

Throughout Puck of Pook’s Hill the influence of the ‘good family’ extends beyond the Roman household, into a Masonic infrastructure that secretly organises the affairs of state,34 a network that recalls the cross-boundary ventures of the Indian and American writings, celebrating allegiances between strong men untroubled by the usual frontiers of politics, race, and culture: General Maximus is the close friend of Parnesius’ father, a fact that wins Parnesius the support of the Emperor. Parnesius is the close friend of Pertinax, both of whom are the friends of Allo and the Picts, which enables the diplomatic conciliation of the Painted People while Maximus attempts to subdue Gaul. In this way, the chain of command leads upwards from the Roman household to the rule of the General, for whom government is ‘one man’s work – always and everywhere!’35 Despite the moral and social values of Parnesius’ tale, Dan and Una’s England is founded upon the destruction of the Roman world and its values. History proves that he could neither defend the Wall nor alter the plight of the empire. His friendships and his imperial world are doomed to fail even before the story begins, and the children are themselves the outcome of the intermarriages – racial and cultural – augured by the fall of Rome and the coming together of Saxon, Roman and Pict. Much as Parnesius renounces Rome to defend Britain; Dan and Una are similarly forced to question their loyalty to the empire and the state. The Roman stories, then, create another image of England after imperial decline, weaving narratives of defeat and decolonisation into the patchwork of British cultural identity. Kipling’s famous poem, ‘Cities and Thrones and Powers’, which makes its first appearance at the beginning of the Roman stories, underlines this message of impermanence and decline: This season’s Daffodil, She never hears, What change, what chance, what chill, Cut down last year’s: But with bold countenance, And knowledge small, Esteems her seven days’ continuance To be perpetual. So Time that is o’er-kind, To all that be, Ordains us e’en as blind,

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172 South Africa and Sussex: An Estranged Homecoming

The shades of Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ and the auguries of ‘death and burial’ intimate Kipling’s acceptance that Britain, like Rome, would inevitably cease to be an imperial power, and the Ozymandian boast – ‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ – would rattle about the ruins of the Liberal wasteland. The penultimate story in the collection, ‘Dymchurch Flit’, draws equally apocalyptic lessons from history, in this case intimating a parallel between the politics of Liberal Reform and the tyranny of the Henrician Reformation. Set during the dissolution of the monasteries, when Puck and his fairy cohort are reckoned ‘among the Images’,37 the tale tells how the two sons of a local Sussex family, the Whitgifts, are enlisted to ferry them from ‘cruel Old England’38 to refuge in France. As the narrator is quick to remind us, Henry VIII, like his Liberal heirs, acts with the full support of the parliament: Can’t do nothing in Old England without Act, Warrant, an’ Summons. [Henry] got his Act allowed him, an’ they say, Queen Bess’s father he used the parish churches something shameful. Justabout tore the gizzards out of I dunnamany. Some folk in England they held with ’en; but some they saw it different, an’ it ended in ’em takin’ sides an’ burnin’ each other no bounds, accordin’ which side was on top.39 In the age which saw the rise of the Labour Party, the growth of the women’s movement, and the initial stirrings of the Welfare State, Kipling had little faith in ‘Act, Warrant, and Summons’ – the parliamentary democracy that he believed harboured political motives as questionable as those of Reformation England. (From 1906 to 1910 the House of Commons and the House of Lords were, so to speak, ‘burnin’ each other no bounds’ over Liberal attempts to reform parliament by restricting the powers of the upper House. The conflict culminated in 1909 with the rejection of Lloyd George’s budget.)40 As an un-propertied working mother with two unemployed sons, the Widow administers just the type of household that the Liberal state sought to uplift:

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As bold as she: That in our very death, And burial sure, Shadow to shadow, well-persuaded, saith, ‘See how our works endure!’36

Now there was a poor widow at Dymchurch under the wall, which, lacking man or property, she had the more time for feeling; and she come to feel there was Trouble outside her doorstep bigger an’ heavier than aught she’d ever carried over it. She had two sons – one born blind, and t’other struck dumb through fallin’ off the Wall when he was liddle. They was grown, but not wage-earnin’, an’ she worked for ’em, keepin’ bees and answerin’ Questions.41 Despite their disadvantages, the Widow and her sons exemplify the qualities of Kipling’s ‘good family’, challenging stereotypes of degeneracy, idleness and stupidity implicit to policies of working-class uplift. When the pining of the fairies causes sickness to fall upon the citizens of Romney Marsh, it is not the Tudor State that saves the community, but the Widow who ‘loans’ her sons to the fairy cause. Perhaps in this picture of sacrificial giving, Kipling had in mind the families of servicemen he had supported during the South African War. These were the wives, mothers, sons, daughters – and widows – who had come to the aid of the empire and would do so again in the ‘Armageddon’ he repeatedly prophesied. At the end of ‘Dymchurch Flit’, there is no institutional uplift for the Widow or her sons. As the narrator, Tom Shoesmith, explains, the brothers are returned to their mother ‘as she sent ’em’.42 Anything else, he explains to the disappointment of Dan and Una, ‘would have been out o’ nature’.43 Moreover, the supposed impediments of the brothers are ultimately the strength and salvation of Old England: ‘The blind man he hadn’t seen naught of anything, and the dumb man nature-ally, he couldn’t say aught of what he’d seen. I reckon’ that was why the [fairies] pitched on ’em for the ferrying job.’44 For Kipling, the culture of social uplift bankrupted the nation in these qualities of unremunerated sacrifice and duty. He increasingly believed that, notwithstanding the well-intentioned gabble and chatter of parliamentary debate, the state would soon abandon the finer points of domestic reform to face the German threat. And in so doing, it would call upon the simplehearted loyalty of the workers, the Whitgifts, of the age. As he wrote in the poem, ‘The Wage-Slaves’ (1902): Yet we, the bondslaves of our day, Whom dirt and danger press – Co-heirs of insolence, delay, And leagued unfaithfulness – Such is our need must seek indeed

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174 South Africa and Sussex: An Estranged Homecoming

Underlying the ancient history of the Puck tales is ultimately the issue of engaging these wage earners for the saving of England. In pursuit of this aim, the tales lend depth and resonance to an organic and familial notion of Englishness rooted in the soil, yet inclusive and diverse, untroubled by the schisms of class, culture and race dividing the modern state.

Imperial rivalry and rearmament In the opening group of tales, the Norman Knight, De Aquilla, guards ‘the Gate of England [ . . . ] when his enemies stand about to batter it in’.46 Set largely on the southern shore of England, where they describe Norman castles and military fortifications, the tales point southwards over the channel for the most immediate threat to Dan and Una’s England. They respond to this threat with the story of allegiance and assimilation between Normans and Saxons in early England. After the conquest, De Aquilla commits himself to assimilating the two races: ‘In fifty years there will be neither Norman nor Saxon, but all English.’47 It is difficult to read these stories, which described Englishness as an amalgam of cross-channel influences, without recognising the theme of Anglo-French entente beneath the Norman and Saxon alliance. This entente dominated British diplomacy in the early part of the century and was established to thwart German expansion in Africa. During 1906, Germany was engaged in suppressing South-West and South-East Africa by large-scale troop deployment and the building of concentration camps. The formation of the Monist League by Ernst Haeckel in the same year was a reminder of the racism and mass murder to which this particular imperial dream led. We only need to add the Wilhelm Reich to the geopolitical circle evoked in these opening stories – encompassing France, England, and, most notably, Africa – to complete the jigsaw of European rivalry Kipling had in mind in the exploits of De Aquilla and his men.48 The tales tell how De Aquilla and his loyal Barons, Sir Richard and Sir Hugh, work to impose order on the land, which requires, above all, this close comradeship between Norman and Saxon. The message of co-operation culminates in a joint venture to plunder gold from the African coast, setting the ‘entente’ in the most topical region of imperial

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And having found, engage The men who merely do the work For which they draw the wage.45

rivalry. In ‘The Knights of the Joyous Venture’, Kipling tells how Sir Richard and Sir Hugh battle with gorillas on the African coast for a rich cargo of gold – their reward for liberating Africans from the tyranny of the tree-dwelling ‘Devils’. The addition of the Danish pirate, Witta, to the venture lends further ambiguity to this strange parable of African colonial exploitation. Witta takes Sir Richard and Sir Hugh prisoner, but eventually allows the Englishmen to sail on his voyage to trade with west-coast natives for gold and ivory. He is a troubling presence in the story. A ‘heathen’, who has trained the ship’s parrot to screech the phrase, ‘Out Swords! Kill! Kill!!’, Witta is known for his ‘covetousness’ and his ‘cunning’.49 He has the same flowing red hair as the ‘Devils’ that terrorise the Africans, and his role in the battle is, to say the least, doubtful. During the great fight, he stays with his ship – ‘ “blame me not”, cried Witta behind us’, and, though he claims to have saved the life of Sir Richard, the Knight can never be sure whether it was Witta who fired the arrow that killed his adversary: ‘each one of the four archers said afterwards that he alone had pierced the devil that fought me. I do not know’.50 Witta is the imponderable element in the colonial enterprise, whose impact upon the African venture is morally ambivalent and potentially hostile. As a Nordic venturer he supplies a missing element in English history and cultural identity that renders the situational parallel with German expansionism darkly ironic. Rapacious he might well be, but he is also firmly a part of the Northern European ferment allegorised in the joyous venture. In this respect, it is significant that during the African expedition the English Knights are old men, placed at the mercy of the piratical Witta. After the battle, they return to Pevensey, where they are forced to hide the gold from various traitors among the Normans and the Barons. The fate of treasure and the two Knights recalls the tragedy of another seemingly incorruptible adventurer: the eponymous hero of Conrad’s Nostromo (1904). Like, the famous Capataz de Cargadores – the fallen champion of Conrad’s Costaguana – Kipling’s Knights win nothing from their wealth but sadness: ‘We were rich beyond belief, and lonely. And lonely!’51 What Witta does with his share – a full half of the treasure – is never told, but his corrupting influence ranges far and wide, reaching into the hearts and minds of all those who touch the gold. As Sir Richard puts it, ‘gold changes men altogether’.52 The empire had changed since Africa, and it had brought out the worst, Witta-like qualities in the English. In the final story of the volume, Kipling traces the fate of the Pevensey gold, and in so doing, attempts to settle the questions of imperial destiny raised by the Puck series. The story, ‘The Treasure and

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Kipling’s Tory Anarchy 175

the Law’, is a sombre tale of Jewish heroism in the face of racial and religious persecution, which in later years Kipling considered ‘too heavy for its frame’.53 As will be suggested, it is a story with specific and powerful historical resonance, published in a period when anti-Semitic policy held sway not just in Germany and Eastern Europe, but also increasingly in England. ‘The Treasure and the Law’ tells the story of a Spanish-born Jew, Kadmiel, who introduces a change to the wording of the Magna Carta to ensure rights and legal protection to all the people of England. The change is made to the fortieth law of the charter, which Kadmiel pays to have rewritten by the Barons so that it runs: ‘To none shall we sell, refuse, or deny right or justice’ (it had originally been written, ‘To no free man shall we sell, refuse, or deny right or justice.’).54 When Kadmiel learns that his friend Elias has found a secret hoard of gold at Pevensey Castle and that his friend plans to use the money to fund the King’s war against the Barons, he decides to sink the treasure in the Channel, beyond the reach of the warring state. In effect, Kadmiel does what Elias and the Pevensey Knights could not, removing the source of political strife and winning the peace of the nation: ‘At sunrise I made my prayer, and cast the gold – all – all that gold into the deep sea! A King’s ransom – no, the ransom of a people!’55 This final story of a Jew who not only saves Medieval England, but also establishes the plinth of the modern parliamentary and civil order seems highly significant given that it was published only very shortly after the passing of the Aliens Act (1905), which was intended to restrict levels of immigration, particularly of Jews from Eastern Europe. An Aliens Act of this kind had been championed for many years by racists and patriots such as Arnold White, who founded the first Anti-Alien society, the Society for the Suppression of the Immigration of Destitute Aliens, and was later involved with another openly anti-Semitic organisation, the British Brothers League.56 Before dismissing Kipling’s portrayal of Kadmiel as yet another Jewish caricature (although the portrait does indeed borrow from the conventional stereotype of the avaricious, scheming Semite), it is worth bearing in mind the power of these Anti-Alien organisations, and recognising how forcefully the tale opposes their ideology of racial exclusion with its message of Jewish heroism. As ‘Lawgiver to a People of strange speech and a hard language’,57 Kadmiel enters the pantheon of Puckish, borderline heroes, quietly serving a thankless people in the dark ages of ‘abominable’ England.58 Making his way to Pevensey, he is feared and despised by the common folk, who believe him to be Ahesuerus, the

