Charles Lamb


Charles Lamb (London, 10 February 1775 – Edmonton, 27 December 1834) was an English essayist with Welsh heritage, best known for his Essays of Elia and for the children's book Tales from Shakespeare, which he produced along with his sister, Mary Lamb (1764–1847).

Lamb was the youngest child of John Lamb, a lawyer's clerk. He was born in Crown Office Row, Inner Temple, London, and spent his youth there, later going away to school at Christ's Hospital. There he formed a close friendship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge which would last for many years. After leaving school in 1789 at age 14, "an inconquerable impediment" in his speech disqualified him for a clerical career. For a short time he worked in the office of Joseph Paice, a London merchant, and then for twenty-three weeks, until 8 February 1792, he held a small post in the Examiner's Office of the South Sea House. Its subsequent downfall in a pyramid scheme after Lamb left would be contrasted to the company's prosperity in the first Elia essay. On April 5, 1792 he went to work in the Accountant's Office for British East India Company, the death of his father's employer having ruined the family's fortunes.

Charles and his sister Mary both suffered periods of mental illness, and Charles spent six weeks in a psychiatric hospital during 1795. He was, however, already making his name as a poet. On September 22, 1796, a terrible event occurred: Mary, "worn down to a state of extreme nervous misery by attention to needlework by day and to her mother at night," was seized with acute mania and stabbed her mother to the heart with a table knife. With the help of friends Lamb succeeded in obtaining his sister's release from what would otherwise have been lifelong imprisonment, on the condition that he take personal responsibility for her safekeeping. In 1799, John Lamb died, leaving Charles, aged 24, to carry on as best he could. Mary came to live again with him in Pentonville, and in 1800 they set up a shared home at Mitre Court Buildings in the Temple, where they lived until 1809.


Charles Lamb Memorial on Watch House Gilspur Street, LondonDespite Lamb's bouts of melancholia, both he and his sister enjoyed an active and rich social life. Their London quarters became a kind of weekly salon for many of the most outstanding theatrical and literary figures of the day. Charles Lamb, having been to school with Samuel Coleridge, counted Coleridge as perhaps his closest, and certainly his oldest, friend. On his deathbed, Coleridge had a mourning ring sent to Lamb and his sister. Fortuitously, Lamb's first publication was in 1796, when four sonnets by "Mr. Charles Lamb of the India House" appeared in Coleridge's Poems on Various Subjects. In 1797 he contributed additional blank verse to the second edition, and met the Wordsworths, William and Dorothy, on his short summer holiday with Coleridge at Nether Stowey, thereby also striking up a lifelong friendship with William. In London, Lamb became familiar with a group of young writers who favored political reform, including Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Hazlitt, and Leigh Hunt.

Lamb continued to clerk for the East India Company and doubled as a writer in various genres, his tragedy, John Woodvil, being published in 1802. His farce, Mr H, was performed at Drury Lane in 1807, where it was roundly booed. In the same year, Tales from Shakespeare (Charles handled the tragedies; his sister Mary, the comedies) was published, and became a best seller for William Godwin's "Children's Library."

In 1819, at age 44, Lamb, who, because of family commitments, had never married, fell in love with an actress, Fanny Kelly, of Covent Garden, and proposed marriage. She refused him, and he died a bachelor. His collected essays, under the title Essays of Elia, were published in 1823 ("Elia" being the pen name Lamb used as a contributor to the London Magazine). A further collection was published ten years or so later, shortly before Lamb's death. He died of an infection, erysipelas, contracted from a cut on his face, on December 27, 1834, just a few months after Coleridge. From about 1828 Charles and Mary lived in Church Street, Edmonton, north of London (now in the borough of Enfield. Lamb is buried in All Saints' Churchyard, Edmonton. His sister, who was ten years his senior, survived him for more than a dozen years. She is buried beside him.

Contents [hide]
1 Quotes
2 Selected works
3 Popular References
4 External links



[edit] Quotes
"Lawyers, I suppose, were children once." — features in the preface to To Kill a Mockingbird.
"Man is a gaming animal. He must always be trying to get the better in something or other." — features in the Essays of Elia, 1823.

[edit] Selected works
Blank Verse, poetry, 1798
Pride's Cure, poetry, 1802
Tales from Shakespeare, 1807
The Adventures of Ulysses, 1808
Specimens of English Dramatic poets who lived about the time of Shakespeare, 1808
On the Tragedies of Shakepeare, 1811
Essays of Elia, 1823
The Last Essays of Elia, 1833

[edit] Popular References
In Season 3, Episode 14 of M*A*S*H, Radar names a lamb "Private Charles Lamb" in order to transfer it, and prevent its roasting for the camp's Greek Easter celebration.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi (born December 5, 1954) is an English playwright, screenwriter and filmmaker, novelist and short story writer. The themes of his work have touched on topics of race, nationalism, immigration, and sexuality.

Biography
Kureishi was born in London to a Pakistani father and an English mother. His father, Rafiushan, was from a wealthy Madras family, most of whose members moved to Pakistan after the Partition of India in 1947. He came to Britain to study law but soon abandoned his studies. After meeting and marrying Kureishi's mother Audrey, he settled in Bromley, where Kureishi was born and worked at the Pakistan Embassy.

He attended Bromley Technical High School where David Bowie had also been a pupil and after taking his A levels at a local sixth form college, he spent a year studying philosophy at Lancaster University before dropping out. Later he attended King's College London and took a degree in philosophy. His most famous work is My Beautiful Laundrette, a screenplay about a gay Pakistani-British boy growing up in 1980's London for a film directed by Stephen Frears. It won the New York Film Critics Best Screenplay Award and an Academy Award nomination for Best Screenplay.

His book The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) won the Whitbread Award for the best first novel, and was also made into a BBC television series with a soundtrack by David Bowie.

The next year, 1991, saw the release of the feature film entitled London Kills Me; a film written and directed Kureishi.

His novel, Intimacy (1998) revolved around the story of a man leaving his wife and two young sons after feeling physically and emotionally rejected by his wife. This created certain controversy as Kureishi himself had recently left his wife and two young sons. It is assumed to be at least semi-autobiographical. In 2000/2001 the novel was loosely adapted to a movie Intimacy by Patrice Chéreau, which won two Bears at the Berlin Film Festival: a Golden Bear for Best Film, and a Silver Bear for Best Actress (Kerry Fox). It was controversial for its unreserved sex scenes. The book was translated into Persian by Niki Karimi in 2005.

His family have accused him of exploiting them with thinly disguised references to them in his work and went on record to deny the claims. His sister Yasmin has accused him of selling her family "down the line". She wrote, in a letter to The Guardian, that if her family's history had to become public she would not stand by and let it be "fabricated for the entertainment of the public or for Hanif's profit". She says that his description of her family's working class roots are fictitious. Their grandfather was not "cloth cap working class", their mother never worked in a shoe factory, and their father, she says, was not a bitter old man.

Yasmin takes up issues with her brother not merely for his thinly disguised autobiographical references in his first novel, Buddha of Suburbia, but also for the image about his past that he portrays in newspaper interviews. She wrote: "My father was angry when the Buddha of Suburbia came out as he felt that Hanif had robbed him of his dignity, and he didn't speak to Hanif for about a year."

Kureishi's drama The Mother was adapted to a movie by Roger Michell, which won a joint First Prize in the Director’s Fortnight section at Cannes Film Festival. It showed a cross-generational relationship with changed roles: a seventy-year-old English lady and grandmother (played by Anne Reid) who seduces her daughter's boyfriend (played by Daniel Craig), a thirty-year-old craftsman. Explicit sex scenes were shown in realistic drawings only, thus avoiding censorship.

His 2006 screenplay Venus saw Oscar, BAFTA, Screen Actors Guild, Broadcast Film Critics Association and Golden Globe nominations for Peter O'Toole in the best actor category.

His latest novel, Something to Tell You, will be published in 2008.

Kureishi is married and has a pair of twins and a younger son.

This article or section may contain an inappropriate mixture of prose and timeline.

Please help convert this timeline into prose or, if necessary, a list.


[edit] Bibliography
Novels
1990 The Buddha of Suburbia. London: Faber and Faber.
1995 The Black Album. London: Faber and Faber.
1998 Intimacy. London: Faber and Faber.
2001 Gabriel's Gift. London: Faber and Faber.
2003 The Body. London: Faber and Faber.
2008 Something to Tell You. London: Faber and Faber.
Story collections
1997 Love in a Blue Time London: Faber and Faber.
1999 Midnight All Day. London: Faber and Faber.
Plays and screenplays
1988 Sammy and Rosie Get Laid. London: Faber and Faber.
1991 London Kills Me. London: Faber and Faber.
1996 My Beautiful Laundrette and other writings. London: Faber and Faber.
1997 My Son The Fanatic. London: Faber and Faber.
1999 Hanif Kureishi Plays One. London: Faber and Faber.
1999 Sleep With Me. London: Faber and Faber.
2002 Collected Screenplays Volume I. London: Faber and Faber.
2003 The "Mother". London: Faber and Faber.
2007 Venus. London: Faber and Faber.
Nonfiction
2002 Dreaming and Scheming: Reflections on Writing and Politics
2004 My Ear at His Heart. London: Faber and Faber.
2005 Word And The Bomb . London: Faber and Faber.
As editor
1995 The Faber Book of Pop. London: Faber and Faber.
Critical works about Kureishi
Moore-Gilbert, Bart. Hanif Kureishi (Contemporary World Writers). Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001.

