All the Mowgli Stories (Macmillan Collector's Library)

In early 1878, Kipling became a pupil at the United Services College at Westward Ho! near Bideford in Devon. It was a relatively new and relatively inexpensive school that prepared boys for imperial employment in either the army or the civil service in India or Great Britain. The headmaster was Cormell Price, a friend of Ruddy’s mother and the Burne-Jones family, who had been recruited from Haileybury, formerly the East India College. USC provided the background for Stalky & Co., and Ruddy’s time there was relatively happy; Cormell Price allowed him free range of the books in his study, where Kipling read widely and without outside direction, extending both his love of literature and his outlook on life. He wrote verse and became editor of the school magazine, and Price told Kipling’s parents, ‘You must not be too hopeful of his sticking to any profession but literature.’ Lockwood wrote to another friend that he proposed to ‘bring Rudyard out to India next year, and get him some newspaper work. Oxford we can’t afford. Ruddy thirsts for a man’s life and a man’s work’. Ruddy was an early developer – he had a noticeable moustache when he arrived at the school – and with Lockwood’s help and after a brief interview in London, Ruddy was appointed Assistant Editor of the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore, where the elder Kiplings were now living, and which he joined in October 1882. He was not quite seventeen.

Kipling’s duties at the CMG were demanding but unexciting, consisting largely of writing parochial stories, proofreading and assisting in the production of the paper each evening. But he endured what he called ‘seven years’ hard labour’ at the CMG and other papers in Lahore, Allahabad, Simla and Rawalpindi, acquiring a wide experience of India and the life of its ruling class. It also provided material for the 1866 publication of Departmental Ditties, which satirized civil and military government and was highly praised by Andrew Lang. Two years later, Kipling’s collection of short stories, Plain Tales from the Hills, was a sensation. By the end of 1888 his reputation was made in India, and in Britain he was spoken of as a coming man. He returned there in 1889 to be lionized by literary London. In January 1892 he married Carrie, the sister of his friend Woolcott Balestier, an American writer who had died of typhoid the year before. They moved to Brattleboro, Vermont, to be near Carrie’s family. It was there that all but one of the Mowgli stories were written, to be published with other stories in The Jungle Book and The Second Jungle Book in 1894 and 1895.

For much of the period 1892–1894, when all but one of the stories were written, Lockwood Kipling was staying with the young married couple in Brattleboro. His book Beast and Man in India: A Popular Sketch of Indian Animals in Their Relation with the People had been published the previous year, so Ruddy had access to an authority on animal behaviour in the jungles and elsewhere. His first published story, which is the penultimate entry in this collection and the last in which Mowgli appears, was ‘In the Rukh’. Where and how Kipling conceived of the idea of a human baby reared by wolves is uncertain. John Lockwood Kipling maintained that ‘India is probably the cradle of wolf-child stories’ and it is likely that Rudyard was familiar with Sir William Henry Sleeman’s pamphlet An Account of Wolves Nurturing Children in Their Dens. In 1867 a child aged about six, known as Dina Sanichar, was discovered in a cave in central India and appeared to have survived by scampering on all fours with a pack of wolves. He never learnt to speak or eat cooked meat and died in 1895. Muller, the Head of the Forestry Service in ‘In the Rukh’, guesses that Mowgli is a wolf-child from the calluses on his knees and elbows, a detail which Sleeman notes in his pamphlet. Muller remarks: ‘Sometimes you hear of dem in der census reports, but dey all die.’ ‘In the Rukh’ seems to have awakened what Kipling called his ‘dæmon’, and ‘the pen took charge.’ The stories of both Jungle Books were first published in quick succession across several magazines, and the back story of Mowgli emerged.