Life

Abstract

Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay on 30 December 1865, son of John Lockwood Kipling and of his wife, Alice, née Macdonald. Both the boy’s grandfathers were Methodist ministers, which may help to account for the Biblical flavour of his prose. Of his mother’s sisters, two married distinguished artists, Edward Burne Jones (1833–98) and Edward Poynter (1836–1919), and another became the mother of a Conservative prime minister, Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947). At the time of Kipling’s birth, his father, a designer and craftsman, had recently been appointed to a teaching post at the Bombay School of Art. A second child, ‘Trix’, was born in 1868.