Mowgli’s Feral Campaign: The Jungle Books and the Americanisation of Empire

Abstract

Kipling’s first child, Josephine, was born deep in the Vermont Winter of 1892, almost on the turn of New Year. The ring of sleigh bells echoing over the snowbound farms, the young family made shift against the cold and counted themselves ‘extraordinarily and self-centredly content’.¹ With the troubles of Yokohama still in recent memory, there was a feeling of nervous expectation, of ‘stillness and suspense’,² about that first American winter. With the snowfall rising to the level of the windowsill, Kipling took to his workroom and watched his pen ‘begin to write stories about Mowgli and the animals, which later grew into the Jungle Books’.³