Kipling’s popularity in Victorian Britain was based in part on the evocative and stylistic power of his early writing and in part on the allure of the exotic. The Victorians who admired Kipling had a predilection for the exotic: They acquired parrots as pets, viewed tropical blooms in their botanical gardens, and were fascinated by images and stories of fairylands and of the mysterious Orient. Many of the stories in Plain Tales from the Hills feature “half-castes.” Many depict the titillating and transgressive crossing of boundaries and the dangerous but exciting movement into the forbidden realms of the “native.” For example, the story “His Chance in Life” begins, “If you go straight away from Levees and Government House Lists, past Trades’ Balls—far beyond everything and everybody you ever knew in your respectable life—you cross, in time, the Borderline where the last drop of White blood ends and the full tide of Black sets in” (p. 79). Likewise, “Beyond the Pale” begins, “A man should, whatever happens, keep to his own caste, race and breed. Let the White go to the White and the Black to the Black.... This is the story of a man who wilfully stepped beyond the safe limits of decent everyday society, and paid for it heavily” (p. 171). Because of his success at stimulating the fantasy life of his readers, when Kipling arrived in London from India in 1889 at age twenty-three, he was an instant literary celebrity. Praise for his writing was enthusiastic. Henry James, a friend of Kipling‘s, dubbed him at this time “the infant monster.”

VERMONT

The events of the early 1890s, pivotal years for Kipling, set the scene for his composition of the stories that comprise The Jungle Books. Shortly after arriving in London, Kipling met and befriended Wolcott Balestier, a minor American novelist and a friend of eminent writers such as Henry James and William Dean Howells. The two quickly became intimate friends, calling each other “brother” and collaborating on an adventure novel, The Naulahka (1892), which narrates the exploits of an American in India. While Kipling was overseas in December 1891, Balestier died suddenly of typhoid. Only weeks after the funeral, Kipling precipitously married his friend’s sister, Car- rie. At the ceremony in London, Henry James gave the bride away. After an abbreviated honeymoon, the couple moved to Brattleboro, Vermont, where the Balestier family had property and some roots.

Rudyard and his new wife bought a large plot of land from Carrie’s younger brother, Beatty, on which they raised a house, calling it Naulakha (a slightly different spelling from the book title) in honor of Wolcott. In late 1892, while they waited for the house to be completed, they rented a cottage where Kipling began to compose the Jungle Book stories. It was here, during a dark and icy Vermont winter, that Kipling created stories about sunny, verdant India.

My workroom in the Bliss Cottage was seven feet by eight, and from December to April the snow lay level with its window-sill. It chanced that I had written a tale about Indian Forestry work which included a boy who had been brought up by wolves. In the stillness, and suspense, of the winter of ‘92 some memory of the Masonic Lions of my childhood’s magazine, and a phrase in [Rider] Haggard’s Nada the Lily combined with the echo of this tale (Something of Myself, pp. 67-68).

The “suspense” to which he refers here is the anticipation of the birth of his first child, Josephine, whose position in utero echoes Kipling’s description of his womblike workspace buried under snow in “Bliss” cottage. The “tale about Indian Forestry” is “In the Rukh.” The story, subsequently published in the collection Many Inventions (1893), centers on a grown-up Mowgli who appears mysteriously out of the jungle to succor a forester working for the British government. In this story as in the Jungle Book tales, Mowgli seems to possess magical powers, as he controls wild animals and communicates with them. Evoking the Greek god Pan, he plays the pipes as his wolf brothers dance, helping him to entrance a young girl. Interestingly, the powers that Mowgli is shown to accrue throughout The Jungle Books here are harnessed for the purposes of empire; at the end of “In the Rukh,” Mowgli agrees to work as a “forest guard,” essentially working for the British government as a forester. Similarly, in Kipling’s novel Kim, which he first conceived at this time, the abilities the eponymous hero acquires in his wanderings are ultimately channeled for his work in the “Great Game,” conducting business for the British Secret Service in India.

Kipling’s work on The Jungle Books corresponds almost exactly with the years he spent in Vermont, 1892 to 1896. It was during this period in America that Kipling first voiced his determination to write works for children. In a letter to a friend composed not long after his arrival in Vermont, Kipling wrote, “I would sooner make a fair book of stories for children than a new religion or a completely revised framework for our social and political life” (letter to Mary Mapes, in The Letters of Rudyard Kipling). Not long after making this pronouncement in November 1892, just before Josephine’s birth, he wrote the first of the Mowgli stories, “Mowgli’s Brothers.” In The Jungle Books, Kipling does, in fact, attempt to generate a “framework” for collective life, a set of precepts the jungle animals call the “Law.” In the ten years following the publication of the first Jungle Book in 1894, Kipling went on to write his most important books for young people, works that have remained in print and are still commonly read: Captains Courageous (1897), Stalky & Co. (1899), Kim (1901), and Just So Stories (1902).

Kipling’s determination to write for children may have stemmed in part from his own childhood experiences. Living in America, far from India and England and the scenes of his childhood and adolescence, Kipling was able to recast the separations of his early years imaginatively. Perhaps the most prevalent theme in The Jungle Books, a subject around which many of the stories turn, is painful separation and loss.