Dear George,
A quick off the cuff and partial answer. If you look through Pinney.
you'll find letters from RK to his American publishers, making all sorts of
suggestions about the magazine illustrations, of which the publishers took
not a blind bit of notice.
When I've got a moment, I'll try and find the reference for you - I
fancy it must be in Vol 2, because it's in my mind that it was writen when
he was at Naulakha.
Yours
Alastair Wilson
----- Original Message -----
From: "George Simmers" <[log in to unmask]>
To: "Alastair Wilson" <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, October 01, 2008 10:40 PM
Subject: Kipling and illustrators
>
> I'm wondering whether anyone knows if research has been done on Kipling
> and the artists who illustrated his stories in magazines.
> This train of thought has been sparked off by the (I think) rather good
> illustrations by J.Dewar Mills for 'The Gardener' in the Strand Magazine,
> May, 1926.
> I'm wondering whether Kipling chose which moments of the story to
> illustrate (I know that this was a question that Dickens, for example, was
> very picky about) and whether he would have discussed the story with
> illustrators.
> The 'Gardener' illustrations certainly seem to show that Mills had read
> the story sensitively. His pictures of Helen show her with very closed,
> rigid body language, which seems to contradict the authorial statement
> that she was 'open as the day' - but the pictures would maybe have helped
> readers to understand that that statement (and much else) is ironical and
> unreliable.
>
> For those who do not know the pictures, I have put two of them on my
> website at:
> http://greatwarfiction.wordpress.com/2008/09/27/the-gardener-in-the-strand/
>
> I'd be interested in any thoughts that occur to readers, on the pictures,
> or on the story.
>
> George
> --
> George Simmers's research blog is at:
> http://greatwarfiction.wordpress.com
>
>
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