Aunt Judy, Ruskin, Carlyle

Abstract

Kipling’s boyhood and youth were passed during the period of the secularisation of middle-class children’s literature, previously dominated by Evangelical ‘realistic’ moral tales such as those of Mrs Sherwood. While these were still a powerful force, there were countercurrents. What was later to harden into an early-twentieth-century orthodoxy, the view that fairytale, folklore, legend and myth not only could but should form the basis of early moral education as the child re-enacted the history of mankind, was being shaped in the 1860s and 1870s. Kipling’s early reading was so catholic that no dominant trend can be isolated, yet it was indubitably rich in these areas — indeed, richer than most. In addition to his imbibing the usual Grimm, Andersen, Kingsley’s The Heroes and Aesop, his favourite ‘Aunt Georgie’ Burne-Jones read him The Arabian Nights and his honorary ‘Uncle Topsy’ (William Morris) tried out on him the Icelandic saga that he happened to be translating. At school he joined in a craze for Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus (SM, pp. 12–14).¹ The oral tradition of Indian storytelling came to him through his ayah and he extended his familiarity with it upon his return to India in 1882. He was a lifelong, if miscellaneous, collector of anthologies of and commentaries upon the mythic and folkloric.²

I also know, a dark Similitude Will on the Fancie more it self intrude And will stick faster in the Heart and Head, Than things from Similies not borrowed. (Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress)