Kipling’s Schoolroom: The Evolution of a Training Process

Abstract

As Kipling reminds us in Something of Myself, the blood of two Wesleyan ministers ran in his veins, and critics have suggested that, although he never met either grandparent, this distant influence may have accounted for the persistent strain of didacticism in his work. In Kipling’s hands, even the simplest children’s tales — e.g., the fust So Stories — seem, in some sense, to be told from the pulpit. However frolicsome their tone, a sub-text of “lessons” can be discerned. In this way, the storyteller in Kipling walked arm in arm with the moralist.