[edit] Filmography
Screenplays
1985 My Beautiful Laundrette
1987 Sammy and Rosie Get Laid
1991 London Kills Me (and director)
1993 The Buddha of Suburbia (television miniseries, based on the novel)
1997 My Son the Fanatic (based on his own short story of the same title)
1999 Mauvaise passe (aka The Escort, aka The Wrong Blonde) (with Michel Blanc}
2003 The God of Small Tales (short) (with Akram Khan)
2003 The Mother (adapted from the play)
2006 Venus
2007 Weddings and Beheadings (2007)
Story basis only
2001 Intimacy
Producer
2006 Souvenir

[edit] External links
Kureishi's website
Hanif Kureishi at www.contemporarywriters.com
Hanif Kureishi at the Internet Movie Database
Hanif Kureishi biography and credits at the British Film Institute's Screenonline
Faber and Faber - UK publisher of Hanif Kureishi
Waraich, Omar. When Bombs Speak Louder Than Words, Interview with Hanif Kureishi. The Daily Star, Beirut -International Herald Tribune Jan 28 2006
"In Conversation: Hanif Kureishi with Hirsh Sawhney". The Brooklyn Rail, July/Aug 2006
Audio interview with Hanif Kureishi from open2.net
About "My Son The Fanatic" Interpretations of and more background information on the short story.
Reference to family controversy [[1]]

[edit] See also
List of authors
List of English novelists
List of novelists
List of playwrights
List of screenwriters
List of short story writers

Rudyard Kipling


Joseph Rudyard Kipling (December 30, 1865 – January 18, 1936) was an English author and poet, born in Bombay, India, and best known for his works The Jungle Book (1894), The Second Jungle Book (1895), Just So Stories (1902), and Puck of Pook's Hill (1906); his novel, Kim (1901); his poems, including Mandalay (1890), Gunga Din (1890), and "If—" (1910); and his many short stories, including "The Man Who Would Be King" (1888) and the collections Life's Handicap (1891), The Day's Work (1898), and Plain Tales from the Hills (1888). He is regarded as a major "innovator in the art of the short story";[2] his children's books are enduring classics of children's literature; and his best work speaks to a versatile and luminous narrative gift.[3][4]

Kipling was one of the most popular writers in English, in both prose and verse, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.[2] The author Henry James famously said of him: "Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius (as distinct from fine intelligence) that I have ever known."[2] In 1907, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the first English language writer to receive the prize, and he remains its youngest-ever recipient.[5] Among other honours, he was sounded out for the British Poet Laureateship and on several occasions for a knighthood, all of which he rejected.[6]

However, later in life Kipling also came to be seen (in George Orwell's words) as a "prophet of British imperialism."[7] Many saw prejudice and militarism in his works,[8][9] and the resulting controversy about him continued for much of the 20th century.[10][11] According to critic Douglas Kerr: "He is still an author who can inspire passionate disagreement and his place in literary and cultural history is far from settled. But as the age of the European empires recedes, he is recognized as an incomparable, if controversial, interpreter of how empire was experienced. That, and an increasing recognition of his extraordinary narrative gifts, make him a force to be reckoned with."[12]

Kipling's childhood

Malabar Point, Bombay, 1860s. Oriental and India Office Collection. British Library.Rudyard Kipling was born on 30 December 1865 in Bombay, British India, to Alice Kipling (née MacDonald) and (John) Lockwood Kipling.[13] Alice Kipling (one of four remarkable Victorian sisters)[14] was a vivacious woman[15] about whom a future Viceroy of India would say, "Dullness and Mrs. Kipling cannot exist in the same room."[2] Lockwood Kipling, a sculptor and pottery designer, was the principal and professor of architectural sculpture at the newly founded Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy School of Art and Industry in Bombay.[15] The couple, who had moved to India earlier that year, had met in courtship two years before at Rudyard Lake in rural Staffordshire, England, and had been so taken by its beauty that they now named their firstborn after it. Kipling's aunt, Georgiana, was married to the painter Edward Burne-Jones and his aunt Agnes was married to the painter Edward Poynter. His most famous relative was his first cousin, Stanley Baldwin, who was Conservative Prime Minister three times in the 1920s and 1930s.[16] Kipling's birthplace home still stands on the campus of the Sir J.J. Institute of Applied Art in Mumbai and for many years was used as the Dean's residence. Mumbai historian Foy Nissen points out however that although the cottage bears a plaque stating that this is the site where Kipling was born the fact of the matter is that the original cottage was pulled down decades ago and a new one built in its place. The wooden bungalow has been empty and locked up for years.[17]


A steamer, Bombay docks, 1870s, with bigger ships farther out in the sea. Oriental and India Office Collection. British Library.Of Bombay, Kipling was to write:[18]

Mother of Cities to me,
For I was born in her gate,
Between the palms and the sea,
Where the world-end steamers wait.


According to Bernice M. Murphy:[19]

"Kipling’s parents considered themselves 'Anglo-Indians' (a term used in the 19th century for British citizens living in India) and so too would their son, though he in fact spent the bulk of his life elsewhere. Complex issues of identity and national allegiance would become prominent features in his fiction." Kipling himself was to write about these conflicts as a man of seventy:[20]

In the afternoon heats before we took our sleep, she (the Portuguese ayah, or nanny) or Meeta (the Hindu bearer, or male attendant) would tell us stories and Indian nursery songs all unforgotten, and we were sent into the dining-room after we had been dressed, with the caution ‘Speak English now to Papa and Mamma.’ So one spoke ‘English,’ haltingly translated out of the vernacular idiom that one thought and dreamed in.


Kipling's India: map of British India with locations and years of Kipling's stays. Click to enlarge.Kipling's days of "strong light and darkness"[20] in Bombay were to end when he was six years old. As was the custom in British India, he and his three-year-old sister, Alice ("Trix"), were taken to England—in their case to Southsea (Portsmouth), to be cared for by a couple that took in children of British nationals living in India. The two children would live with the couple, Captain and Mrs. Holloway, at their house, Lorne Lodge, for the next six years. In his autobiography, written some 65 years later, Kipling would recall this time with horror, and wonder ironically if the combination of cruelty and neglect he experienced there at the hands of Mrs. Holloway might not have hastened the onset of his literary life:[20]

If you cross-examine a child of seven or eight on his day’s doings (specially when he wants to go to sleep) he will contradict himself very satisfactorily. If each contradiction be set down as a lie and retailed at breakfast, life is not easy. I have known a certain amount of bullying, but this was calculated torture—religious as well as scientific. Yet it made me give attention to the lies I soon found it necessary to tell: and this, I presume, is the foundation of literary effort.


James Jacques Tissot. The Gallery of HMS Calcutta (Portsmouth), 1876. Kipling, who had sailed with his family from Bombay to Portsmouth on a P&O paddlewheeler four years earlier, however, only remembered "time in a ship with an immense semi-circle blocking all vision on each side of her."[20]Kipling's sister Trix fared better at Lorne Lodge, Mrs. Holloway apparently hoping that Trix would eventually marry the Holloway son.[21] The two children, however, did have relatives in England they could visit. They spent a month each Christmas with their maternal aunt Georgiana ("Georgy"), and her husband, the artist Edward Burne-Jones, at their house, "The Grange" in Fulham, London, which Kipling was to call "a paradise which I verily believe saved me."[20] In the spring of 1877, Alice Kipling returned from India and removed the children from Lorne Lodge.

Often and often afterwards, the beloved Aunt would ask me why I had never told any one how I was being treated. Children tell little more than animals, for what comes to them they accept as eternally established. Also, badly-treated children have a clear notion of what they are likely to get if they betray the secrets of a prison-house before they are clear of it.[20]


Frederick Gilbert. 1873. 'The Westward Ho! Ladies Golf Club at Bideford, Devon'. Five years later (1878), Kipling was to arrive in Westward Ho! to attend United Services College.In January 1878 Kipling was admitted to the United Services College, at Westward Ho!, Devon, a school founded a few years earlier to prepare boys for the armed forces. The school proved rough going for him at first, but later led to firm friendships, and provided the setting for his schoolboy stories Stalky & Co. published many years later.[21] During his time there, Kipling also met and fell in love with Florence Garrard, a fellow boarder with Trix at Southsea (to which Trix had returned). Florence was to become the model for Maisie in Kipling's first novel, The Light that Failed (1891).[21] Towards the end of his stay at the school, it was decided that he lacked the academic ability to get into Oxford University on a scholarship[21] and his parents lacked the wherewithal to finance him;[15] consequently, Lockwood Kipling obtained a job for his son in Lahore (now in Pakistan), where Lockwood was now Principal of the Mayo College of Art and Curator of the Lahore Museum. Kipling was to be assistant editor of a small local newspaper, the Civil & Military Gazette. He sailed for India on 20 September 1882 and arrived in Bombay on 18 October 1882.


Kipling's England: map of England with locations and years of Kipling's stays. Click to enlarge.So, at sixteen years and nine months, but looking four or five years older, and adorned with real whiskers which the scandalised Mother abolished within one hour of beholding, I found myself at Bombay where I was born, moving among sights and smells that made me deliver in the vernacular sentences whose meaning I knew not. Other Indian-born boys have told me how the same thing happened to them.
There were yet three or four days’ rail to Lahore, where my people lived. After these, my English years fell away, nor ever, I think, came back in full strength.[20]


[edit] Early travels

George Craddock. 1880s. Railway Station at Lahore, India. Kipling arrived at the train station after a four day train journey from Bombay in late October 1882.The Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore, which Kipling was to call "my first mistress and most true love,"[20] appeared six days a week throughout the year except for a one-day break each for Christmas and Easter. Kipling was worked hard by the editor, Stephen Wheeler, but his need to write was unstoppable. In 1886, he published his first collection of verse, Departmental Ditties. That year also brought a change of editors at the newspaper. Kay Robinson, the new editor, allowed more creative freedom and Kipling was asked to contribute short stories to the newspaper.[3]

Meanwhile, in the summer of 1883, Kipling had for the first time visited Simla (now Shimla), well-known hill station and summer capital of British India. By then it was established practice for the Viceroy of India and the government to move to Simla for six months and the town became a "centre of power as well as pleasure."[3] Kipling's family became yearly visitors to Simla and Lockwood Kipling was asked to design a fresco in the Christ Church there. Kipling returned to Simla for his annual leave each year from 1885 to 1888, and the town figured prominently in many of the stories Kipling was writing for the Gazette.[3]

My month’s leave at Simla, or whatever Hill Station my people went to, was pure joy—every golden hour counted. It began in heat and discomfort, by rail and road. It ended in the cool evening, with a wood fire in one’s bedroom, and next morn—thirty more of them ahead!—the early cup of tea, the Mother who brought it in, and the long talks of us all together again. One had leisure to work, too, at whatever play-work was in one’s head, and that was usually full.[20]


Simla (now Shimla), India, in 1865. Simla was a well-known hill station which Kipling visited every summer from 1885 to 1888. Christ Church is on the right.Back in Lahore, some thirty-nine stories appeared in the Gazette between November 1886 and June 1887. Most of these stories were included in Plain Tales from the Hills, Kipling's first prose collection, which was published in Calcutta in January 1888, a month after his 22nd birthday. Kipling's time in Lahore, however, had come to an end. In November 1887, he had been transferred to the Gazette's much larger sister newspaper, The Pioneer, in Allahabad in the United Provinces. His writing, however, continued at a frenetic pace and during the next year, he published six collections of short stories: Soldiers Three, The Story of the Gadsbys, In Black and White, Under the Deodars, The Phantom Rickshaw, and Wee Willie Winkie, containing a total of 41 stories, some quite long. In addition, as The Pioneer's special correspondent in western region of Rajputana, he wrote many sketches that were later collected in Letters of Marque and published in From Sea to Sea and Other Sketches, Letters of Travel.[3]


Samuel Bourne. 1870. Railway Bridge across the Jumna at Allahabad. Kipling lived in Allahabad from 1887 to 1889 and likely crossed this bridge numerous times.In early 1889, The Pioneer relieved Kipling of his charge over a dispute. For his part, Kipling had been increasingly thinking about the future. He sold the rights to his six volumes of stories for £200 and a small royalty, and the Plain Tales for £50; in addition, from The Pioneer, he received six-months' salary in lieu of notice.[20] He decided to use this money to make his way to London, the center of the literary universe in the British Empire.