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176 South Africa and Sussex: An Estranged Homecoming

wandering Jew ‘condemned, as they believe, to live forever’.59 It is a bout of medieval hysteria that surely invites a parallel with the abominable anti-Semitic culture of the Aliens Act. The narrative frame of the story only underlines this Edwardian parallel. Kadmiel meets Dan and Una amid the noise of a nearby shooting party headed by Mr Meyer, the gentrified Jewish neighbour of the children. As the tale unfolds, the background noise of the shooting party intimates why Mr Meyer is so important to Dan and Una’s England. In the ‘cruel guns’60 of the pheasant hunt, which ‘rattle’61 ominously throughout the tale, Kipling evokes the distant rumblings of heavy artillery. At the end of the story, a cock-pheasant that had ‘sheered aside after being hit spattered down almost on top of [the children], driving up the dry leaves like a shell’.62 The explosive fall of the bird emphasises the meaning of Kadmiel’s story for the children: their country was soon to embark on a long, costly and terrible war against imperial Germany, and it was wealthy men like Mr Meyer who would be called upon to finance the military effort. Kadmiel himself explains that he has seen ‘peace or war decided not once, but many times, by the fall of a coin spun between a Jew from Bury and a Jewess from Alexandria’.63 The Treasure was the thing that would save the imperial Law from ‘lesser breeds’ – the German imperial adversary excoriated in ‘Recessional’. For Kipling, men like Mr Meyer held the Fortieth of the Great Charter in their palms. If, as Kipling believed, the Puck stories set the seal upon his imperialist output of the past, they did so in the darkest imaginable manner. There is nothing comfortable or cosy about the inclusiveness of Puck’s England: Kadmiel and implicitly Mr Meyer earn their citizenship by understanding the economics and the inevitability of war, just as the Roman centurion and Norman Knight are willing to fight for England – even in defiance of wider imperial ties. Only nine years after Kipling published ‘The Treasure and the Law’, his 18-year-old son John, the inspiration for the figure of Dan, would be killed by a burst of shrapnel on the 27 September 1915, during the Battle of Loos. Lieutenant Kipling was only admitted to the army after his father begged a favour of Field Marshall Lord Roberts, and Kipling never forgave himself for John’s death, writing the poem, ‘The Children’, in the worst days of selfreproach: That flesh we had nursed from the first to all cleanness was given To corruption unveiled and assailed by the malice of Heaven – By the heart-shaking jests of Decay where it lolled on the Wires –

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178 South Africa and Sussex: An Estranged Homecoming

The mangled bodies of our children, he bitterly added, ‘were all our defence while we wrought our defences’. In 1935, shortly before he died, Kipling had ‘read with interest the apology offered by an American Secretary of State to Nazi Germany for unfavourable comments on that land by a New York Police court’.65 The apology was forced by a torrent of German complaint after a judge compared the swastika to ‘the black flag of piracy’ while in the process of acquitting a group of anti-Nazi protesters charged with destroying the flag of the docked German liner, the S.S. Bremen.66 It was this culture of pacification that he had warned against in the Puck stories, and doubtless he interpreted the American apology as yet another costly truce with despots and murderers. For better or worse, Kipling believed in the human capacity for benevolence and for unspeakable depravity. It was this belief that disillusioned him with democracy and cultivated his naïve idealisation of the strong, morally infallible leader. But it was also a belief in universal frailty and vulnerability that led him to sympathise with those on the margins of society – the unheralded waifs and strays of the empire, the Whitgifts and the Kadmiels of the modern state. The soils he excavated around Burwash were alive with the echoes of brutal historical change, revolution, ruin and warfare. It was the task of Una and Dan to ‘settle’ and subdue the violent disputes and confrontations they would face in the coming years, respecting the alien, fighting the corrupt, and sustaining the integrity of England, the ‘good family’, as the empire rumbled onwards to its end.

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To be blanched or gay-painted by fumes – to be cindered by fires – To be senselessly tossed and retossed in stale mutilation From crater to crater. For this we shall take expiation. But who shall return us our children?64

In her final novel, Between the Acts (1941), Virgina Woolf describes an imperial pageant performed in the grounds of the country house, Pointz Hall. The play ends with the cast turning mirrors upon their bemused, embarrassed audience. It is a gesture that invites the audience to see their own faces in the pageant, acknowledging the quotidian humanity beneath the imperial myth. Set in the months leading up to the Second World War, Woolf’s novel explores the violence, dysfunction, and sexual conflict lurking between the lines of the Pointz Hall fantasy. The central motif of the novel is the true story – reported widely in the newspapers of the time – of the rape of a teenage girl by three English guardsmen. It is an episode Woolf recalls in order to expose the violent underside of Britain’s military and civilising pomp – what Mr Budge, an actor in the pageant, terms the ‘purity of Victoria’s land’.1 As if unable to acknowledge the implications of that terrible news story, the Pointz Hall cast is pitched in a darkly comical struggle to suppress the violence of their history, refusing to portray the role of the army in the rise of empire and concentrating all eyes on the innocence of a ‘small girl with a rosebud in pink’ chosen to play the part of England in the Island History: ‘She’s England,’ they whispered. ‘It’s begun.’ ‘The prologue,’ they added, looking down at the programme. ‘England am I,’ she piped again; and stopped. She had forgotten her lines.2 This rosebud of a girl might be, as it were, Kipling’s Una – a child of some innocent age weaned on the message of imperial destiny and honour. But as a generator chunters ignobly in the background – it 179

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Conclusion: The Edge of Evening

‘was the noise a machine makes when something has gone wrong’3 – her words fall flatly upon the menacing political landscape of the interwar years. She suddenly forgets her lines, and is left standing helplessly on stage. There is something in Woolf’s portrait of imperial discomfiture that Kipling would have admired. As the most astute early readers of the Puck tales had recognised, he had held up the mirror to England, reflecting images of looming social fracture, decline and fall. They were images that foreshadowed the mutterings of the Pointz Hall crowd, who file away from the first act of the pageant confusedly mouthing the phrase, ‘dispersed are we’, finally seeing their own frailty in the unpitying mirrors of the cast. The history of Puck’s England had once been, as he puts it, ‘as natural as an oak growing’, but Kipling knew that he was addressing a nation on the brink of forgetting its imperial role. He nevertheless held fast to the authoritarian values of the frontier, opposing what he considered the enfeeblement of England by its officials and administrators, whether socialist, liberal or conservative. Later years saw him combining the pastoral, Puckish narrative with the fantasy of a new world order governed by the Ariel Board of Control, in which disparate nations were united in pursuit of the Board’s pioneering aeronautical gadgets and technologies – all available, at a price, on a sophisticated global market. In Actions and Reactions (1909) he interspersed pages of imaginary advertisements for ABC-endorsed equipment – the Board’s dirigibles and dirigible-technology – immediately after a typically rustic tale of the southern counties, ‘A Habitation Enforced’, suggesting that the idyll of Puck’s Weald runs cheek by jowl with optimism about technology, armaments, and the beneficence of world trade. The advertisements are supposedly reprinted from a magazine ‘of 2000 AD’, and are accompanied by various mock-reviews, correspondence, and technical writings, all uniformly jubilant about the future technocracy of the Ariel Board of Control. The world of this millennial magazine is perhaps not so far removed from the reality of the present day, with its pursuit of technological development and fantasy of global trade. Imaginary advertisers such as the Standard Dirigible Company link Millwall with Buenos Aires, and Birmingham England with Birmingham Alabama. Under the rule of the ABC, international disputes are swiftly and firmly resolved, and the world markets unite in a utopia of technical precision, high-speed travel, and powerful communications technology. The reputation of the Standard Dirigible Company extends as far afield as Japan, where it won the gold medal at the ‘Kyoto Exhibition of Ariel Appliances, 1997’.

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180 The Man who would be Kipling

Ironically, Kyoto did become the centre of world attention around this time, but the 2001 summit had less to do with celebrating technological achievement than with limiting its damage. Kipling was always disarmingly boyish in his enthusiasm for technology, but his fascination with gadgetry often led him into unwelcome fantasies of social control. In a mock-item of news supposedly drawn from the ABC Monthly Report, he describes the ushering of totalitarian government into the last remaining democracy on earth: Till 25th October Crete, as all the planet knows, was the sole surviving European repository of ‘autonomous institutions’, local selfgovernment,’ and the rest of the archaic lumber devised in the past for the confusion of human affairs. She has lived practically on the tourist traffic attracted by her annual pageants of Parliaments, Boards, Municipal Councils, etc. etc. Last summer the islanders grew wearied, as their premier explained, ‘of playing at being savages for pennies,’ and proceeded to pull down all the landing-towers on the island and shut off general communication till such time as the A.B.C. should annex them.4 Kipling could imagine the citizens of Crete (a proud and fiercely independent quarter of Greek society) happily submitting to annexation by the ABC because he was naively trusting in its abiding bonhomie. His only anxiety is that the Board might be ‘overworked “by the legions of” large, prosperous, and presumably public-spirited communities’ throwing themselves into its hands.5 It would take the rise of the Nazi party to shatter this innocent picture of munificent dictatorship. For the moment, however, he could poke fun at the genteel, belletrist sensibilities of his audience, embracing an alternative millennial culture whose aesthetics were those of pure science, and whose poets and critics were the famous engineers and aeronautic experts of the day. The only bookseller advertising in the magazine, The Bee-Line Bookshop, sells exclusively technical titles such as The Transatlantic and Mediterranean Traffic Lines, Hofman’s Law of Lift and Velocity, and Halliwell’s Illuminated Star Map. It is a distinctly boring selection, and, as if conceding as much, Kipling adds an imaginary review to the magazine of a recently published biography, The Life of Xavier Lavalle. If the title seems promising for the literary crowd, the by-line certainly does not: it is reviewed by ‘Réné Talland. École Aëronautique, Paris’ – a detail that returns the human story almost, though not entirely, to the technical sphere. The Argentinian writer, Jorge Luis Borges was a lifelong Kipling enthusiast,

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Conclusion 181

and this mock-review of a non-existent biography is clearly the model for Borges’ playful, ‘magic realist’ essays on imaginary personalities and texts. Kipling’s dreams of absolute authority, despite their pernicious elements, also reveal the prankster, the hoaxer, and the literary pioneer in him. Wishing to humanise the ABC, he constructs an elaborate, comical fraud, bristling with self-reference and playfulness, on the theme of totalitarian government. The millennial world is an enormous schoolboy lark, filled with clownish geniuses such as Lavalle, whom we learn from the review was a warmer human being than many have supposed: It is to the filial piety of Victor Lavalle that we owe the two volumes consecrated to the ground-life of his father, so full of the holy intricacies of the domestic hearth. Once returned from the abysms of the utter North to that little house upon the outskirts of Meudon, it was not the philosopher, the daring observer, the man of iron energy that imposed himself on his family, but a fat and even plaintiff jester, a farceur incarnate and kindly, the co-equal of his children, and, it must be written, not seldom the comic despair of Madame Lavalle.6 With that phrase ‘the man of iron energy’, we are back on the colonial frontier with Lawrence and the Mutiny men. In the new millennium, however, the Carlylean hero has become a scientist, and the words that impose ‘method’ upon the ‘storm-tossed administration’ are the daunting abstractions of aeronautics. Kipling’s scientist is both ‘farceur incarnate’ and obsessive technician; rooted in the future, but also in tradition or the ‘ground life’ of the past: ‘To the last Lavalle was a Catholic of the old school, accepting – he who looked into the very heart of the lightnings – the dogmas of papal infallibility, of absolution, of confession – of relics great and small. Marvellous – enviable contradiction!’7 In the awed persona of René Talland, Kipling suggests the need for at least one writer in the year 2000 to infuse their dry-as-dust world with fat, jovial humanity. This, then, is the forgotten Kipling, who could proclaim the ‘enviable contradiction’ of Lavelle’s other life as a Catholic traditionalist. It is the forgotten quality that Chesterton grudgingly admired in his 1905 essay on the author (there is something quaintly Chestertonian about the prankster Lavalle). For Chesterton, the ‘genuine charm’ of Kipling’s best work is also its weakness – namely that its author remained to the end a ‘globe-trotter’, who ‘has not the patience to become part of anything’.8 Chesterton was troubled, for this reason, by Kipling’s idea of England:

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182 The Man who would be Kipling

He knows England as an intelligent Englishman knows Venice. He has been to England a great many times; he has stopped there for long visits. But he does not belong to it, or to any place; and the proof of it is this, that he thinks of England as a place. The moment we are rooted in a place the place vanishes. We live like a tree with the whole strength of the universe.9 This was the England of the Norman Knight, Sir Richard. It was a country that had, in his words, ‘taken’ him against his deepest wishes, separating him from his beloved empire: As for my Comrades in camp and highway, That lift their eyebrows scornfully; Tell them their way is not my way – Tell them England hath taken me!10 Kipling always remained, in his own phrase, a ‘vagabond on the face of the earth’.11 The rebellious impulse that took him outside the newspaper office, into the Indian Desert and Native States, took him also beyond the frontiers of British imperialism, leading him to challenge the very terms and values of conservative England – even while he seemed so intractably a part of conservative culture. He was always the man who would be Kipling, a stranger to himself, who never quite fit the mould of imperial spokesman and member of the Tory Establishment, a writer whose narrative style seemed to belong to the Victorian age, but on closer inspection was alive with themes, tropes, and hermeneutic complexities that foreshadowed a later literary epoch. In his final months, Kipling looked back to the Bombay fruit market and the ‘days of strong light and darkness’ he had known in the country of his birth. The colours of modern England had grown darker, less distinct, and the memory of empire had faded into the moral greys of an uncertain political future. He had come a long way since those early years, but the author who wrote about social order and the machineries of control was the same figure who had once fenced himself about with pieces of cord and packing case to keep off ‘any other world’. As in those childhood games, Kipling knew that the imaginary frontiers had fallen and the imperial pageant was over.

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Conclusion 183

Preface 1. Something of Myself (London: Macmillan, 1937), p. 190.

