Prof. Waller Hastings
Northern State University
Aberdeen, SD 57401

Rudyard Kipling

LIFE:   Kipling was born in 1865 in India and returned to England at age 6, first to live with an aunt who mistreated him (at least in his eyes), then after five years to attend the United Services College at Westward Ho! in Devonshire, where he imbibed "the English schoolboy code of honor and duty."  He returned to India at age 17 and remained there as reporter and writer for seven years, then moved back to England.   He did not again return to India, though much of his writing, and most of his significant works,  remained centered there. He married an American woman in 1892 and lived five years in Vermont, then returned to England after quarreling with his in-laws.  He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907, the first English author to do so.

His writings draw heavily on the Indian experience, usually from the perspective of English men and women living in colonial state - e.g., his poems often adopt the viewpoint of enlisted soldiers. 

 “How the Camel Got His Hump”

            This was one of a group of three stories, the first of the Just-So Stories, to be published in St. Nicholas Magazine (January 1898).  It and the other two stories originate in bedtime stories told to his daughter Josephine (Effie), who died in March of the following year: “…references to Effie suggest that, far from being regarded as a passive listener, such a child must be granted a status that approaches that of a collaborator” (Knoepflmacher 27).  Knoepflmacher suggests the derivation of the term “Just-So” stories from the narrator’s introduction to the first of these stories, “How the Whale Got His Throat”:

“…in the evening there were stories meant to put Effie to sleep, and you were not allowed to alter those by one single little word.  They had to be told just so; or Effie would wake up and put back the missing sentence.  So at last they came to be like charms, all three of them…” (28)

In all three of these earlier stories, the changes the animals underwent “were punitive rather than beneficial to the selfish protagonists” (31); in later stories like “The Elephant Child” and “How the Leopard Got Its Spots,” changes were more adaptive. 

            The Norton Anthology of Children's Literature treats this as an animal fable, and insofar as it presents a moral tale about proper behavior (the camel is punished for its unwillingness to work), it is; but it is also, as are many of the Just-So Stories (published 1902) a pourquoi story – i.e., a fanciful tale to explain why something has come to be.  This aspect of the story is emphasized in the very first sentence: “Now this is the next tale, and it tells how the Camel got his big hump.” (405) 

      The fable aspect of the story is supported by the verse moralizing that follows it (“…uglier yet is the hump we get/From having too little to do” 406), but we should note that the moral instruction might be somewhat undercut by the clear sense that submission to the demand to work is a sign of servitude or slavery – each of the other animals approaches the camel with an accessory that marks their relationship to human masters: saddle and bit for the horse, stick for the dog, yoke for the ox.  Discuss this undercurrent. 

      It is possible that Kipling was not himself aware of subverting his own message; he certainly developed an imperialist attitude about the superiority of white men to natives, and consequently of humans to animals – in his head, this is the natural order of things.

      Note the verbal touches in the story that mark it for oral delivery – the narratorial asides (“with the world so new-an-all” p. 405; “Djinns always travel that way because it is Magic” p. 405, “we call it ‘hump’ now not to hurt his feelings,”etc.)

Stalky and Company

      Note the contrast between the Stalky selection and Tom Brown’s Schooldays.  In the earlier work, Tom moves into the mainstream of the school boys, becoming an instant hero at rugby football, and the world seems ordered by a benign overlord, the headmaster.  In contrast, the world of Stalky is a world of arbitrary authority, in which cruelty and arrogance abound; the boys at the story’s center resist the social coercion of sports and take poetically fitting revenge on those who torment them. 

      This story, like Hughes’, is based in part on the author’s own experiences at school, but his was a less pleasant experience than Rugby.  There appears to be little sense of common cause among any of the boys here; the central triumvirate is asked “Why can’t you boys take any  interest in the honor of your house?” (1860), but not long after Stalky comments, “You’ve been here six years and you expect fairness.  Well, you are a dithering idiot.” (1861)  The failure of the school’s regimen to truly educate is indicated by the narrator’s nasty comment, “Outside his own immediate interests the boy is as ignorant as the savage he so admires…” (1865)

      Note that the boys are aware of their fictional antecedents; this particular adventure begins with a reading of Eric; or Little by Little, a very early school story.

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