Imperial Subjects, Imperial Space in Kipling's Jungle Book

Abstract

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 Britain. This shift in national identity put citizens of the Empire in a state of contradiction. On the one hand, Dilke's phrase inspired a larger vision of the self, and on the veldt of South Africa and in the rugged hills of the Indian Northwest Frontier young Britons found vast spaces within which to realize a grander vision of themselves. On the other hand, in the scramble for Africa in the 1880s and 1890s Greater Britain found its expansion checked by rival European powers in many parts of the world. In a society that featured strong pressures and enticements to support an embattled Empire, Britons both home and abroad felt constrained to define their identity in narrow, nationally self-serving rather than large, international terms. This was especially true in the Empire itself, for in military cantonments, civil stations, and colonial settlements, Britons encountered social, professional, and political arrangements whose codes were often more severe and unbending than those they had left at home. These codes were especially inflexible in British India. As Francis G. Hutchins has pointed out, the English middle class in India often outdid their counterparts at home in their fidelity to English middle-class custom (108). The young heroes of juvenile adventure literature seemed to promise readers an escape from this contradiction. In the adventure fiction of Charles and Henry Kingsley, R. M. Ballantyne, G. A. Henty, W. H. G. Kingston, H. Rider Haggard, and Rudyard Kipling, male readers young and old embraced the myth that one could grow up to be robustly free and yet remain resolutely manly, Christian, and British. This myth flourished even more strongly in the juvenile magazines and papers, like Boy's

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