Barrack-Room Ballads

Rudyard Kipling

Jun 2003 · Sold by Penguin

About this ebook

Barrack-Room Ballads (1892) brought Rudyard Kipling instant success and established him as a “friend of the soldier.” At the time, British men generally enlisted to escape dire poverty, and the common soldier was held in low regard by the Victorian public—until he was needed to fight. Kipling had great compassion for the British soldier and chose to celebrate him while criticizing the Empire for its treatment of its fighting men. Told in the London Cockney dialect, Barrack-Room Ballads provided the public with a more insightful, sympathetic view of its soldiers. Featuring such famous poems as Tommy, Danny Deever, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, Mandalay, and the immortal Gunga Din, Barrack-Room Ballads eloquently demonstrates Kipling’s reputation as the poet laureate of the British Empire.
 
With anintroduction and annotations by Andrew Lycett

About the author

Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay, India, to British parents on December 30, 1865. In 1871 Rudyard and his sister, Trix, aged three, were left to be cared for by a couple in Southsea, England. Five years passed before he saw his parents again. His sense of desertion and despair were later expressed in his story "Baa Baa, Black Sheep" (1888), in his novel The Light That Failed (1890), and in his autobiography, Something of Myself (1937). As late as 1935, Kipling still spoke bitterly of the "House of Desolation" at Southsea: "I should like to burn it down and plough the place with salt." Kipling and his wife settled in Brattleboro, Vermont, where Kipling wrote The Jungle Book (1894), The Second Jungle Book (1895), and most of Captains Courageous (1897). By this time Kipling's popularity and financial success were enormous.In 1899 the Kiplings settled in Sussex, England, where he wrote some of his best books: Kim (1901), Just So Stories (1902), and Puck of Pook's Hill (1906). In 1907 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. By the time he died, on January 18, 1936, critical opinion was deeply divided about his writings, but his books continue to be read by thousands.

Andrew Lycett was educated at Charterhouse and went on to read modern history at Christ Church, Oxford. As a former foreign correspondent, he has traveled widely, specializing in Africa and the Middle East. A full-time author since the early 1990s, his books include highly regarded profiles of Ian Fleming, Dylan Thomas, Rudyard Kipling, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature as well as of the Royal Geographical Society. He lives in North London.