Books, Arts & Manners: The Day’s Work

Kipling’s India: Uncollected Sketches, 1884-1888, edited by Thomas Pinney (Schocken, 302 pp., $22)

The 56 short articles in this, volume, previously unknown and now identified by the editor, were written between 1884 and 1888 for the small group of English exiles in Lahore and the Punjab who read the Civil and Military Gazette. Though local and limited, these “unpretentious productions of a young journalist” offer a vivid evocation of social, religious, military, political, literary, and personal life in northern India in the late nineteenth century. They describe horse trading, training, and racing, balloon flights and railway travel, children, ceremonies, and cemeteries: “In a few more years the remaining slabs will tumble from their setting, and the cracked and riven tombs will settle down into mounds of fern and fungus.”

About the Author

Jeffrey Meyers

Mr. Meyers is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the author of John Huston: Courage and Art.

Featured Tags

Kipling’s India: Uncollected Sketches, 1884-1888, edited by Thomas Pinney (Schocken, 302 pp., $22)

The 56 short articles in this, volume, previously unknown and now identified by the editor, were written between 1884 and 1888 for the small group of English exiles in Lahore and the Punjab who read the Civil and Military Gazette. Though local and limited, these “unpretentious productions of a young journalist” offer a vivid evocation of social, religious, military, political, literary, and personal life in northern India in the late nineteenth century. They describe horse trading, training, and racing, balloon flights and railway travel, children, ceremonies, and cemeteries: “In a few more years the remaining slabs will tumble from their setting, and the cracked and riven tombs will settle down into mounds of fern and fungus.”