Inspiring Young Readers
Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling
I expect you know the old joke:
“Do you like Kipling?”
“I don’t know, I’ve never kippled”.
Well, that applies to me. His reputation as the laureate of British Imperialism has ensured I have always manoeuvred around his work despite periodical attempts by plenty of writers I respect to rehabilitate him. So, I’ve never read anything by Rudyard Kipling before and maybe starting with a set of stories for younger children might not be entirely representative of his work. But I was drawn to this Folio Society collection because my eye was caught by the distinctive black and white illustrations that accompany the stories and my interest was further sharpened when I discovered they had been done by Kipling himself and that they came along with quite lengthy narrative descriptions of what the drawings were depicting.
On his excellent website, Interesting Literature: Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle notes that:
“the Just So Stories…(it) has often been claimed, did for very young children’s literature what The Jungle Book had done for slightly more grown-up children. Moving away from the heavy-handed moralising and the condescending tone found in much Victorian and Edwardian children’s stories, Kipling offered, in the Just So Stories, a witty narrative voice and inventive little tales which talked to children rather than at them.”
I would also add to this that these are stories clearly designed for an adult to read out loud to a child and allow for quite a lot of theatricality when it comes to the performance. The stories follow a shape and formula, a series of repetitions that are so popular with the very young when they listen to stories. It is the need for this repetition and familiar story arc that also explains the title of the collection.
Tearle tells us:
“…they’re ‘just so’ stories because Kipling’s daughter Josephine (known as ‘Effie’), to whom he told many of these tales as bedtime stories, insisted that her father tell the stories to her ‘just so’, or in exactly the words she was used to. As Kipling later wrote of them, ‘in the evening there were stories meant to put Effie to sleep, and you were not allowed to alter those by one single little word. They had to be told just so; or Effie would wake up and put back the missing sentence. So at last they came to be like charms, all three of them – the whale tale, the camel tale, and the rhinoceros tale.’”
The stories themselves vary in length but are all slightly absurdist creation myths that seek to explain why the natural world is the way it is. So you get stories you’ll probably be familiar with even if you haven’t read them yourself – ‘How The Whale got his Throat’, ‘How the Camel got his Hump’, ‘How the Rhinoceros got his Skin’, ‘How the Leopard got his Spots’ and so on. What is perhaps less well known, and came as a surprise to me, were the two tales that deal with the human acquisition of language – ‘How the First Letter was Written’ and ‘How the Alphabet was Made’ both longer stories than the animal tales.
Like all top class authors writing for children, Kipling makes the stories here work at different levels – at face value as an amusing and playful reimaging of the workings of evolutionary biology and at another level a chance to speculate on the nature and essence of the natural world and what the relationships are between humanity and animal and animal and animal.
I do think it’s important to get yourself an edition of the Just So Stories that retain Kipling’s own illustration though because his drawings and the explanations of the drawings add another dimension to the words on the page. And if and when you do get a copy, get ready to have to read them out aloud: it transforms the experience even when you’re reading them on your own….
Terry Potter
June 2020