Before he left India at age twentyfour, Kipling's stories and poems had achieved considerable fame, and 1890 had been a literary annus mirabilis for him in London. Moreover, upon returning to England in 1896, Kipling became an "unofficial laureate" of the British Empire and its people. From a not at all highminded viewpoint, he wrote in verse of imperialist triumphs and defeats, illusions of peace, realities of war (particularly the conflict with the Boers of South Africa), local yet ancient history, and finally of World War I and its legacy.
Kipling was born on 30 December 1865 in Bombay, India, when it was a relatively secure colonial possession of Victorian England. His father was an architect and artisan who had gone to India purposefully to encourage, support, and restore native Indian art against the incursions of British business interests. Much like William Morris in England, John Lockwood Kipling sought in India to preserve, at least in part, and to copy styles of art and architecture which, representing a rich and continuous tradition of thousands of years, were suddenly threatened with extinction by an influx of new capital bent solely on immediate, commercial profit.
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