“The English in India had never seen themselves represented in quite this way, and it was all unmistakably done with a remarkable skill and wit.”
This can claim to be Kipling’s first independent commercial publication, as its antecedents were either privately printed, offprints, or collaborative books. The author was only 21 at the time, and had already spent four years as one of two Englishmen on the staff of The Civil and Military Gazette, which reported from Lahore on the life of the Civil Service and the Indian Army in Punjab. This gave him “a perfect position from which to acquire knowledge about almost everything that might be going on in Lahore. He was not an insider: to be that, one had to be a civil servant or a solder, and Kipling was neither … as a journalist, he could talk to anyone, and since he was neither civil nor military he had no institutional rules to follow.” Kipling began inserting his own poems under the heading of Departmental Ditties into the newspaper, and then produced this really rather brilliantly conceived edition, made up to look like a bundle of civil service memoranda.
By no means anodyne, many of the poems act as comic exposés of the colonial class: Jack Barrett gets sent to Quetta, which “killed him out hand”, by the man who marries his widow; Sleary proposes to the ungainly daughter of Judge Boffkin, who is pleased to get her off his hands and promotes Sleary to a well paid post, at which Sleary dumps her (by simulating epilepsy) and returns home on a good pension to marry his real love; Exeter Battleby Tring, despite a life devoted to railways, is denied the job of managing the line by the “Little Tin Gods”, who silence his mouth with rupees, keeping their Circle intact by preferring one of the right social class.
Overall light soiling and traces of dampstaining to wrappers, but an exceptionally good, unrestored copy: although the pink ribbon that originally passed through the slit on the flap is now lacking, the flap itself and its very vulnerable hinge to the overlapping flap is unrestored and intact. Rare in this condition, housed in a fine early 20th-century pull off case with an inner chemise.
Richards A7, citing 500 copies printed. All quotations from Richards & Pinney’s Kipling and his first Publisher. Rivendale Press. 2001.
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