Abstract
Rudyard Kipling is, without question, the most important writer on military matters in the Victorian period. Thackeray, his only real rival, might deal just as often with soldiers and soldiering, but Thackeray is always reflecting on a military order that belongs to the past, whereas Kipling writes of the present. There is, however, more to the issue than this, for Kipling’s works define a mood for the 1890s; the central aspect of this is his reinvention of militarism. As I have argued in previous chapters, the Victorian period saw the disappearance of the military code of the Wellington era. The army might have continued to cling on to its traditional values, but these values meant little to the country at large.1 In the 1880s, however, militarism began to re-emerge, but in a manner that was more often strident than coherent; for example, enthusiastic support for the British soldier abroad was not matched by any great enthusiasm for the army at home, or by any great readiness to pay for an effective army. The achievement of Kipling — or, at any rate, the achievement that makes him a key figure in the history of militarism — is that he re-establishes a link between the lives and values of the military and the lives and values of the people as a whole. Indeed, Kipling puts society back at one with the army for the first time since Waterloo.
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Notes
Gwyn Harries-Jenkins, in The Army in Victorian Society (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), p. 3, suggests that the army preserved its traditional ideas as late as the period of the Boer War.
On boys’ adventure stories, see Joseph Bristow, Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man’s World (London: HarperCollins, 1991).
See Geoffrey Best, ‘Militarism and the Victorian Public School’, in Brian Simon and Ian Bradley (eds), The Victorian Public School (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1975), pp. 129–46.
Edward M. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993), p. 188.
George du Maurier, Trilby (London: Penguin, 1994; first published 1894).
See Andrew Rutherford, The Literature of War: Five Studies in Heroic Virtue (London: Macmillan, 1978), p. 5.
Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981).
Rudyard Kipling, ‘His Private Honour’, Many Inventions (London: Macmillan, 1964; first published 1893), pp. 109–27.
See Edward M. Spiers, The Late Victorian Army, 1868–1902 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1992), p. 201.
Rudyard Kipling, Plain Tales from the Hills (London: Macmillan, 1964; first published 1888).
Rudyard Kipling, Soldiers Three (London: Macmillan, 1964; first published 1888).
Rudyard Kipling, ‘On Greenhow Hill’, Life’s Handicap (London: Macmillan, 1964; first published 1891), pp. 65–84.
For contemporary responses, see Roger Lancelyn Green, Kipling: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971).
Angus Wilson, The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Works (London: Secker & Warburg, 1977), p. 38.
David Masson, British Novelists and Their Styles; Being a Critical Sketch of the History of British Prose Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1859), pp. 227 and 223.
Rudyard Kipling, The Light That Failed (London: Penguin, 1992; first published 1891).
On Maisie as ‘new woman’, see Norman Page, A Kipling Companion (London: Macmillan, 1984), p. 143.
On the fin de siècle, see Sally Ledger and Scott McCracken, Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Rudyard Kipling, Traffics and Discoveries (London: Macmillan, 1949; first published 1904).
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© 1998 John Peck
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Peck, J. (1998). Kipling’s Militarism. In: War, the Army and Victorian Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230378803_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230378803_7
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