Abstract
Kipling’s response to the 1914–18 war is extremely diverse, ranging from the impact on civilian life in ‘Mary Postgate’ and ‘The Gardener’ to the horrors of the Western Front in ‘The Janeites’ and ‘A Madonna of the Trenches’, with other stories that examine the mental scars of ex-servicemen, and even with humour in ‘On the Gate’, and his focus is very much on the effects the war has had. In stories set among freemasons and Jane Austen devotees Kipling appears to be extolling the comforts of ritual and civilized comfort, but the final result is to make us aware that sometimes there can be no real comfort for those who have survived the horrors of war. In ‘The Gardener’ Kipling explores grief, and again exposes the damaging inauthenticity of the English lower and middle classes.
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Notes
- 1.
Kipling, ‘On the Gate’ in Debits and Credits (Macmillan, London, 1926) 335.
- 2.
Kipling, Rudyard Kipling’s Verse, Inclusive Edition, 1885–1932 (Hodder and Stoughton 1933) 98.
- 3.
Kipling, ‘Swept and Garnished’ in A Diversity of Creatures (Macmillan, London, 1917) 416.
- 4.
See Chapter 17 of Andrew Lycett’s biography Rudyard Kipling (Weidenfeld and Nicholson 1999) for a full account of Kipling’s outlook and of his propaganda work during the war.
- 5.
See ‘Slaves of the Lamp, Part II’ in The Complete Stalky and Co (Macmillan, London, 1929) 446, and ‘The Drums of the Fore and Aft’ in Wee Willie Winkie and other stories (Macmillan, London, 1890) 334.
- 6.
Kipling, ‘A Friend of the Family’, in Debits and Credits (Macmillan, London, 1926) 326.
- 7.
Kipling, ‘The Woman in his Life’ in Limits and Renewals (Macmillan, London, 1932).
- 8.
Kipling, ‘In the Interests of the Brethren’, ‘The Janeites’ and ‘A Madonna of the Trenches’ in Debits and Credits (Macmillan, London, 1926).
- 9.
Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That (Penguin, 1957) 159–60 and also 195.
- 10.
C.S Lewis, ‘Kipling’s World’ (1954), collected in Elliot L. Gilbert (ed.) Kipling and the Critics (New York University Press, 1965), 99–117. Although balanced with some admiration, Lewis’s main charge is that Kipling is the ‘slave of the inner ring’.
- 11.
This applies to 1924, the date when ‘The Janeites’ first appeared. A Commission of Enquiry in 1922 had recognised the condition, somewhat grudgingly, and one general still maintained it did not happen in ‘good units’. See the article at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_shock.
- 12.
‘Minor public school is my own embroidery; Humberstall simply says: ‘’E said ’e’d been some sort of schoolmaster once’ (161).
- 13.
The Kipling Society Reader’s Guide summarises commentary that has noted a wide range of possible allusions to Dante, Hamlet, Isolde, as well as Swinburne and St Paul. (www.kiplingsociety.co.uk).
- 14.
J.M.S. Tompkins, The Art of Rudyard Kipling (Methuen, London, 1959, revised 1965) 206.
- 15.
See Kipling Society Reader’s Guide www.kiplingsociety.co.uk.
- 16.
See Kipling Society Reader’s Guide www.kiplingsociety.co.uk.
- 17.
See Jan Montefiore, Rudyard Kipling, (Northgate House, Tavistock, 2007) 135, for the relation between this and modernism.
- 18.
Kipling, ‘The Gardener’, in Debits and Credits, (Macmillan, London, 1926) and ‘On Greenhow Hill’ in Life’s Handicap (Macmillan, London, 1891).
- 19.
Since the village clearly has no intention of investigating Helen’s cover story, George may be real, but may just as well not exist. This is the obvious answer to William B. Dilingham’s belief (English Language Notes, xxxix, 4, June 2002, 61–2) that Michael must really be Helen’s nephew because a woman of her class would not ‘slander’ her brother.
- 20.
See Roger Ayers, ‘The Gardener’, Kipling Journal Vol 77 (Dec 2003) 15.
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Paffard, M. (2023). The Great War. In: Conservative Belief and the Imagination in Kipling’s Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40220-3_11
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