The Jungle Book

The Jungle Book (1894) is a collection of stories by English author Rudyard Kipling. The stories were first published in magazines in 1893-94. The original publications contain illustrations, some by the author’s father, John Lockwood Kipling. Kipling was born in India and spent the first six years of his childhood there. After about ten years in England, he went back to India and worked there for about six-and-a-half years. These stories were written when Kipling lived in Naulakha, the home he built in Dummerston, Vermont (just north of Brattleboro), in the United States. There is evidence the collection of stories was written for his daughter Josephine, who died in 1899 at six years of age of pneumonia; a rare first edition of the book with a poignant handwritten note by the author to his young daughter was discovered at the National Trust’s Wimpole Hall in Cambridgeshire in 2010.

    The tales in the book (as well as those in The Second Jungle Book which followed in 1895, and which includes five further stories about Mowgli) are fables, using animals in an anthropomorphic manner to give moral lessons. The verses of “The Law of the Jungle,” for example, lay down rules for the safety of individuals, families, and communities. Kipling nearly included everything he knew or “heard or dreamed about the Indian jungle” in the stories. Other readers have interpreted the work as allegories of the politics and society of the time. The best-known of them are the three stories revolving around the adventures of Mowgli, an abandoned “man cub” who is raised by wolves in the Indian jungle. The most famous of the other four stories are probably Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, the story of a heroic mongoose, and Toomai of the Elephants, the tale of a young elephant-handler. As with much of Kipling’s works, each of the stories is followed by a piece of verse.