From Sea to Sea: Letters of Travel
Apr 2006 · Cosimo, Inc.
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I want to go Home! I want to go back to India! I am miserable. The steamship Nawab at this time of the year ought to have been empty, instead of which we have one hundred first-class passengers and sixty-six second. All the pretty girls are in the latter class.-from No. VIThough he achieved lasting fame with his children's tale The Jungle Book, Rudyard Kipling left us with a vast array of writing that has fallen into sad-and unwarranted-obscurity. This collection of notes and essays on his world travels reveals a man bursting with self-deprecating wit, keen observational powers, and an intelligent awareness of his own cultural biases and prejudices.First published in 1899, this volume serves as a delightful reminder of Kipling's genius, and includes: . an account of attending the theater in Japan and visiting Shinto shrines. an exploration of India's "city of elephants" and a meeting with "the naughty children of Iquique." notes on a journey to San Francisco and the taking of tea with the "natives" there. an explanation of how to "manufacture ethnological theories at railroad speed." and much more.OF INTEREST TO: Kipling fans, readers of classic English literature, armchair travelersAlso available from Cosimo Classics: Kipling's short-story collection The Courting of Dinah ShaddBritish author and poet RUDYARD KIPLING (1865-1936) was born in colonial India, a locale that inspired his best-known works, The Jungle Book (1894), Kim (1901), and Gunga Din (1892). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907.
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About the author
Kipling, who as a novelist dramatized the ambivalence of the British colonial experience, was born of English parents in Bombay and as a child knew Hindustani better than English. He spent an unhappy period of exile from his parents (and the Indian heat) with a harsh aunt in England, followed by the public schooling that inspired his "Stalky" stories. He returned to India at 18 to work on the staff of the Lahore Civil and Military Gazette and rapidly became a prolific writer. His mildly satirical work won him a reputation in England, and he returned there in 1889. Shortly after, his first novel, The Light That Failed (1890) was published, but it was not altogether successful. In the early 1890s, Kipling met and married Caroline Balestier and moved with her to her family's estate in Brattleboro, Vermont. While there he wrote Many Inventions (1893), The Jungle Book (1894-95), and Captains Courageous (1897). He became dissatisfied with life in America, however, and moved back to England, returning to America only when his daughter died of pneumonia. Kipling never again returned to the United States, despite his great popularity there. Short stories form the greater portion of Kipling's work and are of several distinct types. Some of his best are stories of the supernatural, the eerie and unearthly, such as "The Phantom Rickshaw," "The Brushwood Boy," and "They." His tales of gruesome horror include "The Mark of the Beast" and "The Return of Imray." "William the Conqueror" and "The Head of the District" are among his political tales of English rule in India. The "Soldiers Three" group deals with Kipling's three musketeers: an Irishman, a Cockney, and a Yorkshireman. The Anglo-Indian Tales, of social life in Simla, make up the larger part of his first four books. Kipling wrote equally well for children and adults. His best-known children's books are Just So Stories (1902), The Jungle Books (1894-95), and Kim (1901). His short stories, although their understanding of the Indian is often moving, became minor hymns to the glory of Queen Victoria's empire and the civil servants and soldiers who staffed her outposts. Kim, an Irish boy in India who becomes the companion of a Tibetan lama, at length joins the British Secret Service, without, says Wilson, any sense of the betrayal of his friend this actually meant. Nevertheless, Kipling has left a vivid panorama of the India of his day. In 1907, Kipling became England's first Nobel Prize winner in literature and the only nineteenth-century English poet to win the Prize. He won not only on the basis of his short stories, which more closely mirror the ambiguities of the declining Edwardian world than has commonly been recognized, but also on the basis of his tremendous ability as a popular poet. His reputation was first made with Barrack Room Ballads (1892), and in "Recessional" he captured a side of Queen Victoria's final jubilee that no one else dared to address.
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