INTRODUCTION
This section explores family life at Bateman's (near the Sussex village of Burwash), Kipling’s literary output and the context within which he was writing.
1902
Rudyard and Carrie Kipling had seen Bateman’s for the first time on 14th August 1900.
They bought it in June 1902 for £9, 300.
30th November – 8th December 1902
Behold us the lawful owners of a greystone lichened house, AD 1634 over the door, beamed, panelled, with old oak staircase all untouched and unfaked. Heaven looked after it in the dissolute times of a mid-Victorian restoration and caused the vicar to send his bailiff to live in it for 40 years, and he lived in peaceable filth and left everything as he found it. It is a good and a peaceable place standing in terraced lawns nigh to a walled garden of old red brick and two fat headed old oast houses with red brick stomachs and an aged silver grey oak dovecote on top. There is what they call a river at the bottom of the lawn. It appears in all the maps and that, except after very heavy rain, is the only place where it puts in any appearance. Normally you hunt for it with a pole through Alder bushes but in flood time, so we're told, it runs about all over the little valley. Its name is the Dudwell, and it is quite 10 feet wide.
But I think you'd like the inside of the house if you were here. There is a black and white tiled hall all panelled to the naked beam ceiling and the doors out of it have stone heads and old oak frames, darkest teak. There is a deep window seat and a high leaded window with lots of the old greeny-glass panes left and a flap-table of Queen Elizabeth's time (the worst of the place is that it simply will not ensure modern furniture) and benches and a stone arched fireplace backed by old Sussex ironwork. We burn wood in all the fires and the hall takes 5 foot logs.
But in reality the house is little, not a manor house or a ‘place’, just the kind of house that a successful Sussex ironmaster builded himself 250 years ago. It hasn't a lodge or any nonsense of that kind. You walk up to the porch over a stone paved path laid down in the turf and the cartroad runs within 50 yards of the front door. The rest is all fields and farms and to the southward one glorious sweep of woods. We coveted the place for 2 1/2 or three years and have loved it ever since our first sight of it.
The Letters of Rudyard Kipling. Ed. Thomas Pinney. Volume 3. 1995. Page 113
1915 -1924
Visitors were frequent at Bateman's, often total strangers who came from all the corners of the world to discuss their work and problems, to ask advice or help, or merely to tell of their adventures and experiences. The strain of the first war and my brother's death, left both my parents in poor health in 1918, and my father subject to severe attacks of internal pain. Numbers of doctors tried to cure him, but with little success, though endless treatments were prescribed. During the years following my brothers death in 1915 until my marriage in 1924, I was hardly ever away from my parents, and my father and I were close and constant companions, the three of us went everywhere together.
My mother introduced into everything she did, and even permeated the life of her family with, a sense of strain and worry amounting sometimes to hysteria. Her possessive and rather jealous nature, both with regard to my father and to us children, made our lives very difficult , while her uncertain moods kept us apprehensively on the alert for possible storms. There is no doubt that her difficult temperament sometimes reacted adversely on my father and exhausted him, but his kindly nature, patience, and utter loyalty to her prevented his ever questioning this bondage, and they were seldom apart. She had great qualities, a keen, quick mind and ready wit, a business ability above the average and loyalty and kindness to old friends, but above all, an immense and never feeling courage in pain and sorrow, both of which she bore unflinchingly. My father’s much exaggerated reputation as a recluse sprang, to a certain extent from her domination of his life and the way in which she tried to shelter him from the world. To a certain degree this was a good thing and enabled him to work without too much interruption, but he needed also the stimulus of good talk and mixing with people, and as the years went on and his life became more restricted, he missed these keenly.
Rudyard Kipling: Charles Carrington. 1955. From the Epilogue by Elsie Bambridge.
1924-1936
The war had produced insidious changes in the family. Mr Kipling had lost his buoyant step, though his genius and courage remained unabated. But his physical health was beginning to fail through recurrent attacks of gastric trouble, caused in large measure by overwork, suppressed grief and anxiety about the future.
Rudyard Kipling at Home and at Work. By Dorothy Ponton. 1953. Page 27.