The sentence for mutiny 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

Something of Myself, p. 1. Ibid., p. 2. Ibid., p. 1. In a letter of 1896 he observes that ‘my little books deal only with a small section of a small province [ . . . ] that has been barely fifty years under our control’. (To an Unidentified Recipient, 11 March 1896, in Thomas Pinney (ed.), The Letters of Rudyard Kipling [hereafter referred to as Letters], 4 vols to date (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990–), vol. 2, p. 236. Ibid., p. 4. Ibid., p. 3. Ibid., p. 3. Kipling’s memories of his ayah contrast with the attitude of many Anglo-Indians. Aberigh Mackay, for example, offers a typically prejudiced account of the ‘orientalisation’ of an English baby by its nursemaid and bearer: ‘Baby is debarred from the society of his compatriots [ . . . ] so Baby lisps his dawn paeans in soft Oriental accents, waking harmonious echoes among those impulsive and impressionable children of Nature who masque themselves in the black slough of Bearers and Ayahs; and Baby blubbers in Hindustani [ . . . ]. Very soon Baby will think from right to left, and will lisp in the luxuriant bloom of Oriental hyperbole’ (Mackay, Twenty-One Days in India, being the Tour of Sir Ali Baba, K.C.B. [London: W.H. Allen & Co., 1890], pp. 91–93). Something of Myself, p. 3. Ibid., p. 2. Ibid., p. 2. Ibid., p. 6. Lord Birkenhead, Rudyard Kipling (London: W.H. Allen & Co., 1978), p. 17. Something of Myself, pp. 9–10. Ibid., p. 25. Ibid., p. 25. To W.C. Crofts, 18–27 February 1886, in Letters, vol. 1, p. 118. Something of Myself, p. 40. Ibid., p. 40. Ibid., p. 39. Ibid., p. 62. Cf. Memmi’s account of the privileges of colonial life that wage a war of moral attrition against the liberal sensibilities of the young imperial official, transforming him, against his better judgement, into a card-carrying colonialist 184

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Notes

22. 23. 24.

25.

26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40.

(Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized [1957, London: Earthscan, 1990]). To Margaret Burne-Jones, 28 November 1885–1911 January 1886, Letters, vol. 1, p. 101. Ibid., p. 51. The Ilbert Bill, named after the Legal Member of Council, was controversially introduced in February 1883. Reforming certain areas of the legal process, it incidentally granted native authorities the power to try British subjects. After initially opposing the Bill with numerous items of ‘stern disapproval’ (Something of Myself, p. 32), the Civil and Military Gazette changed its position, proclaiming that the Bill should be allowed to pass. Something of Myself, p. 51. I have corrected Kipling’s error about his age in the printed text. At the time of the incident he was seventeen, not, as he wrote, twenty. Cf. Edward Shanks, Rudyard Kipling: A Study in Literature and Political Ideals (London: Macmillan, 1940), pp. 40–42; Louis L. Cornell, Kipling in India (London: Macmillan, 1966), p. 91, Shamsul Islam, Kipling’s ‘Law’: A Study in his Philosophy of Life (London: Macmillan, 1975), p. 21, and Clare Hanson, Short Stories and Short Fictions, 1880–1980 (London: Macmillan, 1985), p. 29. Plain Tales from the Hills (1888, London: Macmillan, 1899), p. 9. Ibid., p. 15. Something of Myself, p. 208. To Margaret Burne-Jones, 27 September 1885, Letters, vol. 1, pp. 91 and 93. Although Lewis Wurgaft has written an insightful account of this period in relation to Kipling’s work (see Lewis D. Wurgaft, The Imperial Imagination: Magic and Myth in Kipling’s India [Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1983]) he focuses upon the psychology of the civil service at the expense of the specifically textual and juridical aspects of British authority. The non-regulation system itself has received no critical attention in terms of its rhetorical structures and their influence upon Kipling’s writings. L.S.S. O’Malley, The Indian Civil Service (1931, London: Frank Cass, 1965), p. 58. Macaulay, ‘Minute on Education’, 12 October 1836, in Eric Stokes, English Utilitarians and India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 46. Ibid., pp. 45–46. The term ‘Mutiny’ is used only for the sake of coherence, this being the term employed by Kipling and the Anglo-Indian writers of the period. O’Malley, The Indian Civil Service, pp. 58–59. Ibid., p. 55. After clearing and cultivating the district known as the Santal Parganas, the Santals ‘fell into the hands of moneylenders whose exactions were enforced by legal process’ (ibid., p. 55). Distrustful of the law-courts, they rose against the British in a campaign that lasted for six months, which, following its suppression, resulted in the district being brought under the non-regulation system (ibid., p. 56). Ibid., p. 60. S.S. Thorburn, The Punjab in Peace and War (1904, New Delhi: Usha Publications, 1987), p. 253. S.S. Thorburn, Musalmans and Money-lenders (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1886), p. 98.

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Notes 185

41. Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present (1843) in H.D. Trail (ed.), The Centenary Edition of The Works of Thomas Carlyle, 30 vols (New York: Scribner, 1896–1899), vol. X, p. 104. 42. Heroes and Hero-Worship (1841), The Works of Thomas Carlyle, vol. V, p. 61. 43. The Punjab in Peace and War, p. 156. 44. Ibid., p. 241. 45. Ibid., p. 241. 46. William Wilson Hunter, Annals of Rural Bengal (1868–1872, London: Smith and Elder, 1897), pp. 259–260. 47. Eric Stokes explains the important role of Fitzjames Stephen, law member for India (1869–1872), in the codification of British law in India and the establishment of a ‘great administrative machine’ based on the utilitarian model of Bentham (English Utilitarians and India [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959], pp. 280–281). The first census of British India was undertaken in 1872 – a project that gave rise, under the direction of William Wilson Hunter, to the massive Imperial Gazetteer of British India (9 vols, London: Trubner, 1881). Hunter’s efforts illustrate the influence of the utilitarian tradition upon the running of the land. 48. Annals of Rural Bengal, p. 103. 49. Ibid., p. 103. Hunter’s anthropological and philosophical speculations are indebted to Henry Maine, legal member in India from 1862 to 1869, who, in works such as Ancient Law (1861, London: John Murray, 1870), Village Communities in the East and West (London: John Murray, 1871) uses the study of Sanskrit and comparative jurisprudence to argue that India comprised Aryan institutions arrested at an early stage of development. Maine is usefully considered in J.W. Burrow, Evolution and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), pp. 144–169, placing scientific positivism in its geological and anthropological context. 50. Hunter uses Sanskrit literature to explain the intellectual superiority of the Aryan Bengali over the Indian ‘aborigine’: ‘The Aryan warrior used to pray for victory over “the men of the inarticulate utterance” and “of the uncouth talk”[ . . . ]. Of [their] language, the most striking features are its multitude of words for whatever can be seen or handled, and its absolute inability to express reflex conceptions of the intellect’ (Annals of Rural Bengal, p. 113). Hunter’s reverence for a warrior caste, who deplore the inability of the aboriginal language to ‘shadow forth the mystery of man’s inward life’, not only further parallels the progressive Raj administration, but also intimates the crusading, controlling temper of the reformers and educators. 51. Annals of Rural Bengal, p. 139. 52. C.E. Trevelyan, The Education of the People of India, pp. 192–195, in Stokes, English Utilitarians and India. For further discussion of the role of education in the governance of India, see Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (London: Faber, 1990). Viswanathan suggests that in India the discipline of English studies evolved in accordance with the double agenda of moral improvement and political control, providing a means to represent British cultural ‘authority’ while maintaining a policy of religious non-interference. 53. John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic Ratiocinative and Inductive (1843), in F.E. Priestley and J.M. Robson, Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, 33 vols

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186 Notes

54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

75. 76.

(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963–1991), vol. VII, pp. 642 and 643. Ibid., p. 10. Ibid., p. 462. John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government (1861), Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. XIX, p. 393. Stokes, English Utilitarians and India, p. 239. Ibid., p. 269. Something of Myself, p. 15. Ibid., p. 15. To Charles Eliot Norton, 31 December 1896, Letters, vol. 2, p. 279. To Charles Eliot Norton, 19 October 1894, Letters, vol. 2, p. 154. The unpleasant side of Carlyle is evidenced by his support for Governor Eyre, who was tried for the massacre of colonised peoples during the Morant bay rebellion (1865), and his excoriations of ‘pumpkin eating’ slaves in Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question. Edward Said argues that Carlyle ‘speaks a lingua franca for metropolitan Britain: global, comprehensive, and with so vast a social authority as to be accessible to anyone speaking to and about the nation’ [Culture and Imperialism (1993, London: Vintage, 1994), p. 123]. For Said, this lingua franca ‘locates England at the focal point of a world also presided over by its power, illuminated by its ideas and culture, kept productive by the attitudes of its moral teachers, artists, legislators’ [ibid., p. 123]. Kipling understood the social authority that Carlyle conferred upon his pronouncements ‘to and about the nation’. Famously bullish and brusque, Carlyle enjoyed a sort of fugitive status in English letters, yet was also one of its feted sons – a self-appointed outsider whose critique of flunkeyism was not just the scourge of liberals, but also of complacent, middle-class Tories. Sartor Resartus (1831), The Works of Thomas Carlyle, vol. I, p. 157. Past and Present (1843), The Works of Thomas Carlyle, vol. X, p. 47. ‘On History’, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, The Works Of Thomas Carlyle, vol. XXVII, p. 88. James Anthony Froude (ed.), Reminiscences by Thomas Carlyle, 2 vols (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1881), vol. 2, p. 223. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 7. Something of Myself, p. 43. To Margaret Burne-Jones, 28 November 1885–1911 January 1886, Letters, vol. 1, p. 100. Ibid., p. 100. Carlyle, Signs of the Times (1829), The Works of Thomas Carlyle, vol. XXVII, p. 66. Ibid., p. 99. Andrew Lycett, Rudyard Kipling (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1999), p. 130. Longman’s Magazine, vol. VIII, October 1886. Reprinted in Roger Lancelyn Green (ed.), Kipling: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), pp. 34–35. Louis Cornell, Kipling in India, p. 41. To Edith Macdonald, 4–5 December, 1886, Letters, vol. 1, p. 139.

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Notes 187

77. To Robert Underwood Johnson, 14 December 1895, Letters, vol. 2, p. 219. 78. Ibid., p. 219. 79. The two instalments of ‘In the Year ’57’ are included in Kipling’s scrapbooks at Sussex (The Kipling Papers, 28/4). Reference here is to the Civil and Military Gazette, May 14 and 23, 1887. 80. ‘In the Year ’57’, ibid., May 14, 1887, p. 4. 81. Ibid., p. 4. 82. Ibid., p. 4. 83. Ibid., p. 4. 84. Ibid., p. 4. 85. Ibid., May 23, 1887, p. 4. 86. Ibid., p. 4. 87. Bombay was often regarded as a soft-option by Anglo-Indians, who were fond of satirising its elaborate domestic arrangements and extravagances. See, for example, E.H. Aitken’s Behind the Bungalow (Calcutta: Thacker & Co., 1889). 88. ‘In the Year ’57’, the Civil and Military Gazette, May 23, 1887, p. 4. 89. Ibid., p. 4. 90. Sartor Resartus (1831), The Works of Thomas Carlyle, vol. I, p. 6. 91. Heroes and Hero-Worship (1841), ibid., vol. V, p. 66. 92. ‘In the Year ’57’, the Civil and Military Gazette, May 14, 1887, p. 4. 93. Past and Present (1843), The Works of Thomas Carlyle, vol. X, pp. 91–92. 94. ‘In the Year ’57’, the Civil and Military Gazette, May 23, 1887, p. 4. 95. Ibid., p. 4. 96. ‘The Viceroy at Patiala’, the CMG, 22 March 1884. Reprinted in Thomas Pinney (ed.), Kipling’s India: Uncollected Sketches, 1884–88 [hereafter Kipling’s India] (London: Macmillan, 1986), p. 27. 97. Ibid., p. 28. 98. ‘A Week in Lahore’, 7 May 1884, ibid., p. 34. 99. Anglo-Indian Society, 29 January 1887, ibid., p. 193. 100. ‘Typhoid at Home’, ibid., p. 77. 101. ‘To Meet the Ameer’, ibid., pp. 78, 93. For an account of the history and symbolic significance of the durbar to the Raj, see Bernard S. Cohn, ‘Representing Authority in Victorian India’ in Hobsbawm and Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 198. 102. Ibid., p. 101. 103. Ibid., p. 101. 104. Kipling’s India, p. 274. The interview seems to have furnished the details of a little-known Kipling story, ‘The Amir’s Homily’, collected in Life’s Handicap (London: Macmillan, 1890) – particularly regarding the account of the location and workings of the Amir’s durbar, and the fascination with summary justice. 105. Kipling’s India, p. 274. 106. Ibid., pp. 272 and 273. 107. From Sea to Sea and Other Sketches. Letters of Travel [hereafter From Sea to Sea] 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1899–1900), vol. I, p. 98. 108. Ibid., p. 101. 109. Kipling’s India, p. 275.

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188 Notes

110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121.

122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131.

132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141.

