When Rudyard was five years old, he and his sister were precipitously dispatched “home” to England to be raised by strangers for pay at a house in Southsea, which he later designated “the House of Desolation.” Although the Anglo-Indian practice of shipping one’s children to England to be educated was commonplace, Kipling’s descriptions of this early desertion by his parents were ever tainted with bitterness. He remained in Southsea in misery for six years until his parents “rescued” him. In his story “Baa Baa, Black Sheep,” a thinly disguised rendering of these years, he refers to himself and his sister as “Punch and Judy,” suggesting that they were mere puppets in Southsea and subject to violence at the hands of their foster family.

As a child in Southsea, Kipling discovered that reading offered an escape from his wretched circumstances. In Something of Myself, he recalls how books became “a means to everything that would make me happy” (p. 6). In “Baa Baa, Black Sheep,” he writes of Punch’s escape into the world of stories: “If he were only left alone Punch could pass, at any hour he chose, into a land of his own, beyond the reach of Aunty Rosa and her God” (p. 148). According to his own account, his childhood reading provided inspiration for The Jungle Books. Kipling explains that as a child, he “somehow or other came across a tale about a lion-hunter in South Africa who fell in among lions who were all freemasons, and with them entered into a confederacy against some wicked baboons.” He continues, “I think that, too, lay dormant until the Jungle Books began to be born” (p. 7). As in the lion-hunter’s story, which R. L. Green, in Kipling and the Children, has identified as James Greenwood’s tale “King Lion,” in The Jungle Books a human figure—Mowgli—joins in a fellowship with animals to whom he is bound by a code of ethics. Much like the role played by books for the boy Rudyard, the role played by this new fellowship with beasts is to provide salvation for young Mowgli and ultimately to help him rise to great power.

At the conclusion of Kipling’s sojourn in the “House of Desolation,” after a brief and joyful reunion with his family, his parents returned to India, and Kipling was sent off to the United Services College, a school for officers’ children in the North Devon resort town of Westward Ho! The adventures described in his children’s book Stalky & Co. (1899) were based on his experiences at this college. During his years there, Kipling began to experiment with short fiction and poetry. He submitted his first writing for publication—a poem entitled “The Dusky Crew”—to the American children’s monthly St. Nicholas Magazine, which rejected it. Only a decade later, the magazine would publish many of the stories collected in The Jungle Books.

At sixteen Rudyard bid farewell to both school and England to begin life as a journalist in India; he rejoined his parents and sister, restoring what the Kiplings called “the family square.” Kipling’s parents, Lockwood and Alice (née Macdonald) always held deep fascination for him. The children of Methodist ministers, they both rejected the faith of their fathers. Both were irreverent, spirited, and creative. Alice, who wrote poetry, was one of a group of beautiful and gifted sisters who married talented men; two wed painters—the Pre-Raphaelite artist Sir Edward Burne-Jones and the historical painter Sir Edward Poynter—and one married a wealthy industrialist named Alfred Baldwin and became the mother of future prime minister Stanley Baldwin. Before her marriage, Alice allegedly tossed a lock of hair belonging to the Evangelical preacher and founder of Methodism John Wesley into the fire, declaring, “A hair of the dog that bit us!” Lockwood was an artist and a teacher of artisans. His appointment as an artist craftsman at the Sir Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy School of Art and Industry in Bombay enabled him to marry Alice in 1865, shortly after they met. The Kiplings remained in Bombay for ten years, then moved to Lahore, where Lockwood became principal of the Mayo School of Industrial Arts and curator of the Lahore Museum. In 1882 Lockwood secured a position for his son at a daily paper, the Civil and Military Gazette, which was published in Lahore. Rudyard worked as a journalist at the Gazette for five years until he earned a position as an editor at its more prominent sister paper, the Pioneer, where he worked until 1889.

During his years working as a journalist in India, Kipling published many sketches, tales, and poems. In 1885 he collaborated with his family on a collection of poetry and stories entitled Quartette, which was published as a Christmas supplement to the Civil and Military Gazette. His first book of poetry, Departmental Ditties, was published in 1886, and his first book of short stories, Plain Tales from the Hills, appeared in 1888; the two volumes established his reputation as an important new writer. Plain Tales mostly portrayed Anglo-Indian society and army life; while some tales included comic elements, in places they depicted the unsettling or even tragic mixing of Indian and European cultures, as in “Lispeth,” “In the House of Suddhoo,” and “Beyond the Pale.” Kipling produced five more volumes of short stories before leaving India in 1889. During this period he also began a novel, Mother Maturin; but after writing more than 300 pages, he stopped work on it, saving some of the material to use in his novel Kim (1901) and destroying the rest.

It is no accident that Kipling’s phenomenal success as a writer coincided with the era of British high imperialism, beginning from about 1880. In 1876, just at the time Kipling began to experiment with fiction and poetry, Queen Victoria was declared empress of India by the viceroy of India, Lord Lytton, a friend of Kipling’s parents.