From Who's Who in British History published by Collins & Brown Limited 2000

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) Writer

The stories and verse that Kipling wrote at the turn of the century did much to shape public attitudes towards the British Empire and the worthiness of its purpose. Born in Bombay, the son of an art teacher and illustrator, he was educated in England (a miserable experience recaptured in some of his stories) before returning to India in 1882 as a newspaper reporter.

Nine years later he came back to England with an emerging reputation as an author and poet for both adults and children. His works on Indian, imperial, military and patriotic themes enjoyed huge commercial and literary success, Plain Tales from the Hills (1888), Barrack Room Ballards (1892), The Jungle Book (1894), Just So Stories (1902), Stalky & Co. (1899), and his generally acknowledged masterpiece Kim (1901) among them.

Kipling won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907. For all the success and seemingly jingoistic nature of the works, they were often double-edged in their depiction of the Raj and the British in India. Those in authority were often satirised, the ordinary soldier (his 'Tommy Atkins') was patronised, while those back in Britain were criticised for failing to comprehend the meaning and importance of Empire. Kipling subscribed to the gospels of hard work and progress as a remedy for those faults: therein lay much of his popular appeal and eventually the eclipse of his literary star.

In 1892 he married and moved to Vermont, USA, for four years. He saw war at first hand only when visiting South Africa in 1900. Through his mother Kipling was related to the painter Sir Edward Burne-Jones and the four times Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, and he was friends with many of the public figures of the 1910s and 1920s. Yet he became increasingly disilusioned and dispirited: neither electors nor elected seemed capable of defending Empire or his idealised visions of England, encapsulated in A School History of England (1911) and the children's stories Puck of Pook's Hill (1906) inspired by his Sussex home, Bateman's, purchased in 1902.

In spite of his warnings, he became convinced that the First World War, the Irish and the Indian questions all seemed to presage imperial decline, while personal sorrows crowded in. His only son John died in action in 1915 and his elder daughter Josephine had died of pneumonia in New York in 1899. In his latter years Kipling sought some solace in spiritualism, attempting to reach his loved ones. He was buried in Westminster Abbey as the Empire which he had celebrated was indeed entering its final phase.