“BAA BAA, BLACK SHEEP” (1888)
Summary
(The Week's Mews, December 22, 1888;
collected in Wee Willie Winkie
[Allahabad, A.H. Wheeler, 1889])Editor's Note
This story was written in Allahabad, in the house of Mr. and Mrs. S.A. Hill, where Kipling was then living as a paying guest. Mrs. Hill, the details of whose recollections are not always to be trusted, gives the following account of the story's composition:
The Week's News demanded a Christmas story which would fill a whole sheet of the paper. R.K. brooded over this awhile; the result was “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep,” which is a true story of his early life when he was sent with his little sister to England to be educated… It was pitiful to see Kipling living over the experience, pouring out his soul in the story, as the drab life was worse than he could possibly describe it … When he was writing this he was a sorry guest, as he was in a towering rage at the recollection of those days.
(“The Young Kipling,” Atlantic Monthly, 157, 413–14)In his Rudyard Kipling (New York, 1978), Lord Birkenhead, presumably on the authority of Kipling's sister Trix, states that
it was a grievous blow to the Lockwood Kiplings when they read these savage outpourings in cold print, and, unwilling to recognize their own contribution to this suffering, they tried to make Trix say it was all exaggerated and untrue, but even to comfort them she could not pretend that they had ever been happy,
(pp. 27–28)- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Something of Myself and Other Autobiographical Writings , pp. 135 - 170Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2013
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