Kipling, Rudyard (1865–1936). Kipling is often thought of primarily as the trumpet of empire, but his writings were more varied than that suggests and he was far from triumphalist in tone. His parents were methodists. Kipling was born in Bombay, where his father had a chair in architecture. His first name is derived from Rudyard Lake, near Leek (Staffs.), where his parents had met. Stanley Baldwin was his first cousin. Kipling hurt his eyes reading as a boy and wore spectacles from his schooldays. After United Services College in Devon, he returned to India as a journalist and rapidly acquired a reputation. At 24 he settled in London, though continuing to travel widely, particularly in America and South Africa. Life's Handicap (1891) launched him as a London figure and he followed with The Jungle Book (1894/5). His poem ‘Recessional’ for the Diamond Jubilee of 1897—‘lest we forget’—made him a national figure. Stalky and Co. (1899) drew on his schooldays and Kim (1901) on India. He published the Just-So Stories, one of the few children's books that children enjoy, in 1902 when he moved into Bateman's in Sussex, and Puck of Pook's Hill, set in the post-Roman period, in 1906. His poem ‘The Way through the Woods’—a lovely example of controlled nostalgia—was in Rewards and Fairies (1910). Kipling declined national honours but was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1907. His only son was killed in the Great War in 1915. Kipling's reputation after his death sank even more quickly than that of most authors: the new generation did not respond to calls to shoulder ‘the white man's burden’, and whimsy was out of fashion. It is true that Kipling published too much and his work is uneven, but at his best he coined haunting phrases—‘the Captains and the Kings depart’; ‘and there's no discharge in the war’; ‘and the dawn comes up like thunder out of China 'cross the bay’.

J. A. Cannon