“A woman’s guess is much more accurate than a man’s certainty.” – Rudyard Kipling.
Rudyard Kipling Biography
Joseph Rudyard Kipling was born on 30 December 1865 in Mumbai, then called Bombay, in India. John Lockwood Kipling, his father, was a sculptor and pottery designer whereas his mother, Alice, was the daughter of a Wesleyan Methodist minister. After the couple met in 1863, they courted at Rudyard Lake in Staffordshire, England, and they were so taken by the beauty of the place that it featured in the name of their first child.
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The custom in British India at the time was to send children back to England for their education and so it was that in 1871, Rudyard, who was only five years old and his sister Alice, who was three, were sent to stay with Captain Pryse Agar Holloway, an ex-officer of the merchant navy and Mrs. Sarah Holloway. Rudyard remembered in his autobiography that the next six years of his life were filled with cruelty, neglect, and bullying. Trix, as his sister was known, was treated better, probably because Mrs. Holloway had designs on her one day marrying her son. Relief from life at the Holloway’s in Southsea came for Rudyard for a month every Christmas, when the two children spent time with their aunt Georgiana in Fulham, London. Compared to Southsea, Rudyard thought the place was paradise.
In 1877, the torture would be over though as Alice returned from India and removed the children. The following year, Rudyard Kipling was admitted to the United Services College in Devon. This was a new school which had been set up to prepare boys for a life in the British Army. His time there influenced two of his future works. The schoolboy series Stalky & Co which was published in 1899 takes from his experiences at USC and the character of Maisie in his first novel entitled The Light that Failed is based upon Florence Gerrard who was boarding with Trix, and whom Kipling had fallen in love with.
However, Rudyard Kipling lacked the academic skills to get into Oxford on a scholarship and his parents lacked the finances to buy him a place and so his father, who was Principal at the Mayo College of Art and Curator of the Lahore Museum arranged a job for him as assistant editor of the Civil & Military Gazette, a small local newspaper in Lahore, which is now in Pakistan. Kipling left England on 20 September 1882 and arrived in Bombay a month later.
Kipling was worked hard at the Gazette but this didn’t seem to be a problem for a man with such a love for writing. When a new editor took over in 1886, he was given more creative freedom and was asked to contribute short stories. Between 1885 and 1888, Rudyard Kipling went to Simla each year for his annual leave and the town, which became a center of power in India for six months of the year, features quite strongly in his stories.
In November 1887, Kipling became assistant editor at the Gazette’s larger sister paper, the Pioneer. He remained just as prolific, though, turning out 41 short stories in six collections in 1888. His time at the Pioneer was short though and after a dispute, he was discharged of his duties there in 1889. Kipling sold the rights to his stories and with the proceeds, along with six months’ salary in lieu of notice from the paper, he decided to return to London.
His route back to London was not a direct one. He first headed for San Francisco via Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Rangoon. He was particularly impressed with Japan, writing that the Japanese were gracious folk. His arrival in San Francisco was just the start of a tour of the United States and Canada. On his travels, he saw Niagara Falls and met Mark Twain. He visited New York, Boston, Washington D.C., Salt Lake City, and Yellowstone National Park. At the end of his tour he set sail across the Atlantic and arrived in Liverpool...
