30 Dec 2021
On This Day
30 December 2021 Cheryl

30 December 1865: Rudyard Kipling is born

Rudyard Kipling in 1892

In 1863, John Lockwood Kipling and Alice MacDonald met and courted at Lake Rudyard, a man-made reservoir in Staffordshire, England. They were so moved by the beauty of the area that when their first child was born, they named him for it. [1]

It was in Bombay, on 30 December 1865, that Joseph Rudyard Kipling was born to professor John Lockwood Kipling and his wife Alice, daughter of a Methodist minister.

Young Kipling’s early years in India were idyllic – he had exotic pets, was loved by his ayah from whom he learned the local language, and he had doting parents. The family was not rich, but they lived in comfort. When he was two, his mother took him to England for a visit. He was a spoiled child, and his relatives there were all very pleased when the little boy was taken back to India after his sister Alice was born. He grew up knowing he was not Indian, and not quite feeling at home in England either – all his life he had a feeling that he did not really belong anywhere.

In that era English children in India went ‘home’ to receive a proper British education. In 1871 Alice took her children to England and left them without any warning to be boarded and educated at Southsea. Six years went by before the two children saw their parents again. Kipling later wrote about this hideous experience in his powerful short story Baa Baa Black Sheep.

Rudyard Kipling would have loved to go to university, but the family didn’t have money for that, so instead he sailed for India, aged sixteen, to take up work as a journalist and to live once again with his parents. Soon he was seeing his poems and stories published and he made his fame as a writer early.

Kipling excelled at so many literary forms – he was a superb poet, novelist and letter writer. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries he was considered one of the finest short story writers in English. Henry James said “Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius, as distinct from fine intelligence, that I have ever known.” In 1907, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, as the first English-language writer to receive the prize, and at 41, its youngest recipient to date. He was also considered for the British Poet Laureateship and several times for a knighthood, but declined both.

Rudyard Kipling died on 18 January 1936, aged 70, and his ashes were interred at Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.