From Sea to Sea, p. 306. Ibid., p. 276. Plain Tales from the Hills, p. 107. Ibid., p. 108. Ibid., p. 108. Signs of the Times (1829), The Works of Thomas Carlyle, vol. XXVII, p. 68. Plain Tales from the Hills, p. 153. Ibid., p. 154. The Punjab in Peace and War, p. 231. Plain Tales from the Hills, p. 153. Ibid., p. 152. For example, G.F. Monkshood comments: ‘In reading Suddhoo there comes again a shuddering remembrance of that lurid genius Edgar Poe and his imaginings of things darksome and full of dread. [...] Mr Kipling seems to acknowledge and anticipate the shudder that will greet these gazings into the windows of the East and into its inmost life’ (Rudyard Kipling: An Attempt at Appreciation [London: Greening, 1899], p. 156). More recently, Elliot Gilbert has argued that ‘In the House of Suddhoo’ is ‘not a story of the supernatural’ (The Good Kipling [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1972], p. 68). Nevertheless, by attributing the humiliation of the official to a combination of his own naiveté and the superior cunning of the tenants, Gilbert refuses to blame the Penal Code for his downfall, which is surely the response – given the closing passages and the original title – that Kipling had in mind. Something of Myself, p. 228. Kim (London: Macmillan, 1901), p. 4. Ibid., p. 233. Ibid., p. 12. Ibid., p. 14. Ibid., p. 16. Ibid., p. 362. Ibid., p. 218. Ibid., p. 403. See Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority Under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817’ (1985), Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin (eds), The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 35. Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (New York: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 227. Ian Baucom, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of identity (Princeton: Princeton Unvirsity Press, 1999), pp. 65–69. Plain Tales from the Hills, p. 316. ‘False Dawn’, ibid., p. 42. Ibid., p. 224. Ibid., p. 225. William H. Whyte, The Organisation Man (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956). ‘Miss Youghal’s Sais’, Plain Tales from the Hills, p. 29. Ibid., p. 28. Ibid., p. 181.

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Notes 189

190 Notes

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

Something of Myself, p. 57. Ibid., pp. 41, 47. Lycett, Rudyard Kipling, p. 30. ‘A Study of the Congress by an Eye Witness’, the Pioneer, 1 January 1889, and ‘A Job Lot’, the Pioneer, 1 September 1888. Something of Myself, p. 68. Ibid., p. 70. Ibid., p. 69. Ibid., p. 70. John R. McLane, Indian Nationalism and the Early Congress (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 3. Lycett, Rudyard Kipling, p. 168. Something of Myself, p. 52. Ibid., p. 71. Ibid., p. 68. Ibid., p. 73. In The Colonizer and the Colonized, Memmi suggests that the Englishman abroad in the empire enjoys privileges unimaginable to his counterparts on the home front. These advantages shape his conservative politics and his attitude to the home country, which he considers a threat to his freedom and authority (ibid., p. 129). My account of Kipling’s move from the obscurity of Lahore to the ‘all-India’ environment of Allahabad – where he faced new levels of professional discipline and strictures upon his writing – borrows from this formulation directly. To Margaret Burne-Jones, 25 January–24 March 1888, Letters, vol. 1, p. 151. Ibid., pp. 151–152. Ibid., p. 70. Said employs this term to describe the ‘author’s position in a text with regard to the Oriental material he writes about’, encompassing ‘the kind of narrative voice he adopts, the type of structure he builds, the kinds of images, themes, motifs that circulate in his text’ (Orientalism [1978, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995], p. 20). William Lee-Warner, The Native States of India (1894, New York, AMS Press, 1971), p. vii. From Sea to Sea, vol. I, p. 130. Ibid., p. 131. Ibid., p. 9. Ibid., p. 10. Ibid., pp. 10–11. To Margaret Burne-Jones, 25 January–24 March 1886, Letters, vol. 1, p. 151. Ibid., p. 151. ‘The Amir’s Homily’, Life’s Handicap: Being Stories of Mine Own People (London: Macmillan, 1891), p. 333. Wee Willie Winkie and Other Stories (1888, Harmondsworth: Macmillan, 1899), p. 249. In a letter to his cousin, Kipling explains that during a train journey through Rajasthan he had ‘met a man who was also a mason’, and had agreed to carry an inscrutable message to a man – who was also a brother of mine – at an

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Borderline fictions and fantasies

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

unnamed junction on the north-west edge of the desert (To Margaret BurneJones, 25 January–24 March 1886, Letters, vol. 1, p. 153). Wee Willie Winkie and Other Stories, p. 207. Ibid., p. 208. Ibid., p. 209. Ibid., p. 205. Ibid., p. 211. Ibid., p. 217. Ibid., pp. 211–212. Ibid., p. 209. Ibid., p. 232. Ibid., p. 232. Ibid., pp. 205 and 240. Ibid., p. 236. Ibid., p. 232. Ibid., p. 200. Ibid., p. 200. Ibid., p. 216. Ibid., p. 220. In The Wretched of the Earth (1961, London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1965), Frantz Fanon explores the relationship between the design of the colonial city and its policies of segregation and surveillance, suggesting that colonial authorities have much to fear, and therefore to control, in urban centres. Hannerz, Cultural Complexity: Studies in the Social Organisation of Meaning (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), pp. 173–216. Ibid., pp. 199, 201. The City of Dreadful Night, reprinted in From Sea to Sea, vol. II, p. 202. Ibid., p. 254. Ibid., p. 242. Ibid., p. 247. Ibid., p. 247. Ibid., p. 204. Ibid., pp. 205–206. Ibid., p. 201. Ibid., p. 205. Ibid., p. 203. Ibid., pp. 203, 205, and 208. ‘Among the Railway Folk’, From Sea to Sea, vol. II, p. 275. Ibid., p. 282. Ibid., p. 274. Ibid., p. 276. Ibid., p. 298. Ibid., p. 298. ‘The Giridhi Coal Fields’, ibid., p. 309. Ibid., 322. Ibid., p. 317. ‘In an Opium Factory’, From Sea to Sea, vol. II, p. 338. The City of Dreaful Night, ibid., p. 249. Kipling advised Baldwin, then in Parliament, that the ‘native of India is by nature and environment temperate to an extent that the Englishman

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Notes 191

74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108.

does not appreciate and his dealings with the drug (an excellent thing in itself and in moderation about as harmful as tobacco) are most strictly limited. In fever districts, opium is much used as a guard against fever; also among coolies as a stimulus under heavy work. [ . . . ] I know that the opium habit in India is nothing as compared to the ordinary effects of liquor in a town full of white Christians but you see I can’t prove it and my evidence wouldn’t be worth a rap’ (To Baldwin, May 1893, Letters, vol. 2, pp. 98–99). The City of Dreadful Night (London: Sampson, Low, Marston and Company, 1891), p. 96. This comment is omitted from the reprint in From Sea to Sea. From Sea to Sea, vol. II, p. 336. Ibid., p. 332. Ibid., p. 333. Ibid., pp. 333–334. Ibid., p. 332. Ibid., p. 332. Ibid., p. 333. Ibid., p. 332. Richard Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye (London: Faber and Faber, 1990), p. 53. Ibid., p. 29. Soldiers Three and Other Stories (1888, London: Macmillan, 1899), p. 324. Ibid., p. 332. Ibid., p. 335. Ibid., p. 339. Ibid., p. 345. Ibid., p. 349. Ibid., p. 321. Ibid., p. 322. Ibid., p. 322. Ibid., p. 331. Ibid., p. 324. Ibid., p. 325. Ibid., p. 341. Ibid., p. 346. Ibid., p. 346. Ibid., p. 339. Ibid., p. 340. Ibid., p. 340. Ibid., p. 351. Ibid., p. 329. Ibid., p. 351. Donald Levine (ed.), George Semmel: On Individuality and Social Forms (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), pp. 75–76. K.T. Erikson, Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance (New York: Wiley, 1966), p. 13. These were confusingly entitled ‘The City of Two Creeds’ and ‘The City of the Two Creeds’, appearing in the Civil and Military Gazette on 19 and 22 October 1885, and 1 October 1887 respectively.

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192 Notes

109. 110. 111. 112. 113.

114.

115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127.

‘The City of the Two Creeds’, Kipling’s India, p. 266. Ibid., p. 266. Ibid., p. 266. Ibid., p. 268. The phrase occurs in the letter to Edith Macdonald cited above: ‘I find that Allahabad is 800 miles from Lahore and I should be as completely out of the family as though I were in England’ (To Macdonald, 30 July–1 August 1885, Letters, vol. 1, p. 82). In a letter to his cousin written soon after his arrival in Allahabad, he makes perhaps the most telling connection between exile in Southsea and life in the city, recalling the brief annual stay at the home of his aunt, which had granted him temporary respite from the House of Desolation: ‘I fancy from what I can make out of the movements of my folk in the north, that I shall come home next year for a while and then we will sit in the mulberry tree and hide pieces of bread and pork dripping under the dining room sofa and slide down the drawing room table and flatly deny the existence of any such objectionable being as “Mr Rudyard Kipling” or of so womanly wise a soul as “Miss Margaret Burne-Jones”.’ (To Margaret Burne-Jones, 25 January to 24 March, Letters, vol. 1, p. 151). The reference to the mulberry tree and the construction of a slide fits perfectly with the description of the visits he gave in his autobiography many years later: ‘[T]here was the society of my two cousins, and a sloping mulberry tree which we used to climb for our plots and conferences. There was a rocking-horse in the nursery and a table that, tilted up on two chairs, made a toboggan-slide of the best’ (Something of Myself, p. 12). Wee Willie Winkie and Other Stories, p. 297. Ibid., p. 291. Ibid., pp. 282–283. Ibid., p. 302. Ibid., pp. 290–291. Ibid., p. 280. Ibid., p. 271. Ibid., p. 292. Ibid., p. 284. Ibid., p. 287. Ibid., p. 305. Ibid., p. 300. Ibid., p. 310.

American fiction 1. Something of Myself, p. 74. 2. Charles Neider (ed.), The Autobiography of Mark Twain (1917, London: Chatto and Windus, 1960), p. 287. 3. From Sea to Sea, vol. II, p. 186. 4. Something of Myself, p. 79. 5. Ibid., p. 80.

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Notes 193

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46.

Ibid., p. 80. Lycett, Rudyard Kipling, p. 198. Ibid., p. 185. Birkenhead, Rudyard Kipling, pp. 106–107. The full title of the poem, ‘In Partibus Infidelium’ means ‘In the Countries of Infidels’. ‘In Partibus’, Andrew Rutherford (ed.), Early Verse by Rudyard Kipling, 1879–1889: Unpublished, Uncollected, and Rarely Collected Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 471. Lycett, Rudyard Kipling, pp. 183 and 196. Something of Myself, p. 91. Ibid., p. 92. ‘In Partibus’, Early Verse by Rudyard Kipling, p. 472. Something of Myself, p. 87. Ibid., p. 87. Ibid., p. 93. The Light That Failed (1891, London: Macmillan, 1899), p. 51. Ibid., p. 191. Ibid., p. 279. Ibid., p. 195. Ibid., pp. 42–43. Birkenhead, Rudyard Kipling, p. 307. Ibid., p. 307. The Naulahka: A Story of West and East (London: Macmillan, 1892), p. 315. Ibid., p. 331. Ibid., p. 321. Lycett, Rudyard Kipling, p. 228. The Naulahka, p. 317. Something of Myself, pp. 93 and 94. Ibid., p. 134. Ibid., p. 107. See John Carlos Rowe, Literary Culture and US Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Orientalism, p. 290. Culture and Imperialism, p. 381. Lycett, Rudyard Kipling, p. 273. Brooks Adams, America’s Economic Supremacy (New York: Macmillan, 1900), p. 143. Hugh Brogan, The History of the United States of America (Longman: 1985, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), p. 395. Christine Bolt, A History of the U.S.A. (London: Macmillan, 1974), p. 445. Ibid., p. 432. Ibid., p. 435. Michael Shwartz, ‘The Southern Farmers’ Alliance: Growth and Merger’, William F. Holmes (ed.), American Populism (Lexington: Mass., DC Heath and Co., 1994), p. 81. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (London: Macmillan, 1899). Something of Myself, p. 117. From Sea to Sea, vol. I, p. 489.

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194 Notes

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

76. 77. 78. 79.

Ibid., p. 473. Ibid., p. 482. To William Ernest Henley, 18–19 January 1893, Letters, vol. 2, p. 86. Something of Myself, p. 117. The two articles are reprinted in Letters of Travel (London: Macmillan, 1920), pp. 3–15, and pp. 102–116. The History of The United States of America, pp. 444–445. In 1896, he filed a lawsuit against his brother-in-law, alleging that Balestier had threatened to kill him during a family dispute. He lost the case and was humiliated in the courtroom and in the press. See Frederic F. Van de Water, Kipling’s Vermont Feud (Weston: Countryman Press, 1937). Populists have been accused of laying the foundations of right-wing extremism in twentieth century America. See, for example, Edward A. Shils, The Torment of Secrecy (Glencoe, Ill: Free Press, 1956) and Oscar Handlin, Race and Nationality in American Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1957). C. Vann Woodward offers a more positive account of the Populist social influence in his volume, The Burden of Southern History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968). See Holmes (ed.), American Populism for recent essays on Populism and race by Carl N. Degler, Barton C. Shaw and Greg Cantrell. Other writers, such as Sarah Jewett, Hamlin Garland, Theodor Dreiser, and Jack London, concurred, in one form or another, with this view. Something of Myself, p. 131. Captains Courageous (London: Macmillan, 1897), p. 203. Ibid., p. 241. Brooks Adams, America’s Economic Supremacy (New York: Macmillan, 1900), p. 111. Patrick Brantlinger, The Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914, p. 36. The Day’s Work, p. 294. 2 Samuel 4. 1–12. 2 Kings 5. 17–18. The Day’s Work, p. 283. Ibid., p. 283. Ibid., p. 282. Ibid., pp. 190 and 314. Ibid., p. 314. Ibid., p. 316. Ibid., p. 316. Ibid., p. 316. Ibid., p 284. Ibid., p. 282. Ibid., p. 282. Gene Clanton, Populism: The Humane Preference in America, 1890–1910 [Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991], p. 6). A ‘walking delegate’ is a labour union official (Pinney [ed.], The Day’s Work [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987], p. 291). The Day’s Work, pp. 58–59. Populism: The Humane Preference in America, 1890–1910, p. 99. Ibid., p. 44. Ibid., p. 47.

