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Bezig met laden... Kipling Sahib: India and the Making of Rudyard Kipling 1865-1900 (2007)door Charles Allen
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A sensitive study of Kipling's Bombay childhood and lifelong interest in India, Kipling Sahib presents the author in a much more forgiving light. Allen's Kipling Sahib is an excellent, immensely readable, strikingly illustrated introduction to this lost complexity. Prijzen
Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay in 1865 and spent his early years there, before being sent, aged six, to England, a desperately unhappy experience. Charles Allen's great-grandfather brought the sixteen-year-old Kipling out to Lahore to work on The Civil and Military Gazette with the words 'Kipling will do', and thus set young Rudyard on his literary course. And so it was that at the start of the cold weather of 1882 he stepped ashore at Bombay on 18 October 1882 - 'a prince entering his kingdom'. He stayed for seven years during which he wrote the work that established him as a popular and critical, sometimes controversial, success. Charles Allen has written a brilliant account of those years - of an Indian childhood and coming of age, of abandonment in England, of family and Empire. He traces the Indian experiences of Kipling's parents, Lockwood and Alice and reveals what kind of culture the young writer was born into and then returned to when still a teenager. It is a work of fantastic sympathy for a man - though not blind to Kipling's failings - and the country he loved. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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Focusing on Kipling’s life until age thirty-five (when Kim was published), the greatest strength of Allen’s work is the placement of Kipling’s poems, short stories, and eventually books into the context of his life. Allen lays the groundwork of Kipling’s parents’ meeting, his birth and early years in India, his schoolboy days in England and finally his return to India. Allen then is able to correlate Kipling’s progress as a journalist, his family life and his travels with his published works. Fortunately, Allen does not assume a thorough knowledge of Kipling’s works, but describes and quotes from them enough to ensure that the reader understands how they relate to Kipling’s development.
There are fascinating tidbits throughout the book. Kipling’s mother Alice McDonald, was one of four sisters, daughters of a Methodist clergyman. Amazingly, all four sisters married men and/or produced sons who were quite famous in their own fields (I’ll be reading Circle of Sisters about the four sister soon). The descriptions of the summer social whirl in Simla are captivating and I was intrigued to learn that Kipling, a man of few intimate friends, became a close friend to writer H. Rider Haggard.
Having read Kipling Sahib I will go back and reread his works bolstered by a new understanding of their author. Highly recommended.