Rudyard Kipling
Posts in The Copybook credited to ‘Rudyard Kipling’
Kim O’Hara starts his apprenticeship as a British spy with a little competition.
In the city of Shimla, summer capital of the British Raj, a jeweller named Lurgan is schooling young orphan Kim O’Hara for intelligence work in Afghanistan. A Hindu boy already in his care has become so jealous of this ‘stranger’ that he has tried to poison Lurgan, and is now sobbing with remorse, which the canny Lurgan turns to advantage.
Rudyard Kipling’s poem about St Wilfrid’s chaplain and an unusual Christmas congregation.
Kipling firmly believed that Christianity should embrace the animal kingdom, and this poem precedes a tale in which a seal plays a key role in the conversion of the South Saxons. That story and this poem are pure fiction, though Eddi (Eddius Stephanus, Stephen of Ripon) really was St Wilfrid’s chaplain.
A tribute to the postal workers of British India, and to the kind of empire they helped to build.
‘The Overland Mail’ is a tribute to the runners who carried letters across India during the Raj, and in particular the personal and business letters of the Indian Civil Service to which young Englishmen were posted. Among other things, Kipling’s poem is a welcome reminder that by Victoria’s day, the British Empire was increasingly united by trade, services and communications rather than by armies or centralised political will.
A heartfelt plea for humility at the height of Britain’s Empire.
Kipling wrote ‘Recessional’ for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, calling for humility at the height of Empire, and warning that control over other nations cannot be held for long through coercive government. Germany was at that very moment arming itself to make a grab for empire, and the consequences would soon bear out Kipling’s words at terrible cost.
A professional journalist and author recognises that he has met his match
Bombay-born Rudyard Kipling’s first job was as a journalist in what was then the Indian city of Lahore. Kipling grasped the importance of sending his ‘honest serving-men’ out on duty in the search for accurate reports, but even the most investigative of journalists has to recognise that in certain company, he is a mere amateur.
A meditation on our instinctive love for the place in which we live.
This is just part of a rather longer poem in which Kipling explores the fundamental truth that no mere human can really love everyone and everything equally. That, he says, is why it is both necessary and right that we feel particularly bound to, and responsible for, the place we call home.