ABSTRACT
Rudyard Kipling remains the best-known “empire writer” for children, and his adult and children’s works have received a great deal of critical attention, particularly his India texts. But his Just So Stories for Little Children (1902), written and lavishly illustrated by Kipling himself, have received less attention. The Just So Stories began as a collection of three stories and accompanying illustrations published in St. Nicholas Magazine in 1897 under the title “The ‘JustSo’ Stories,” accompanied with a preface explaining the title:
Additional “Just-So” stories were published in Ladies’ Home Journal between 1900 and 1902, followed by a collected edition in 1902 called Just So Stories for Little Children. The Just So Stories collected and revised the 11 existing tales and included a new story, “How the Alphabet was Made.” Each short narrative is accompanied by a brief poem, often tenuously linked to the text, and two illustrations with captions, all authored/drawn by Kipling himself.2 Where the short stories for adult magazines had a preface explaining their status as children’s literature, the title of the collected edition clearly indicated the intended audience of the text. The Just So Stories, like the 1894 Jungle Books,
draw on a tradition of animal stories for the entertainment and moral instruction of children, but where the Jungle Books offer an explicit moral code in the Jungle Laws, the Just So Stories appear much less didactic.3 The first considered review of the Just So Stories came in 1902 from G.K. Chesterton, who linked the narratives to myths and fairytales, claiming that “[The Just So Stories] do not read like fairy tales told to children by the modern fireside, so much as like fairy tales told to men in the morning of the world. They see animals, for instance, as primeval men saw them” (Chesterton 1971, 273-4). For Chesterton, the Just So Stories capture how primitive man saw and understood the world around him-a worldview implicitly shared by the child being told the stories. But other than Chesterton, the stories were not generally discussed by Kipling’s contemporaries, who tended to focus on Kipling’s adult texts and what they revealed of his politics or literary skill. An anonymous review in the Athenaeum in 1902 comments that Kipling “understands young folk” and that the Just So Stories “deal a good deal in what is pure nonsense to the child,” implying that the stories are not intended to teach the child reader any specific lessons, but rather entertain them with “nonsense” invention.4 The Just So Stories were either mentioned fondly as “permanent additions to the books not to be denied to youth” or dismissed as “crude avuncularity”; either way, they were mere imaginative nonsense compared to Kipling’s “real” work.5
