SOURCE: McBratney, John. “Imperial Subjects, Imperial Space in Kipling's Jungle Books.” Victorian Studies 35, no. 3 (spring 1992): 277-93.

In the following essay, McBratney considers Kipling's concept of cultural identity as it relates to juvenile characters in the author's short fiction.

The romantic image of the child held a special value for Victorian readers. In an age in which individual energies were increasingly disciplined, routinized, and regulated within an industrialized society, that Wordsworthian “Seer blest,” whose joyful amplitude of being was set against the encroaching “Shades of the prison-house,” represented both the vestige and hope of individual powers unfettered by school, factory, church, or state.

This figure of the child was equally valued by a nation that, toward the end of the nineteenth century, was not simply industrial but self-consciously imperial—whose conception of itself was defined less by Little Englanders than by Charles Dilke's notion of a “Greater Britain.” This...