£1,063
Rare Books, Manuscripts, Maps & Photographs ft. the Library of the Late William St Clair | 683
Auction: 2 February 2022 at 10:00 GMT
[Lahore: Civil and Military Press Gazette, 1886]. Tall 8vo, one of 500 copies printed [Richards], original printed 'envelope' wrappers designed to look like a bundle of civil service papers, protective folder and slipcase in green half morocco, fold slightly holed, slipcase split
Note: This first edition of Rudyard Kipling's 1886 Departmental Ditties, and Other Verses constitutes not only a most unusually presented volume, but also his first independently published work, written when the author was only twenty-one.
Kipling, after eleven years' schooling in England, returned to India (the nation of his birth) in 1882 to pursue a career as a journalist. His initial sojourn in Bombay was something of a homecoming, having a marked impact on a young man whose 'English years fell away, nor ever, I think, came back full strength'. In 1894, he wrote of Bombay as:
Mother of Cities to me,
For I was born in her gate,
Between the palms and the sea,
Where the world-end steamers wait
He swiftly relocated to Lahore (in modern-day Pakistan) where his father had secured him a position as 'fifty per cent of the 'editorial staff' of the one daily paper of the Punjab'. His first years at the Civil and Military Gazette were, by his own admission, heavy work. Kipling quickly learned that that 'a man can work with a temperature of 104, even though the next day he has to ask the office who wrote the article'. It was during this period, in 1885, that he embarked on the project of writing a collection of short stories, Plain Tales from the Hills - some of which appeared in the Civil and Military Gazette as 'padding' before their 1888 publication in a single volume.
The present work is therefore Kipling's first work published outside the strictures of his journalistic career. Departmental Ditties is a collection of verse concerned with 'Anglo-Indian' life in the British Raj. It is important to note that Kipling used the term 'Anglo-Indian' to describe British residents in India, as opposed to those of dual Indian and British heritage. He stated that this collection was 'well received', by virtue of its subject matter 'dealing with things known and suffered by many'.
His abundant affection for India was evidently governed by his belief in, and adherence to the British colonial system to which his milieu belonged. His work as a journalist in this environment gave him access to local and military information; 'he could talk to anyone, and since he was neither civil [service] nor military he had no institutional rules to follow'. Much of his knowledge of officialdom in British India must have originated from his membership of the Punjab Club. Here he would meet men from the 'Army, Education, Canals, Forestry, Engineering, Irrigation, Railways, Doctors and Lawyers [...] each talking his own shop. It follows then that that 'show of technical knowledge' for which I was blamed later came to me from the horse's mouth'. The verses within this collection delineate the social interactions of his compatriots with (an often self-effacing) lively, satirical humour:
By reason of her marriage to a gentleman in power,
Delilah was acquainted with the gossip of the hour;
And many little secrets, of a half-official kind,
Were whispered to Delilah, and she bore them all in mind.
She patronised extensively a man, Ulysses Gunne,
Whose mode of earning money was a low and shameful one.
He wrote for divers papers which, as everybody knows,
Is worse than serving in a shop or scaring off the crows.
("Delilah")
The highly idiosyncratic presentation of this volume is thus explained by its contents and the environment in which it was conceived and consumed. The verses are concealed in printed 'envelope' wrappers, addressed to 'all Heads of Depa.... and all Anglo-Indians', from 'Rudyard Kipling ASSISTANT. DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC INFORMATION. LAHORE DISTRICT'. Thus, Departmental Ditties is humorously bound as a pastiche bureaucratic proclamation, its presentation thematically aligned to its contents, both of which delight in the world the British Raj had created for itself whilst gently mocking those who operated within its framework.
Resultantly, this edition (one of only five hundred) is not only a scarce survival from the author's early printed oeuvre, but an illuminating record of Kipling's formative career in India, and a revealing insight into both the cerebral bureaucracy and sensational tittle-tattle that pervaded the colonial sub-continent.