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Rudyard Kipling
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Plain Tales from the Hills, By Rudyard Kipling (World's Classics): Joseph Rudyard Kipling Paperback – July 19, 2016

by Rudyard Kipling (Author)
4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 153 ratings
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Plain Tales from the Hills (published 1888) is the first collection of short stories by Rudyard Kipling. Out of its 40 stories, "eight-and-twenty", according to Kipling's Preface, were initially published in the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore, Punjab, British India, between November 1886 and June 1887. "The remaining tales are, more or less, new." (Kipling had worked as a journalist for the CMG—his first job—since 1882, when he was not quite 17.) The title refers, by way of a pun on "Plain" as the reverse of "Hills", to the deceptively simple narrative style; and to the fact that many of the stories are set in the Hill Station of Simla—the "summer capital of the British Raj" during the hot weather. Not all of the stories are, in fact, about life in "the Hills": Kipling gives sketches of many aspects of life in British India. The tales include the first appearances, in book form, of Mrs. Hauksbee, the policeman Strickland, and the Soldiers Three (Privates Mulvaney, Ortheris and Learoyd). Joseph Rudyard Kipling ( 30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936) was an English journalist, short-story writer, poet, and novelist. Kipling's works of fiction include The Jungle Book (1894), Kim (1901), and many short stories, including "The Man Who Would Be King" (1888). His poems include "Mandalay" (1890), "Gunga Din" (1890), "The Gods of the Copybook Headings" (1919), "The White Man's Burden" (1899), and "If—" (1910). He is regarded as a major innovator in the art of the short story;[3] his children's books are classics of children's literature; and one critic described his work as exhibiting "a versatile and luminous narrative gift". Kipling was one of the most popular writers in the United Kingdom, in both prose and verse, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Henry James said: "Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius, as distinct from fine intelligence, that I have ever known."In 1907, at the age of 42, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the first English-language writer to receive the prize, and its youngest recipient to date. He was also sounded out for the British Poet Laureateship and on several occasions for a knighthood, both of which he declined.Kipling's subsequent reputation has changed according to the political and social climate of the age and the resulting contrasting views about him continued for much of the 20th century.George Orwell called him a "prophet of British imperialism". Literary critic Douglas Kerr wrote: "[Kipling] is still an author who can inspire passionate disagreement and his place in literary and cultural history is far from settled. But as the age of the European empires recedes, he is recognised as an incomparable, if controversial, interpreter of how empire was experienced. That, and an increasing recognition of his extraordinary narrative gifts, make him a force to be reckoned with."Rudyard Kipling was born on 30 December 1865 in Bombay, in the Bombay Presidency of British India, to Alice Kipling (née MacDonald) and John Lockwood Kipling. Alice (one of four remarkable sisters) was a vivacious woman about whom Lord Dufferin would say, "Dullness and Mrs. Kipling cannot exist in the same room."Lockwood Kipling, a sculptor and pottery designer, was the Principal and Professor of Architectural Sculpture at the newly founded Sir Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy School of Art in Bombay.......
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  1. Print length
    148 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publication date
    July 19, 2016
  4. Dimensions
    8 x 0.34 x 10 inches
  5. ISBN-10
    1535362545
  6. ISBN-13
    978-1535362542
  7. See all details
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Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (July 19, 2016)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 148 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1535362545
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1535362542
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 10.9 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 8 x 0.34 x 10 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 153 ratings

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Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling

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Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was born in Bombay in December 1865. He returned to India from England shortly before his seventeenth birthday, to work as a journalist first on the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore, then on the Pioneer at Allahabad. The poems and stories he wrote over the next seven years laid the foundation of his literary reputation, and soon after his return to London in 1889 he found himself world-famous. Throughout his life his works enjoyed great acclaim and popularity, but he came to seem increasingly controversial because of his political opinions, and it has been difficult to reach literary judgements unclouded by partisan feeling.

Customer reviews

4.1 out of 5 stars
4.1 out of 5
153 global ratings
Homeschool for older high schoolers.
5 Stars
Homeschool for older high schoolers.
I am adding two photos of the table of contents. This is a collection of short stories.Advice from someone who knows: American kids need context. Watch a few Agatha Christie movies or the Sean Connery film ”The Man Who Would Be King” before you tackle this book. You’ll need something visual for context for modern American kids. The “Out of Africa” movie is another good choice, if you don't mind the adultery.Kipling writes human nature – full of sin and deceit and manipulation and fear and lust and love and vice and vengeance. Some of the vengeance stories are absolutely hilarious!High achieving high schoolers like yours *need* Kipling. Reading Kipling helps us notice that human nature is unchanging. His writing is perfect for whiling away rainy winter days – Kipling wants to be read out loud.It is good to pair Kipling with some classical philosophy works – try Marcus Aurelius' "Meditations" (for similar philosophical themes) or Xenophon’s “Persian Expeditions” (for similar settings.)
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Top reviews from the United States