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Notes 195

80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98.

99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113.

114. 115. 116. 117.

The Day’s Work, p. 50. Ibid., p. 63. To Brander Matthews, 13 December 1894, Letters, vol. 2, p. 161. British Library, MS. 45,541, p. 190. Debs: His Authorized Life and Letters (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1919), p. 128. Ibid., p. 165. Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), p. 76. The Day’s Work, p. 247. Ibid., pp. 250–251. Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), p. 20. Ibid., p. 20. Ibid., p. 24. Ibid., p. 30. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark (London: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 8. Captains Courageous, pp. 87 and 166. W.E.B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903, New York, Signet, 1982), p. 52. Playing in the Dark, p. 5. To William Ernest Henley, 3–4 December 1893, Letters, vol. 2, p. 112. Charles Edward Mudie (1818–1890) owner of the largest circulating library in England, who censored books by refusing to stock those he did not approve of. Letters, vol. 2, p. 112. The Naulahka, pp. 204 and 205. The Day’s Work, pp. 185 and 184. Ibid., p. 185. Louis Filler, The Muckrakers (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1968), p. 38. To Edward Bok, 15 March 1895, Letters, vol. 2, p. 177. The Day’s Work, p. 187. To Bok, 10 October 1895, Letters, vol. 2, p. 203. The Day’s Work, p. 5. Ibid., p. 6. Ibid., p. 32. Something of Myself, p. 132. Ibid., pp. 132 and 120. Christopher Hitchens, Blood, Class, and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1990). Ibid., p. 37. Hitchens provides a detailed account of Kipling’s friendship with Theodore Roosevelt, documenting the author’s attempts, via Roosevelt, to enlist American support for Britain during and after the Great War (ibid., pp. 63–83). The Day’s Work, p. 319. Ibid., p. 319. Ibid., pp. 317–318. Ibid., p. 320.

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196 Notes

118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126.

127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132.

133. 134. 135. 136.

137. 138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147.

Ibid., p. 321. Ibid., p. 326. Ibid., p. 328. Ibid., p. 318. Ibid., p. 318. Ibid., p. 322. Ibid., p. 338. Ibid., p. 328. The dispute concerned the frontier between Venezuela and British Guiana. On 17 December 1885, President Cleveland raised the prospect of war by denouncing British foreign policy and asserting America’s right to defend Venezuela against British military action. The Day’s Work, p. 341. Ibid., p. 342. Ibid., p. 341. Ibid., p. 342. Ibid., p. 342. Ibid., p. 343. Tess of the D’Urbervilles was first published in 1891, about three years before ‘My Sunday at Home’. Tompkins considers ‘My Sunday at Home’ a ‘reaction to Hardy’s tragic artistries’ (J.M.S. Tompkins, The Art of Rudyard Kipling [London: Methuen, 1959], p. 46). The Day’s Work, p. 343. Ibid., p. 344. Ibid., p. 350. The social historian Eric Hobsbawm locates the formation proper of the British working class between 1870 and 1914, identifying the ‘apparently frivolous’ detail of the flat cap as its distinguishing feature (Hobsbawm, Uncommon People: Resistance, Rebellion and Jazz [London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1998], pp. 57–74). The Day’s Work, p. 358. Ibid., p. 356. ‘Kipling’s World’, Elliot Gilbert (ed.), Kipling and the Critics (London: Peter Owen, 1966), p. 101. The Day’s Work, p. 348. Ibid., pp. 351–352. Ibid., p. 356. Ibid., pp. 351–352. Ibid., p. 352. ‘The English Flag’, Barrack Room Ballads and Other Verses (London: Methuen and Co., 1892), p. 174. Something of Myself, p. 123. Ibid., p. 123.

Mowgli’s feral campaign 1. Something of Myself, p. 110. 2. Ibid., p. 113. 3. Ibid., p. 113.

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Notes 197

4. Ibid., p. 109. 5. See Stuart Hall, ‘The Meaning of New Times’, David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (eds), Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 233–237, and John Fiske, Power Plays, Power Works (London: Verso: 1993), p. 7. 6. To Edward Everett Hale, 16 January 1895, Letters, vol. 2, p. 168. 7. The Jungle Book (1894, London: Macmillan, 1899), p. 142. 8. Ibid., p 144. 9. Ibid., p. 128. 10. Ibid., p. 144. 11. Ibid., p. 129. 12. Ibid., p. 130. 13. Ibid., p. 127. 14. Ibid., p. 142. 15. Ibid., p. 127. 16. Henry W. Elliot, The History and Present Condition of the Pribilofs Fishery Industries, etc.: The Seal Islands of Alaska (Washington: Department of the Interior, Government Printing Office, 1881), pp. 68–69. 17. Robert Craig Brown and Ramsay Cook, Canada 1896–1921: A Nation Transformed (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1974), p. 107. 18. The title of the story itself seems to refer to this dispute, evoking concepts of racial and cultural alliance in the play upon the words, ‘white’ and ‘seal’. The colour of the seal evokes the whiteness of the ‘Caucasian race’, and the creature’s species intimates a diplomatic ‘seal’ or agreement between the powers of the North Atlantic. On this level the phrase, ‘the white seal’, involves Anglo-Saxon racial overtones similar to the title of Kipling’s poem, ‘The White Man’s Burden’. 19. British Library, MS. 45,540, p. 31. 20. To Jewett, 16 October 1895, Letters, vol. 2, p. 204. 21. As Daniel Karlin suggests, the guidance of the manatee provides an ‘image of death’, suggesting the unlikeliness or ‘fictionality’ of the redemptive theme (Introduction, The Jungle Books [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987], p. 11). 22. The Second Jungle Book (1895, London: Macmillan, 1899), p. 198. 23. Ibid., p. 202. 24. Ibid., p. 204. 25. Ibid., p. 181. 26. Ibid., p. 200. 27. Ibid., p. 192. 28. Ibid., p. 184. 29. Ibid., p. 186. 30. Ibid., pp. 215–216. 31. Ibid., p. 186. 32. The Jungle Book, p. 164. 33. Ibid., p. 168. 34. Ibid., p. 169. 35. Ibid., p. 189. 36. Ibid., p. 187. 37. Kim, p. 86. 38. To Edward Lucas White, 11 November 1902, Letters, vol. 3, p. 111.

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198 Notes

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

69. 70.

The Jungle Book, p. 195. Ibid., p. 201. Ibid., p. 201. Ibid., p. 200. Ibid., p. 203. Ibid., p. 194. Ibid., p. 194. Ibid., pp. 192 and 193. Ibid., p. 198. Ibid., p. 205. British Library, MS. 45,540, p. 162. Ibid., p. 158. Ibid., p. 158. This broadening of concepts of racial and cultural affinity was characteristic of the empire federalist movement in the late nineteenth century. See Ann Parry, The Poetry of Rudyard Kipling: Rousing the Nation (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1992), pp. 53–78. W.H. Sleeman, ‘An Account of Wolves Nurturing Children in Their Dens. By an Indian Official’. Quoted from Zoologist, vol. XII (1888), pp. 92, 95–96. William Wilson Hunter, Annals of Rural Bengal, pp. 112, 115. Ibid., p. 115. The Jungle Book, p. 51. Ibid., p. 113. Ibid., p. 95. Ibid., p. 96. Ibid., p. 30. Ibid., p. 31. Ibid., p. 59. Ibid., p. 75. Ibid., p. 59. Ibid., p. 73. Ibid., p. 75. Ibid., p. 81. See Henry Adams’ 1894 communication to the American Historical Association in The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma (New York: Macmillan, 1919), pp. 130–131. The Second Jungle Book, p. 232. Ibid., p. 238.

By equal war made one 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Something of Myself, p. 132. Ibid., p. 142. Ibid., p. 144. Ibid., p. 190. Ibid., p. 149. Ibid., p. 149. Ibid., p. 149.

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Notes 199

8. Lycett, Rudyard Kipling, p. 315. 9. Something of Myself, p. 95. 10. In The Eclipse of Great Britain: The United States and British Imperial Decline (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 24–25. Ann Orde describes the gradual concession of naval power to America in the western hemisphere. 11. A Fleet in Being (London: Macmillan, 1898), p. 21. 12. Ibid., p. 35. 13. Stalky & Co. (London: Macmillan, 1899), p. 271. 14. Ibid., p. 271. 15. Birkenhead, Rudyard Kipling, p. 238. Across the country in 1900, there were a number of serious riots and many assaults on suspected pro-Boers (see Richard Price, An Imperial War and the British Working Class [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972], pp. 196–197). 16. At the time of the war, Rhodes was the leader of the newly-formed Progressive Party in the Cape, a ‘coalition of jingoist, Dutch-hating, antiKrugerite, moneyed imperialists and of Cape Liberals who hoped to introduce Coloured and other black citizens into the polity’ (Geoffrey Wheatcroft, The Randlords: The Men who Made South Africa [London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985], p. 208). 17. Wheatcroft offers a fascinating account of Jameson’s near miraculous political rehabilitation after the public disgrace of the Raid (for which he narrowly escaped hanging). Little over eight years after the Raid, following a term of fifteen months in an English prison, he was installed as Prime Minister of the Cape Colony, remaining in power for four years (ibid., p. 190). 18. Ann Orde, The Eclipse of Great Britain: The United States and British Imperial Decline, p. 12. 19. Wheatcroft, The Randlords, p. 182. 20. Birkenhead, Rudyard Kipling, p. 232. 21. Ibid., p. 213. 22. To Charles Eliot Norton, 15 January 1900, Letters, vol. 3, p. 10. 23. To Charles Eliot Norton, 19 May 1901; in Thomas Pinney, Letters, vol. 3, p. 53. 24. Ibid., p. 53. 25. See Letters, vol. 3, pp. 41 and 45. Birkenhead explains how ‘[w]ith an eye all ready on the next war, he regarded his club with deadly seriousness. He always shot in the competitions, adequately, in spite of his eyesight, coming over at three or four in the afternoon in his wide-brimmed hat and leather-patched clothes’ (Rudyard Kipling, pp. 233–234). 26. Ibid., p. 234. 27. Ibid., p. 210. 28. To Charles Eliot Norton, 15 January 1900, Letters, vol. 3, p. 10. 29. Ibid., pp. 10–11. 30. Birkenhead, Rudyard Kipling, p. 215. 31. The Poetry of Rudyard Kipling: Rousing the Nation, p. 106. 32. Smith, M. Van Wyk, Drummer Hodge: The Poetry of the Anglo–Boer War, 1899–1902 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), p. 98. 33. Speech of March 31, 1897. Charles W. Boyd (ed.), Mr Chamberlain’s Speeches, vol. II (London: Constable, 1914), p. 4.

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200 Notes

34. Ibid., December 30, 1902, p. 88. 35. Ibid., January 17, 1903, p. 104. 36. Sidney Webb, ‘Lord Rosebury’s Escape From Houndsditch’, Nineteenth Century and After, vol. CCXCV (1901), pp. 385–386. 37. H.G. Wells, Anticipations (London: Chapman and Hall, 1902), p. 212. 38. Arnold White, Efficiency and Empire (1901, Brighton: Harvester Press Limited, 1973), p. 117. 39. Sally Ledger, ‘In Darkest England: The Terror of Degeneration in fin de siecle Britain’, Literature and History, 4.2 (1995), p. 75. 40. G.R. Searle, The Quest for National Efficiency: A Study in British Politics and Political Thought, 1899–1914 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1971), p. 54. For an example of the use of Germany as a model of municipal government, see Chiozza Money, Riches and Poverty (London: Methuen and Co., 1905), pp. 206–207. 41. Bernard Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform: English Social and Imperial Thought, 1895–1914 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1960), p. 13. 42. Ibid., p. 93. 43. Ibid., p. 93. 44. National Review, vol. XXIII (1894), pp. 7–9; quoted in Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform, p. 92. 45. Ibid., p. 112. 46. Tariff Reform League Leaflet No. 212; quoted in Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform, p. 117. 47. Ibid., p. 117. 48. Ibid., p. 117. 49. Ledger, ‘In Darkest England: The Terror of Degeneration in fin de siecle Britain’, Literature and History, 4.2 (1995), p. 73. 50. See Richard Price, An Imperial War and the British Working Class. Price argues that the importance of the urban working classes to the war changed the face of British party politics. To illustrate the point, he cites the urban focus of the political campaign fought by the Conservative Party during the so-called ‘Khaki’ election of 1900, suggesting that the Party won the most urban seats, especially in Scotland, because the towns were most affected by ‘war fever’ (ibid., p. 113). 51. J.A. Hobson, The Psychology of Jingoism (London: Grant Richards, 1901), p. 6. 52. Ibid., p. 2. 53. The Poetry of Rudyard Kipling: Rousing the Nation, p. 92. 54. Rudyard Kipling’s Verse: Definitive Edition (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1940), p. 459. 55. Ibid., p. 460. 56. Homi Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation: time, narrative, and the margins of the modern nation’, Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 310. 57. Rudyard Kipling’s Verse: Definitive Edition, p. 460. 58. Ibid., p. 311. 59. ‘DissemiNation: time, narrative, and the margins of the modern nation’, Nation and Narration, p. 294. 60. Ibid., p. 301. 61. The Five Nations (London: Methuen, 1903), p. 159. 62. Ibid., p. 162.

