About Dickens - but Kipling the most talented?

[MsAmerica]

This is about Dickens, a review of a biography, but what got my attention was this reference to Kipling. Is anyone here a Kipling fan? I've only read a few Jungle Book stories.

Dickensworld — the Great Novelist’s Grand Universe
By Robert Gottlieb

The Mystery of Charles Dickens
By A. N. Wilson
Harper Collins

After he died, in 1870, his reputation — though not his popularity — dipped. Yes, he was a supreme entertainer, but the author of “A Christmas Carol” and “A Tale of Two Cities” couldn’t really be considered a serious writer in a world of Hardy and Meredith and Conrad and James. And other popular writers had come along and won large readerships — Conan Doyle, Rider Haggard and, of course, Kipling, the most talented of them all, whose reputation has fluctuated even more than Dickens’s, given his fatal identification with imperialism.

www.nytimes.com/2020/11/06/books/review/mystery-of-charles-dickens-a-n-wilson.html

Read Kim.

Very unfashionable at the moment but genuinely, luminously, brilliant. The problem with Kipling is he set his books in the Empire (in India where he was from) and wrote about/within the racialised society he lived in. It's easier to pretend all that wasn't happening in books set in England.

gutenberg.org/ebooks/2226

If you read it as meaning that Kipling was the most talented of the popular writers like Conan Doyle and Rider Haggard, then that is probably fair. I have some of Kipling’s short stories for adults and the ones set in England are amazing. Other than that, I would completely disagree with that paragraph.

Kipling is wonderful. Also racist and imperialist. I still enjoy him greatly.

Was!

I’d agree with the sentence as I understand it, that Kipling was the most talented of the generation of popular writers that included Conan Doyle and Rider Haggard.

If what you’re asking is — is Kipling more talented than Dickens, Hardy, James, Meredith, and Conrad? then I’d say he was more talented than Meredith, for me, but can’t hold a candle to the others, if you take their careers as a whole. Though there are individual Kipling books that outshine weaker books from Dickens or Hardy.

Can I also just point out what a typically AN Wilson set of names that is? No one with a vagina ever wrote anything worth reading, obviously.

Can I also just point out what a typically AN Wilson set of names that is? No one with a vagina ever wrote anything worth reading, obviously.

And yet I've never read any Meredith (or even heard of him) and when I googled him all that stood out was that he died at Box Hill, which is immediately makes me think of the picnic scene in Emma by the vagina-ed Austen .

Agree, the only thing I have to say about Meredith is that Vaughan Williams made a beautiful silk purse out of the sow’s ear of The Lark Ascending.

@JaninaDuszejko

Can I also just point out what a typically AN Wilson set of names that is? No one with a vagina ever wrote anything worth reading, obviously.

And yet I've never read any Meredith (or even heard of him) and when I googled him all that stood out was that he died at Box Hill, which is immediately makes me think of the picnic scene in Emma by the vagina-ed Austen .

'Badly done, Emma!'

[quote lokomojo]Read Kim.

Very unfashionable at the moment but genuinely, luminously, brilliant. The problem with Kipling is he set his books in the Empire (in India where he was from) and wrote about/within the racialised society he lived in. It's easier to pretend all that wasn't happening in books set in England.

gutenberg.org/ebooks/2226[/quote]
Are you saying "I've read Kim" or "You should read Kim"?

I think it's not a good idea for people to dismiss someone for being a product of their times a century or more ago, so I have no problem with that. I also have no problem with recommending mostly males for anything during periods when there were few females who even surfaced, Even Austen might never have been published if it hadn't been for the men in her family.

Okay, I'll give Kipling a go.

Plain Tales From the Hills is probably one of the best collections of short stories I’ve read.

Just a perfect set of snapshots from colonial life. Tight, taut, and well written. Unlike many authors before and since, He knows when to stop writing.

Kipling wrote some wonderful poetry. Probably the best Poet Laureate we never had.
www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems.htm

'If' was voted 'The Nation's Favourite Poem' and most people probably know 'A Smuggler's Song' (brandy for the parson, baccy for the clerk) but there are many more that are worth reading. Try these:

The Roman Centurion's Song
Merrow Down - read it, and then read the background notes
The Coiner
Tommy (imagine it recited by Michael Caine or Dennis Waterman)

@DameAlyson

Kipling wrote some wonderful poetry. Probably the best Poet Laureate we never had. www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems.htm

'If' was voted 'The Nation's Favourite Poem' and most people probably know 'A Smuggler's Song' (brandy for the parson, baccy for the clerk) but there are many more that are worth reading. Try these:

The Roman Centurion's Song
Merrow Down - read it, and then read the background notes
The Coiner
Tommy (imagine it recited by Michael Caine or Dennis Waterman)

Merrow Down is one of those poems that always brings tears to my eyes. The Way Through the Woods is another of my favourite of Kipling’s.

I keep dipping into Kim because it's my Mum's favourite book, but so far I've found it completely unreadable. I don't know what I'm expecting.

I love Kipling's poetry. I had The Thousandth Man read at dh's funeral and it was so much what I needed said. I'll try Plain Tales.

Dismissing Dickens is very odd. He's an extraordinary writer. He was prolific and sentimental. He also wrote extraordinary characters in wholly satisfying stories. I'm not skilled enough to say more than that.

I would take Kipling above Dickens any day of the week. Both racists, incidentally...

The Gardener, the Kipling short story, is the most sublime study of the divergence between personal morality and public appearances.

“I also have no problem with recommending mostly males for anything during periods when there were few females who even surfaced,…”

That’s not really true though, they just don’t get the press. Marie Corelli, Louisa May Alcott, Mrs Gaskell, the Brontës, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, Christina Rossetti, Mary Shelley …

Mrs Henry Wood, Frances Trollope, Charlotte M. Yonge - they were hugely popular and successful in their day - and many others who made a living by writing who are forgotten now.

@DameAlyson

Kipling wrote some wonderful poetry. Probably the best Poet Laureate we never had. www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems.htm

'If' was voted 'The Nation's Favourite Poem' and most people probably know 'A Smuggler's Song' (brandy for the parson, baccy for the clerk) but there are many more that are worth reading. Try these:

The Roman Centurion's Song
Merrow Down - read it, and then read the background notes
The Coiner
Tommy (imagine it recited by Michael Caine or Dennis Waterman)

I love the rhythm and rhyme of Kipling's poetry. "Gunga Din" always reduces me to tears, and he wrote a lovely one called "The Land".

'Puck's Song' is another lovely one about Sussex.

The Puck stories are rooted in the part of Sussex where Kipling lived and the locations are often still recognisable.

I find Wilson’s view of Dickens strange. There’s a reason why he is widely read still and Meredith isn’t.