G. A. Kale. c.1900. Kipling stayed at this palace in Bundi, Rajputana, as a correspondent for The Pioneer and got inspiration for his book 'Kim' during his stay.On 9 March 1889, Kipling left India, traveling first to San Francisco via Rangoon, Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan. He then traveled through the United States writing articles for The Pioneer that too were collected in From Sea to Sea and Other Sketches, Letters of Travel. Starting his American travels in San Francisco, Kipling journeyed north to Portland, Oregon; on to Seattle, Washington; up into Canada, to Victoria and Vancouver, British Columbia; back into the U.S. to Yellowstone National Park; down to Salt Lake City; then east to Omaha, Nebraska and on to Chicago, Illinois; then to Beaver, Pennsylvania on the Ohio River to visit the Hill family; from there he went to Chautauqua with Professor Hill, and later to Niagara, Toronto, Washington, D.C., New York and Boston.[22] In the course of this journey he met with Mark Twain in Elmira, New York, and felt much awed in his presence. Kipling then crossed the Atlantic, and reached Liverpool in October 1889. Soon thereafter, he made his début in the London literary world to great acclaim.[2]


[edit] Career as a writer

The building on Villiers Street off the Strand in London where Kipling rented rooms from 1889 to 1891. A century later, the building was completely renovated and renamed Kipling House.
[edit] London
In London, Kipling had a number of stories accepted by various magazine editors. He also found a place to live for the next two years:

Meantime, I had found me quarters in Villiers Street, Strand, which forty-six years ago was primitive and passionate in its habits and population. My rooms were small, not over-clean or well-kept, but from my desk I could look out of my window through the fanlight of Gatti’s Music-Hall entrance, across the street, almost on to its stage. The Charing Cross trains rumbled through my dreams on one side, the boom of the Strand on the other, while, before my windows, Father Thames under the Shot Tower walked up and down with his traffic.

In the next two years, and in short order, he published a novel, The Light That Failed; had a nervous breakdown; and met an American writer and publishing agent, Wolcott Balestier, with whom he collaborated on a novel, The Naulahka (a title he uncharacteristically misspelt; see below).[15] In 1891, on the advice of his doctors, Kipling embarked on another sea voyage visiting South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and once again India. However, he cut short his plans for spending Christmas with his family in India when he heard of Wolcott Balestier's sudden death from typhoid fever, and immediately decided to return to London. Before his return, he had used the telegram to propose to (and be accepted by) Wolcott's sister Caroline (Carrie) Balestier, whom he had met a year earlier, and with whom he had apparently been having an intermittent romance.[15] Meanwhile, late in 1891, his collection of short stories of the British in India, Life's Handicap, was also published in London.


[edit] Marriage and honeymoon
On 18 January 1892, Carrie Balestier (aged 29) and Rudyard Kipling (aged 26) were married in London, in the "thick of an influenza epidemic, when the undertakers had run out of black horses and the dead had to be content with brown ones."[20] The wedding was held at All Souls Church, Langham Place and Henry James gave the bride away.


The house Naulakha, in Brattleboro, Vermont, USA as it appears today during the fall.The newlyweds settled upon a honeymoon that would take them first to the United States (including a stop at the Balestier family estate near Brattleboro, Vermont) and then onto Japan.[15] However, when the couple arrived in Yokohama, Japan, they discovered that their bank, The New Oriental Banking Corporation, had failed.


[edit] United States
Taking their loss in their stride, they returned to the U.S., back to Vermont—Carrie by this time was pregnant with their first child — and rented a small cottage on a farm near Brattleboro for ten dollars a month.

We furnished it with a simplicity that fore-ran the hire-purchase system. We bought, second or third hand, a huge, hot-air stove which we installed in the cellar. We cut generous holes in our thin floors for its eight inch tin pipes (why we were not burned in our beds each week of the winter I never can understand) and we were extraordinarily and self-centredly content.[20]

It was in this cottage, Bliss Cottage, that their first child, Josephine, was born "in three foot of snow on the night of December 29, 1892. Her Mother’s birthday being the 31st and mine the 30th of the same month, we congratulated her on her sense of the fitness of things ..."[20] It was also in this cottage that the first dawnings of the Jungle Books came to Kipling:

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 Haggard’s Nada the Lily, combined with the echo of this tale. After blocking out the main idea in my head, the pen took charge, and I watched it begin to write stories about Mowgli and animals, which later grew into the Jungle Books.[20]


Cover of the 1894 first edition of The Jungle Book illustrated by Lockwood Kipling.With Josephine's arrival, Bliss Cottage was felt to be congested, so eventually the couple bought land—ten acres on a rocky hillside overlooking the Connecticut River—from Carrie's brother Beatty Balestier, and built their own house. Kipling named the house "Naulakha" in honour of Wolcott and of their collaboration, and this time the name was spelled correctly.[15] (Naulakha which means literally "nine lakh (or, nine hundred thousand) rupees", in Hindi, was a name applied to the fabled necklaces worn by queens in North Indian folk-tales;[23] Kipling translated it as a "jewel beyond price"). The house still stands on Kipling Road, three miles north of Brattleboro: a big, secluded, dark-green house, with shingled roof and sides, which Kipling called his "ship", and which brought him "sunshine and a mind at ease."[15]

His seclusion in Vermont, combined with his healthy "sane clean life", made Kipling both inventive and prolific. In the short span of four years, he produced, in addition to the Jungle Books, a collection of short stories (The Day's Work), a novel (Captains Courageous), and a profusion of poetry, including the volume The Seven Seas. The collection of Barrack-Room Ballads, first published individually for the most part in 1890, which contains his poems Mandalay and Gunga Din was issued in March 1892. He especially enjoyed writing the Jungle Books—both masterpieces of imaginative writing—and enjoyed too corresponding with the many children who wrote to him about them.[15]


Rudyard Kipling's America 1892–1896, 1899. Click to enlarge..The writing life in Naulakha was occasionally interrupted by visitors, including his father, who visited soon after his retirement in 1893,[15] and British author Arthur Conan Doyle, who brought his golf-clubs, stayed for two days, and gave Kipling an extended golf lesson.[24][25] Kipling seemed to take to golf, occasionally practising with the local Congregational minister, and even playing with red painted balls when the ground was covered in snow.[25][13] However, the latter game was "not altogether a success because there were no limits to a drive; the ball might skid two miles down the long slope to Connecticut river."[13] From all accounts, Kipling loved the outdoors,[15] not least of whose marvels in Vermont was the turning of the leaves each fall:

A little maple began it, flaming blood-red of a sudden where he stood against the dark green of a pine-belt. Next morning there was an answering signal from the swamp where the sumacs grow. Three days later, the hill-sides as fast as the eye could range were afire, and the roads paved, with crimson and gold. Then a wet wind blew, and ruined all the uniforms of that gorgeous army; and the oaks, who had held themselves in reserve, buckled on their dull and bronzed cuirasses and stood it out stiffly to the last blown leaf, till nothing remained but pencil-shadings of bare boughs, and one could see into the most private heart of the woods.[26]


Kipling in his study in Naulakha ca. 1895In February 1896, the couple's second daughter, Elsie, was born. By this time, according to several biographers, their marital relationship was no longer light-hearted and spontaneous.[27] Although they would always remain loyal to each other, they seemed now to have fallen into set roles.[15] In a letter to a friend who had become engaged around this time, the 29 year old Kipling offered this somber counsel: marriage principally taught "the tougher virtues—such as humility, restraint, order, and forethought."[28]

The Kiplings might have lived out their lives in Vermont, were it not for two incidents—one of global politics, the other of family discord—that hastily ended their time there. By the early 1890s, Great Britain and Venezuela had long been locking horns over a border dispute involving British Guiana. Several times, the U.S. had offered to arbitrate, but in 1895 the new American secretary of state Richard Olney upped the ante by arguing for the American right to arbitrate on grounds of sovereignty on the continent (see the Olney interpretation as an extension of the Monroe Doctrine).[15] This raised hackles in Britain and before long the incident had snowballed into a major Anglo-American crisis, with talk of war on both sides. Although, eventually, the crisis would lead to greater U.S.-British cooperation, at the time, Kipling was bewildered by what he felt was persistent anti-British sentiment in the U.S., especially in the press.[15] He wrote in a letter that it felt like being "aimed at with a decanter across a friendly dinner table."[28] By January 1896, he had decided, according to his official biographer,[13] to end his family's "good wholesome life" in the U.S. and seek their fortunes elsewhere.


Josephine in the loggia, Naulakha, ca. 1895But the final straw, it seems, was a family dispute. For some time, the relations between Carrie and her brother Beatty Balestier had been strained on account of his drinking and insolvency. In May 1896, an inebriated Beatty ran into Kipling on the street and threatened him with physical harm.[15] The incident led to Beatty's eventual arrest, but in the subsequent hearing, and the resulting publicity, Kipling's privacy was completely destroyed, and left him feeling both miserable and exhausted. In July 1896, a week before the hearing was to resume, the Kiplings hurriedly packed their belongings and left Naulakha, Vermont, and the U.S. for good.[13]


[edit] Devon
Back in England, in September 1896, the Kiplings found themselves in Torquay on the coast of Devon, in a hillside home overlooking the sea. Although Kipling didn't much care for his new house, whose feng shui, he claimed, left its occupants feeling dispirited and gloomy, he nevertheless managed to remain productive and socially active.[15] Kipling was now a famous man, and in the previous two or three years, had increasingly been making political pronouncements in his writings. He had also begun work on two poems, Recessional (1897) and The White Man's Burden (1898) which were to create controversy when published. Regarded by some as anthems for enlightened and duty-bound empire-building (that captured the mood of the Victorian age), the poems equally were regarded by others as propaganda for brazenfaced imperialism and its attendant racial attitudes; still others saw irony in the poems and warnings of the perils of empire.[15]

Take up the White Man's burden—
Send forth the best ye breed—
Go, bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait, in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild—
Your new-caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.[29]


The Torquay Inner Harbour, c. 1890. The Kiplings lived in Torquay from September 1896 to May 1897, in a house built on a hillside above the cliffs.There was also foreboding in the poems, a sense that all could yet come to naught.[30]

Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet.
Lest we forget - lest we forget![31]