Petra DeVerona
5.0 out of 5 stars good book
Reviewed in the United States on August 8, 2013
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This book is a collection of short stories by Rudyard Kipling. If you haven't read anything by Kipling, this would be a great way to try him out as an author. If you have only read some of his more famous books (i.e. The Jungle Books, Kim), this will show you more of his talent. If you are a fan of his poetry, I would encourage you to check out his prose (this book would be a fine start. If you a fan of his writing in general and haven't read this, by all means treat yourself.
2 people found this helpful
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D. S. Winefield
4.0 out of 5 stars Nostalgia for 60 year olds
Reviewed in the United States on August 12, 2006
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I bought this book to recall the halcyon days of my secondary schooling in the years 1957 - 61. Then the book was an assigned text for all students in English in New Zealand. The language and the concepts were then frankly beyond the comprehension of 15 year olds. As I grew older, I became aware of the position Kipling held in the Late Victorian era, and the period following the end of the First World War.

I came to understand a little of what the British Empire meant in those times, and the great debt owed by the world to the British Army which subdued Iraq, Pakistan, and the Indian Continent for almost 200 years.

Without the benefit of the bomb, with a tiny armed service, and a desire to provide fair and equitable government, the Raj governed fearlessly through the efforts of the thirds sons of many of the great English Families, while the fourth sons provided the humanity of the Church. Patterns we could well emulate again today!

This was bread and butter to Kipling. In his early years as a huge supporter of the system, as a spiritualist after the death of his son in the First World War, and in his later years as the designer of the huge Military Cemetaries established in France and Belgium after the War to the Empire's dead, he truly became in his own words a "Builder of the Silent Cities".

In 2006, the concepts of his writings are remote from many. In terms of the trials of people, and their attempts to rise over their circumstances through a sense of duty and moral propriety, Kipling's works are without peer. For those starting out to discover him, start with "Stalky and Company", and move to this book, and his other works as extended learning. I hope you come to love his simple characters as I have, and that your School System, and its weird sense of Boyhood Literature does not destroy the desire to read Kipling until your late 60's

This book has brought great joy to someone in the prime of life, and brings back some important memories of Scouts, Church and Honour in a time when these are so sadly lacking.
41 people found this helpful
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JMG
5.0 out of 5 stars Classic Kipling
Reviewed in the United States on July 10, 2013
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Excellent series of short tales from Queen Victoria's India. Classic Kipling humor with occasional darker stories bordering on the macbre. A must for Kipling fans.
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Cirstie A Noble
3.0 out of 5 stars Mixed-bag of stories, some great, some...less so.
Reviewed in the United States on January 8, 2023
This collection of stories from Rudyard Kipling is a mixed bag--some are really good, and some are meandering, and some are outright unintelligible, in the case of the few that are written in the dialect of some of the soldiers. I tried to read those few out loud, which helped to a certain extent. I am a fan of Kipling--I liked Kim, and the Jungle Book, and some other, longer short stories, so I came to it with positive feelings. I enjoy the way he seems to be tongue-in-cheek poking fun at the British aristocrats and military in India. The unfortunate thing about Kipling is that, well, he lived in colonial India, and the underlying racism and otherizing of native Indians is cringingly evident, and can make a couple of the stories, not hard to read, but I feel like I am embarrassed for him, and the fact that the culture he lived in will make him increasingly unpalatable for modern readers. There are some gems though, and those who enjoy his writing will find a few stories in this collection that reflect what we love about Kipling.
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Sherri Miller
5.0 out of 5 stars Classic Lit!
Reviewed in the United States on June 25, 2016
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What is there to say? This is classic literature of a high caliber.
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1.0 out of 5 stars Describes the ordinary lives and times of British soldiers and ...
Reviewed in the United States on February 13, 2016
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Describes the ordinary lives and times of British soldiers and citizens during the British
Raj of Kipling's time. Interesting from a historical perspective.
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United States on April 24, 2016
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Excellent reading if you like visions of far away places. Kipling puts you there.
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sue hennessey
4.0 out of 5 stars Stories of the Raj.
Reviewed in the United States on March 27, 2016
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Kipling`s British Raj is a foreign country, the stories are from a long time past when the Empire was all consuming and the characters were unlike any we would recognise today, yet they resonate with us in the way of the lost generation of young men from 1914-1918. My grandparents would find these stories quite ordinary and also deliciously shocking. The book makes me feel very connected to his portrayals of the hapless and the ones with humanity & integrity.
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Rekha
5.0 out of 5 stars Every house should have this
Reviewed in India on February 20, 2019
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Been wanting to read this book , quite interesting stories .
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Client d'Amazon
1.0 out of 5 stars No page number
Reviewed in France on February 2, 2018
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This book has no page number, which makes the table of contents useless. One can hardly find each novel without searching the whole book page by page... Annotations are actually just the location of the first edition, and a summary most often re-citing sentences extracted from the text body.
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Tim Hill
1.0 out of 5 stars Don't buy this book!
Reviewed in Australia on September 25, 2020
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For reasons I can't understand, this text of this book has replaced many of Kipling's words with synonyms of his original words. It is as if this book has been translated from English into another language and then back into English.