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Notes 201

63. Julian Ralph, War’s Brighter Side (London: C. Arthur Pearson, 1901), p. 51. 64. Speech to the House of Commons, 5 February 1900; in Charles W. Boyd (ed.), Mr Chamberlain’s Speeches, vol. II, p. 67. 65. Rudyard Kipling, The Five Nations (London: Methuen, 1903), p. 177. 66. Kipling, ‘The Song of the Dead’, The Seven Seas (London: Methuen, 1896), p. 6. 67. ‘The Sin of Witchcraft’, The Times, 15 March 1900; reprinted in R.E. Harbord (ed.), The Reader’s Guide to Rudyard Kipling’s Works, vol. V (Canterbury: Privately Printed, 1970), p. 2551. 68. The Five Nations, p. 212. 69. Ibid., p. 177. 70. Ibid., p. 192. 71. M. Van Wyk Smith, Drummer Hodge: The Poetry of the Anglo–Boer War, 1899–1902, p. 86. 72. The Five Nations, p. 87. 73. Ibid., p. 102–103. 74. Elleke Boehmer (ed.), Empire Writing: An Anthology of Colonial Literature 1870–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 175. 75. Ibid., p. 189. 76. Ibid., p. 177. 77. Boehmer (ed.), Empire Writing: An Anthology of Colonial Literature 1870–1918, p. 95. 78. Although he bemoaned ‘bad smart society’ (Efficiency and Empire [1901, Brighton: Harvester Press Limited, 1973], p. 74), White ultimately remained committed to an aristocratic principle of government, arguing that there existed a species of ‘true’ or proper aristocrat, who would rise to the top of the social hierarchy according to their superior efficiency: ‘The gentle folk will always win in a crowd whenever they take the trouble – for aristocracy is nothing more than the most efficient people in the nation, whose efficiency has been graded up by generations of training’ (ibid., p. 23). 79. Ibid., pp. ix–x. 80. The Five Nations, p. 135. 81. White, Efficiency and Empire, p. 253. 82. Ibid., p. 111. 83. Ibid., pp. 113, 117 and 258. 84. The Five Nations, p. 153. 85. There is a curious ambivalence about the phrase ‘the black waste of it all’, given the African labour and lands both races sought to control. The concept of atonement takes on a further resonance in connection with this meaning. 86. Shanks, Rudyard Kipling: A Study in Literature and Political Ideas, p. 189. 87. Chris Brooks and Peter Faulkner (eds), The White Man’s Burdens: An Anthology of British Poetry of the Empire (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1996), p. 320. 88. Ibid., p. 333. 89. ‘Last Post’, For England’s Sake: Verses and Songs in Time of War, The Works of W.E. Henley, vol. II (London: David Nutt, 1908), p. 157. 90. ‘Envoy’, ibid., p. 162.

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202 Notes

Notes 203 The Five Nations, pp. 107–108. Shanks, Rudyard Kipling, p. 178. The Five Nations, pp. 107–108. Speech to the House of Commons, 5 February 1900, Mr Chamberlain’s Speeches, vol. II, p. 67.

Strange deaths in liberal England 1. On 28 January 1902 Kipling wrote to Wells expressing admiration for the recently published Anticipations, in which Wells prophecies the rise of government by such authoritarian technocrats, and the disappearance of ‘old school’ political and military institutions (Letters, vol. 3, pp. 84–85). 2. The Burwash Edition: The Collected Works of Rudyard Kipling: Uncollected Prose, vol. XXIII (New York: Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc., 1941), p. 486. 3. Ibid., pp. 486 and 493. 4. Ibid., p. 486. 5. Ibid., p. 492. 6. To H.A. Gwynne, 28 May 1904, Letters, vol. 3, p. 155. 7. The Collected Works of Rudyard Kipling: Uncollected Prose, vol. XXIII, p. 525. 8. Ibid., p. 523. 9. Ibid., p. 523. 10. Ibid., p. 529. 11. Ibid., p. 484. 12. Ibid., p. 487. 13. Ibid., pp. 486 and 487. 14. Ibid., p. 485. 15. Ibid., p. 487. 16. Ibid., p. 492. 17. Ibid., p. 500. 18. Ibid., p. 520. 19. Traffics and Discoveries (London: Macmillan, 1904), pp. 166–167. 20. Ibid., p. 160. 21. Ibid., p. 162. 22. Ibid., p. 161. 23. Ibid., pp. 169–170. 24. The Collected Works of Rudyard Kipling: Uncollected Prose, vol. XXIII, p. 487. 25. Traffics and Discoveries, p. 170. 26. Ibid., p. 171. 27. To H.A. Gwynne, 23–24 August 1901, Letters, vol. 3, p. 68. 28. Cultural Complexity: Studies in the Social Organisation of Meaning, p. 34. 29. Traffics and Discoveries, p. 364. 30. Ibid., p. 365. 31. Ibid., p. 364. 32. Lodge, ‘ “Mrs Bathurst”: Indeterminacy in Modern Narrative’, in Phillip Mallett (ed.), Kipling Considered (Basingstoke: Macmillan 1989), p. 71. 33. Traffics and Discoveries, p. 359.

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91. 92. 93. 94.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

Ibid., p. 358. Ibid., p. 358. Ibid., p. 355. Ibid., p. 353. Ibid., p. 353. Ibid., p. 356. Ibid., p. 340. Ibid., p. 355. The Seven Seas, pp. 9–10. Something of Myself, p. 180. Ibid., p. 181. Ibid., p. 182. To John St Loe Strachey, 13 May 1902, Letters, vol. 3, p. 90. Something of Myself, p. 179. Ibid., p. 178. To Filson Young, April 1904, Letters, vol. 3, p. 150. Ibid., p. 150. Ibid., p. 150. Alun Howkins, ‘Kipling, Englishness and History’, in Angus Ross (ed.), Kipling 86: Papers Read at Sussex in May 1986 (Sussex: University of Sussex Library, 1987), pp. 25–29. George Newman, The Health of the State (London: Headley Brothers, 1907), p. vi. Quoted from the preface to the second edition. See Hugh Brogan, Mowgli’s Sons: Kipling and Baden-Powell’s Scouts (London: Jonathan Cape, 1987). The Health of the State, p. 67. Ibid., p. 168. Ibid., p. 1. Ibid., p. 24. Ibid., p. 24. Ibid., p. 34. David Matless, Landscape and Englishness (London: Reaktion Books, 1998), p. 33. Ibid., p. 47. Ibid., p. 66. C.F.G. Masterman, The Condition of England (London: Methuen, 1909), p. 191. Ibid., p. 207. Ibid., p. 45. Charles Furth, Life Since 1900 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1956), p. 27. Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows (1908, London: Bloomsbury Books, 1994), p. 92. Ibid., p. 92. Simon Nowell-Smith (ed.), Edwardian England, 1901–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), p. 45. Something of Myself, p. 177. To Filson Young, April 1904, Letters, vol. 3, p. 150. Traffics and Discoveries, p. 312. Ibid., p. 320. Ibid., p. 319.

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204 Notes

76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118.

Ibid., p. 303. Landscape and Englishness, p. 64. The Health of the State, pp. 109–110. Ibid., p. 110. Traffics and Discoveries, p. 324. Ibid., p. 324. The Health of the State, p. 112. See also George Newman’s Infant Mortality: A Social Problem (London: Methuen, 1906), p. 17. Between 1901 and 1905 the infant mortality rate for Sussex (101 in every 1000 births) was extremely low in comparison with the industrial areas, particularly the Midlands, where the rate commonly reached 170 in every 1000 (Infant Mortality: A Social Problem, pp. 22–23). Ibid., p. 22. The name of the house echoes The Pilgrim’s Progress. Traffics and Discoveries, pp. 329–330. Ibid., p. 322. The Condition of England, p. 208. Traffics and Discoveries, p. 194. Ibid., p. 195. Ibid., p. 219. Ibid., p. 220. Ibid., pp. 228–229. Ibid., p. 235. Ibid., pp. 234–235. Ibid., p. 232. Ibid., p. 215. Ibid., p. 215. Ibid., p. 215. Ibid., p. 216. J.B. Priestley, The Edwardians (London: Heinemann, 1970), pp. 84 and 87. Traffics and Discoveries, p. 213. Ibid., p. 212. Keats, ‘Ode to Psyche’, Elizabeth Cook, John Keats: A Critical Edition of the Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 280. Blackwood’s, August, 1818. Quoted from Cook, Introduction, ibid., p. xxi. Traffics and Discoveries, p. 220. Ibid., p. 223. Ibid., p. 232. Ibid., p. 228. Ibid., p. 238. See Hermione Lee (ed.), Traffics and Discoveries (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), p. 343. Charles Furth, Life Since 1900, p. 34. Traffics and Discoveries, p. 372. Ibid., p. 374. Ibid., p. 386. Ibid., p. 391. Ibid., p. 392. Ibid., p. 393.

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Notes 205

206 Notes

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

Something of Myself, p. 192. Ibid., p. 192. Ibid., p. 185. Ibid., p. 186. Ibid., p. 186. Ibid., p. 188. Ibid., p. 197. Ibid., p. 188. Ibid., p. 190. Published in the febrile atmosphere that followed the South African war, the Puck stories echo the quest for Old England in contemporary works including, for example, Newbolt’s The Old Country: A Romance (London: Smith, Elder, 1906) and Ford Maddox Ford’s The Heart of the Country (London: A. Rivers, 1906). See also Masterman’s contribution to Oldershaw, L. (ed.), England: A Nation. Being the Papers of the Patriot’s Club (London: R. Brimley Johnson, 1904). Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, quoted in Matless, Landscape and Englishness, p. 10. Edward Shanks, Rudyard Kipling, p. 230, and Martin Seymour-Smith, Rudyard Kipling (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), p. 354. Alfred Noyes, signed review (1906) in Roger Lancelyn Green (ed.), Kipling: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), pp. 300–301. Quoted in Sarah Wintle (ed.), Introduction, Puck of Pook’s Hill (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), p. 24. Susan Pederson, Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 71. See Pederson’s reading of Wells’s Marriage (1912), Family, Dependence and the Origins of the Welfare State, pp. 26–78. Ibid., p. 32. Ibid., p. 48. David Thomson, England in the Nineteenth Century (1950, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), pp. 177 and 179. Ibid., p. 178. Puck of Pook’s Hill, p. 144. Ibid., p. 152. Ibid., p. 152. Ibid., p. 152. Ibid., p. 154. Ibid., p. 152. Ibid., p. 153. Ibid., p. 153. ‘A Centurion of the Thirtieth’, Puck of Pook’s Hill, p. 122. Ibid., p. 154. Ibid., p. 148. Ibid., p. 152. Ibid., p. 152. Kipling often used the Masonic term the ‘family square’ to refer to his relations.

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Kipling’s tory anarchy

35. ‘On the Great Wall’, Puck of Pook’s Hill, p. 189. Kipling portrays Mithraism (the Roman religion) as a kind of Freemasonry, which allows Parnesius to recognise his Saxon collaborator, the ‘Winged Hat’, Amal, as a fellow-Mason: ‘ “I addressed him a certain Question which can only be answered in a certain manner. He answered with the necessary Word – the Word that belongs to the degree of Gryphons in the science of Mithras my God” ’ (Puck of Pook’s Hill), p. 205. 36. Puck of Pook’s Hill, p. 139. 37. Ibid., p. 267. 38. Ibid., p. 273. 39. Ibid., p. 267. 40. Thomson, England in the Nineteenth Century, p. 185. 41. Puck of Pook’s Hill, pp. 269–270. 42. Ibid., p. 274. 43. Ibid., p. 274. 44. Ibid., p. 274. 45. Rudyard Kipling’s Verse: Definitive Edition, p. 309. 46. ‘Old Men at Pevensey’, Puck of Pook’s Hill, pp. 120–121. 47. Ibid., p. 112. 48. Kipling was aware of the bellicose German reportage frequently reprinted in the English penny press – for example, the following article published in the Daily Mail at the beginning of the South African War: ‘England receives her death stroke in Africa.’ What a prospect for Germany! The United States of South Africa, founded upon the broken-up British Empire, will be her natural arch enemy, and Germany’s natural ally. Then at last the German race, too, will occupy one of the foreign continents (Twells Brex (ed.), ‘Scaremongerings’ from the Daily Mail: The Paper that Foretold the War, 1896–1914 [London: The Daily Mail, 1914]). A copy of this volume of articles reprinted from the German press can be found in the library at Bateman’s. 49. Puck of Pook’s Hill, pp. 78, 74 and 83. 50. Ibid., p. 89. 51. ‘The Old Men of Pevensey’, ibid., p. 109. 52. ‘The Knights of the Joyous Venture’, ibid., p. 94. 53. Something of Myself, p. 189. 54. Puck of Pook’s Hill, p. 297. 55. Ibid., p. 301. 56. See Bernard Crier, The Alien Invasion: the Origins of the Aliens Act of 1905 (London: Heineman, 1972), p. 61. 57. Puck of Pook’s Hill, p. 289. 58. Ibid., p. 297. 59. Ibid., p. 297. 60. Ibid., p. 283. 61. Ibid., p. 289. 62. Ibid., p. 303. 63. Ibid., p. 291. 64. Rudyard Kipling’s Verse: Definitive Edition, p. 533. 65. Something of Myself, p. 122. 66. Thomas Pinney (ed.), Something of Myself and Other Autobiographical Writings, p. 246.