A prolific writer—nothing about his work was easily labeled—during his time in Torquay, he also wrote Stalky & Co., a collection of school stories (born of his experience at the United Services College in Westward Ho!) whose juvenile protagonists displayed a know-it-all, cynical outlook on patriotism and authority. According to his family, Kipling enjoyed reading aloud stories from Stalky & Co. to them, and often went into spasms of laughter over his own jokes.[15]


Phillip Burne-Jones. 1891. The Village Church, Rottingdean. Kipling and his family lived in Rottingdean, Sussex from 1897 to 1901.In early 1898 Kipling and his family traveled to South Africa for their winter holiday, thus beginning an annual tradition which (excepting the following year) was to last until 1908. With his newly minted reputation as the poet of the Empire, Kipling was warmly received by some of the most powerful politicians of the Cape Colony, including Cecil Rhodes, Sir Alfred Milner, and Leander Starr Jameson. In turn, Kipling cultivated their friendship and came to greatly admire all three men and their politics. The period 1898–1910 was a crucial one in the history of South Africa and included the Second Boer War (1899–1902), the ensuing peace treaty, and the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910. Back in England, Kipling wrote poetry in support of the British cause in the Boer War and on his next visit to South Africa in early 1900, he helped start a newspaper, The Friend, for the British troops in Bloemfontein, the newly captured capital of the Orange Free State. Although his journalistic stint was to last only two weeks, it was the first time Kipling would work on a newspaper staff since he left The Pioneer in Allahabad more than ten years earlier.[15]

Kipling began collecting material for another of his children's classics, Just So Stories for Little Children. That work was published in 1902, and another of his enduring works, Kim, first saw the light of day the previous year.

On a visit to America in 1899, Kipling and his eldest daughter Josephine developed pneumonia, from which Josephine eventually died.


Bateman's garden with house in the background. Rudyard Kipling lived in Bateman's, Burwash, East Sussex from 1902 until his death in 1936In the non-fiction realm he also became involved in the debate over the British response to the rise in German naval power, publishing a series of articles in 1898 which were collected as A Fleet in Being.


[edit] Peak of his career
The first decade of the 20th century saw Kipling at the height of his popularity. In 1907 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The prize citation said: "in consideration of the power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas and remarkable talent for narration which characterize the creations of this world-famous author." Nobel prizes had been established in 1901 and Kipling was the first English language recipient. At the award ceremony in Stockholm on December 10, 1907, the Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, C.D. af Wirsén, paid rich tributes to both Kipling and three centuries of English literature:[3]


First day cover issued by the Government of Sweden in 1967 honouring the Nobel laureates of 1907 including Kipling. Kipling is shown on the right in the blue stamp and middle row right in the sketches.The Swedish Academy, in awarding the Nobel Prize in Literature this year to Rudyard Kipling, desires to pay a tribute of homage to the literature of England, so rich in manifold glories, and to the greatest genius in the realm of narrative that that country has produced in our times.

"Book-ending" this achievement was the publication of two connected poetry and story collections: 1906's Puck of Pook's Hill and 1910's Rewards and Fairies. The latter contained the poem "If—". In a 1995 BBC opinion poll, it was voted Britain's favourite poem. This exhortation to self-control and stoicism is arguably Kipling's most famous poem.

Kipling sympathised with the anti-Home Rule stance of Irish Unionists. He was friends with Edward Carson, the Dublin-born leader of Ulster Unionism, who raised the Ulster Volunteers to oppose "Rome Rule" in Ireland. Kipling wrote the poem "Ulster" in 1912(?) reflecting this. The poem reflects on Ulster Day (28 September 1912) when half a million people signed the Ulster Covenant.


[edit] Effects of World War I

Memorial Plaque with the words, "Their Name Liveth for Evermore," selected by Kipling as member of the Imperial War Graves Commission. Brockville Museum, Brockville, ON, CanadaKipling was so closely associated with the expansive, confident attitude of late 19th century European civilization that it was inevitable that his reputation would suffer in the years of and after World War I. Kipling also knew personal tragedy at the time as his only son, John, died in 1915 at the Battle of Loos, after which he wrote "If any question why we died/ Tell them, because our fathers lied". It is speculated that these words may reveal Kipling's feelings of guilt at his role in getting John a commission in the Irish Guards, despite his initially having been rejected by the army because of his poor eyesight.[32] Partly in response to this tragedy, Kipling joined Sir Fabian Ware's Imperial War Graves Commission (now the Commonwealth War Graves Commission), the group responsible for the garden-like British war graves that can be found to this day dotted along the former Western Front and all the other locations around the world where Commonwealth troops lie buried. His most significant contribution to the project was his selection of the biblical phrase "Their Name Liveth For Evermore" found on the Stones of Remembrance in larger war graves and his suggestion of the phrase "Known unto God" for the gravestones of unidentified servicemen. He also wrote a two-volume history of the Irish Guards, his son's regiment, that was published in 1923 and is considered to be one of the finest examples of regimental history.[33] Kipling's moving short story, "The Gardener", depicts visits to the war cemeteries.

With the increasing popularity of the automobile, Kipling became a motoring correspondent for the British press, and wrote enthusiastically of his trips around England and abroad, even though he was usually driven by a chauffeur.


Kipling, aged 60, on the cover of Time magazine, 27 September 1926In 1922, Kipling, who had made reference to the work of engineers in some of his poems and writings, was asked by a University of Toronto civil engineering professor for his assistance in developing a dignified obligation and ceremony for graduating engineering students. Kipling was very enthusiastic in his response and shortly produced both, formally entitled "The Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer". Today, engineering graduates all across Canada are presented with an iron ring at the ceremony as a reminder of their obligation to society.[34] The same year Kipling became Lord Rector of St Andrews University in Scotland, a position which ended in 1925.


[edit] Death and legacy
Kipling kept writing until the early 1930s, but at a slower pace and with much less success than before. He died of a haemorrhage from a perforated duodenal ulcer on 18 January 1936, two days before George V, at the age of 70. (His death had in fact previously been incorrectly announced in a magazine, to which he wrote, "I've just read that I am dead. Don't forget to delete me from your list of subscribers.")

Rudyard Kipling's ashes were buried in Poets' Corner, part of the South Transept of Westminster Abbey, where many literary people are buried or commemorated.

Following his death, Kipling's work continued to fall into critical eclipse.[citation needed] Fashions in poetry moved away from his exact metres and rhymes. Also, as the European colonial empires collapsed in the mid-20th century, Kipling's works fell far out of step with the times. Many who condemn him feel that Kipling's writing was inseparable from his social and political views, despite Kipling's considerable artistry.[weasel words] They point to his portrayals of Indian characters, which often supported the colonialist view that the Indians and other colonised peoples were incapable of surviving without the help of Europeans, claiming that these portrayals are racist. An example supporting this argument can be seen in the mention of "lesser breeds without the Law" in "Recessional" and the reference to colonised people in general, as "half-devil and half-child" in the poem "The White Man's Burden".

However, this poem, and others, may be read as a deliberate satire by Kipling, warning of the dangers of colonialism and the oppression of native nations.


Photograph of General Sir Ian Hamilton, commander of the ill-fated Mediterranean Expeditionary Force in the Battle of Gallipoli in World War I, at Rudyard Kipling's funeral in 1936. Hamilton was a close personal friend of Kipling.Kipling's links with the Scouting movements were strong. Baden-Powell, the founder of Scouting, used many themes from The Jungle Book stories and Kim in setting up his junior movement, the Wolf Cubs. These connections still exist today. Not only is the movement named after Mowgli's adopted wolf family, the adult helpers of Wolf Cub Packs adopt names taken from The Jungle Book, especially the adult leader who is called Akela after the leader of the Seeonee wolf pack.[35]

Those who defend Kipling from accusations of racism point out that much of the apparent racism in his writing is spoken by fictional characters, not by him, and thus accurately depicts the characters. An example is the soldier who (in "Gunga Din") calls the title character "a squidgy-nosed old idol". However, in the same poem, Gunga Din is seen as a heroic figure; "You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din". They see irony or alternative meanings in poems written in the author's own voice, including "The White Man's Burden" and "Recessional".


Rudyard Kipling's grave, Poet's Corner, Westminster AbbeyDespite changes in racial attitudes and literary standards for poetry, Kipling's poetry continues to be popular with those who see it as "vigorous and adept" rather than "jingling". Even T. S. Eliot, a very different poet, edited A Choice of Kipling's Verse (1943), although in doing so he commented that "[Kipling] could write poetry on occasions — even if only by accident!" Kipling's stories for adults also remain in print and have garnered high praise from writers as different as Poul Anderson, Jorge Luis Borges, and George Orwell. Nonetheless, Kipling is most highly regarded for his children's books. His Just-So Stories have been illustrated and made into successful children's books, and his Jungle Books have been made into several movies; the first was made by producer Alexander Korda, and others by the Walt Disney Company.

After the death of Kipling's wife in 1939, his house, "Bateman's" in Burwash, East Sussex was bequeathed to the National Trust and is now a public museum dedicated to the author. Elsie, the only one of his three children to live past the age of eighteen, died childless in 1976, and bequeathed his copyrights to the National Trust. There is a thriving Kipling Society in the United Kingdom.

In modern-day India, from where he drew much of material, his reputation remains largely negative especially amongst modern Hindu nationalists and "post-colonial" critics. However, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, 1st Prime Minister of India, always described Kipling's novel, Kim as his favourite book and, in November 2007, it was announced that his birthplace in the campus of the JJ School of Art in Mumbai will be turned into a museum celebrating the author and his works.[36]


[edit] Places named after Kipling

[edit] Canada
During the first decade of the twentieth century, at a time when Kipling was at the peak of his popularity, a town in southeast Saskatchewan, was named after him. (Initially, the community was known as "Rudyard", but the name was later changed to "Kipling" because another district already had the name Rudyard.) The welcome sign located at the entrance to the town depicts a scroll and feather with the name "Kipling" on it to symbolize his writing career. The town, home to about 1000 residents, now has a senior citizen's residential complex which bears the name "Rudyard Manor". The town of Kipling has become noted because of the now famous one red paperclip trade where a man managed to turn a paper clip into a house by means of trading. The house he finally ended up with is located in the town of Kipling, Saskatchewan.

Kipling Avenue, a major street in Toronto, (and consequently also the Kipling subway station and the nearby Kipling regional commuter rail station) is also named after him.[citation needed] There is a township near Kapuskasing, Ontario, named Kipling township which may possibly have been named after Kipling, though no confirmatory records exist.


[edit] United Kingdom
One of the boarding houses in the English boarding school Haileybury was renamed Kipling House, in his memory. (In 1942, Haileybury, or more formally, Haileybury and Imperial Service College, had absorbed the Imperial Service College, which had already absorbed Kipling's school, the United Services College.)

