ABSTRACT
Rudyard Kipling readily identified with the spirit of adventure, though often he did so in terms which regard it as a compulsion, even a sickness, as when Dick Heldar is overcome by ‘the go-fever which is more real than many doctors’ diseases’, and yearns for the ‘unregenerate life’ he knew before coming to London. InLetters of Marque, however, Kipling’s series of reports for the Pioneer on his visit to Rajasthan in November 1887, it has a more benign form. Kipling figures in the letters as ‘the Englishman’, and the third person narration allows some broad comedy at his expense. If the Englishman in Letters of Marque is a diminished version of the adventurer, the same cannot be said of Peachey Carnehan and Daniel Dravot, the protagonists of ‘The Man who would be King’, who are in every respect built to a larger scale.
