 |
 |
Solovyova
Victoria:
- As we know, Kipling's life
was quite
difficult during his stay in London from the age of 5 till 11.
Why didn't his
parents help him when needed? Didn't they know how hard it was
for Redyard? Did
it influence Redyard's relationships with his mother?
Actually,
young Rudyard
spent the years from the age of 5 to 11 with a family in
Southsea, which is
next to the naval port of Portsmouth, on the south coast of
England. (It was as
though he had been sent to live in
a suburb of Sevastopol.) Without
doubt,
his parents thought that they were doing the right thing for him
– all the
British expatriates (then referred to as Anglo-Indians) living
in India sent
their children home to be educated, because there were no
suitable schools in
India, and more importantly, India was considered unhealthy for
European
children. So it was the
accepted practice
to send European children home to England from the age of 5-6
onwards.
What
does seem strange, and
we do not really know the answer, is why Kipling’s parents did
not send him to
stay with one of his aunts, his mother’s sisters? In my view, Kipling’s
parents would not have
wanted to be under an obligation to any one of his mother’s
sisters, and there
had been an unfortunate visit to his aunt Louisa, when young
Rudyard had been
2-3 years old, when he had upset the household with his
tantrums. So it would
not have been thought unusual for
the two Kipling children to have been boarded with another
family – and the
family which Mrs. Kipling interviewed before deciding to entrust
her children
to them was not the same as it later became.
Captain Holloway, the man of the house, was definitely a
moderating
influence on his wife and son, but he died about 18 months after
the Kipling
children started to board with him, and his widow became
obsessed with what she
saw as her duty to bring the Kiplings up in a God-fearing path
of
righteousness.
Did
the Kipling parents
know of Kipling’s unhappiness? Probably
not. In his incomplete
autobiography, Something
of Myself, Kipling wrote “Often
and often afterwards, the beloved aunt asked me why I had never
told anyone how
I was being treated.” [The “beloved aunt” was his aunt Georgiana
Burne-Jones,
wife of Sir Edward Burne-Jones, a celebrated Victorian artist –
while he was at
Southsea, he spent one month every year with his aunt, which was
a time of
unalloyed pleasure for him.] Kipling
continued “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 the prison-house before they are
clear of it.” So, no,
the Kipling parents did not know,
until it was almost too late.
Did
it influence Kipling’s
relationships with his mother?
Seemingly, not. He
had a good
relationship with his mother for the rest of her life – she died
in 1910. However, his
mother’s relationship, later,
with his wife Carrie was much less happy, and this must have
caused some family
tensions.
-
We know that Kipling's
wife was American. Was it difficult for them to foster mutual
understanding
because of this fact?
No,
Kipling lived in
America, 1892-96, and became quite well assimilated into local
society, and
enjoyed the company of American friends.
One must remember that America, in the 1890s, was still
largely WASP
(White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant), especially in the north-east
states of New
England which was the America that Kipling knew. There were still many
people in 1890 whose
parents had been born as the subjects of King George III. And so
their values
were based on the same values as those of Kipling’s grandfather.
-
In his book 'the light
that failed' he wrote a lot
about loneliness. It seems to me that this very feeling was
familiar to the
author and he wanted to share it with the readers. Is it true?
A
good question. I don’t
know The Light that Failed (I’ve never really been able
to get on with
Kipling’s full length stories – my favorites are the stories he
wrote after
1892.) However. in the
years before he
wrote The Light that
Failed, he had
only been intermittently lonely – during his time in Southsea,
when his books
were his companions and when he was living in India, 1882-1889,
with his family,
during the hot weather, when his father and mother and sister
went to the hills,
and he was left alone in their bungalow with only the Indian
servants – even at
work he was on his own – the editor of the Civil
and Military Gazette, the only other European on the staff
had also gone to
the hills. So yes, he
was familiar with
loneliness. I would have
doubted that he
“wanted to share it with the readers”, but it was presumably
appropriate for the
plot of the story he was trying to tell, and because of his
experience, he was
able to give expression to it.
-
What was his relationship
with other writers? Particularly with Stevenson and Wilde?
He
admired Stevenson
enormously, and twice tried to get to the South Pacific to visit
him – once in
1891, when Kipling was in New Zealand, but there were no regular
shipping lines
running to Samoa, and he could not find a coasting schooner to
take him there:
and next year, 1892, while on his honeymoon with Carrie, they
had got as far as
Japan, intending to go on to the South Pacific and Samoa, when
they ran out of
money (their bank failed), so they never got there, and
Stevenson died two
years later.
As
for Wilde, I don’t know.
So far as I am aware, Kipling never actually met Wilde, but he
did write
disparagingly about the aesthetic types whom Wilde represented –
“But I consort
with long-haired things / In velvet collar-rolls / who talk
about the aims of
Art / and “theories” and “goals” / And moo and coo with
women-folk / About
their blessed souls.” That describes Wilde very well.