Stalky & Co.

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Stalky & Co.
AuthorRudyard Kipling
CountryUnited Kingdom
LanguageEnglish
GenreSchool story
PublisherMacmillan (UK)
Publication date
1899
Media typePrint (hardcover)
Pages272 pp

Stalky & Co. is a novel by

school stories whose three juvenile protagonists display a know-it-all, cynical outlook on patriotism and authority. It was first published in 1899 after the stories had appeared in magazines during the previous two years. It is set at a school dubbed "the College" or "the Coll.", which is based on the actual United Services College that Kipling attended as a boy.[1]

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. The final chapter recounts events in the lives of the boys when, as adults, they are in the armed forces in India. It is implied that the mischievous pranks of the boys in school were splendid training for their role as instruments of the British Empire.

George Orwell wrote in 1940 that Stalky had "had an immense influence on boys' literature".[2]

Characters

Boys

  • "Stalky" (real name: Arthur Lionel Corkran[3]). He knows that he is destined for Sandhurst, so he does not care about many academic subjects. Stalky later turns out to be brilliant in battle. He is based on Lionel Dunsterville.[4]
  • Reginald (or Reggie) Beetle, based on Kipling himself.[4]
  • William "Turkey" M'Turk (pronounced McTurk; he comes from a landed estate in Ireland). He is based on George Charles Beresford.[4]

Staff

  • Mr. Bates - the Headmaster, always wise and usually firm. Based on Cormell Price, headmaster of the United Services College.
  • Mr. Prout – a housemaster in charge of Stalky's House, the victim of many of their deceptions
  • Mr. King – a housemaster who sometimes bedevils the boys; "generally held to be based on W. C. Crofts," plus F. W. Haslam[5]
  • Mr. Hartopp – a housemaster, President of the Natural History Society; he seldom comes into conflict with the three boys and is more objective about them than Prout or King
  • the Reverend John Gillett – the school's chaplain, who understands the three boys and has friendly chats with them
  • Foxy – a "subtle red-haired school Sergeant"

Contents with summaries

The novel is a compilation of nine previously published stories,

Sirach
44:1).

Several of the stories appeared in more than one magazine before being collected in book form. The stories are listed below in the order in which they appeared in the book, along with the date and location of their magazine appearances:

Other stories

An expanded version of Stalky & Co. called The Complete Stalky and Co. was published in 1929. It contains all of the stories in the 1899 book plus five more, most of which had appeared in magazines in the 1920s.[11] They appear in the following order:

Other Stalky stories:

  • "A Deal in Cotton": Stalky only listens to and comments on the main character's narration. Collected in Actions and Reactions.
  • "The Honours of War" (1917 in A Diversity of Creatures): Stalky (now a lieutenant-colonel) and Beetle learn that two subalterns are in trouble for playing pranks on a fellow subaltern named Wontner, including abducting him to the Infant's mansion. As Wontner intends to create a scandal that will end their careers, Stalky diverts him by helping to tie up and embarrass the pranksters, after which Wontner is as guilty as they are.

Criticism

When the stories were published, some critics praised them, including most of those in the daily papers. The

Robert Buchanan's essay on Kipling in The Contemporary Review,[13] in which Buchanan saw Kipling's work as a sign of British culture's reversion to barbarism, and said of the book, "The vulgarity, the brutality, the savagery reeks on every page."[14]

F. E. Smith (now Lord Birkenhead) in Ireland".[18] On the other hand, Richard Le Gallienne called it "perhaps the best school story ever written" and replied to its detractors by quoting the story "An Unsavoury Interlude": "It's not brutality... It's boy; only boy."[19]

Language and allusions

The stories contain a good deal of language, from slang and Devon dialect to legal Latin, that is unfamiliar to modern readers, especially those outside Britain. Also Kipling portrays the boys as being widely read in the literature available to them. Their casual talk includes Latin and French (often distorted), not unusual for schoolboys of the time, and they quote or purposefully misquote classical authors such as Cicero and Horace. At least two editions have provided notes to help modern readers understand these words and references.[20][16] Allusions include:

Posthumously published manuscript

Kipling wrote an additional story about Stalky and Co., "Scylla and Charybdis", that remained unpublished in his lifetime. It depicts Stalky and his friends catching a colonel cheating at golf near Appledore in North Devon. The story existed only in manuscript form, attached to the end of the original manuscript of Stalky & Co.: it may have been planned as the opening chapter. On his death in 1936 Kipling bequeathed the manuscript to the Imperial Service Trust, the body that administered the Imperial Service College (successor institution to the United Services College). That school merged with Haileybury in 1942 to form Haileybury and Imperial Service College. The manuscript was displayed at Haileybury in 1962, in an exhibition to mark the school's centenary; and in 1989, after spending many years in a bank vault, was transferred to the College archives.

