About this episode
Rudyard KiplingRudyard Kipling was the great poet of British Imperialism. He was born in 1865 in Mumbai (then Bombay) British India. He died in London, England in 1936 aged 70.He was named Rudyard because that was the place his parents had met and courted at Rudyard Lake in Staffordshire, England. Kipling was well-connected. HIs cousin was a conservative prime minister and two of his aunts were married to famous painters, one the great pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-JonesHe was immensely successful and you will have heard of The Jungle Book via Disney if nowhere else, but also his books Kim, Gunga Dinand his famous poems (at least to British schoolboys of my generation) Mandalay and I imagine the world-famous poem If is familiar to most peopl.eHe actually won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907. Henry James thought he was a literary genius. Kipling has the ability to write wonderful prose that puts us right in the scene, whether that me the lush English countryside, dusty India or a grand old haunted house.It is worth saying also that Kipling also evidenced great affection for India and the Indians. He had a nanny or 'ayah' when he was small, but went back to England for his education. Interestling, after he finished at his military school, which he found a little rough, at the age of 17, it was decided he wasn't smart enough to go to Oxford University so he sailed back to India, where he became a journalist. To him, landing back in India was a home coming. He published a collection of short stories set in British India in 1886; Plain Tales from the Hills, these had previously been released over a period of two years in a Lahore magazine. He travelled back to England in 1889, via Rangoon, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan and San Francisco. He travelled around the USA and Canada before going back to London, spending time in the Pacific North West at Portland, Seattle, British Columbia then going east via Alberta to the Yellowstone National park, Omaha, Chicago, Washington DC, New York and Boston. He met Mark Twain and was very impressed with him. At that time, Twain had published Tom Sawyer and was writing Huckleberry Finn. He then took ship to Liverpool from whence he went to London to great literary acclaimHe went back to America for his honeymoon and it was in Vermont that he got the idea of The Jungle Book. He stayed in New England for a whle and was visited by Arthur Conan Doyle and met Theodore Roosevelt.He visited South Africa each winter and then in 1897, settled in rural Sussex and he lived there until his death in 1897 in a great house called Batemans.TheyThey was first published in Scribner's Magazine for August 1904 and then collected in Traffics and Discoveries in the same year. The 'house beautiful' that it describes is thought to be modelled on his own house in Sussex. I hadn't picked up on this, but some reviewers infer that the visitor's own child has died, and this makes sense of the passage where he says he never sees the faces of his own dead in his dreams. The butler has also lost a child who is now walking in the wood. The butler won't accept a tip for setting the visitor back on his way, which may indicate some commonality of feeling and loss. The girl's kiss on his hand at the end which breaks the spell, is the special kiss of his own dead daughter, and it is only at this point he realises (though we had this figured much earlier) that the children are ghosts of the children who have died. The point is that Miss Florence has never borne a child so she can never see them. In this sense her blindness is symbolic. He can see them and ultimately feel them because he li Support the show Visit us here: www.ghostpod.org Buy me a coffee if you're glad I do this: https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker If you really want to help me, become a Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/barcud Music by The Heartwood Institute: https://bit.ly/somecomeback Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices