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Rudyard Kipling
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==Childhood (1865β1882)== [[File:Malabarpoint governmenthouse bombay.jpg|thumb|upright=1.15|[[Malabar Hill|Malabar Point]], Bombay, 1865]] Rudyard Kipling was born on 30 December 1865 in [[Mumbai|Bombay]] in the [[Bombay Presidency]] of [[British Raj|British India]], to [[Alice Kipling]] (born MacDonald) and [[John Lockwood Kipling]].<ref name="carrington" /> Alice (one of the four noted [[MacDonald sisters]])<ref>Flanders, Judith (2005). ''A Circle of Sisters: Alice Kipling, Georgiana Burne-Jones, Agnes Poynter, and Louisa Baldwin''. W. W. Norton and Company, New York. {{ISBN|0-393-05210-9}}</ref> was a vivacious woman,<ref name="gilmour">[[#Gilmour|Gilmour]]</ref> of whom [[Frederick Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 1st Marquess of Dufferin and Ava|Lord Dufferin]] would say, "Dullness and Mrs Kipling cannot exist in the same room."<ref name="rutherford" /><ref>[http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/rg_rival1.htm "My Rival" 1885] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20171222051457/http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/rg_rival1.htm |date=22 December 2017 }}. Notes edited by John Radcliffe. kiplingsociety.co.uk</ref><ref>[[#Gilmour|Gilmour]], p. 32.</ref> John Lockwood Kipling, a sculptor and pottery designer, was the Principal and Professor of Architectural Sculpture at the newly founded [[Sir J. J. School of Art]] in Bombay.<ref name="gilmour" /> John Lockwood and Alice met in 1863 and courted at [[Rudyard Lake]] in [[Rudyard, Staffordshire]], England. They married and moved to India in 1865 after John Lockwood had accepted the position as Professor at the School of Art.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Kastan |first1=David Scott |title=The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature Volume 1 |date=2006 |publisher=Oxford University Press |page=202}}</ref> They had been so moved by the beauty of the Rudyard Lake area that they named their first child after it, Joseph Rudyard. Two of Alice's sisters were married to artists: [[Georgiana Burne-Jones|Georgiana]] to the painter [[Edward Burne-Jones]], and her sister Agnes to [[Edward Poynter]]. A third sister, Louisa, was the mother of Kipling's most prominent relative, his first cousin [[Stanley Baldwin]], who was [[Conservative Party (UK)|Conservative]] [[Prime Minister of the United Kingdom]] three times in the 1920s and 1930s.<ref>{{cite web |last=thepotteries.org |date=13 January 2002 |url=http://www.thepotteries.org/did_you/002.htm |title=did you know... |publisher=The potteries.org |access-date=2 October 2006 |archive-date=26 May 2012 |archive-url=https://archive.today/20120526040100/http://www.thepotteries.org/did_you/002.htm |url-status=live }}</ref> Kipling's birth home on the campus of the Sir J. J. School of Art in Bombay was for many years used as the dean's residence.<ref>{{cite news |last1=Ahmed |first1=Zubair |title=Kipling's India home to become museum |url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/7095922.stm |access-date=7 August 2015 |work=BBC News |date=27 November 2007 |archive-date=7 January 2009 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090107091311/http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/7095922.stm |url-status=live }}</ref> Although a cottage bears a plaque noting it as his birth site, the original building was torn down and replaced.<ref name="rkbirthplace">{{cite web |last=Sir J. J. College of Architecture |date=30 September 2006 |url=http://www.sirjjarchitecture.org/v2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=21&Itemid=30 |title=Campus |publisher=Sir J. J. College of Architecture, Mumbai |access-date=2 October 2006 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110728025442/http://www.sirjjarchitecture.org/v2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=21&Itemid=30 |archive-date=28 July 2011 }}</ref><ref name=":0" /> Some historians and conservationists take the view that the bungalow marks a site merely close to the home of Kipling's birth, as it was built in 1882 β about 15 years after Kipling was born. Kipling seems to have said as much to the dean when visiting J. J. School in the 1930s.<ref>{{cite news |last1=Aklekar |first1=Rajendra |title=Red tape keeps Kipling bungalow in disrepair |url=http://www.mumbaimirror.com/mumbai/others/Red-tape-keeps-Kipling-bungalow-in-disrepair/articleshow/40075245.cms |access-date=7 August 2015 |work=Mumbai Mirror |date=12 August 2014 |archive-date=7 March 2016 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160307153423/http://www.mumbaimirror.com/mumbai/others/Red-tape-keeps-Kipling-bungalow-in-disrepair/articleshow/40075245.cms |url-status=live }}</ref> [[File:Map british india kipling en.svg|right|thumb|250px|Map of places visited by Kipling in [[British India]]]] Kipling wrote of Bombay: <blockquote><poem>Mother of Cities to me, For I was born in her gate, Between the palms and the sea, Where the world-end steamers wait.<ref>Kipling, Rudyard (1894). "To the City of Bombay", dedication to ''Seven Seas'', Macmillan & Co.</ref></poem></blockquote> According to Bernice M. Murphy, "Kipling's parents considered themselves '[[Britons in India|Anglo-Indians]]' [a term used in the 19th century for people of British origin living in India] and so too would their son, though he spent the bulk of his life elsewhere. Complex issues of identity and national allegiance would become prominent in his fiction."<ref name="murphy">{{cite web |last=Murphy |first=Bernice M. |date=21 June 1999 |url=http://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/SchoolofEnglish/imperial/india/kipling-bio.htm |title=Rudyard Kipling β A Brief Biography| publisher=School of English, The Queen's University of Belfast |access-date=6 October 2006 |url-status=bot: unknown |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20121114033722/http://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/SchoolofEnglish/imperial/india/kipling-bio.htm |archive-date=14 November 2012 }}</ref> Kipling referred to such conflicts. For example: "In the afternoon heats before we took our sleep, she (the Portuguese ''[[Amah (occupation)|ayah]]'', or nanny) or Meeta (the Hindu ''bearer'', or male attendant) would tell us stories and Indian nursery songs all unforgotten, and we were sent into the dining-room after we had been dressed, with the caution 'Speak English now to Papa and Mamma.' So one spoke 'English', haltingly translated out of the vernacular idiom that one thought and dreamed in."<ref name="autobio" /> ===Education in Britain=== [[File:Rudyard Kipling 1865-1936 writer and Nobel Laureate lived here as a boy 1871-1877.jpg|thumb|left|upright|[[English Heritage]] [[blue plaque]] marking Kipling's time in Southsea, Portsmouth]] Kipling's days of "strong light and darkness" in Bombay ended when he was five.<ref name="autobio">{{cite web |url=http://ghostwolf.dyndns.org/words/authors/K/KiplingRudyard/prose/SomethingOfMyself/index.html |title=''Something of Myself'' |last=Kipling |first=Rudyard |year=1935 |access-date=6 September 2008 |url-status=bot: unknown |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140223004314/http://ghostwolf.dyndns.org/words/authors/K/KiplingRudyard/prose/SomethingOfMyself/index.html |archive-date=23 February 2014 }}</ref> As was the custom in British India, he and his three-year-old sister Alice ("Trix") were taken to the United Kingdom β in their case to [[Southsea]], [[Portsmouth]] β to live with a couple who [[Boarding house|boarded]] children of British nationals living abroad.<ref name="oxdnb">{{cite ODNB |id=34334 |title=Kipling, (Joseph) Rudyard (1865β1936) |orig-year=2004 |year=2011 |last=Pinney |first=Thomas}}</ref> For the next six years (from October 1871 to April 1877), the children lived with the couple β Captain Pryse Agar Holloway, once an officer in the [[Merchant Navy (United Kingdom)|merchant navy]], and Sarah Holloway β at their house, Lorne Lodge, 4 Campbell Road, Southsea.<ref name="Kipling R β A Very Young Person">{{cite web |last=Pinney |first=Thomas |year=1995 |url=http://www.kipling.org.uk/rg_veryyoung_notes.htm |title=A Very Young Person, Notes on the text |publisher=[[Cambridge University Press]] |access-date=6 March 2012 |archive-date=20 May 2013 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130520092440/http://www.kipling.org.uk/rg_veryyoung_notes.htm |url-status=dead }}</ref> Kipling referred to the place as "the House of Desolation".