Kipling

by Jad Adams

Joseph Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936): short storywriter, author and poet, but also imperialist, racist, misogynist, and sexually confused? Kipling’s life and experiences spanned exhilaration (growing up in India during the Raj) and cataclysm (losing his only son in World War I). He has been vilified as an imperialist and racist; his work considered ‘politically incorrect’. Yet, he is one of the few, if not only, writers of the time to describe his world in exacting, caring detail - to tell us of ‘the little man’, whether private soldier, sailor or a poor native boy. Having lived a charmed early childhood in India and experienced a rather more horrid existence in foster homes and boarding schools as a boy, Kipling’s early years equipped him with an imagination that allowed him to create such ever popular children’s classics as The Jungle Book and Just So Stories for Children. Perhaps because his poetry was more straightforward and easily understood in a single reading, critics have not bothered to analyze it for hidden meaning and warning, looking for the irony behind the simple language he used. If he was truly a champion of British Imperialism, why would he turn down a knighthood and the position of Poet Laureate, yet accept the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907? Is Kipling the Man as simple to understand as his work or is there complexity hiding under the veneer? Would a committed patriot and imperialist pen lines such as ‘If any question why we died, tell them, because our fathers lied.’ (‘Common Form’, 1919). This new biography sheds light on the man and places him in context as a sensitive artist of his time.

218 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Jad Adams is a historian working as an author and an independent television producer. He has specialized in work on radical characters from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and 'the decadence' of the 1890s.

Reviews

[Hamza Shafiq · Rating 3 out of 5]

I believe that a biography should not be judged on the merits of the individual rather than on the artistic style of the biographer. While I found Kipling to be a slightly complex writer, I still feel that this biography could have done a better job at painting a complete picture.

What I didn't like was that the author routinely dropped famous names and acquaintances without context, which sometimes made me wonder what's up and if the timeline is linear or not. Overall, I would've appreciated a little more detail and a more coherent style of story-telling that actually gave an insight into what anguish made Kipling great, rather than just everything trickling down to bias and the death of his children.

[Christophe · Rating 4 out of 5]

A short but not superficial biography of Kipling. Adams doesn't shun the sensitive issues : the guy who wrote The Man Who Would Be King when he was 23 years old was a an imperialist, a reactionary and a misogynist. And he didn't get any better with age.