Kipling—who held multiple honorary doctorates—was no ordinary storyteller. A fellow of the Royal Literary Society and a foreign member of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, he received honorary degrees from Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, and Edinburgh and awards from the universities of Paris, Strasbourg, Toronto, and Athens. He was the first Englishman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and he wore many hats: prose writer, poet, children’s author, journalist, rector, traveler, and Freemason. Less well known are the personal losses he endured, the price he paid for his worldview.
The “Black Sheep”
Kipling’s biography is full of vivid details about how he became who he was. Born on December 30, 1865, in British India, he was named Rudyard after Rudyard Lake in England, where his parents met. His father, John Lockwood Kipling, was a professor at the School of Art who taught architecture, and his mother, Alice Macdonald, came from a family deeply tied to the arts. Her sisters included the poet Louise Baldwin. Kipling’s aunts’ husbands were prominent too: Edward Poynter became president of the Royal Academy of Arts, and Edward Burne-Jones was a leading Pre-Raphaelite painter. Artists, writers, and even a future prime minister came from those families—such was Rudyard Kipling’s lineage.
Although both his parents came from families of clergymen and his official first name, Joseph, honored his clergyman grandfather, his parents gave him a pagan middle name—Rudyard, which derives from “red yard.” At that time the British were starting to embrace their older cultural roots as part of their identity.
Rudyard Kipling as a child
Kipling’s earliest years in Bombay were happy, but at five he and his three-year-old sister were sent to a private boarding school in Southsea, near Portsmouth, where they stayed for six years. The owners of Lorne Lodge—a former merchant captain and his wife—dished out harsh punishments that left many children traumatized. Kipling developed sleep disorders there and struggled with insomnia for the rest of his life. He later recounted that painful period in “Me-ow, the Black Sheep.”
Choosing a Profession
The future author of “The Man Who Would Be King” left that harsh upbringing behind only in his teenage years. From 4 Campbell Road, his parents—who had hoped he would pursue a military career—sent 12-year-old Rudyard to Devon School, which could be a stepping stone to a military academy. He later drew on his school impressions in the autobiographical work “Stalky & Co.”
Although nearsightedness ended his military ambitions, the school proved crucial: headmaster Cornwell Price, a friend of his father’s, encouraged Kipling’s literary interests and urged him to pursue writing. Impressed by his son’s early stories, Kipling’s father helped him secure a position as a journalist at the Civil and Military Gazette. That daily paper was based in Lahore (now in Pakistan) during the time of British India, and Rudyard set off there in the fall of 1882.
Rudyard Kipling with his father John Lockwood Kipling, 1890
Studying Life
At his first job, the inexperienced reporter hunted down engaging topics and expanded his knowledge of local life—sometimes as thoroughly as the police did in a year. Kipling explored the unfamiliar lives of ordinary people through nighttime “expeditions” to taverns and gambling dens. The new editor-in-chief granted the novice more freedom than the previous management had allowed, giving Rudyard the chance to practice writing short stories. Within six months he published about thirty pieces in the CMG, many of them in the series “Plain Tales from the Hills,” and began to attract attention from other publications.
In 1887 he accepted a more appealing offer from The Pioneer in Allahabad—a post that sent him traveling and let him write essays from across the globe. After visiting Burma, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, the USA, and Canada, Kipling published six books based on his collected material in 1888–89, which brought him fame. The following year, in 1890, his first novel “The Light That Failed” was released.
Having traveled with a notebook through San Francisco, Portland, New York, Boston, Chautauqua, Seattle, Beaver, Victoria, Salt Lake City, Omaha, Chicago, Toronto, Vancouver, and Liverpool, the eager observer returned to London in awe of the beauty of Yellowstone National Park and the grandeur of Niagara Falls. During this journey Kipling also met Mark Twain; the two writers talked for two hours about the prospects of Anglo-American literature. Shortly after, contemporaries began referring to the Brit as a literary heir to Charles Dickens.
Kipling in Naulakha, Vermont, USA, 1895
Also a Freemason
The English magazine “Masonic Illustrations” reported that Kipling was initiated into Freemasonry in 1885 in Lahore—before he turned 21, the usual minimum age. He was introduced to the local lodge Hope and Perseverance (No. 782) by a member of the Brahmo Samaj, a Hindu reform movement.