In Brighton, the Rudyard Kipling Primary School and nearby streets Rudyard Road, Rudyard Close and Kipling Avenue, in Woodingdean, are not far from where Kipling lived in Rottingdean.

In Sheffield there is a Rudyard Road and a Kipling Road just off Hillsborough Corner.

In the English Lake District (Gimmer Crag) there is a classic rock climb called "Kipling Groove" - so named by a North Country climber because it was "ruddy 'ard" (i.e. very difficult).


[edit] United States
When a railroad was being built along the north shore of Lake Michigan, the managing director, a fan of the writer, asked that two towns be named in Kipling's honour: hence Rudyard, Michigan and Kipling, Michigan. There is also a Rudyard, Montana, and a Kipling community in Kemper County, Mississippi (founded in the 1880s and then the size of a small town). There is a boy's summer camp in the town of Hebron, New Hampshire, named after Kipling's hero of The Jungle Book, Mowglis. The camp, founded in 1903, draws much from the Jungle Books characters, themes, and morality lessons. http://mowglis.org


[edit] Kipling and the re-invention of science fiction
Kipling has remained influential in popular culture even during those periods in which his critical reputation was in deepest eclipse. An important specific case of his influence is on the development of science fiction during and after its Campbellian reinvention in the late 1930s.

Kipling exerted this influence through John W. Campbell and Robert A. Heinlein. Campbell described Kipling as "the first modern science fiction writer", and Heinlein appears to have learned from Kipling the technique of indirect exposition — showing the imagined world through the eyes and the language of the characters, rather than through expository lumps — which was to become the most important structural device of Campbellian science fiction.

This technique is fully on display in With the Night Mail (1905) and As Easy As A. B. C (1912), both set in the 21st century in Kipling's Aerial Board of Control universe. These read like modern hard science fiction (there are reasons to believe this story was a formative influence on Heinlein, who was five when it was written and probably first read it as a boy). Kipling seems to have developed indirect exposition as a solution to some technical problems of writing about the unfamiliar milieu of India for British and American audiences. The technique reaches full development in Kim (1901), which influenced Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy.

Tributes and references to Kipling are common in science fiction, especially in Golden Age writers such as Heinlein and Poul Anderson, but continuing into the present day. The science fiction field continues to reflect many of Kipling's values and preoccupations, including nurturing a tradition of high-quality children's fiction in a moral-didactic vein, a fondness for military adventure with elements of bildungsroman set in exotic environments, and a combination of technophilic optimism with classical-liberal individualism and suspicion of government.


[edit] Swastika in old editions

Covers of two of Kipling's books from 1919 (l) and 1930 (r)Many older editions of Rudyard Kipling's books have a swastika printed on their covers associated with a picture of the elephant-headed Hindu god Ganesha. Since the 1930s this has raised the possibility of Kipling being mistaken for a Nazi-sympathiser, though the Nazi party did not adopt the swastika until 1920. Kipling's use of the swastika, however, was based on the sign's Indian meaning of good luck and well-being. He used the swastika symbol in both right and left facing orientations, and it was generally very popular at the time as well. Even before the Nazis came to power, Kipling ordered the engraver to remove it from the printing block so that he should not be thought of as supporting them. Less than one year before his death Kipling gave a speech (titled "An Undefended Island") to The Royal Society of St George on 6 May 1935 warning of the danger Nazi Germany posed to Britain.[37]


[edit] Works of Rudyard Kipling
See List of the works of Rudyard Kipling for a complete list.
See also Rudyard Kipling: Collected Works for lists of the collected volumes by type.
The Story of the Gadsbys (1888)
Plain Tales from the Hills (1888)
The Phantom Rickshaw and other Eerie Tales (1888)
The Light That Failed (1890)
Mandalay (1890) (poetry)
Gunga Din (1890) (poetry)
The Jungle Book (1894) (short stories)
The Second Jungle Book (1895) (short stories)
If— (1895) (poetry)
Captains Courageous (1897)
The Day's Work (1898)
Stalky & Co. (1899)
Kim (1901)
Just So Stories (1902)
Puck of Pook's Hill (1906)
Life's Handicap (1915) (short stories)

[edit] See also
Works of Rudyard Kipling
Rudyard Kipling: Collected Works
The White Man's Burden
Iron Ring
Recessional (poem)
My Boy Jack

[edit] References
^ The Times, 18 January 1936, p.12
^ a b c d e Rutherford, Andrew. 1987. General Preface to Oxford World's Classics Editions of Rudyard Kipling, in "Puck of Pook's Hill and Rewards and Fairies", by Rudyard Kipling. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-282575-5
^ a b c d e Rutherford, Andrew. 1987. Introduction to the Oxford World's Classics edition of "Plains Tales from the Hills", by Rudyard Kipling. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-281652-7
^ James Joyce considered Tolstoy, Kipling and D'Annunzio to be the "three writers of the nineteenth century who had the greatest natural talents", but that "he did not fulfill that promise". He also noted that the three writers all "had semi-fanatic ideas about religion, or about patriotism." Diary of David Fleischman, 21 July 1938, quoted in James Joyce by Richard Ellmann, p. 661, Oxford University Press (1983) ISBN 0-19-281465-6
^ Alfred Nobel Foundation (2006-09-30). Who is the youngest ever to receive a Nobel Prize, and who is the oldest?. nobelprize.org. Retrieved on 2006-09-30.
^ Birkenhead, Lord. 1978. Rudyard Kipling, Appendix B, “Honours and Awards”. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London; Random House Inc., New York.
^ Orwell, George (2006-09-30). Essay on Kipling. Retrieved on 2006-09-30.
^ Lewis, Lisa. 1995. Introduction to the Oxford World's Classics edition of "Just So Stories", by Rudyard Kipling. Oxford University Press. pp.xv-xlii. ISBN 0-19-282276-4
^ Quigley, Isabel. 1987. Introduction to the Oxford World's Classics edition of "The Complete Stalky & Co.", by Rudyard Kipling. Oxford University Press. pp.xiii-xxviii. ISBN 0-19-281660-8
^ Said, Edward. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. London: Chatto & Windus. Page 196. ISBN 0-679-75054-1.
^ Sandison, Alan. 1987. Introduction to the Oxford World's Classics edition of Kim, by Rudyard Kipling. Oxford University Press. pp. xiii–xxx. ISBN 0-19-281674-8.
^ Douglas Kerr, University of Hong Kong. "Rudyard Kipling." The Literary Encyclopedia. 30 May. 2002. The Literary Dictionary Company. 26 September 2006. [1]
^ a b c d e Carrington, Charles. 1955. Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Work. Macmillan and Company, London and New York.
^ Flanders, Judith. 2005. A Circle of Sisters: Alice Kipling, Georgiana Burne-Jones, Agnes Poynter, and Louisa Baldwin. W.W. Norton and Company, New York. ISBN 0-393-05210-9
^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s Gilmour, David. 2002. The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, New York.
^ thepotteries.org (2002-01-13). did you know ..... The potteries.org. Retrieved on 2006-10-02.
^ Sir J.J. College of Architecture (2006-09-30). [2] Campus]. Sir J. J. College of Architecture, Mumbai. Retrieved on 2006-10-02.
^ "To the City of Bombay", dedication to Seven Seas, by Rudyard Kipling, Macmillan and Company, 1894.
^ Murphy, Bernice M. (1999-06-21). Rudyard Kipling - A Brief Biography. School of English, The Queen's University of Belfast. Retrieved on 2006-10-06.
^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n Kipling, Rudyard (1935). Something of myself. University of Newcastle (public domain). Retrieved on 2006-10-03.also: 1935/1990. Something of myself and other autobiographical writings. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-40584-X.
^ a b c d Carpenter, Henry and Mari Prichard. 1984. Oxford Companion to Children's Literature. pp. 296–297.
^ Pinney, Thomas (editor). Letters of Rudyard Kipling, volume 1. Macmillan and Company, London and New York.
^ Steel, Flora Annie. Tales of the Punjab (with illustrations by John Lockwood Kipling), 1894.. Macmillan and Company, London & New York. Retrieved on 2006-10-06.
^ Mallet, Phillip. 2003. Rudyard Kipling: A Literary Life. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. ISBN 0-333-55721-2
^ a b Ricketts, Harry. 1999. Rudyard Kipling: A life. Carroll and Graf Publishers Inc., New York. ISBN 0-7867-0711-9.
^ Kipling, Rudyard. 1920. Letters of Travel (1892–1920). Macmillan and Company.
^ Nicholson, Adam. 2001. Carrie Kipling 1862-1939 : The Hated Wife. Faber & Faber, London. ISBN 0-571-20835-5
^ a b Pinney, Thomas (editor). Letters of Rudyard Kipling, volume 2. Macmillan and Company, London and New York.
^ Kipling, Rudyard. 1899. The White Man's Burden. Published simultaneously in The Times, London, and McClure's Magazine (U.S.) 12 February 1899.
^ Snodgrass, Chris. 2002. A Companion to Victorian Poetry. Blackwell, Oxford.
^ Kipling, Rudyard. 1897. Recessional. Published in The Times, London, July 1897.
^ Webb, George. Foreword to: Kipling, Rudyard. The Irish Guards in the Great War. 2 vols. (Spellmount, 1997), p. 9.
^ Kipling, Rudyard. The Irish Guards in the Great War. 2 vols. (London, 1923)
^ http://www.ironring.ca/
^ http://www.scoutbase.org.uk/library/history/cubs/index.htm#Jungle
^ BBC News: "Kipling's India home to become museum".
^ Rudyard Kipling, War Stories and Poems (Oxford Paperbacks, 1999), pp. xxiv-xxv.

Charles Kingsley


Charles Kingsley (June 12, 1819 – January 23, 1875) was an English novelist, particularly associated with the West Country and north-east Hampshire.

[edit] Life & Character
Kingsley was born in Holne, Devon, the second son of a Rev. Charles Kingsley and his wife Mary. His brother, Henry Kingsley, also became a novelist. He spent his childhood in Clovelly and was educated at Bristol Grammar School before studying at King's College London, where he met Frances ‘Fanny’ Grenfell, with whom he fell almost immediately in love and married in 1844. In 1842, Charles left for Cambridge to read for Holy Orders at Magdalene College. He was originally intended for the legal profession, but changed his mind and chose to pursue a ministry in the church. From 1844, he was rector of Eversley in Hampshire, and in 1860, he was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge.

In 1872 Kingsley accepted the Presidency of the Birmingham and Midland Institute and became its 19th President.[1]

Kingsley died in 1875 and was buried in St Mary's Churchyard in Eversley.

