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Rudyard Kipling with his father, John Lockwood Kipling c.1880
Introduction
The personal papers of writer Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), held
on deposit from the National Trust at the University of Sussex, illuminate
every aspect of a long and extraordinary career, providing the Kipling
scholar with an incomparable resource. From Kipling’s earliest
days as a cub reporter and part-time poet in India, through years of
enormous popular and critical success with The Jungle Book (1894) and
Kim (1901), and into the years in which his campaigning spirit left
him out of step with public opinion and political thinking, the Archive
aids biographers and literary critics by detailing his affairs through
manuscripts, printed papers and personalia. Material ranges from notebooks
and sketchbooks to personal correspondence with monarchs and statesmen.
Three generations of Kiplings are represented, as the Archive also
contains papers relating to Rudyard’s father, John Lockwood Kipling,
and his three children, Josephine, John and Elsie. The truly international
career (Lahore, South Africa, Vermont, East Sussex) of a writer at
work in momentous times, yet increasingly at odds with social and political
developments, is amply represented in the main Archive and refracted
through seventeen further related collections. These papers have been
used frequently and extensively by leading biographers and the Archive
is an essential holding for anyone undertaking work on Kipling and
his world.
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