Plain Tales?

Abstract

No, they’re not. The contrast is striking between the stories which make up Plain Tales from the Hills (1888), and the verses collected in Departmental Ditties (1886). The verses are light and smart, with nothing in them to prefigure the formal and emotional strengths of Barrack-Room Ballads (1892). Kipling’s own account of them is revealingly inconsistent. In his posthumously published memoir, Something of Myself, he recalled Departmental Ditties as ‘newspaper verses on Anglo-Indian life … which, dealing with things known and suffered by many people, were well received’ (p. 108).¹ The implied audience here is local and communal. In the ‘Prelude’ to the volume, however, added in the first English edition (1890), Kipling had sounded a more portentous note. The writer, now in England, addresses the Anglo-Indians as ‘Dear hearts across the seas’, but they are no longer the main audience, as the final stanza makes clear:

I have written the tale of our life

For a sheltered people’s mirth,

In jesting guise — but ye are wise,

And ye know what the jest is worth.

(Departmental Ditties, p. ix)