In person Charles Kingsley was tall and spare, sinewy rather than powerful, and of a restless excitable temperament. His complexion was swarthy, his hair dark, and his eye bright and piercing. His temper was hot, kept under rigid control; his disposition tender, gentle and loving, with flashing scorn and indignation against all that was ignoble and impure; he was a good husband, father and friend. One of his daughters, Mary St Leger Kingsley (Mrs Harrison), became well known as a novelist under the pseudonym of "Lucas Malet."

Kingsley's life was written by his widow in 1877, entitled Charles Kingsley, his Letters and Memories of his Life, and presents a very touching and beautiful picture of her husband, but perhaps hardly does justice to his humour, his wit, his overflowing vitality and boyish fun.

Charles also received letters from Thomas Henry Huxley in 1860 and later in 1863, discussing Huxley's early ideas on Agnosticism.


[edit] Influences & Works
Kingsley's interest in history is shown in several of his writings, including The Heroes (1856), a children's book about Greek mythology, and several historical novels, of which the best known are Hypatia (1853), Hereward the Wake (1865), and Westward Ho! (1855).

His concern for social reform is illustrated in his great classic, The Water-Babies (1863), a kind of fairytale about a boy chimney-sweep, which retained its popularity well into the 20th century. Furthermore in The Water-Babies he developed in this literary form something of a purgatory, which runs counter to his "Anti-Roman" theology. The story also mentions the main protagonists in the scientific debate over Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, gently satirising their reactions.

He was sympathetic to the idea of evolution, and was one of the first to praise Darwin's book. He had been sent an advance review copy and in his response of 18 November 1859 (four days before the book went on sale) stated that he had "long since, from watching the crossing of domesticated animals and plants, learnt to disbelieve the dogma of the permanence of species."[2]. Darwin added an edited version of Kingsley's closing remarks to the next edition of his book, stating that "A celebrated author and divine has written to me that 'he has gradually learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that He created a few original forms capable of self-development into other and needful forms, as to believe that He required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the action of His laws'." [3]

Kingsley was influenced by Frederick Denison Maurice, and was close to many Victorian thinkers and writers, e.g. George MacDonald. Like many Victorians', his writings contain what today would be called racism, as when he wrote to his wife describing a visit to Ireland, "But I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that hundred miles of horrible country. I don't believe they are our fault. I believe there are not only many of them than of old, but they are happier, better, more comfortably fed and lodged under our rule than they ever were. But to see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black, one would not feel it so much, but their skins, except where tanned by exposure, are as white as ours." [4]

As a novelist his chief power lay in his descriptive faculties. The descriptions of South American scenery in Westward Ho!, of the Egyptian desert in Hypatia, of the North Devon scenery in Two Years Ago, are brilliant; and the American scenery is even more vividly and more truthfully described when he had seen it only by the eye of his imagination than in his work At Last, which was written after he had visited the tropics. His sympathy with children taught him how to secure their interests. His version of the old Greek stories entitled The Heroes, and Water-babies and Madam How and Lady Why, in which he deals with popular natural history, take high rank among books for children.

Kingsley also wrote poetry and political articles, as well as several volumes of sermons. His argument, in print, with the Venerable John Henry Newman, accusing him of untruthfulness and deceit, prompted the latter to write his Apologia Pro Vita Sua, which clearly shows the strength of Kingsley's invective and the distress it induced. He also wrote a preface to the 1859 edition of Henry Brooke's book The Fool of Quality in which he defends their shared belief in universal salvation.[5]

Kingsley's humour has escaped many; perhaps it can be found in another of his historical romances, named after its heroine, Hypatia, in which the arch neo-Platonist of end-of-empire Alexandria converts to Christianity at the moment of her obscene murder.


[edit] Legacy
Charles Kingsley's novel Westward Ho! led to the founding of a town by the same name - the only place name in England which contains an exclamation mark - and even inspired the construction of a railway, the Bideford, Westward Ho! and Appledore Railway. Few authors can have had such a significant effect upon the area which they eulogised. A hotel in Westward Ho! was named for him and it was also opened by him.

A hotel opened in 1897 in Bloomsbury, London, was named after Kingsley. It still exists, but changed name in 2001 to the Thistle Bloomsbury. The original reasons for the chosen name was that the hotel was opened by teetotallers who admired Kingsley for his political and ideas on social reform.


[edit] Bibliography
Saint's Tragedy, a drama
Alton Locke, a novel (1849)
Yeast, a novel (1849)
Twenty-five Village Sermons (1849)
Cheap Clothes and Nasty (1850)
Phaeton, or Loose Thoughts for Loose Thinkers (1852)
Sermons on National Subjects (1st series, 1852)
Hypatia, a novel (1853)
Glaucus, or the Wonders of the Shore (1855)
Sermons on National Subjects (2nd series, 1854)
Alexandria and her Schools (I854)
Westward Ho!, a novel (1855)
Sermons for the Times (1855)
The Heroes, Greek fairy tales (1856)
Two Years Ago, a novel (1857)
Andromeda and other Poems (1858)
The Good News of God, sermons (1859)
Miscellanies (1859)
Limits of Exact Science applied to History (Inaugural Lectures, 1860)
Town and Country Sermons (1861)
Sermons on the Pentateuch (1863)
The Water-Babies (1863)
The Roman and the Teuton (1864)
David and other Sermons (1866)
Hereward the Wake, a novel (1866)
The Ancient Régime (Lectures at the Royal Institution, 1867)
Water of Life and other Sermons (1867)
The Hermits (1869)
Madam How and Lady Why (1869)
At Last: A Christmas in the West Indies (1871)
Town Geology (1872)
Discipline and other Sermons (1872)
Prose Idylls (1873)
Plays and Puritans (1873)
Health and Education (1874)
Westminster Sermons (1874)
Lectures delivered in America (1875)

[edit] Notes and references
^ Presidents of the BMI, BMI, nd (c.2005)
^ Darwin 1887, p. 287.
^ Darwin 1860, p. 481.
^ L. P. Curtis, Jr, Anglo-Saxons and Celts (Bridgeport, Ct; 1968),p.84
^ Thomas Whittemore. The Modern History of Universalism: Extending from the Epoch of the Reformation to the Present Time. (1860). p. 378.
Darwin, Charles (1860), On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, London: John Murray, 2nd edition. Retrieved on 2007-07-20
Darwin, Charles (1887), Darwin, F, ed., The life and letters of Charles Darwin, including an autobiographical chapter., London: John Murray, (The Autobiography of Charles Darwin) Retrieved on 2007-07-20

John Keats


John Keats (IPA: /ˈkiːts/; 31 October 1795 – 23 February 1821[1]) was one of the principal poets of the English Romantic movement. During his short life, his work received constant critical attacks from the periodicals of the day, but his posthumous influence on poets such as Alfred Tennyson has been immense. Elaborate word choice and sensual imagery characterize Keats's poetry, including a series of odes that were his masterpieces and which remain among the most popular poems in English literature. Keats's letters, which expound on his aesthetic theory of "negative capability", are among the most celebrated by any writer.

Life
John Keats was born in 1795 at 85 Moorgate in London, where his father, Thomas Keats, was a hostler. The pub is now called "Keats The Grove", only a few yards from Moorgate station. Keats was baptised at St Botolph-without-Bishopsgate and lived happily for the first seven years of his life. The beginnings of his troubles occurred in 1804, when his father died from a fractured skull after falling from his horse. His mother, Frances Jennings Keats, remarried soon afterwards, but quickly left the new husband and moved herself and her four children (a son had died in infancy) to live with Keats' grandmother, Alice Jennings. There, Keats attended a school that first instilled in him a love of literature. In 1810, however, his mother died of tuberculosis, leaving him and his siblings in the custody of their grandmother. Keats' grandmother appointed two guardians to take care of her new "charges", and these guardians removed Keats from his old school to become a surgeon's apprentice. This continued until 1814, when, after a fight with his master, he left his apprenticeship and became a student at Guy's Hospital. During that year, he devoted more and more of his time to the study of literature. Keats travelled to the Isle of Wight in the spring of 1819, where he spent a week. Later that year he stayed in Winchester. It was in Winchester that Keats wrote Isabella, St. Agnes' Eve and Lamia. Parts of Hyperion and the five-act poetic tragedy Otho The Great were also written in Winchester.


Keats' grave in RomeFollowing the death of his grandmother, he soon found his brother, Tom Keats, entrusted to his care. Tom was suffering, as his mother had, from tuberculosis. Finishing his epic poem "Endymion", Keats left to work in Scotland and Ireland with his friend Charles Brown. However, he too began to show signs of tuberculosis infection on that trip, and returned prematurely. When he did, he found that Tom's condition had deteriorated, and that Endymion had, as had Poems before it, been the target of much abuse from the critics. On 1 December 1818, Tom Keats died from his disease, and John Keats moved again, to live in Brown's house in Hampstead. There he lived next door to Fanny Brawne, where she had been staying with her mother. He then quickly fell in love with Fanny. However, it was overall an unhappy affair for the poet; Keats' ardour for her seemed to bring him more vexation than comfort. The later (posthumous) publication of their correspondence was to scandalise Victorian society. In the diary of Fanny Brawne was found only one sentence regarding the separation: "Mr. Keats has left Hampstead." Fanny's letters to Keats were, as the poet had requested, destroyed upon his death.

This relationship was cut short when, by 1820, Keats began showing worse signs of the disease that had plagued his family. On the suggestion of his doctors, he left the cold airs of London behind and moved to Italy with his friend Joseph Severn. Keats moved into a house on the Spanish Steps, in Rome, where despite attentive care from Severn and Dr. John Clark, the poet's health rapidly deteriorated. He died in 1821 and was buried in the Protestant Cemetery, Rome. His last request was to be buried under a tomb stone reading, "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." His name was not to appear on the stone. Despite these requests, however, Severn and Brown also added the epitaph: "This Grave contains all that was mortal, of a YOUNG ENGLISH POET, who on his Death Bed, in the Bitterness of his heart, at the Malicious Power of his enemies, desired these words to be Engraven on his Tomb Stone" along with the image of a lyre with broken strings.


Life and Death masks, RomeShelley blamed his death on an article published shortly before in the Quarterly Review, with a scathing attack on Keats's Endymion. The offending article was long believed to have been written by William Gifford, though later shown to be the work of John Wilson Croker. Keats' death inspired Shelley to write the poem Adonais.'; Byron later composed a short poem on this theme using the phrase "snuffed out by an article". However Byron, far less admiring of Keats' poetry than Shelley and generally more cynical in nature, was here probably just as much poking fun at Shelley's interpretation as he was having a dig at his old fencing partners the critics. (see below, Byron's other less than serious poem on the same subject).