A darkness falls on the last years at Bateman's. The Kipling's visit the war cemeteries in France. ‘There has never been anything like this in all history’, he says, ‘the embalming of a race’. Carrie’s eyesight is failing. She becomes rheumatic and diabetic. When in 1924 Elsie leaves to marry George Bambridge, a brother officer of John’s, whom neither of her parents likes, Bateman's seems vast, gloomy and empty. ‘A train has to stop at some station or other’, he wrote of old age to a friend. ‘I only wish it wasn't such an ugly and lonesome place.’
Bateman’s. The National Trust. 1999. Page 45.
IMPERIAL WAR GRAVES COMMISSION
The Imperial War Graves Commission (IWGC) was the British institution that dealt with burying and commemorating First World War dead and missing soldiers.
https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/features/what-was-the-imperial-war-graves-commission
Kipling was invited to join the IWGC as a commissioner in 1917.
He provided literary advice and dedicated much of his time after the war to the work of the Commission.
LITERARY OUTPUT
Non-fiction
•Book of Words, A - Speeches 1906-1927
•France at War - 1915
•Fringes of the Fleet, The - 1915
•New Army in Training, The - 1915
•New Army in Training, The - 1915
•Sea Warfare - 1916
•Letters of Travel - 1920
•Irish Guards in the Great War, The, Vol.1 - 1923
•Irish Guards in the Great War, The, Vol.2 - 1923
•Something of Myself - 1937
•Souvenirs of France - 1933
Verse Collections
The Years Between, (1919)
Short Story Collections
•Just So Stories - 1902
•Traffics and Discoveries - 1904
•Puck of Pook’s Hill - 1906
•Abaft the Funnel - 1909
•Actions and Reactions - 1909
•Rewards and Fairies - 1910
•Diversity of Creatures, A - 1917
•Eyes of Asia, The - 1918
•Land & Sea Tales - 1923
•Debits and Credits - 1926
•Limits and Renewals - 1932
•Thy Servant a Dog - 1930
REPUTATION
Why we still don't know what to make of Kipling
Is he hopelessly outdated, a standard-bearer for a discredited part of British history, or a writer with a profound understanding for all humanity?
Is this Indian-born, youngest ever winner of the Nobel prize for literature a parochial English figure? Is this exquisite stylist and literary innovator a hopelessly old-fashioned stick-in-the-mud? Is he a racist, or someone with sympathy and understanding for all humanity?
Sam Jordison. 5th January 2016. The Guardian.
Rudyard Kipling was one of the most widely read authors of the early 20th century. His reputation as a poet and novelist has varied according to fashion: regarded widely in the late-19th century as an unofficial poet laureate of the British Empire, he was later criticised for vulgarity, jingoism and romanticising colonialism. However, his writing for children has never lost its appeal, and the Just So Stories for Little Children show him at his most inventive and engaging.
…and from the First World War onwards, almost total critical disdain.
Bateman’s, National Trust Guidebook. 1999 Page 41.
Why does Rudyard Kipling get no respect?
Few authors ever fell as far, in terms of reputation, in their own lifetimes. Jack Little, a professor emeritus at Simon Fraser University, says that in Kipling’s prime he was “greeted like a rock star in his railway journeys across Canada.” By the time he died in 1936, he was considered not only old-fashioned, but a representative of British imperialism at its most unthinking. “During five literary generations every enlightened person has despised him,” George Orwell wrote not long after his death, and while Orwell defended him to some extent, he also called Kipling “a jingo imperialist” who was “morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting.”
Lycett notes that after Kipling died, there was a sort of cold war “between those who had served in the British empire and who regarded him as their unofficial bard, and those who were ideologically opposed to all vestiges of imperialism, who took against him with equal vehemence.”
Jamie Weinman
8th December 2015
DISCUSSION
Rudyard Kipling: an unexpected revival for the ‘bard of empire’ | Rudyard Kipling | The Guardian
Each generation seems to get the Kipling criticism it deserves…the people who felt most strongly for and against Kipling have passed on. It is now possible to look at Kipling without historical prejudice, and the result is a growth of objective interest in his work.
Based on what you have read:
1.Consider your own opinions of Kipling.
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2.What has influenced criticism of Kipling’s work?
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3.Do you agree with Lycett’s statement that ‘it is now possible to look at Kipling without historical prejudice’ ?
PERMISSIONS
Bateman's
DeFacto, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0e/Bateman%27s.jpg
The Graves of the Fallen
Rudyard Kipling, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/The_Graves_of_the_Fallen_-_cover_page.jpg