Citizens of America

Abstract

On 3 February 1892 the Kiplings sailed from Liverpool on the SS Teutonic. Their plan was to escort Carrie’s mother and sister home and then make a honeymoon tour to the Far East, covering the costs of the trip with a series of travel letters for The Times, which would also be syndicated around the world by Alex Watt. They arrived in New York eight days later in a flood of winter sunshine, and then moved on to Brattleboro in Vermont, ending their journey with a midnight sleigh ride to the home of Carrie’s brother Beatty and his wife Mai, wrapped up against the cold in blankets and buffalo robes. Kipling already knew something of the landscape through the stories of Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman. Now he was enchanted by it, though the abandoned farms on the hill-sides testified to the harshness of an ‘iron-bound life … in a lean land’, for the women perhaps still more than for the men. The presence on the horizon of Mount Monadnock seemed a good omen; he knew the name from his reading of Emerson, and had come to associate it with ‘everything that was helpful, healing, and full of quiet’.¹