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Notes 207

208 Notes

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Between the Acts (1941, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), p. 102 Ibid., pp. 47–48. Ibid., p. 47. Actions and Reactions, p. 147. Ibid., p. 148. Ibid., p. 154. Ibid., p. 156. G.K. Chesterton, Heretics (1905). Quoted from Kipling: The Critical Heritage, pp. 295 and 297. 9. Ibid., p. 295. 10. Puck of Pook’s Hill, p. 64. 11. To Margaret Burne-Jones, 25 January–24 March, 1888, Letters, vol. 1, p. 151.

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Conclusion: the edge of evening

Works by Rudyard Kipling Except where noted otherwise, quotations are from the Uniform Edition of the Works of Rudyard Kipling (London, 1899–1937). Works of Rudyard Kipling are reproduced with the permission of A.P. Watt Ltd on behalf of The National Trust for Places of Historical Interest or Natural Beauty. Individual titles and dates of first publication are listed in the main text. Quotations from the poems are from the individual Methuen volumes and the complete edition, Rudyard Kipling’s Verse: Definitive Edition (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1940).

Correspondence Gilbert, E.L. (ed.), ‘O Beloved Kids’: Rudyard Kipling’s Letters to his Children (1983, London: Zenith, 1984). Pinney, T., The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, 4 vols to date (Basingstoke: Macmillan 1990–).

Editions of uncollected and rarely collected works Harbord, R.E. (ed.), The Reader’s Guide to Rudyard Kipling’s Works (8 vols, Privately Printed, Canterbury, Bournemouth, 1961–1972). Pinney, T. (ed.), Something of Myself and Other Autobiographical Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). ———, Kipling’s India: Uncollected Sketches, 1884–88 (London: Macmillan, 1986). Rutherford, A. (ed.), Early Verse by Rudyard Kipling, 1879–89: Unpublished, Uncollected, and Rarely Collected Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).

Manuscripts The Jungle Books, British Library, MS. 45,540. Stories 1892–1896, British Library, MS. 45,541. Kim, British Library, MS. 44,840. Letters of Travel and Boer Stories, British Library, MS. 45,542. The Seven Seas, British Library, MS. 44,841.

Material in the Rudyard Kipling Archive, the University of Sussex Library (figures correspond to box and file numbers) Scrapbooks 28/1, 28/2, 28/3 and 28/4: press-cuttings of newspaper articles, stories and poems published in the Civil and Military Gazette, the Pioneer, and 209

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Bibliography

210 Bibliography The Week’s News, 1884–1891. Scrapbook 28/6: press cuttings from British and South African newspapers, 1899–1902.

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Books and articles

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Henley, W.E., The Works of W.E. Henley (London: David Nutt, 1908). Hitchens, C., Blood, Class, and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1990). Hobsbawm, E. and Ranger, T. (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Hobsbawm, E.J., The Age of Empire: 1875–1914 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987). ———, Uncommon People: Resistance, Rebellion and Jazz (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1998). ———, with Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Hobson, J.A., The War in South Africa: Its Causes and Effects (London: Nisbet, 1900). ———, The Psychology of Jingoism (London: Grant Richards, 1901). Holmes, W.F. (ed.), American Populism (Lexington: Mass., D.C. Heath and Co., 1994). Hopkirk, P., The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). Hunter, W.W., Annals of Rural Bengal (1868–1872, London: Smith and Elder, 1897). ———, Imperial Gazetteer of British India, 9 vols (London: Trubner, 1881). Hutchens, F.G., The Illusion of Permanence: British Imperialism in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967). Islam, S., Kipling’s ‘Law’: A Study in his Philosophy of Life (London: Macmillan, 1975). Javed, M., Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill’s The History of British India and Orientalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). Karlin, D. (ed.), The Jungle Books (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987). Karsner, D., Debs: His Authorized Life and Letters (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1919). Lee, H. (ed.), Traffics and Discoveries (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992). Lee-Warner, W., The Native States of India (1894, New York: AMS Press, 1971). Levine, D. (ed.), George Semmel: On Individuality and Social Forms (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971). Low, Gail Ching-Liang, White Skins / Black Masks: Representation and Colonialism (London: Routledge, 1996). Lycett, A., Rudyard Kipling (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1999). Macdonald, R.H., ‘Discourse and Ideology in Kipling’s “Beyond the Pale” ’, Studies in Short Fiction, XXIII (Fall, 1986), 413–418. Mackay, A., Twenty-One Days in India, Being the Tour of Sir Ali Baba, K.C.B. (London: W.H. Allen & Co., 1890). Maine, H., Ancient Law (1861, London: John Murray, 1870). ———, Village Communities in the East and West (London: John Murray, 1871). Mallett, P. (ed.), Kipling Considered (Basingstoke: Macmillan 1989). Masterman, C.F.G., The Condition of England (London: Methuen, 1909). Matless, D., Landscape and Englishness (London: Reaktion Books, 1998). McLane, J.R., Indian Nationalism and the Early Congress (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977). Memmi, A., The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957, London: Earthscan, 1990). Mendelson, E. (ed.), W. H. Auden: Selected Poems (London: Faber, 1979). Money, C., Riches and Poverty (London: Methuen and Co., 1905).

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Wintle, S. (ed.), Puck of Pook’s Hill (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987). Woolf, V., Between the Acts (1941, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992). Wurgaft, L.D., The Imperial Imagination: Magic and Myth in Kipling’s India (Middletown, Connecticut: Weslyan University Press, 1983). Young, R.J.C., Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995).

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Bibliography 215

‘Absent-Minded Beggar, The’ (RK; poem), 126, 143 Adams, Brooks, 69, 75–6, 194, 195 Adams, Henry, 69, 199 Aesthetes, 63 Afghanistan, 25–6, 27 ‘Africanism’, 84–5 in RK’s fiction, 85 Aitken, E.H., 188 Alien’s Act, 176 Allahabad, vii, 190, 193 influence of Indian National Congress upon, 48–9 RK’s alienation from, 52–7 RK’s move to, 34–7 Allen, Sir George: conflict with RK, 34–5 employs RK on the Pioneer, 34 ‘Among the Railway Folk’ (RK; article), 45–6, 193 anti-alien leagues, 176 Arctic, 98–103 Auden, W.H.: thoughts on RK, vi–vii Australia, 130–1, 169 ‘Baa Baa, Black Sheep’ (RK; story), 36, 53 Baldwin, Alfred, 46, 191, 192 Baldwin, Stanley, 156 Balestier, Beatty, 117, 195 Balestier, Walcott, 62 literary collaboration with RK, 66–7 Banerjee, Sir Surendranath, 35 Barrack Room Ballads (RK; poetry), 197 Baum, L. Frank, 73 ‘Below the Mill Dam’ (RK; story), 162–4 Bengal: colonial scholarship of, 13–14 RK visits, 45 Beresford, George (‘M’Turk’), 5, 16 Bering Sea dispute, 100 Besant, Walter, 63

Betjeman, John, 152 Bhabha, Homi, 31, 127–8, 189 Birkenhead, Lord, 121, 194, 200 Bismarck, Prince Otto Von, 124 Bloemfontein, 137, 138 Blunt, Wilfred, 163 Boehmer, Elleke, 202 Bok, Edward, 88, 196 Bolt, Christine, 194 Bombay: parents at home in, 4 RK’s memories of, 3–6 Borges, Jorge Luis, 181 Boswell, James, 166 Boy Scouts, 149 Boyd, Charles W., 200, 202 Brantlinger, Patrick, 31, 189, 195 ‘Bread upon the Waters’, 76–9 ‘Bridge Builders, The’, 88–9 Brook, Rupert, 93 Brooks, Chris, 202 Brown, Robert Craig, 198 Browning, Robert, 16, 35–6 Bryan, William Jennings, 72–3, 81 Buddhism, 97, 105–6, 108–9, 114 ‘Burgher of the Free State’ (RK; story), 137–40 Burne-Jones, Georgiana, 4, 119 Burne-Jones, Margaret, 6, 38, 185, 187, 190, 191, 193, 208 Burrow, J.W., 186 Calcutta, 34 renaissance of, 43 RK visits and describes, 43–5 Canada, 100, 129, 131, 169 Cantrell, Greg, 195 Captains Courageous (RK; novel), 74–5, 79, 85 Carlyle, Thomas, 11–12, 140, 186, 187, 188, 189 echoed by RK, 20, 22–4, 182 influence upon RK, 15–18

216

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Index

‘Centurion of the Thirtieth’ (RK; story), 170, 206 Chamberlain, Joseph, 82, 122, 129, 130, 135 ‘Chant Pagan’ (RK; poem), 128, 131 Chen, Kuan-Hsing, 198 Chesterton, G.K., 182 ‘Children, The’ (RK; poem), 177–8 China: RK visits and describes, 27 ‘Cities and Thrones and Powers’ (RK; poem), 171 City of Dreadful Night (RK; article), 43–5, 46, 191–2 Civil and Military Gazette (CMG; Punjab newspaper), 188, 192 focus upon Afghan affairs in, 25–6 influence upon RK’s literary work, 7 politics, policies and readership of, 7, 19, 35, 185 RK joins, 6 RK leaves, 34 RK’s typical journalistic duties on, 24–5 Clanton, Gene, 195 ‘Comprehension of Private Copper, The’ (RK; story), 140–3 Comte, Auguste, 27 concentration camps, see also South Africa Conrad, Joseph, 75, 123, 175 ‘conspicuous consumption’, see Veblen, Thorstein ‘Conversion of Aurelian McGoggin, The’ (RK; story), 27–8 Cook, Ramsay, 198 Cornell, Louis, 187 Council for the Preservation of Rural England (CPRE), 150–1 Crete, 181 Crier, Bernard, 207 Crofts, W.C., 184 Curzon, George Nathaniel, 1st Baron and 1st Marquis of, 163 Daily Express, 124 Daily Mail, 124, 126, 127 Day’s Work, The (RK; collection), 61, 76–95

Debs, Eugene V., 70, 81–2, 84 ‘Deep Sea Cables’ (RK; poem), 147 Defoe, Daniel, 166 Degler, Carl N., 195 Departmental Ditties (RK; poems), 18–19, 61 Dickens, Charles, 16, 51, 61 Disney, Walt, 104 Dreiser, Theodore, 195 DuBois, W.E.B., 85 Dufferin and Ava, Frederick Blackwood, 1st Marquis of, 25 Duncan, Sarah Jeanette, 132 Dunsterville, Major-General Lionel (‘Stalky’), 5, 16 East India Company, 14 Eliot, T.S. 126, 152 Elizabethans, 165 Elliot, Henry W., 99–100 ‘English Flag, The’ (RK; poem), 197 Entente (Anglo-French), 174 environmentalism, 99, 101–3 Erikson, T.K., 192 ‘Error in the Fourth Dimension, An’ (RK; story), 89–92 Eugenics, 122, 123–4, 125, 126, 127, 132–3, 149, 151, 202 Fabian socialism, 125, 132 Fanon, Frantz, 191 Farmer’s Alliance (American labour movement), 70 Fascism, vi, 83, 85, 178, 181 Faulkner, Peter, 202 film, 144–7 Fiske, John, 198 Five Nations, The (RK; poetry), 117–35, 129, 131, 201–3 Fleet in Being, A (RK; collection), 119 Ford, Ford Maddox, 205 Forster, E.M., 156 Foucault, Michel, 206 freemasonry, 39–43, 83, 190–1, 206, 207 Friend of the Free State (Bloemfontein newspaper), 121, 129, 139 From Sea to Sea (RK; collection), 61, 188–94

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Index 217

Froude, J.A., 187 Furth, Charles, 204–5 Garland, Hamlin, 195 Garrard, Florence Violet, 64 George, Lloyd, 172 Germany, 124, 176 RK’s thoughts on, 132, 137, 138, 173, 174–5, 177, 178, 207 Ghazipur, 47 Gilbert, Elliot, 197 Gilded Age, 69 Giridih, 46, 191 Gosse, Edmund, 63 Grahame, Kenneth, 152 Great War (1914–18), 89, 136, 177–8 Gwynne, H.A., 203 Haeckel Ernst, 174 Hall, Stuart, 198 Handlin, Oscar, 195 Hannerz, Ulf, 143–4, 147, 203 Hanson, Clare, 185 Hardy, Thomas, 92, 197 Hay, John, 68–9 Henley, William Ernest, 62, 86–7, 195, 196 Hill, Alexander, 53 Hill, Edmonia, 53 Hinduism, 35 caste system in RK’s fiction, 110–11 in RK’s fiction, 48–51, 88–9, 106–9 Hitchens, Christopher, 89, 196 Hobhouse, Emily, 143 Hobsbawm, Eric, 188, 197 Hobson, J.A., 120, 126, 201 Holloway, Sarah (‘Aunty Rosa’), 4, 36, 53 Howkins, Alun, 149 Hume, Allan Octavian, 35, see also Indian National Congress Hunter, William Wilson, 12–15, 41, 110, 186, 199 Ilbert Bill, 7, 185 imperial federation, 129, 169, 199 ‘In an Opium Factory’ (RK; article), 191 ‘In Partibus’ (RK; poem), 64

