ABSTRACT
Adrian Poole describes the classic Victorian narrative as characterised by optimism regarding the possibility of reconciling individuals and society. Fiction at the turn of the century, however, is dominated by a crisis of faith over the possibility of ever healing the schism between the public and the private world. Literary, social and political fragmentation present authors with the difficulties of identity; late Victorian writers exhibit an ‘unprecedented intransigence in terms of the opposition between the inner, personal and subjective, and the outer, public and objective’ (Poole, 1975:8-9). For Poole, Kipling represents a throwback, a modern writer who in a gesture of bad faith indulges in the pleasures of demarcation. Kipling ‘essay[s] a Dickensian confidence about naming’, thriving on his ‘ability to define “us” and “them”’. Unlike George Gissing, Thomas Hardy, Henry James and Joseph Conrad who are all ‘examining the disastrous consequences of man’s propensity for naming the living and moving into fixity’, Kipling exalts in the fiction of absolute control that finds political justification in the ideas of imperialism (Poole, 1975:22-23).