The largest collection of Keats's letters, manuscripts, and other papers is in the Houghton Library at Harvard University. Other collections of such material will be found at the British Library; Keats's House, Hampstead; Keats-Shelley Memorial House, Rome; and the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York.


[edit] Career and criticism

The Spanish Steps, Rome, Italy, seen from Piazza di Spagna. John Keats lived in the house in the right foreground.
John KeatsHis introduction to the work of Edmund Spenser, particularly The Faerie Queene, was to prove a turning point in Keats' development as a poet; it was to inspire Keats to write his first poem, Imitation of Spenser. He befriended Leigh Hunt, a poet and editor who published his first poem in 1816. In 1817, Keats published his first volume of poetry entitled simply Poems. Keats' Poems was not well received, largely due to his connection with the controversial Hunt. Keats produced some of his finest poetry during the spring and summer of 1819; in fact, the period from September 1818 to September 1819 is often referred to among Keats scholars as the Great Year, or the Living Year, because it was during this period that he was most productive and that he wrote his most critically acclaimed works. Several major events have been noted as factors in this increased productivity: namely, the death of his brother Tom, the critical reviews of Endymion, and his meeting of Fanny Brawne. The famous odes he produced during the spring and summer of 1819 include: Ode to Psyche, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on Melancholy, and To Autumn.

Keats developed his poetic theories, chief among them Negative Capability and The Mansion of Many Apartments, in letters to friends and family. In particular, he stated he wished to be a "chameleon poet" and to resist the "egotistical sublime" of Wordsworth's writing. Oscar Wilde, the aestheticist non pareil was to later write: "[...] who but the supreme and perfect artist could have got from a mere colour a motive so full of marvel: and now I am half enamoured of the paper that touched his hand, and the ink that did his bidding, grown fond of the sweet comeliness of his charactery, for since my childhood I have loved none better than your marvellous kinsman, that godlike boy, the real Adonis of our age[...] In my heaven he walks eternally with Shakespeare and the Greeks."

Percy Bysshe Shelley, in his elegy Adonais described Keats thusly:

He is made one with Nature: there is heard
His voice in all her music; from the moan
Of thunder to the song of night's sweet bird;
He is a presence to be felt and known
In darkness and in light, from herb and stone,
Spreading itself where'er that Power may move
Which has withdrawn his being to its own;
Which wields the world with never wearied love,
Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above.
He is a portion of the loveliness
Which once he made more lovely: he doth bear
His part, while the one Spirit's plastic stress
Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there
All new successions to the forms they wear.'
Adonais, St: 42 & 43.

William Butler Yeats was intrigued by the contrast between the "deliberate happiness" of Keats's poetry and the sadness that characterised his life. He wrote in Ego Dominus Tuus (1915):

I see a schoolboy when I think of him,
With face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window,
For certainly he sank into his grave
His senses and his heart unsatisfied,
And made – being poor, ailing and ignorant,
Shut out from all the luxury of the world,
The coarse-bred son of a livery-stable keeper –
Luxuriant song.
Wallace Stevens described Keats as the "Secretary for Porcelain" in Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas.

Let the Secretary for Porcelain observe
That evil made magic, as in catastrophe,
If neatly glazed, becomes the same as the fruit
Of an emperor, the egg-plant of a prince.
The good is evil's last invention.
Lord Byron wrote (in a parody of the nursery rhyme 'Who killed Cock Robin?') on Keats' death in 1821:

Who kill'd John Keats?
"I," says the Quarterly,
So savage and Tartarly;
"'Twas one of my feats."
Who shot the arrow?
"The poet-priest Milman
(So ready to kill man),
Or Southey, or Barrow."

[edit] Popular references
In allusion to Keat's complaint to Sir Isaac Newton for destroying the beauty of the rainbow, Richard Dawkins names his book "Unweaving the rainbow"
John Keats was mentioned in The Smiths' song "Cemetry Gates": "Keats and Yeats are on your side \ while Wilde is on mine".
Dan Simmons's science-fiction novels of the Hyperion Cantos feature two characters with the cloned body of John Keats, as well as his personality (reconstructed and programmed into an AI). Some of the main themes of these novels, as well as their names, draw upon John Keats's poems "Hyperion" and "Endymion".
In pop singer Natasha Bedingfield's 2005 single "These Words", Keats is mentioned along with Byron and Shelley.
A quote from Keats also appears in Phillip Pullman's novel The Subtle Knife, "...capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason -" (from a 21 Dec. 1817 letter by Keats on his theory of negative capability).
Two films about Keats's life are in pre-production as of July 2007: a period drama about Keats's romance with Fanny Brawne titled Bright Star, directed by Jane Campion, and a mockumentary 'grunge' musical based on Keats's letters and set in Seattle at the beginning of the 1990s, titled Negative Capability, directed by Daniel Gildark.
Keats in Hampstead, a play, written and directed by James Veitch and based on the poet's time at Wentworth Place, premiered in the garden of Keats House in July 2007.
A radio play The Mask Of Death on the final days of John Keats in Rome written by the Indian English poet Gopi Kottoor captures the last days of the young poet as revealed through his circle of friends (Severn), his poetry and letters.
The popular teen series Gossip Girl mention Keats throughout the novels as the male protagonist Daniel Humphrey's poetic hero and is referenced numerous times by the character.
The indie-punk band Tellison mention John Keats in the song Architects on their album Contact! Contact!
J. D. Salinger, in his novella Seymour: An Introduction, introduces the reader to a certain haiku, the authorship of which he attributes to his most complex fictional creation, Seymour Glass. The haiku reads as follows: "John Keats/ John Keats/ John/ Please put your scarf on." Obviously, this is in reference to Keats' unfortunate premature death by Tuberculosis, a condition aggravated by cold weather.

[edit] Bibliography
Addressed to Haydon text
Addressed to the Same text
Asleep! O sleep a little while, white pearl! text
A Song About Myself
Bards of Passion and of Mirth text
Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art (1819)
Calidore (a fragment)
The Day Is Gone, And All Its Sweets Are Gone
Dedication. To Leigh Hunt, Esq.
A Dream, After Reading Dante's Episode Of Paolo And Francesca text
A Draught of Sunshine
Endymion: A Poetic Romance (1817)
Epistle to John Hamilton Reynolds
Epistle to My Brother George
The Eve of Saint Mark
The Eve of St. Agnes (1819) text
The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream (1817)
Fancy (poem)
Fill For Me A Brimming Bowl text
Fragment of an Ode to Maia
Give Me Women, Wine, and Snuff
Happy Is England! I Could Be Content
Hither, Hither, Love
How Many Bards Gild The Lapses Of Time!
The Human Seasons
Hymn To Apollo
Hyperion (1818)
I had a dove
I stood tip-toe upon a little hill
If By Dull Rhymes Our English Must Be Chain'd
Imitation of Spenser text
In Drear-Nighted December
Isabella or The Pot of Basil (1818) text
Keen, fitful gusts are whisp’ring here and there
La Belle Dame sans Merci (1819) text
Lamia (1819)
Lines (poem)
Lines on Seeing a Lock of Milton's Hair
Lines on The Mermaid Tavern
Meg Merrilies
Modern Love (Keats)
O Blush Not So!
O Solitude! If I Must With Thee Dwell
Ode (Keats)
Ode on a Grecian Urn (1819) text
Ode on Indolence (1819)
Ode on Melancholy (1819) text
Ode to a Nightingale (1819) text
Ode to Apollo
Ode to Fanny
Ode to Psyche (1819)
Oh! how I love, on a fair summer's eve
On Death
On Fame text
On First Looking into Chapman's Homer (1816) text
On Leaving Some Friends At An Early Hour
On Peace (1814) text
On receiving a curious Shell
On Seeing the Elgin Marbles for the First Time
On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again
On the Grasshopper and Cricket
On the Sea text
On The Sonnet
The Poet (a fragment)
A Prophecy - To George Keats in America
Robin Hood
Sharing Eve's Apple
Sleep and Poetry
A Song of Opposites
Specimen of an Induction to a Poem
Staffa
Stanzas
Think Not of It, Sweet One
This Living Hand
To —
To a Cat
To A Friend Who Sent Me Some Roses
To a Lady seen for a few Moments at Vauxhall
To A Young Lady Who Sent Me A Laurel Crown
To Autumn
To Ailsa Rock
To Autumn (1819) text
To Byron text
To Charles Cowden Clarke
To Chatterton
To Fanny
To G.A.W. (Georgiana Augusta Wylie)
To George Felton Mathew
To Georgiana Augusta Wylie
To Haydon
To Homer
To Hope
To John Hamilton Reynolds
To Kosciusko
To My Brother
To My Brothers
To one who has been long in city pent
To Sleep
To Solitude
To Some Ladies
To the Nile
Two Sonnets on Fame
When I have fears that I may cease to be (1818) text
Where Be Ye Going, You Devon Maid?
Where's the Poet?
Why did I laugh tonight?
Woman! when I behold thee flippant, vain
Written in Disgust of Vulgar Superstition
Written on a Blank Space
Written on a Summer Evening
Written on the Day that Mr Leigh Hunt Left Prison
Written Upon the Top of Ben Nevis
You say you love



[edit] References
^ "He is gone--he died with the most perfect ease--he seemed to go to sleep. On the 23rd, about 4, the approaches of death came on. "Severn-I--lift me up--I am dying--I shall die easy--don't be frightened--be firm, and thank God it has come!" I lifted him up in my arms. The phlegm seemed boiling in his throat, and increased until 11, when he gradually sunk into death--so quiet-that I still thought he slept. I cannot say now-I am broken down from four nights' watching, and no sleep since, and my poor Keats gone. Three days since, the body was opened; the lungs were completely gone. The Doctors could not conceive by what means he had lived these two months. I followed his poor body to the grave on Monday, with many English. They take such care of me here--that I must, else, have gone into a fever. I am better now--but still quite disabled." Severn, in a letter to Charles Brown[1]
Goslee, Nancy (1985), Uriel's Eye: Miltonic Stationing and Statuary in Blake, Keats and Shelley, University of Alabama Press, ISBN 0817302433
Jones, Michael (1984), "Twilight of the Gods: The Greeks in Schiller and Lukacs", Germanic Review 59 (2): 49-56.
Lachman, Lilach (1988), "History and Temporalization of Space: Keats's Hyperion Poems.", Proceedings of the XII Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association, edited by Roger Bauer and Douwe Fokkema (Munich, Germany): 159-164.
Keats, John & Stillinger, Jack (1982), Complete Poems, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, ISBN 0674154304
Wolfson, Susan J., The Questioning Presence., Ithaca, New York, ISBN 0801419093

John Josselyn

John Josselyn (fl. 1638–1675) was a seventeenth-century English traveler to New England who wrote with credulity about what he saw and heard during his sojourn there before returning to England. Yet his books give some of the earliest and most complete information on New England flora and fauna in colonial times, and his outlook was later praised by Henry Thoreau, among others. Little is known about his life.

