For someone who adjured posterity to seek not to question other than / The books I leave behind, Kipling has been extremely well served by biographers and continues to attract biographical interest.
Kipling’s autobiography Something of Myself (first published by Macmillan, London 1937) is a good guide to the areas it covers such as his early life, life in India, first years of marriage and the Boer War, despite its many omissions.
There is the choice of not one but two authorised biographies, both by writers who had the advantage of being able to speak to people who knew Kipling intimately.
Though three writers were tried, Carrie Kipling failed to find a satisfactory biographer; and after her death Elsie Bambridge sought a biographer for her father’s life. Her husband introduced her to another military man, Lord Birkenhead, who was hoping to make a name for himself as a biographer and who laboured on Kipling and Carrie’s papers and interviewed people who had known Kipling well in Britain and the USA. When he presented a draft to Elsie in 1948 (significantly, after the death of Captain Bambridge in 1943) she forbade him to publish it, and sought another biographer.
The eventual official biographer was Charles Carrington, whose authorised biography, Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Work (first published by Macmillan, London) appeared in 1955. Birkenhead continued work on his own book, however. Birkenhead’s son, after his father’s death in 1976 (and Elsie’s in 1975), felt free from the prohibition on publication and Birkenhead’s book came out in 1978 under the title Rudyard Kipling (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London), subsequently published by other publishers.
Such biographical riches are matched with original source material in the form of the Letters of Rudyard Kipling, in six volumes (Palgrave Macmillan, London: 1990–2004) edited with erudite notation by Thomas Pinney.
Harold Orel has collected two lively volumes of personal reminiscences of Kipling, published as Kipling: Interviews and Recollections (Macmillan, London: 1983).
Kipling has not been short of later interpreters. Angus Wilson’s perceptive The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling (Secker and Warburg, London: 1977) gives a thoughtful analysis of why the man was so buttoned-down, challenging him with ‘persistent evasion of introspection.’ Martin Seymour-Smith, in Rudyard Kipling (Macdonald, London: 1989) writes what is really a long essay musing on Kipling’s personal qualities of authoritarianism and homo-eroticism; and frankly calls him a ‘repressed homosexual’.
In The Unforgiving Minute (Chatto and Windus, London: 1999) Harry Ricketts, also a poet, gives a detailed analysis of the way in which Kipling’s life is closely reflected in his work.
David Gilmour’s exemplary The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling (John Murray, London: 2002) details the complexity of Kipling’s relationship to the Empire and contemporary criticism of it.
Andrew Lycett’s Rudyard Kipling (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London: 1999) is the extensively researched, fully comprehensive, 659-page biography that brings up to date the work of the official biographers.
My constant companion in writing this biography has been Norman Page’s A Kipling Companion (Macmillan, London: 1984), an invaluable fast guide to Kipling’s life and work.
For general works on the great events in which Kipling took part: Thomas Pakenham’s The Boer War (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London: 1979) is the classic history of the conflict; and those interested in the Indian sub-continent’s history during Kipling’s lifetime could do worse than read Jad Adams and Phillip Whitehead’s The Dynasty: The Nehru-Gandhi Story (Penguin, London: 1997).
The primary source for work on Kipling is the Kipling Archive at the University of Sussex, and I wish to thank the librarians there. Material from the Kipling Papers is used by kind permission of The National Trust. If any copyright has been created by the present publication of previously unpublished material, the author and publisher of Kipling unreservedly relinquish this in favour of The National Trust.
My thanks are due to Thomas Pinney for patiently answering queries. Quotations from his Letters of Rudyard Kipling are used with the permission of Palgrave Macmillan.
Quotations from Kipling’s published work are used by permission of A P Watt Ltd on behalf of The National Trust.
Work for this book was also done at the University of London Library and the British Library, and advice sought from the libraries of the National Army Museum and the Imperial War Museum. Staff at Bateman’s, Kipling’s former home and now a National Trust property receiving upwards of 60,000 visitors a year, were particularly helpful.
Many thanks are due to Julie Peakman from the Wellcome Trust Centre for her reading and advice on early drafts.