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From Roger Ayers, Dear George. I was unable to respond when you posed these questions but I am now convalescing and have had the time to look at them, since I have also been interested in the illustrations to Kipling's work. I have a couple of dozen books of magazines in which Kipling's work appeared between 1893 and 1908, mostly four or six months-worth bound together of the Pall Mall Gazette, Pearsons, Windsor Magazine and the Idler. In addition to illustrated first printings of Kipling's verse (for which I bought them) there are some of his stories and also many other illustrated stories by other authors. There is one Kipling poem in particular that demonstrates that the illustrator, G. Montbard, worked without reference to Kipling. For "Soldier an' Sailor Too" Montbard totally misunderstood that it was narrated by a soldier on a troopship about the relationship between the Army and the Royal Marines, since he depicts the narrator as a sailor on a warship and illustrates the lines "We've fought 'em on troopers and fought 'em in dock and drunk with 'em in between" with pictures of sailors and Marines carousing together and then fighting each other. Quite enough to make Kipling liken illustrators to slugs and wish to exterminate them. An interesting example of an illustrator asking Kipling for direction is in Kipling's response of 31 Oct 1898 to an enquiry from L.Raven-Hill. (Letters, Pinney, Vol 2) This well regarded illustrator wanted details of how the three in Stalky & Co. tormented Sefton and Campbell in "The Moral Reformers". Kipling says that he deliberately omitted the details from the story 'for moral and pious reasons' and refuses to provide them. Raven-Hill had to make do with a picture of a boy 'trussed for cock-fighting' taken from the description in the text. My own thoughts on 'The Gardener' can be read in the Kipling Journal No 308 ( Dec 2003), also available on the on-line archive on the Kipling Society website. As for the illustrations on your website, I think that the way in which the characters are depicted has a great deal more to do with an illustrator's convention in portraying various forms of emotion so that the reader, or possibly more importantly, someone skimming through a magazine for sale in a newsagents, gets a quick impression of what the story might be about. A young man in uniform, a contrite woman on a chair and then the woman looking shocked at a military cemetery - it says it all. They were, after all, commercial magazines and, apart from the change in fashion, I found similar figures in similar poses showing similar emotions in the magazines of 20 years before. Roger Ayers To: <[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 >