Commonplace 193 George & His Contemporaries: Rudyard Kipling.
Apart from both sporting magnificent moustaches, George and Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) seem to have little in common. In fact, there were stark differences: Kipling loved children, respected the working class, and believed the world was a better place if Great Britain ruled it. George didn't. They both would lose a son in WW1, but George was dead and beyond the realm of emotional pain that Kipling endured when his son was killed at the Somme. George was an amateur poet, whilst Kipling wrote one of Britain's favourite poems (If... click), won a Nobel Literature prize (1907) and is buried in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey. George is buried in a small backwater in France. However, both have a uniquely, contrasting 'English' quality - George with his reticent, reserved and formal stiffness of thought and behaviour, and Kipling, with his ebullient sentimentality freely flowing heart on his sleeve 'what you see is what you get' directness of thought.
Kipling was born in Bombay/Mumbai, then dragged away from his family aged nearly 6 and forced to live with a heartless pair of paid carers in Southsea, the posh part of Portsmouth, down in Hampshire, in the UK. This house was within easy walking distance from the one Sir Arthur Conan Doyle used for his GP practice (1892-1890), and just up the road from where HG Wells was forced into his apprenticeship in the drapery shop (1880-1883), both sites close to where George Meredith was born and partly raised (1828-1840) near to where Walter Besant grew up. A short ride on the omnibus from there will take you to where Charles Dickens was born in 1812. There is something in the water in Southsea - contemporary writer Neil Gaiman was born there, too.
The Kiplings were not wealthy, but Rudyard's father was appointed Professor of Architecture at the newly formed Bombay School of Art, so a modest salary went a long way in India and provided for a lifestyle they could not have afforded back home. Rudyard's parents did what was considered the right thing at the time - they found someone back home in the UK to take over the care of their two children. The mother found digs for Rudyard and his sister at Lorne Lodge, Campbell Road, living with a retired merchant seaman, Captain Harry, and Mrs Rosa Holloway, and the two children were sent back to Blighty for the remainder of their childhood. The early beginnings were good - the Cap'n liked young Ruddy; but when the old sea dog passed away, Rosa took to thrashing the boy, and Kipling would always subsequently refer to this home as 'The House of Desolation'. He was punished by having his books withdrawn, and was humiliated by having to go to school with the word 'liar' printed on a label attached to his coat. As I said, there is something in that Southsea water... Later, Kipling was to write of this shaming experience: If you cross-examine a child of seven or eight on his day’s doings (specially when he wants to go to sleep) he will contradict himself very satisfactorily. If each contradiction be set down as a lie and retailed at breakfast, life is not easy. I have known a certain amount of bullying, but this was calculated torture—religious as well as scientific. Yet it made me give attention to the lies I soon found it necessary to tell: and this, I presume, is the foundation of literary effort.
George would have empathised with the origins of Kipling's literary effort - already by the time he was a student at Owens College, George was an accomplished and experienced liar. From the small amount of information there is relating to his early days, George is clearly seen to be lying to tutors when he goes off sick - he has a good deal of time off his college studies and some of the excuses are pathetic - 'burnt hand' being one memorable line. He also lied about why he went to Southport on his little holiday, with a girlfriend always assumed, but not proven to be, Nell. And there are numerous examples throughout his letters and Diaries where he lies to everyone sooner or later - he even lied to Clara Collet about how long his first wife had been dead, claiming he couldn't remember the exact YEAR she died! He lied to his second wife about having syphilis and about what would happen to their son, Walter, when George forced him to go and live in Wakefield. And he lied repeatedly to Gabrielle Fleury in his letters to her - about his health, his family, his wife, his money. Still, if he was just lying in the name of literary effort...
George would have envied Kipling's artistic family heritage - Sir Edward Burne Jones and Sir Edward Poynter were uncles; future prime minster Stanley Baldwin was a cousin. When he reached his teens, Kipling was sent to a United Services College in Westward Ho! in north Devon, and would have followed that with military service but his father found him a job back in India, and so RK sailed from England aged 16. He was initially disappointed about the decision and always regretted not having a university education - something George would have understood. The job his father found for him was as a reporter on an English language newspaper, and RK would apply his literary talents to the trade of journalist by day, whilst practising the dark art of story-writing in his spare time. His first book in prose was published in 1888 - 'Plain Tales from The Hill'. Eight years after going back to India, with a growing literary reputation under his belt, Kipling came back to England (via Burma, Malaya, Hong Kong, Japan and San Francisco) intending to make a name for himself as a teller of ripping yarns.
