7.8 /10 1 Votes
Originally published 1899 | 3.9/5 Goodreads | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Similar Works by Rudyard Kipling, Classical Studies books | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Stalky & Co. is a novel by Rudyard Kipling, about adolescent boys at a British boarding school. It was first published in 1899 (following serialisation in the Windsor Magazine). Reflecting its origins, the novel is episodic in nature, with self-contained chapters. It is set at an unnamed school referred to as the College or the Coll., which is based on the United Services College in Devon, which Kipling attended. The character Beetle, one of the main trio, is partly based on Kipling himself, while the charismatic character Stalky is based on Lionel Dunsterville, M'Turk is based on George Charles Beresford, Mr King is based on William Carr Crofts., and the school Head, Mr. Bates, is based on Cormell Price.
Contents
- Rare and missing materials
- Students
- School administrators
- Further stories
- Posthumously published manuscript
- Television adaptation
- Texts of Stalky Co
- References
The stories have elements of revenge, the macabre, bullying and violence, and hints about sex, making them far from childish or idealised. For example, Beetle pokes fun at an earlier, more earnest, boys' book, Eric, or, Little by Little, thus flaunting his more worldly outlook. There is also some information about Stalky in later life. In his essay entitled “What We Can Expect of the American Boy,” Teddy Roosevelt disdained this novel, calling it “a story which ought never to have been written, for there is hardly a single form of meanness which it does not seem to extol, or of school mismanagement which it does not seem to applaud.”
Contents
The novel is a "fix-up" compilation of eight previously published stories, with a prefatory untitled poem beginning "Let us now praise famous men".
Different sources give conflicting information, unfortunately. It is unlikely, for example, that "Slaves of the Lamp, Part II" preceded "Part I." At times, both citations are given.
Rare and missing materials
A Stalky story manuscript, believed to have been written in 1897, was found in an English school library in 2004:
The "missing chapter" of Rudyard Kipling's celebrated book Stalky and Co has been found in a school library.
The manuscript, believed to have been written in 1897 - two years before the book's publication - was found in the archives of Haileybury, a private school in Hertfordshire, by Jeremy Lewins, a former Kipling Fellow at Magdalene College, Cambridge.
The work tells the "entirely new" story of three schoolboys who taunt an elderly major who cheats at golf near Appledore in North Devon, Dr Lewins said.
Kipling intended it to be the first chapter of Stalky and Co ...
The manuscript was given by the Kipling Estate to the United Services College after he died in January 1936. It was acquired by Haileybury School in 1962 when it merged with the United Services College and lodged in the archives, where it remained unnoticed.
Kipling expert Flora Virginia Milner Livingston, of Houghton Library, Harvard College Library, wrote in a 1972 Kipling bibliography:
No. 1 of the Stalky & Co. series in the Windsor Magazine was entitled "Stalky" and appeared in the "December, 1898" number of that Magazine. It was not included in the book, nor has it ever been reproduced.
However, the Kipling Society states that it was indeed collected in 1923, as one of the Land and Sea Tales for Scouts and Guides.
An expanded version of "Stalky & Co." called "The Complete Stalky and Co." was published by Doubleday and Company (New York) in 1946. It contains all of the 1899 stories plus five more. They appear in the following order:
Students
School administrators
The Dean, Mr. Bates
Further stories
More tales about Stalky & Co. appeared in magazines and later in collections: "Regulus" and "The Honours of War" in A Diversity of Creatures (1917); "Stalky" in Land and Sea Tales for Scouts and Guides (1923); "The United Idolators" and "The Propagation of Knowledge" in Debits and Credits (1926); and "The Satisfaction of a Gentleman" (with the others) in The Complete Stalky & Co (1929). Kipling describes "Stalky" as the first of the Stalky & Co tales to be written: it was originally published in The Windsor Magazine and McClure's Magazine in 1898.
Posthumously published manuscript
Kipling wrote an additional story about Stalky and Co., "Scylla and Charybdis", but it was never published in his lifetime. It depicts Stalky and his friends catching a colonel cheating at golf. The story existed only in manuscript form, attached to the end of the original manuscript copy of Stalky & Co..
On his death in 1936 Kipling bequeathed the manuscript of Stalky & Co to the Imperial Service Trust, the body that operated his old school, the Imperial Service College (formerly the United Services College). It passed into the possession of Haileybury and Imperial Service College when that school absorbed the Imperial Service College in 1942. The manuscript was displayed at Haileybury in 1962, in an exhibition to mark the school's centenary, and in 1989 it was moved permanently to the College archives after spending many years in a bank vault.
While the story "Scylla and Charybdis" was known to exist, it had never been transcribed or widely discussed. The school eventually decided to publish it, in association with the Kipling Society, in 2004.
Television adaptation
The tales were adapted for television by the BBC in 1982. The six-part series starred Robert Addie as Stalky and David Parfitt as Beetle. It was directed by Rodney Bennett and produced by Barry Letts.