‘In Sight of Mount Monadnock’ (RK; article), 72 ‘In the House of Suddhoo’ (RK; story), 28–9 India, see also Punjab conflict between conservatives and progressives of, 11–14 educational policy of, 9–10 legal reforms of, 9–10 movements of independence in, 35 RK travels in, 24–5, 26–7, 36–9, 43–8 RK’s paternalist approach to, 6–7, 8 RK’s respect for John Lawrence, Governor of, 20–4 RK’s response to self-government and nationalist politics of, 43–6, 48–53 types of colonial government in, 9–15 utilitarian influence upon, 12–15 Indian Mutiny, see also In the Year ’57 Indian National Congress, 34–5, 48–9, 56 Indian Penal Code, 15, 28 infant mortality, 205 ‘information society’, 143, see also mass communications Islam, 22–3, 30 in RK’s fiction, 32, 48–51 Islam, Shamsul, 185 Jamalpur, 45–6 James, Henry, 67 Jameson, Leander Starr, 120 Jatakas, see also Buddhism Jeffries, Richard, 152 Jewett, Sarah Orne, 195, 198 Johnson, Robert Underwood, 188 Johnson, Samuel, 166 Jungle Books (RK; stories), vii, 61, 68, 96–114, 198–9 ‘Kaa’s Hunting’ (RK; story), 111 Karlin, Daniel, 198 ‘Kaspar’s Song in Varda’ (RK; poem), 161 Keats, John, 146, 158–62 Kim (RK; novel), 9, 30–1, 86, 105–6, 189, 198

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218 Index

Kipling, (Joseph) Rudyard: BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS: achieves success in London, 63; death of Balestier and marriage to Carrie, 67; death of daughter, Josephine, 118, 153; financial collapse, 67; frustrated in Allahabad, 35–6, 39–42, 52–7; Indian childhood, 3–4; introduced to Hay–Adams circle, 68–9; joins staff of The Friend in Bloemfontein; 121, leaves India for London via the Far East and USA, 61–2; leaves USA and settles permanently in England, 117; loses son, John, in Great War, 177–8; meets Walcott Balestier, 66; moves to America, 67–8; publishes early stories and poems, 18–19; purchases Bateman’s and settles in Burwash, 148; researches local Sussex history for Puck stories, 165; returns to India to work in the Punjab on CMG, 6–7; schooling in England, 4–5; suffers breakdown, 64; supports South African war, 120–2; transferred to the Pioneer, 34; travels in Native States, 36–7; visits South Africa and meets Cecil Rhodes, 118–19 IDEAS AND OPINIONS: admiration for Cecil Rhodes, 120; aesthetic views, 8, 20–4, 35–6, 166, 167; attitude to Decadents and Aesthetes, 64; dislike of authorial explanation, 100; love of motoring, 147–64; on Catholicism, 182; on communism, 113; on democracy, 181; on empire and imperial decline, 118, 167, 171–2; on fascism, 178; on liberalism, 44, 64, 105, 115, 162–3, 168, 172–4; on socialism, 80–4; on technology and modernisation, 143–64,

180–2; on the future, 136, 179–83; response to feminism, 63–4, 87–8 Kipling, Alice (RK’s mother), 4, 6 Kipling, Alice ‘Trix’ (RK’s sister), 4, 63 Kipling, Caroline (RK’s wife, ‘Carrie’), 67, 118, 148 Kipling, Elsie (RK’s daughter), 119 Kipling, John Lockwood (RK’s father), 4 Kipling, John, (RK’s son), 119, 177 Kipling, Josephine (RK’s daughter), 96, 118, 153 Kitchener, Field Marshal Horatio Herbert, 1st Earl, 123, 143 ‘Knight of the Joyous Venture, The’ (RK; story), 175–6, 207 Koran, 22 Korda, Alexander, 104 Kruger, Paul, 120 Ku Klux Klan, 82 Labour Party, 172 Lahore, 6, 8, 12, 17, 22, 25, 30, 35, 52, 193 Lang, Andrew, 19, 63, 87 Larkin, Philip, 152 Lawrence, D.H., 156 Lawrence, John, 9, 20–4, 182 ‘Leaves from a Winter Notebook’ (RK; article), 72 Ledger, Sally, 124, 125 Lee-Warner, William, 190 Lee, Hermione, 205 Letters of Travel (RK; collection), 195 Lewis, C.S., 94, 145 ‘Lichtenburg’ (RK; poem), 130–1 Life’s Handicap (RK; collection), 190 Light That Failed, The (RK; novel), 64–6 Lodge, David, 145 Lodge, Henry Cabot, 68 London, Jack, 195 Lorne Lodge, 5, 53–5 Lutyens, Sir Edwin Landseer, 149 Lycett, Andrew, 187, 190, 194, 200 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 10 Macdonald, Alice, 4 Macdonald, Edith, 187, 193

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Index 219

Macdonald, George Browne, 4 Mackay, Aberigh, 184 McLane, John R., 190 Macmillan, Frederick George, 63 Magna Carta, 176 Maine, Henry, 186 Mallet, Phillip, 203 ‘Man who would be Kipling, The’ (RK; story), vii, 39–43 mass communications: in RK’s work, 39–43, 136–47, 158–64 Masterman, C.F.G., 151, 153, 154, 156, 204, 206 Matless, David, 151, 204 Matthews, Brander, 196 Memmi, Albert, 33, 184–5, 190 Mill, James, 11, 14 Mill, John Stuart, 11, 14, 15 Milton, John, 25 ‘Miracle of Purun Bhagat, The’ (RK; story), 106–9 ‘Miss Youghal’s Sais’ (RK; story), 189 Monkshood, G.F., 189 Montgomery, Sir Robert, 10 Morley, David, 198 Morris, Mowbray, 63 Morrison, Toni, 84 Morton, H.V., 154 Motoring, 148, 151–8 ‘Mrs Bathurst’ (RK; story), 144–7 Mudie, Charles Edward, 196 ‘My Sunday at Home’ (RK; story), 92–5 national efficiency, 123–5, 202 Native States, 26, 36–9, 183 Naulahka, The (RK with Wolcott Balestier; novel), 62, 87 Nazism, 178, 181 Neider, Charles, 193 New Zealand, 131, 169 Newbolt, Sir Henry, 205 Newman, George, 149–51, 154 Norman history, 166, 174–5, 183 Norton, Charles Eliot, 16, 187, 200 Nowell-Smith, Simon, 204 Noyes, Alfred, 167, 170

‘Old Men at Pevensey’ (RK; story), 207 Oldershaw, L., 206 Omaha Convention, 71 O’Malley, L.S.S., 9, 10–11, 22, 185 ‘On the City Wall’ (RK; story), 48–52 ‘On the Great Wall’ (RK; story), 107 opium trade, 46, 191 Orde, Ann, 200 Orientalism, 68, 110 ‘Our Lady of the Snows’ (RK; poem), 131 Owen, Wilfred, 93 Parry, Ann, 122, 199 ‘Parting of the Columns’ (RK; poem), 129 Paterson, A.B. (‘Banjo’), 131–2 Pederson, Susan, 168, 205 ‘Pig’ (RK; story), 32 Pinney, Thomas, 184, 188, 195, 207 Pioneer (Allahabad newspaper): politics of, 34 RK in conflict with, 35–6, 53 RK joins, 34 Plain Tales from the Hills (RK; collection), 11, 18, 27–30, 31–3, 185, 189 Populist (People’s) Party, 70, 73 racial controversy of, 195 in RK’s fiction, 80–2 Poynter, Ambrose, 165 Price, Richard, 200, 201 Priestley, J.B., 160 Puck of Pook’s Hill (RK; collection), 118, 165–78, 180, 206–8 Punjab, 3, 6 administrator-historians of, 9–13 influence upon RK’s literary style, 7–33 non-regulation system of government in, 9–12, 14, 15, 16, 20, 29, 30, 185 RK leaves, 34 RK’s loyalty to, 7, 17–18 ‘Quiquern’ (RK; story), 101–3

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220 Index

Rahman, Abdur (Amir of Afghanistan), 25–6, 118 Rajasthan, 36–9, 190 Ralph, Julian, 202 Ranger, Terence, 188 Rawalpindi conference, 25–6 Reade, Charles, 79 ‘Recessional’ (RK; poem), 177 ‘Red Dog’ (RK; story), 113 ‘Return, The’ (RK; poem), 130, 131 Rhodes, Cecil, 42, 118–19, 120, 123, 200 ‘Rikki-tikki-tavi’ (RK; story), 104–5 Roberts, Frederick Sleigh (Lord), 34, 121, 137, 177 Roman history, 165 in RK’s fiction, 169–72 Roosevelt, Theodore, 68–9, 95 Rowe, John Carlos, 68, 194 Rutherford, Andrew, 194 Said, Edward, 68, 187, 190 Saintsbury, George, 63 Salvatore, Nick, 196 Sampson Low, 63 Saville Club, 63 Saxon history, 166, 171 School Meals Act, 168 Searle, G.R., 201 Second World War, 179 Semmel, Bernard, 124, 125, 129 Sennet, Richard, 47–8, 192 Seven Seas, The (RK; poetry), 202, 204 Seymour-Smith, Martin, 205 Shakespeare, William, 54–5 Shanks, Edward, 133, 134 Sharp, Cecil, 149 Shaw, Barton C., 195 Shaw, George Bernard, 125 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 172 Shils, Edward, 195 Shwartz, Michael, 194 Simla, 4, 18, 27, 38 ‘Sin of Witchcraft, The’ (RK; article), 130 Sleeman, W.H., 109 Smith, M. Van Wyk, 171 Social Imperialism, 124–5 Soldiers Three (RK; collection), 192

Something of Myself (RK; autobiography), 3, 6, 72, 184, 185, 187, 189, 190, 193–7, 199, 200, 204, 206, 207 ‘Song of the Dead’ (RK; poem), 202 South Africa, 117–19, 142–3, 147 colonial involvement in conflict, 129–31 impact of the conflict upon RK’s social identity and belonging, 153–6, 158–62 impact of war on British social and imperial reform, 123–4, 126, 132–3, 148–9 negotiation of post-war social change in RK’s rural fictions, 148–9, 157–8, 163–4 pro-war jingoism, 133 technological and informational repercussions, 136–47 war in, 119–35 Southsea, 4, 53, 114 Spencer, Herbert, 27 Stalky & Co. (RK; collection), 5 ‘Steam Tactics’ (RK; story), 157–8 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 75 Stokes, Eric, 10, 186, 187 Strachey, John St Loe, 204 Swinburne, Algernon, 133 Tariff Reform League, 124 Temple, Richard, 10 In the Year ’57 (RK; article), 10, 15, 19–24, 27–8, 45, 110, 182, 185 ‘They’ (RK; story), 152–7 Thomas, Edward, 93 Thomson, David, 206, 207 Thorburn S.S., 11–13, 29, 185 ‘Thrown Away’ (RK; story), 32 ‘Tiger! Tiger!’ (RK; story), 110–11 Times, The, 134 Tompkins, J.M.S., 159 Traffics and Discoveries (RK; collection), 136–64, 203–6 transatlantic culture, 62, 67, 86, 113–14, 137–8, 140, 143, 144 Transvaal, 122, 137, 139 ‘Treasure and the Law, The’ (RK; story), 175–7

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Index 221

Trevelyan, C.E., 186 Tudors, 167 in RK’s fiction, 172–3 Twain, Mark, 62, 74, 76, 79 United Services College, Devon (USC), 5, 16 United States of America, vii impact of American capitalism and industry upon RK’s writings, 71–84, 89–92 influence of mobile, multi-ethnic society on RK’s writing, 96–114 rise of organised labour and the Populist (People’s) Party, 69–71 RK attacks American socialism and organised labour, 74–84, 113 RK brokers imperial values to, 75–6, 82, 86–95, 96–103 RK criticises industrial power and mass culture of, 71–2, 86–7 RK introduced to the Hay-Adams circle, 68–9 RK’s concern for Anglo-American relations, 67, 89–95, 98–103, 113–14 Urbanisation, 43–6, 72, 97, 123, 125–8, 132, 135, 149, 150, 151, 156–7, 201 Utilitarianism, 10, 11, 12, 14–15, 21, 28, 29, 30, 32, 186 Van de Water, Frederick, 195 Veblen, Thorstein, 71 Venezuela crisis, 92, 97, 113, 117, 120 Viswanathan, Gauri, 186

‘Wage Slaves, The’, 173–4 ‘Walking Delegate, A’, 81–2 Weaver, General James B., 71, 80 Webb, Sidney, 123, 125, 149 Wee Willie Winkie (RK; collection), 190, 193 Week’s News (literary supplement to the Pioneer), 35 Welfare State, 169 Wells, H.G., 123, 168, 201, 203 Westward Ho!, Devon, 5 Wheatcroft, Geoffrey, 200 Wheeler & Co. (publisher; Indian Railway Library), 37, 63 ‘White Man’s Burden, The’ (RK; poem), 86, 129 ‘White Seal, The’ (RK; story), 98–101 White, Arnold, 176, 202 White, Edward Lucas, 198 White, Gilbert, 152 Wiebe, Robert, H., 196 Wilde, Oscar, 63 Willcocks, Sir William, 148 William II, Kaiser, 120 ‘William the Conqueror’ (RK; story), 87–8 Wintle, Sarah, 205 ‘Wireless’ (RK; story), 158–62 Woodward, C. Vann, 195 Woolf, Virginia, 156, 179–80 Woolsack, The, 119 ‘Wressley of the Foreign Office’ (RK; story), 32 Wurgaft, Lewis D., 185 Yeats, W.B., vi ‘Young Queen, The’ (RK; poem), 131 Young, Filson, 204

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222 Index