Kim

Abstract

In 1902, as the war in South Africa was coming to an end, Kipling was arranging the Just So Stories: in its volume form, twelve tales and twelve poems, with 23 full-page drawings and numerous smaller illustrations.¹ lie had begun them in very different circumstances. The first story, ‘How the Whale got his Throat’, had appeared in the 1897 Christmas issue of St Nicholas Magazine, in time for Josephine’s fifth birthday, followed in the next two months by ‘How the Camel got his Hump’ and ‘How the Rhinoceros got his Skin’, but all three must have been told to her many times before then, perhaps to reassure her in the months leading up to John’s birth in August 1897. The magazine version of ‘Flow the Whale got his Throat’ includes a preamble which admits her right over the stories, as the child who insisted that they must be told ‘just so’, and who discovered that some were morning stories, others stories for bedtime.² This was removed for the 1902 edition, but the completed volume confesses her absence, most openly in the poem attached to ‘How the Alphabet was Made’, the only one of the stories not to have been published separately:

For far — oh, very far behind, So far she cannot call to him,

Comes Tegumai alone to find The daughter that was all to him.