Here's the first two sentences from this book:
"She became the daughter of Sonoo, a Hill-man, and Jadeh his spouse. One yr their maize failed, and two bears spent the night time in their only poppy-discipline just above the Sutlej Valley at the Kotgarth aspect; so, next season, they grew to become Christian, and brought their toddler to the Mission to be baptized."

Here's what Kipling actually wrote:
"She was the daughter of Sonoo, a Hill-man, and Jadeh his wife. One year their maize failed, and two bears spent the night in their only poppy-field just above the Sutlej Valley on the Kotgarth side; so, next season, they turned Christian, and brought their baby to the Mission to be baptized."

You don't want this book. It's worse in every way.
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Oliver Twist
5.0 out of 5 stars The British Abroad
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 26, 2018
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My understanding is that in India there are the Plains and there are the Hills (a euphemistic term for the Himalayas) so there is something of a pun carried in the title 'Plain Tales from the Hills'.

You could not wish to find forty more varied and penetrating stories about Anglo/Indian society under the Raj than those which make up this book. They provide us with a brilliant series of windows through which we can look into the social and administrative life of Simla, the summer capital of the Indian Empire. Besides this, they touch upon a very wide range of subjects which include suicide, (implied) transvestism, opium addiction and infant mortality; love variously lost, found and misplaced; careerism, charlatanry, sportsmanship and the supernatural. The brevity of the individual stories, coupled with what the publisher rightly calls their 'concentration of effect', means that very few of them will waste the reader's time.

Kipling was twenty when he began writing them, and twenty-two when they were first published in collected form. They were written in the latter half of the 1880s, when he was working as an assistant editor for the 'Civil and Military Gazette' in Lahore, north-western India (now Pakistan). It was this journalistic experience which brought him into daily contact with all sorts and conditions of life in India, and it was in the CMG (a daily newspaper) that these stories were first published, in the form of a series.

I think it is worth pointing out that if the British Empire in India was 'a middle-class paradise' - as one of the characters in these stories refers to it as being - then Kipling does take some pains to include the role played by the working class in its maintenance, principally by way of those tales which feature privates Learoyd, Ortheris and Mulvaney, Kipling's 'Soldiers Three'. There are also stories in this collection which penetrate quite deeply into the lives of the native population, of which 'In the House of Suddhoo' would be but one example, and I think it is true that Kipling did see a correlation between the Indian caste system and the British class system; referring to one British regiment, for example, as being 'high-caste'.

There are occasions in the 'Plain Tales' when I think that Kiplng does affect the manner and tone of voice of a man of considerably more years and experience than he actually had at the time he wrote them. As a result of this, one wonders how reliable his judgement of people and events actually is. Neverthless, one has to acknowledge that these stories were very popular at the time they were written, both amongst their intended local audience and, later, with the wider global readership. And to this day they remain amongst the most popular and widely read of his works. Given his remarkable talents as a storyteller, poet and prose stylist, it is not difficult to see why this is the case. Plus these forty short stories do provide us with a perhaps unparalleled contemporary insight into the values and functioning of Anglo/Indian society at the Victorian apex of the Raj. To this end, Kipling was the right man, in the right place, at the right time.

I suppose that Kipling's status as a journalist meant that he was somewhat semi-detached from the society which he describes. Being neither a military man, nor a member of the Indian Civil Service, possibly meant that he was not quite so dependant upon these institutions for preferment, or even for approval of what he was doing, as others might have been. Even so, he would have had to tread the social and political tightropes with some care, and he was certainly 'inside' enough to have been invited, or sent by his newspaper, to Simla (and other Hill stations) for 'the season'. Presumably in order to report upon their goings on. It is from these places and vantage points that he clearly gleaned a great deal of the material for the 'Plain Tales', and a stunningly good collection of stories they are, too.

Note: This review relates to the 'Oxford World's Classics' edition which contains an Introduction and General Preface by Andrew Rutherford, a chronology of Kipling's life and works, as well as Explanatory Notes for the Indian terms which the reader will encounter in the text.
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margaretshaw
4.0 out of 5 stars A useful edition
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 17, 2020
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Enjoying so far. Belong to a Kipling reading group and read several stories each week.
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