ABSTRACT
The first three chapters of this book examine the men and women of British India in the 1880s, how they acted and the thought that underlay their actions. The aim is to construct from their recorded words the audience for whom the young Kipling wrote and from whom he learned how to think about life. It is important to investigate his sources because their clear effect on Kipling puts into question a long-standing thread of argument, appearing most influentially in Edmund Wilson’s 1941 essay “The Kipling that Nobody Read”: the attempt to separate Kipling’s views on British policy in India or Ireland or South Africa from his best stories’ underlying ethic. Typical and summative of its contemporary form is Thomas Pinney’s 1986 characterization of a Kipling who had “two broadly different ways of looking at India,” one “official” and the other “more personal and humane” (1986, 18).1