The writer confirmed in the London press that he served for several years as the lodge’s secretary and that its membership included brothers of various faiths. He was initiated (entered as an apprentice) by a Hindu, raised (to the degree of fellowcraft) by a Muslim, and exalted (to the degree of master) by an Englishman, while the officer holding the tyler’s post was an Indian Jew. This ethnic diversity softened Kipling’s views about the “natural place” of different peoples.
British aristocracy traditionally promoted the superiority of English culture, and coming from a creative family Kipling saw colonial rule as a mission to bring progress to the regions Britain controlled. His Masonic experience, however, exposed him to people of many faiths and appears to have tempered his outlook, making him more inclined to treat local cultures with respect—even as he wrote poems such as “The White Man’s Burden,” which argued for imperial responsibility.
Kipling also joined a French lodge, Builders of the Perfect City (No. 12), and as a Francophile he pushed for closer Anglo-French ties—a stance many of his compatriots disliked. He even wrote the text for the engineers’ initiation oath and referenced Freemasonry in the poem “The Mother Lodge.”
The Flowers of Life
After marrying Caroline Starr Balestier—sister of a publisher he’d worked with—Kipling and his wife spent their first four years together in Vermont, where her family lived, until a quarrel with his brother-in-law disrupted their time there. The newlyweds arrived with their last savings after the writer’s funds vanished during the honeymoon—not through extravagance on their trip to Japan, but because the bank they used went bankrupt. That setback only seemed to fuel Kipling’s creativity.
During this period he produced celebrated philosophical tales and children’s stories. In 1894 and 1895 he published The Jungle Book and The Second Jungle Book, and he released poetry collections such as The Seven Seas and “The White Seal.” Besides short tales, Kipling wrote novellas that blended Shakespearean motifs with old English folklore long before the rise of modern fantasy series. Contemporary British fantasy still echoes characters and themes from works such as Rewards and Fairies and Puck of Pook’s Hill, which include narratives told from the perspective of an elf.
The children of Rudyard Kipling
The births of daughters Josephine and Elsie, followed by the birth of son John, inspired Kipling to create new works that appealed to both children and adults. In 1897 he published the adventure story Captains Courageous, which features a 15-year-old hero. But two years later the family faced tragedy: during a trip to the USA, Josephine died of pneumonia. Greater loss still awaited them.
“Why Did We Die?”
Kipling gathered material for Just So Stories while in Africa, where he also helped establish a local newspaper. Just So Stories appeared in 1902, and in 1903 he published one of his best novels, Kim. In 1907, at 42, he became the youngest recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature.
After that success, he bought a country house in Sussex and moved in circles that included influential politicians. As he became more involved in politics, Kipling had less time for creative work and made increasingly public political statements. A staunch supporter of the British Empire and a friend of King George V, he backed the Conservative Party, opposed Irish independence, criticized feminist movements, and urged a hard line against Germany. For an imperial conservative like Kipling, the coming war seemed an opportunity to celebrate British arms. For his family, however, World War I became a devastating personal tragedy.
The estate in Sussex, now home to the Kipling Museum
The story of Kipling’s son John, killed at the Battle of Loos on September 27, 1915, was dramatized in the British television film My Boy Jack, which borrows the title from Kipling’s postwar publication. It was Rudyard who—despite his son’s earlier rejections from service because of inherited nearsightedness—used his connections to get 18-year-old John into the Irish Guards. While the Kiplings worked with the Red Cross during the war, they spent four years trying to find John, whose body was never recovered. Unable to locate him in life or in captivity, the despairing parents only acknowledged his death in 1919. That same year Kipling published a poignant cycle of poems, “Epitaphs of the War,” which includes the lines: “If anyone asks why we died, tell them: because our parents lied to us.”
Rudyard Kipling with his wife Caroline
After the war, Kipling tried to atone by serving on the commission that oversaw the graves of unknown soldiers. He died of a perforated ulcer in 1936 and did not live to see World War II. In the 1930s he also had the older Indian swastika emblem removed from new book covers after the symbol became associated with Hitler.
The cover of Kipling’s 1915 book featuring the swastika, and the cover after the symbol was removed in 1930.