While "Scylla and Charybdis" was known to exist, it had never been transcribed or widely discussed. It was "discovered" in 2004 by Jeremy Lewins, a former Kipling Fellow at Magdalene College, Cambridge. The school subsequently decided to publish it, in association with the Kipling Society.[22][23][24][25]

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.

References

  1. ^ "Stalky & Co.: The general background", Roger Lancelyn Green
  2. ^ Orwell, George (1940). "Boys' Weeklies". Inside the Whale and Other Essays. Victor Gollancz Ltd.
  3. ^ Kipling, Rudyard. "Land and Sea Tales: Stalky". www.telelib.com. Retrieved 19 January 2016..
  4. ^ a b c "Boy-Society in Rudyard Kipling's Stalky & Co.", Lynne M. Rosenthal, The Lion and the Unicorn (journal) Volume 2, Number 2, 1978 pp. 16–26
  5. ^ Green, Roger Lancelyn (1961). "Some Notes on the Characters". Kipling Society. Retrieved 19 January 2016. ... or rather, like the essence of Crofts distilled with genius, with the perspective of more than thirty years to colour even Kipling's recollection of the real man. The first written of the stories, "Slaves of the Lamp", suggests that to begin with Kipling's "mixture" for King contained a large percentage of Crofts, but with a certain admixture of Mr. F. W. Haslam...
  6. ^ Livingston, Flora V. (1972). A Bibliography of the Works of Rudyard Kipling (1881–1921). Vol. 2. London: Haskell House. p. 48.
  7. ^ Green, Roger Lancelyn (2 April 2003). "Slaves of the Lamp, Part I". Kipling Society. Retrieved 21 January 2016. This was the first 'Stalky' story to be published, and possibly the first to be written. It first appeared in Cosmopolis in April 1897, and was subsequently collected in Stalky & Co. (1899) It was later included in The Complete Stalky & Co. (1929) It is twinned with "Slaves of the Lamp Part II", in which the tactics used by Stalky against his enemies at school are used again with great success on the North West Frontier of India.
  8. ^ Livingston, Flora V. (1972). A Bibliography of the Works of Rudyard Kipling (1881–1921). Vol. 2. London: Haskell House. p. 48. 'Slaves of the Lamp, Parts I & II,' McClure's Magazine, August, 1897).
  9. ^ "The English Flag". The Kipling Society. 2 April 2021. Retrieved 16 March 2022.
  10. ^ Green, Roger Lancelyn (17 February 2003). "Slaves of the Lamp, Part II". Kipling Society. Retrieved 21 January 2016.
  11. ^ List of Stories
  12. ^ "Stalky"
  13. ^ a b Richards, Jeffrey (1988). Happiest Days: The Public Schools in English Fiction. Manchester University Press. p. 162.
  14. ^ Buchanan, Robert (December 1899). "The Voice of 'The Hooligan'". The Contemporary Review. LXXVI: 773–789.
  15. ^ Roosevelt, Theodore (May 1900). "What We Can Expect of the American Boy". St. Nicholas. Retrieved 7 August 2016.
  16. ^ .
  17. ^ Wells, H. G. (1934). Experiment in Autobiography. Victor Gollancz Ltd.
  18. ^ Wells, H. G. (1920). The Outline of History. Vol. 2. George Newnes. pp. 423–424.
  19. ^ Le Gallienne, Richard (1900). Rudyard Kipling: A Criticism. London and New York: John Lane: The Bodley Head. p. 70. Ellipsis by Le Gallienne.
  20. ^ Kipling, Rudyard (1968). Stalky & Co (Laurel Leaf Library. With an introduction and glossary by John Rouse ed.). New York: Dell Publishing Co.
  21. ^ Rouse op. cit., page 8. "One of the most popular novels of school life in Kipling's time was Frederick Farrar's Eric, or Little by Little, a book that went through nearly fifty editions in as many years. It is a novel that Stalky & Co. know very well and constantly ridicule. Eric's troubles begin one night in the dormitory when he listens to boys swearing and fails to warn them about the dangers of foul language. From there on it's moral decay all the way."
  22. ^ The Kipling Society
  23. ^ Scylla and Charybdis - Reader's Guide (The Kipling Society)
  24. ^ The Haileybury Connection, Andrew Hambling, 2004
  25. ^ Milner, Catherine (22 February 2004). "Kipling's 'missing Stalky and Co. chapter' found in school library". The Telegraph (online). London: Telegraph Media Group. Retrieved 21 January 2016.

External links