Travel, they tell us, broadens the mind. In Kipling's case, this might not have been true. He thought little of the intellect of the indigenous people he had known in India. Of the Chinese, he wrote in 1899, that it was ...justifiable to kill him (the Chinaman). It would be quite right to wipe the city of Canton off the face of the earth. Maybe he had received bad service in a restaurant there. Initially for America, he reserved special disdain. He derided San Francisco's infrastructure, saying it would only take a 'couple of gun boats' to retake it for the Empire. He described Americans as being lawless, ignorant, ill-mannered, badly dressed, boastfulness and hated their tendency to gob everywhere - pretty much what the world holds against Americans nowadays haha. On the plus side, he liked the relaxed social milieu and the scenery and the women. It was eventually the American women who would win him over, as he married one.
Luckily for him, when he arrived in England in 1889, Kipling was already a household name. Then in 1890-2, he published a collection of prose, ballad lyrics and poetry that would cement his place in the hearts of all true Brits: The Barrack-room Ballads which gave us his poem in celebration of 'Gunga Din' click and 'Tommy' click, the ordinary soldier. It also gives us some of the most cringeworthy casual racism so beloved of the Brits, certainly those old school racists of my parents' generation who assumed everyone born outside the Home Counties click was a dodgy foreigner. George reports in his Diary that he read Barrack-room in September, 1892, but he passes no comment - though he redacted many entries, so there might have been some remark which he later excised. It was infamous for its use of salty colloquial language and was considered a 'men only' read. A bit like an Austin Allegro Repair Manual.
George does not pass comment on what he thought of Kipling's work, but it's clear from the Diary entries that he kept his eye on Kipling's progress. But of the 7 entries where he mentions Kipling, two are for gossip-related purposes. George, who completely opposed either Marianne aka Nell or Edith making friends with their neighbours for fear they might gossip, thoroughly enjoyed passing round tidbits of information especially if they presented his rivals in a controversial light. He mentions
(May 1896) Kipling taking a brother-in-law to court for attempting to murder him. In December 1898 George writes he has lunched with, amongst others, a Mrs Clifford who dated the young Kipling. She gave up the goss on how Kipling once read his short story Without Benefit of Clergy click to her, and when he reached the pathos of the conclusion, he grabbed her hand and started to cry. To offset claims that Kipling was a racist comes this tale of inter-faith and inter-racial true love that ended in tragedy. Nothing is ever simple, is it?
Apart from both sporting magnificent moustaches, George and Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) seem to have little in common. In fact, there were stark differences: Kipling loved children, respected the working class, and believed the world was a better place if Great Britain ruled it. George didn't. They both would lose a son in WW1, but George was dead and beyond the realm of emotional pain that Kipling endured when his son was killed at the Somme. George was an amateur poet, whilst Kipling wrote one of Britain's favourite poems (If... click), won a Nobel Literature prize (1907) and is buried in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey. George is buried in a small backwater in France. However, both have a uniquely, contrasting 'English' quality - George with his reticent, reserved and formal stiffness of thought and behaviour, and Kipling, with his ebullient sentimentality freely flowing heart on his sleeve 'what you see is what you get' directness of thought.
