Rudyard Kipling
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Rudyard Kipling’
Kitty Beighton enters an archery contest where the prize is one very beautiful bracelet and one very ugly Commissioner.
Kitty Beighton has entered an archery contest in Shimla. First prize, officially, is a diamond bracelet. Unofficially, it is Commissioner Barr-Saggott. Mrs Beighton wants Kitty to win; young Cubbon of the Dragoons definitely doesn’t. But Kitty’s first shot has hit in the gold and unwisely, Barr-Saggott (already no oil painting) allows himself a smirk...
A street urchin of Lahore takes it on himself to provide a naive Tibetan monk with a hot meal.
Young Kim O’Hara, who knows all the ways and wiles of the dusty streets of Lahore, has promised to help a Tibetan monk beg for his dinner. He has high hopes of a certain grocer’s wife, but she is not disposed to dole out charity to yet another holy man.
Kim O’Hara starts his apprenticeship as a British spy with a little competition.
In the city of Shimla, summer capital of the British Raj, a jeweller named Lurgan is schooling young orphan Kim O’Hara for intelligence work in Afghanistan. A Hindu boy already in his care has become so jealous of this ‘stranger’ that he has tried to poison Lurgan, and is now sobbing with remorse, which the canny Lurgan turns to advantage.
Rudyard Kipling’s poem about St Wilfrid’s chaplain and an unusual Christmas congregation.
Kipling firmly believed that Christianity should embrace the animal kingdom, and this poem precedes a tale in which a seal plays a key role in the conversion of the South Saxons. That story and this poem are pure fiction, though Eddi (Eddius Stephanus, Stephen of Ripon) really was St Wilfrid’s chaplain.
A tribute to the postal workers of British India, and to the kind of empire they helped to build.
‘The Overland Mail’ is a tribute to the runners who carried letters across India during the Raj, and in particular the personal and business letters of the Indian Civil Service to which young Englishmen were posted. Among other things, Kipling’s poem is a welcome reminder that by Victoria’s day, the British Empire was increasingly united by trade, services and communications rather than by armies or centralised political will.
A heartfelt plea for humility at the height of Britain’s Empire.
Kipling wrote ‘Recessional’ for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, calling for humility at the height of Empire, and warning that control over other nations cannot be held for long through coercive government. Germany was at that very moment arming itself to make a grab for empire, and the consequences would soon bear out Kipling’s words at terrible cost.