Page 144 - DENG203_ELECTIVE_ENGLISH_IV

Unit 8: Before a Midnight Breaks in Storm by Rudyard Kipling

Notes
Kipling, his wife and their three children Josephine, Elsie and baby John, moved into the
property as the writer wanted to be closer to his aunt - who lived next door. The
family remained in the home - for which Kipling reportedly paid three guineas a week -
for six years. In one journal, Kipling wrote about the property: ‘It was small, none too well
built, but cheap.’ While living there, he enjoyed one of the most productive periods of his
life, writing the poem Recessional in 1897 for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee.
Controversial poem The White Man’s Burden, about the obligation of white people to
rule over those from other cultural backgrounds, was written in 1899. Kim - a novel about
political conflict between Russia and Britain in Central Asia following the second Afghan
War - was also written in the house in 1902. The Just So stories - inspired by the bed-time
stories Kipling would tell his eldest daughter Josephine while they lived at the house was
also penned in 1902. Kipling illustrated the first edition of the stories, also. It is thought
that the name came from his daughter’s request for her father to repeat his stories for her
just as he had first told them, or ‘Just So’. Sadly Josephine died of pneumonia, which she
contracted on a family trip to visit Carrie’s mother in American in 1902. The family moved
to Burwash, East Sussex to a house called Bateman’s which dated back to 1634, following
her death. Someday Kipling, who by 1902 was one of the highest paid writers in the world,
moved from the house because his neighbours kept looking over the wall that surrounds
the property.
Kipling stayed at Bateman’s, around 50 miles from the Rotting dean house, until he died
in 1936.

United States

The couple settled upon a honeymoon that would take them first to the United States (including
a stop at the Balestier family estate near Brattleboro, Vermont) and then on to Japan. However,
when they arrived in Yokohama, Japan, they discovered that their bank, The New Oriental
Banking Corporation, had failed. Taking this loss in their stride, they returned to the U.S., back
to Vermont—Carrie by this time was pregnant with their first child—and rented a small cottage
on a farm near Brattleboro for ten dollars a month. According to Kipling, “We furnished it with
a simplicity that fore-ran the hire-purchase system. We bought, second or third hand, a huge,
hot-air stove which we installed in the cellar. We cut generous holes in our thin floors for its
eight-inch [20 cm] tin pipes (why we were not burned in our beds each week of the winter I never
can understand) and we were extraordinarily and self-centredly content.”

In this house, which they called Bliss Cottage, their first child, Josephine, was born “in three foot
of snow on the night of 29 December 1892. Her Mother’s birthday being the 31st and mine the
30th of the same month, we congratulated her on her sense of the fitness of things ...”
It was also in this cottage that the first dawnings of the Jungle Books came to Kipling: “. .
workroom in the Bliss Cottage was seven feet by eight, and from December to April the snow
lay level with its window-sill. It chanced that I had written a tale about Indian Forestry work
which included a boy who had been brought up by wolves. In the stillness, and suspense, of the
winter of ’92 some memory of the Masonic Lions of my childhood’s magazine, and a phrase
in Haggard’s Nada the Lily, combined with the echo of this tale. After blocking out the main
idea in my head, the pen took charge, and I watched it begin to write stories about Mowgli and
animals, which later grew into the two Jungle Books ”. With Josephine’s arrival, Bliss Cottage was
felt to be congested, so eventually the couple bought land—10 acres (40,000 m ) on a rocky
2
hillside overlooking the Connecticut River—from Carrie’s brother Beatty Balestier, and built
their own house.
Kipling named the house Naulakha, in honour of Wolcott and of their collaboration, and this
time the name was spelled correctly. From his early years in Lahore (1882–87), Kipling had

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