ABSTRACT
Unless we understand Kipling’s affection for the wondrous and the effects he could achieve with its deployment, the apparently drastic shift in his work between 1889 and 1892 seems as extraordinary as anything in his fiction. How does the precocious young author of the cynical Simla tales and the gruesomely explicit “Dray Wara Yow Dee” connect with the Kipling of the Jungle Books and “The Ship that Found Herself”? The change seems not at all predicted by the work that has come before. And it was permanent. The Kipling who was praised in 1890 for his stark realism wrote nearly half his stories between 1892 and 1935 for children.1 Moreover, his stories for adults increasingly featured elements of fantasy. Before 1890, he had written only four of more than a hundred stories in which any event or person was fantastic. But from what its first readers took to be the brutal realism of “Bertran and Bimi” (“without any mixture of mystery and impossibility”—Johnson, 93) in January 1891, to “Teem-A Treasure Hunter” (narrated by a dog with a French accent) in 1936, fewer than half of Kipling’s stories are set in a realistic world. In the rest, the supernatural intervenes in an otherwise realistic situation (“ ‘They’,” “A Madonna of the Trenches,” “The Gardener”), the tale’s premise is fantasy (“As Easy as ABC” and all the Puck stories), or animals talk.2
