‘The writer is indebted to the Pioneer and Civil and Military Gazette’: Kipling, Newspapers, and Poetry

This paper takes its title quotation from the Contents page of the first edition of Departmental Ditties (1886). It argues that Kipling's polite notice of acknowledgement of the place of prior publication for his poems may usefully also be read as an (unintentional) declaration of literary indebtedness. In doing so, it takes up an invitation offered by Khwaja Jamiludin in The Tropic Sun (1974). Jamiludin asks us to imagine the impact on Kipling's literary work of his day job in Lahore at the Civil and Military Gazette (CMG) and, in particular, to imagine the impact of his reuse of telegraphed news, concerning events all over the world, to produce copy for the paper.

That impact, and Kipling's indebtedness, has been examined by Matthew Rubery in terms of Kipling's prose in The Novelty of the News (2009). Rubery describes a Kipling remarkably attuned and receptive to ways in which the traditions of personal story-telling reshaped themselves, in the nineteenth century, through and against an engagement with a “post-telegraphic world of impersonal intelligence transmitted from an unseen source.” This paper sets out to examine that impact and indebtedness in terms of Kipling's early poetry, which, though written in India primarily for what would have then been termed the Anglo-Indian audience, had also, through the subscription list of the CMG, an audience “up and down the Empire from Aden to Singapore” (The Idler, 1892).

Looking at the poems in their original places of publication, my paper focuses on the importance of the newspaper as a poetic medium for Kipling. It suggests that Kipling's work ‘repurposing’ telegrams influenced a poetic style which sought to make itself as ‘newsworthy’ as possible. On the level of the single poem, this involved the development of a style suited to the medium, which prioritized the easily detachable, short phrase whose summary nature, and popular, unlocalized, ‘British’ idioms lent itself to quotation and re-use. On a more political level, Kipling sought to exploit the immediate and intimate contact which newsprint offered to both give a sense of Anglo-Indian society to itself, and to place it within a 'greater Britain' based upon the imperial news network.

What is suggested, at least in terms of Kipling's poetry, is that this early work at Lahore offered the first version of a style that, while often dealing with local matters, aimed at a literary internationalism – a style which would later become more transatlantically inflected. Kipling sought, through newsprint, a new kind of global authorship. Kipling's imperial politics, much studied within approaches influenced by post-colonial studies, have remained in many ways curiously opaque.

This is certainly a result, in part, of the complexity of his literary art. Hence, what I hope to show is that Kipling's imperialism may be best understood not in terms of particular political positions, but more generally as a product of his understanding of the political importance of acquiring the widest, and yet most systematically intimate of readerships. 

 Dr. John Lee, Senior Lecturer at the University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom, has published widely on Shakespeare and Renaissance literature, and more recently has been working on Kipling. Organizer of a multidisciplinary national conference (2010) on Kipling's 'The Absent-minded Beggar', and a related special issue of the Kipling Journal (2011), he is the author of the Kipling entry in Oxford Bibliographies Online (2013), and has published articles on Kipling in the Kipling Journal, Essays in Criticism (2013), and the Journal of Media History (2014). He can be contacted at j.lee@bristol.ac.uk.