Rudyard Kipling lived in Southsea as a child in the 1870s.

Extract from Rudyard Kipling, Something Of Myself.

From Chapter 3: Seven Years Hard [detailing Kipling’s life in Southsea from age 5–11, following on from his blissful early childhood in Mumbai]:

Then came a new small house smelling of aridity and emptiness, and a parting in the dawn with Father and Mother, who said that I must learn quickly to read and write so that they might send me letters and books.

I lived in that house for close on six years. It belonged to a woman who took in children whose parents were in India. She was married to an old Navy Captain, who had been a midshipman at Navarino, and had afterwards been entangled in a harpoon-line while whale-fishing, and dragged down till he miraculously freed himself. But the line had scarred his ankle for life – a dry, black scar, which I used to look at with horrified interest.

The house itself stood in the extreme suburbs of Southsea, next to a Portsmouth unchanged in most particulars since Trafalgar – the Portsmouth of Sir Walter Besant’s By Celia’s Arbour. The timber for a Navy that was only experimenting with iron-clads such as the Inflexible lay in great booms in the Harbour. The little training-brigs kept their walks opposite Southsea Castle, and Portsmouth Hard was as it had always been. Outside these things lay the desolation of Hayling Island, Lumps Fort, and the isolated hamlet of Milton. I would go for long walks with the Captain, and once he took me to see a ship called the Alert (or Discovery) returned from Arctic explorations, her decks filled with old sledges and lumber, and her spare rudder being cut up for souvenirs. A sailor gave me a piece, but I lost it. Then the old Captain died, and I was sorry, for he was the only person in that house as far as I can remember who ever threw me a kind word.

It was an establishment run with the full vigour of the Evangelical as revealed to the Woman. I had never heard of Hell, so I was introduced to it in all its terrors – I and whatever luckless little slavey might be in the house, whom severe rationing had led to steal food. Once I saw the Woman beat such a girl who picked up the kitchen poker and threatened retaliation. Myself I was regularly beaten. The Woman had an only son of twelve or thirteen as religious as she. I was a real joy to him, for when his mother had finished with me for the day he (we slept in the same room) took me on and roasted the other side.

If you cross-examine a child of seven or eight on his day’s doings (specially when he wants to go to sleep) he will contradict himself very satisfactorily. If each contradiction be set down as a lie and retailed at breakfast, life is not easy. I have known a certain amount of bullying, but this was calculated torture – religious as well as scientific. Yet it made me give attention to the lies I soon found it necessary to tell: and this, I presume, is the foundation of literary effort.

But my ignorance was my salvation. I was made to read without explanation, under the usual fear of punishment. And on a day that I remember it came to me that ‘reading’ was not ‘the Cat lay on the Mat,’ but a means to everything that would make me happy. So I read all that came within my reach. As soon as my pleasure in this was known, deprivation from reading was added to my punishments. I then read by stealth and the more earnestly.

Rudyard Kipling (30 Dec 1865–18 Jan 1936) was a prolific and popular writer of fiction and poetry, and the first English writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature (1907). He remains its youngest recipient, and on more than one occasion he was approached to become Poet Laureate, a position he declined. Henry James, a writer who was difficult to please, described Kipling as ‘the most complete man of genius, as distinct from fine intelligence, that I have ever known’. Kipling’s works include the novel Kim (1901), the children’s classics, The Jungle Book (1894), Just So Stories (1902), and Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906), and the poetry and song collections, *Barrack-Room Ballads (1892) and The Seven Seas. He also produced military works, travel writing, and speculative fiction. Still read in India, Kipling remains a controversial figure both there and in western literary scholarship, with great scrutiny being directed towards his views on Empire, race, and Englishness, with poems such as The White Man’s Burden seeming symptomatic of the problematical nature of his output. In a Literary Encyclopaedia piece, Douglas Kerr describes Kipling as ‘an author who can inspire passionate disagreement’ and whose ‘place in literary and cultural history is far from settled’. Kerr argues that ‘as the age of the European empires recedes, he is recognised as an incomparable, if controversial, interpreter of how empire was experienced’ and suggests that ‘an increasing recognition of his extraordinary narrative gifts, make him a force to be reckoned with’. Distaste for Kipling began in the 1930s, with George Orwell, a writer with his own painful experiences of British Imperial rule, describing Kipling in a 1936 essay as ‘a jingo imperialist […] morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting’.

Born in Mumbai, India, Kipling was India, where his artist father, John Lockwood Kipling, was an arts, crafts, and architecture teacher at the Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy School of Art. His mother, Alice Kipling, was a sister-in-law of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones, and one of four sisters who married remarkable men. His happy early years in India abruptly ended at the age of six when his parents took Rudyard and his younger sister Alice to England to be fostered for five years at Lorne Lodge, 4 Campbell Road, Southsea. Kipling suffered much cruelty and neglect at the hands of his foster family, the former merchant navy officer, Captain Pryse Agar Holloway, and Sarah Holloway, as detailed in the quotation above.

These desperately unhappy years were followed, at the age of twelve, by his time at the United Services College, Westward Ho!, near Bideford. Here his literary abilities were fostered, and Kipling memorialised this happy period of his life in the children’s novel, Stalky & Co. (1899). Kipling’s poor eyesight made a military career impossible, and in 1882 he returned to his parents (now in Lahore), and began working for the newspapers, the [Civil and Military Gazette] and [The Pioneer]. His fiction and poetry were included in these publications and were later published separately, quickly gaining Kipling a strong reputation in the literary world. In 1892, in London, he married Carrie Balestier, with Henry James giving the bride away. The couple had three children. For some time in the 1890s they lived in New England, but returned to the UK in 1896, living successively in Devon and Susex. By this time Kipling was approaching the height of his fame, and his Nobel Prize award followed in 1907. During WWI Kipling accepted an offer to produce war propaganda, and was highly critical of Germany, attacking the ‘rape of Belgium’ and the sinking of the Lusitania. However, he was also highly critical of the role of pre-war British politicians and military tacticians in the calamitous direction that the conflict took. Kipling also lost his son, John, to the Battle of Loos (1915). Kipling became a member of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, chose the inscription, ‘The Glorious Dead’ on the Cenotaph, and in 1923 published The Irish Guards In The Great War, a history of his son’s regiment. His literary output subsequently diminished in the post-war years. Critical of the emerging Labour Party as well as Bolshevism, Italian fascism and Nazism, Kipling’s views were broadly right-wing. He died on January 18, 1936 in London, and was buried in Poet’s Corner, Westminster Abbey. Kipling travelled widely during his lifetime, visiting Japan, South Africa, and North America.

If you have any comments, corrections, or suggestions in relation to the map please contact Dr Mark Frost, English Literature Department, University of Portsmouth: mark.frost@port.ac.uk