<ref name="autobio" /> In his autobiography published 65 years later, Kipling recalled the stay with horror, and wondered if the combination of cruelty and neglect that he experienced there at the hands of Mrs Holloway might not have hastened the onset of his literary life: "If you cross-examine a child of seven or eight on his day's doings (specially when he wants to go to sleep) he will contradict himself very satisfactorily. If each contradiction be set down as a lie and retailed at breakfast, life is not easy. I have known a certain amount of [[bullying]], but this was calculated [[torture]] β religious as well as scientific. Yet it made me give attention to the lies I soon found it necessary to tell: and this, I presume, is the foundation of literary effort."<ref name="autobio" /> [[File:Kiplingsengland3.jpg|thumb|upright=1.35|''Kipling's England'': A map of England showing Kipling's homes]] Trix fared better at Lorne Lodge; Mrs Holloway apparently hoped that Trix would eventually marry the Holloways' son.<ref name="oxfordchildren">Carpenter, Humphrey and Prichard, Mari (1984). ''Oxford Companion to Children's Literature''. Oxford University Press, pp. 296β297. {{ISBN|0192115820}}.</ref> The two Kipling children, however, had no relatives in England they could visit, except that they spent a month each Christmas with a maternal aunt Georgiana ("Georgy") and her husband, [[Edward Burne-Jones]], at their house, The Grange, in [[Fulham]], London, which Kipling called "a paradise which I verily believe saved me".<ref name="autobio" /> In the spring of 1877, Alice returned from India and removed the children from Lorne Lodge. Kipling remembers "Often and often afterwards, the beloved Aunt would ask me why I had never told any one how I was being treated. 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 a prison-house before they are clear of it."<ref name="autobio" /> Alice took the children during spring 1877 to Goldings Farm at [[Loughton]], where a carefree summer and autumn was spent on the farm and adjoining Forest, some of the time with [[Stanley Baldwin]]. In January 1878, Kipling was admitted to the [[United Services College]] at Westward Ho!, Devon, a school recently founded to prepare boys for the army. It proved rough going for him at first, but later led to firm friendships and provided the setting for his schoolboy stories ''[[Stalky & Co.]]'' (1899).<ref name="oxfordchildren" /> While there, Kipling met and fell in love with Florence Garrard, who was boarding with Trix at Southsea (to which Trix had returned). Florence became the model for Maisie in Kipling's first novel, ''[[The Light That Failed]]'' (1891).<ref name="oxfordchildren" /> ===Return to India=== Near the end of his schooling, it was decided that Kipling did not have the academic ability to get into Oxford University on a scholarship.<ref name="oxfordchildren" /> His parents lacked the wherewithal to finance him,<ref name="gilmour" /> and so Kipling's father obtained a job for him in [[Lahore]], where the father served as Principal of the [[National College Of Arts, Lahore|Mayo College of Art]] and Curator of the [[Lahore Museum]]. Kipling was to be [[sub-editor|assistant editor]] of a local newspaper, the ''[[Civil and Military Gazette]]''. He sailed for India on 20 September 1882 and arrived in Bombay on 18 October. He described the moment years later: "So, at sixteen years and nine months, but looking four or five years older, and adorned with real whiskers which the scandalised Mother abolished within one hour of beholding, I found myself at Bombay where I was born, moving among sights and smells that made me deliver in the vernacular sentences whose meaning I knew not. Other Indian-born boys have told me how the same thing happened to them."<ref name="autobio" /> This arrival changed Kipling, as he explains: "There were yet three or four days' rail to Lahore, where my people lived. After these, my English years fell away, nor ever, I think, came back in full strength."<ref name="autobio" />
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