Josselyn's years of birth and death are not known, but he was born early in the seventeenth century to Sir Thomas Josselyn of Kent. He first visited New England in July 1638 when he presented his respects to Governor John Winthrop and to the Rev. John Cotton, two whom he delivered from Francis Quarles a translation of several psalms into English. He stayed in New England for 15 months, then visited again 24 years later, in 1663. Returning to England in 1671, Josselyn published New England's Rarities, discovered in Birds, Beasts, Fishes, Serpents, and Plants of that Country (the book included a picture of Boston in 1663).[1]

The evidence gleaned from New England Rarities and An Account of Two Voyages indicates he was well educated and may have been trained as a surgeon and physician. "His observations on the state of medicine have been highly valued", according to the University of Delaware Library.[2]


Critical evaluation
Josselyn was "a writer of almost incredible credulity", according to the anthology Colonial Prose and Poetry: The Beginnings of Americanism 1650–1710. "He is frank in criticism, somewhat affected in style. His interest is more in the curiosities of nature than in questions of religious or social polity. His credulity rises almost to genius, as when he tells us that the Indians disputed "in perfect hexameter verse".


[edit] Works
1671: New England's Rarities, discovered in Birds, Beasts, Fishes, Serpents, and Plants of that Country, reprinted with notes by Edward Tuckerman in 1865.
1674: An Account of the Voyages to New England, London: Printed for Giles Widdows. "[H]is work is among the earliest on the natural history of the region," according to the University of Delaware Library. "An extensive and quite accurate catalog of the fauna and flora of the region makes up much of the text."[2] A critical edition edited by Paul J. Lindholdt was published in 1988 by the University Press of New England, ISBN 0-87451-543-2
The Most Remarkable Passages from the First Discovery of the Continent of America to 1673, reprinted by Edward Tuckerman in 1865 along with New England's Rarities (see above)

Jerome K. Jerome


Jerome Klapka Jerome (May 2, 1859 – June 14, 1927) was an English author, best known for the humorous travelogue Three Men in a Boat.

Jerome was born in Walsall, at that time part of the county of Staffordshire, where there is now a museum in his honour, and was brought up in poverty in London.

Other works include the essay collections Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow and Second Thoughts of an Idle Fellow; Three Men on the Bummel, a sequel to Three Men in a Boat; and several other novels.

Early life
Jerome was the fourth child of Jerome Clapp (who later renamed himself Jerome Clapp Jerome), an ironmonger and lay preacher who dabbled in architecture, and Marguerite Jones. He had two sisters, Paulina and Blandina, and one brother, Milton, who died at an early age. Jerome was registered, like his father's amended name, as Jerome Clapp Jerome, and the Klapka appears to be a later variation (after the exiled Hungarian general György Klapka). Due to bad investments in the local mining industry, the family suffered poverty, and debt collectors often visited, an experience Jerome described vividly in his autobiography My Life and Times.

The young Jerome wished to go into politics or be a man of letters, but the death of both his parents in 1872, when he was 13 years old, forced him to quit his studies and find work to support himself. He was employed at the London and North Western Railway, initially collecting coal that fell along the railway, and remained there for four years.


[edit] Acting career and early literary works
In 1877, inspired by his older sister Blandina’s love for the theatre, Jerome had decided to try his hand at acting, under the stage name Harold Crichton. He joined a repertory troupe who tried to produce plays on a shoestring budget, often drawing on the meager resources of the actors themselves to purchase costumes and props. Jerome had later comically reflected on this period in On the Stage—and Off, where it is apparent that he was penniless at the time. After three years on the road and with no evident success, a 21 year old Jerome decided he had had enough with stage life, and sought other occupations. He tried to become a journalist, writing essays, satires and short stories, but most of these were rejected. Over the next few years he was a school teacher, a packer, and a solicitor’s clerk. Finally, in 1885, he had some success with On the Stage—and Off, a humorous book which publication had opened the door for more plays and essays. Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, a collection of humorous essays, followed in 1886. On June 21, 1888, Jerome married Georgina Elizabeth Henrietta Stanley Marris (a.k.a. Ettie), nine days after she had divorced her first husband. She had a daughter from a previous, five-year marriage, nicknamed Elsie (her actual name was also Georgina). The honeymoon took place on the Thames, a fact which was to have a significant influence on his next, and most important work, Three Men in a Boat.


[edit] Three Men in a Boat and later career
Jerome sat down to write Three Men in a Boat as soon as the couple returned from their honeymoon. In the novel, his wife was replaced by his longtime friends George Wingrave (George) and Carl Hentschel (Harris). This had allowed him to create comic (and non-sentimental) situations which were nonetheless intertwined with the history of the Thames region. The book, published in 1889, became an instant success and has remained in print until the present. Its popularity was such that the number of registered Thames boats went up fifty percent in the year following its publication, and it contributed significantly to the Thames becoming a tourist attraction. In its first twenty years alone, the book sold over a million copies worldwide. It has been adapted to movies, TV and radio shows, stage plays, and even a musical. Its writing style influenced many humorists and satirists in England and elsewhere. Its endurance can probably be attributed to the style and choice of a relatively unchanged location, which prevents the work from appearing dated[citation needed].

With the financial security the sales of the book provided, Jerome was able to dedicate all of his time to writing. He wrote a number of plays, essays and novels, but was never again able to recapture the success of Three Men in a Boat. In 1892 he was chosen by Robert Barr to edit The Idler (over Rudyard Kipling). The magazine was an illustrated satirical monthly catering to gentlemen (who, following the theme of the publication, appreciated idleness). In 1893 he founded To-Day, but had to withdraw from both publications because of financial difficulties and a libel suit.

In 1898, a short stay in Germany inspired Three Men on the Bummel, the sequel to Three Men in a Boat. While reintroducing the same characters in the setting of a foreign bicycle tour, the book was nonetheless unable to capture the life-force and historic roots of its predecessor[citation needed], and it enjoyed only a mild success. In 1902 he published the novel Paul Kelver, which is widely regarded as autobiographical. His 1908 play Passing of the Third Floor Back introduced a more sombre Jerome, which the public was reluctant to accept.[citation needed]


[edit] World War I and last years
Jerome volunteered to serve his country at the outbreak of the war but, being 56 years old, was rejected by the British Army. Eager to serve in some capacity, he volunteered as an ambulance driver for the French Army. The war experience was said to have dampened his spirit, as no doubt did the death in 1921 of his stepdaughter, Elsie.

In 1926, Jerome published his autobiography, My Life and Times. Shortly afterwards, the Borough of Walsall conferred on him the title Freeman of the Borough. In June 1927, on a motoring tour from Devon to London via Cheltenham and Northampton, Jerome suffered a paralytic stroke and a cerebral hemorrhage. He lay in Northampton General Hospital for two weeks before succumbing on June 14.[1] He was cremated at Golders Green and his ashes buried at St Mary's Church, Ewelme, Oxfordshire. Elsie, Ettie, and his sister Blandina are buried beside him. A museum dedicated to his life and works now exists at his birth home in Walsall.


[edit] Notes
There is a French graphic novel series named Jerome K. Jerome Bloche after the author.
George Wingrave is described in Three Men in A Boat as a bank clerk. Later in his career he became a senior manager in Barclays Bank.
The route down the Thames of Three Men in a Boat was reproduced in a 2005 BBC documentary by comedians Dara O'Briain, Rory McGrath and Griff Rhys Jones.
Jerome was good friends with J. M. Barrie, H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas Hardy, and Israel Zangwill.
Three Men in a Boat is well-known in India, Russia and Pakistan, because the book or excerpts from it had been required reading in public schools.[citation needed]
Connie Willis's time-travel novel To Say Nothing of the Dog has the characters of Three Men in a Boat make a brief appearance while they were on their Thames trip. The reference is to the full title of the original book; "Three Men in a Boat - To Say Nothing of the Dog".

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Novels
Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886)
Three Men in a Boat (1889)
The Diary of a Pilgrimage (1891)
Novel Notes (1893)
Second Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1898)
Three Men on the Bummel (aka Three Men on Wheels) (1900)
Paul Kelver, a novel (1902)
Tommy and Co (1904)
They and I (1909)
All Roads Lead to Calvary (1919)
Anthony John (1923)
The Love of Ulrich Nebendahl (1909)
The Philosopher's Joke (1909)

[edit] Collections
Told After Supper (1891)
John Ingerfield: And Other Stories (1894)
Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green (1895)
The Observations of Henry (1901)
The Angel and the Author and Others (1904)
American Wives and Others (1904)
The Passing of the Third Floor Back: And Other Stories (1907)
Malvina of Brittany (1916)
A miscellany of sense and nonsense from the writings of Jerome K. Jerome. Selected by the author with many apologies, with forty-three illustrations by Will Owen. 1924
Three Men in a Boat and Three Men on the Bummel (1974)
After Supper Ghost Stories: And Other Tales (1985)

[edit] Autobiography
My Life and Times (1926)

[edit] Anthologies containing stories by Jerome K. Jerome
Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror 1st Series (1928)
A Century of Humour (1934)
The Mammoth Book of Thrillers, Ghosts and Mysteries (1936)
Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1957)
Famous Monster Tales (1967)
The 5th Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories (1969)
The Rivals of Frankenstein (1975)
The 17th Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories (1981)
Stories in the Dark (1984)
Gaslit Nightmares (1988)
Horror Stories (1988)
100 Tiny Tales of Terror (1996)
Knights of Madness: Further Comic Tales of Fantasy (1998)
100 Hilarious Little Howlers (1999)

[edit] Short stories
The Haunted Mill (1891)
The New Utopia (1891)
The Dancing Partner (1893)
Christmas Eve in the Blue Chamber
Silhouettes
The Skeleton
The Snake
The Woman of the Saeter

[edit] Plays
The Maister of Wood Barrow: play in three acts (1890)
The Night of Feb. 14th. 1899: a play in nine scenes
Miss Hobbs: a comedy in four acts (1902)
Fanny and the Servant Problem, a quite possible play in four acts (1909)
The Master of Mrs. Chilvers: an improbable comedy, imagined by Jerome K. Jerome (1911)
The Celebrity: a play in three acts (1926)
Robina's Web ("The Dovecote," or "The grey feather"): a farce in four acts




[edit] References
^ [1] Jerome K. Jerome: The Man, from the Jerome K. Jerome Society. Accessed 6 April 2007
To share this blog with your friends please use above share buttons !