54 Facts About Kipling

1. Joseph Rudyard Kipling was an English novelist, short-story writer, poet, and journalist.

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2. Kipling was born in British India, which inspired much of his work.

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3. Kipling is seen as an innovator in the art of the short story.

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4. Kipling was sounded out for the British Poet Laureateship and several times for a knighthood, but declined both.

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5. Literary critic Douglas Kerr wrote: "[Kipling] is still an author who can inspire passionate disagreement and his place in literary and cultural history is far from settled.

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6. Kipling referred to the place as "the House of Desolation".

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7. Kipling was to be assistant editor of a local newspaper, the Civil and Military Gazette.

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8. Kipling sailed for India on 20 September 1882 and arrived in Bombay on 18 October.

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9. From 1883 to 1889, Kipling worked in British India for local newspapers such as the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore and The Pioneer in Allahabad.

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10. Former, which was the newspaper Kipling was to call his "mistress and most true love", appeared six days a week throughout the year, except for one-day breaks for Christmas and Easter.

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11. Kipling included most of them in Plain Tales from the Hills, his first prose collection, published in Calcutta in January 1888, a month after his 22nd birthday.

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12. Kipling was discharged from The Pioneer in early 1889 after a dispute.

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13. Kipling decided to use the money to move to London, the literary centre of the British Empire.

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14. Kipling was favourably impressed by Japan, calling its people and ways "gracious folk and fair manners".

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15. The Nobel Prize committee cited Kipling's writing on the manners and customs of the Japanese when they awarded his Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907.

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16. Kipling named this Naulakha, in honour of Wolcott and of their collaboration, and this time the name was spelt correctly.

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17. 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.

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18. Kipling loved the outdoors, not least of whose marvels in Vermont was the turning of the leaves each fall.

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19. Kipling described this moment in a letter: "A little maple began it, flaming blood-red of a sudden where he stood against the dark green of a pine-belt.

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20. In February 1896, Elsie Kipling was born, the couple's second daughter.

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21. Kipling wrote in a letter that it felt like being "aimed at with a decanter across a friendly dinner table.

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22. Kipling cultivated their friendship and came to admire the men and their politics.

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23. Kipling wrote articles published more widely expressing his views on the conflict.

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24. Kipling penned an inscription for the Honoured Dead Memorial in Kimberley.

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25. In 1897, Kipling moved from Torquay to Rottingdean, near Brighton, East Sussex – first to North End House and then to the Elms.

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26. In 1902, Kipling bought Bateman's, a house built in 1634 and located in rural Burwash.

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27. Kipling was offended by the German Emperor Wilhelm II's Hun speech in 1900, urging German troops being sent to China to crush the Boxer Rebellion to behave like "Huns" and take no prisoners.

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28. Kipling sympathised with the anti-Home Rule stance of Irish Unionists, who opposed Irish autonomy.

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29. Kipling was friends with Edward Carson, the Dublin-born leader of Ulster Unionism, who raised the Ulster Volunteers to prevent Home Rule in Ireland.

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30. Kipling wrote that the Irish countryside was beautiful, but spoiled by what he called the ugly homes of Irish farmers, with Kipling adding that God had made the Irish into poets having "deprived them of love of line or knowledge of colour.

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31. Kipling wrote the poem "Ulster" in 1912, reflecting his Unionist politics.

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32. Kipling admitted it was meant to strike a "hard blow" against the Asquith government's Home Rule bill: "Rebellion, rapine, hate, Oppression, wrong and greed, Are loosed to rule our fate, By England's act and deed.

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33. Kipling was a staunch opponent of Bolshevism, a position which he shared with his friend Henry Rider Haggard.

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34. Alongside his passionate antipathy towards Germany, Kipling was privately deeply critical of how the war was being fought by the British Army, complaining as early as October 1914 that Germany should have been defeated by now, and something must be wrong with the British Army.

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35. John Kipling was sent to Loos two days into the battle in a reinforcement contingent.

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36. Kipling was last seen stumbling through the mud blindly, with a possible facial injury.

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37. Kipling is said to have assuaged his grief by reading the novels of Jane Austen aloud to his wife and daughter.

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38. Kipling chose the inscription "The Glorious Dead" on the Cenotaph, Whitehall, London.

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39. Kipling hoped the United States would take on a League of Nations mandate for Armenia as the best way of preventing isolationism, and hoped that Theodore Roosevelt, whom Kipling admired, would again become president.

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40. Kipling was hostile towards communism, writing of the Bolshevik take-over in 1917 that one sixth of the world had "passed bodily out of civilization".

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41. In 1920, Kipling co-founded the Liberty League with Haggard and Lord Sydenham.

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42. In 1922 Kipling became Lord Rector of St Andrews University in Scotland, a three-year position.

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43. An admirer of Raymond Poincare, Kipling was one of few British intellectuals who supported the French Occupation of the Ruhr in 1923, at a time when the British government and most public opinion was against the French position.

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44. In 1924, Kipling was opposed to the Labour government of Ramsay MacDonald as "Bolshevism without bullets".

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45. Kipling believed that Labour was a communist front organisation, and "excited orders and instructions from Moscow" would expose Labour as such to the British people.

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46. Kipling used the swastika symbol in both right and left-facing forms, and it was in general use by others at the time.

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47. Kipling kept writing until the early 1930s, but at a slower pace and with less success than before.

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48. Kipling was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium in north-west London, and his ashes interred at Poets' Corner, part of the South Transept of Westminster Abbey, next to the graves of Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy.

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49. Kipling identified himself with the ruling power and not with the opposition.

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50. Kipling dealt largely in platitudes, and since we live in a world of platitudes, much of what he said sticks.

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51. Poet Alison Brackenbury writes "Kipling is poetry's Dickens, an outsider and journalist with an unrivalled ear for sound and speech.

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52. Kipling recorded several albums of Kipling's verse set to traditional airs, or to tunes of his own composition written in traditional style.

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53. In 1911, Kipling wrote the poem "The Reeds of Runnymede" that celebrated the Magna Carta, and summoned up a vision of the "stubborn Englishry" determined to defend their rights.

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54. In 1903, Kipling gave permission to Elizabeth Ford Holt to borrow themes from the Jungle Books to establish Camp Mowglis, a summer camp for boys on the shores of Newfound Lake in New Hampshire.

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