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

A family dispute became the final straw. For some time, relations between Carrie and her Notes
brother Beatty Balestier had been strained, owing to his drinking and insolvency. In May 1896,
an inebriated Beatty encountered Kipling on the street and threatened him with physical
harm. The incident led to Beatty’s eventual arrest, but in the subsequent hearing, and the resulting
publicity, Kipling’s privacy was destroyed, and he was left feeling miserable and exhausted. In
July 1896, a week before the hearing was to resume, the Kiplings packed their belongings, left
the United States, and returned to England.

Devon

By September 1896, the Kiplings were in Torquay, Devon, on the southwestern coast of England,
in a hillside home overlooking the English Channel. Although Kipling did not much care for his
new house, whose design, he claimed, left its occupants feeling dispirited and gloomy, he
managed to remain productive and socially active. Kipling was now a famous man, and in the
previous two or three years, had increasingly been making political pronouncements in his
writings. The Kiplings had welcomed their first son, John, in August 1897. Kipling had begun
work on two poems, “Recessional” (1897) and “The White Man’s Burden” (1899) which were to
create controversy when published. Regarded by some as anthems for enlightened and duty-
bound empire-building (that captured the mood of the Victorian age), the poems equally were
regarded by others as propaganda for brazenfaced imperialism and its attendant racial attitudes;
still others saw irony in the poems and warnings of the perils of empire.
Take up the White Man’s burden—
Send forth the best ye breed—
Go, bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait, in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild—
Your new-caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.
—The White Man’s Burden
There was also foreboding in the poems, a sense that all could yet come to naught.
Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet.
Lest we forget—lest we forget!
—Recessional

A prolific writer during his time in Torquay, he also wrote Stalky & Co., a collection of school
stories (born of his experience at the United Services College in Westward Ho!) whose juvenile
protagonists displayed a know-it-all, cynical outlook on patriotism and authority. According to
his family, Kipling enjoyed reading aloud stories from Stalky & Co. to them, and often went
into spasms of laughter over his own jokes.

South Africa

In early 1898 the Kiplings travelled to South Africa for their winter holiday, thus beginning an
annual tradition which (excepting the following year) was to last until 1908. They always stayed

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