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| Kipling in 1915 |
The Kiplings were not wealthy, but Rudyard's father was appointed Professor of Architecture at the newly formed Bombay School of Art, so a modest salary went a long way in India and provided for a lifestyle they could not have afforded back home. Rudyard's parents did what was considered the right thing at the time - they found someone back home in the UK to take over the care of their two children. The mother found digs for Rudyard and his sister at Lorne Lodge, Campbell Road, living with a retired merchant seaman, Captain Harry, and Mrs Rosa Holloway, and the two children were sent back to Blighty for the remainder of their childhood. The early beginnings were good - the Cap'n liked young Ruddy; but when the old sea dog passed away, Rosa took to thrashing the boy, and Kipling would always subsequently refer to this home as 'The House of Desolation'. He was punished by having his books withdrawn, and was humiliated by having to go to school with the word 'liar' printed on a label attached to his coat. As I said, there is something in that Southsea water... Later, Kipling was to write of this shaming experience: If you cross-examine a child of seven or eight on his day’s doings (specially when he wants to go to sleep) he will contradict himself very satisfactorily. If each contradiction be set down as a lie and retailed at breakfast, life is not easy. I have known a certain amount of bullying, but this was calculated torture—religious as well as scientific. Yet it made me give attention to the lies I soon found it necessary to tell: and this, I presume, is the foundation of literary effort.
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| A British favourite and nothing to do with Rudyard. Not suitable for vegetarians. |
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| Andromeda by Sir Edward Poynter 1869 |
Travel, they tell us, broadens the mind. In Kipling's case, this might not have been true. He thought little of the intellect of the indigenous people he had known in India. Of the Chinese, he wrote in 1899, that it was ...justifiable to kill him (the Chinaman). It would be quite right to wipe the city of Canton off the face of the earth. Maybe he had received bad service in a restaurant there. Initially for America, he reserved special disdain. He derided San Francisco's infrastructure, saying it would only take a 'couple of gun boats' to retake it for the Empire. He described Americans as being lawless, ignorant, ill-mannered, badly dressed, boastfulness and hated their tendency to gob everywhere - pretty much what the world holds against Americans nowadays haha. On the plus side, he liked the relaxed social milieu and the scenery and the women. It was eventually the American women who would win him over, as he married one.
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| Commemorating the nightmare. |
George does not pass comment on what he thought of Kipling's work, but it's clear from the Diary entries that he kept his eye on Kipling's progress. But of the 7 entries where he mentions Kipling, two are for gossip-related purposes. George, who completely opposed either Marianne aka Nell or Edith making friends with their neighbours for fear they might gossip, thoroughly enjoyed passing round tidbits of information especially if they presented his rivals in a controversial light. He mentions
(May 1896) Kipling taking a brother-in-law to court for attempting to murder him. In December 1898 George writes he has lunched with, amongst others, a Mrs Clifford who dated the young Kipling. She gave up the goss on how Kipling once read his short story Without Benefit of Clergy click to her, and when he reached the pathos of the conclusion, he grabbed her hand and started to cry. To offset claims that Kipling was a racist comes this tale of inter-faith and inter-racial true love that ended in tragedy. Nothing is ever simple, is it?
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| Sidonia von Borcke by Sir Edward Burne-Jones 1860
George didn't think much of any author who was popular - he often conflated the two terms 'popular' with 'populist' and tended to look down on anyone who was widely read on the Clapham Omnibus. Kipling was so popular that many of his books and poems have become synonymous with British Empire and nationalism, but his children;s books are triumphs of wonder and adventure. A quick list of his best known children's works: The Jungle Book; Just So Stories; Stalky & Co; Captains Courageous; Kim... in fact, his bibliography click is worth a look just for the size of the bibliography. (George's own bibliography is somewhat more modest.) Rudyard Kipling has the
Kipling Society to further interest his readers. George has the Gissing Journal.
Kipling gave us several well-known English phrases - 'the law of the jungle'; 'the white man's burden'; 'Lest We Forget'. That last one was part of the work he did for the War Graves Commission, the organisation which oversees the remembrance of fallen service personnel. He took a very close interest in this because his son, John, was killed at the Battle of Loos in September 1915. The boy's body was not recovered in his father's lifetime. For Kipling, grief was made worse by guilt; despite him having been turned down for the Royal Navy and various branches of the army, because his eyesight was appalling, Kipling pulled some strings to get his son into the Irish Guards. This
terrible blow turned Kipling against the conflict, and produced the famous line about WW1: If
any question why we died / Tell them, because our fathers lied.
If he had lived to see it, George might very well have agreed with that. On
July 1st 1916, his first born son, Walter, died at the Somme, thirteen years
after his father's own end in France. Both Gissings are buried 'in some corner of a foreign field that is forever England'.
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