- How the Just So Stories Were Made, by John Batchelor. Yale University Press, $39.95.
John Batchelor's previous books include biographies of Joseph Conrad, John Ruskin and Alfred Lord Tennyson. Now, he turns his attention to Nobel Laureate Rudyard Kipling (1865- 1936) and the Just So Stories.
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Batchelor notes that Kipling was a major figure in English letters but "one always slightly apart from the great central strand, acknowledged but slighted, appreciated, but never fully canonised". Batchelor addresses, through the book's subtitle,"the brilliance and tragedy behind Kipling's celebrated tales for little children".
The stories began with Kipling telling his, "Best Beloved", daughter, Josephine, bedtime stories, which Josephine insisted "had to be told 'just so'".
Sadly, Josephine died of pneumonia when she was just six and only heard three of the "alternative creation narratives" before her death. Kipling wrote the rest of the 13 stories as "imaginative reparation".
In 1902, when the Just So Stories was published, Kipling was 36 and already famous through the publication of Kim and The Jungle Book. GK Chesterton described the stories, which Kipling illustrated, as "fairytales from the morning of the world".
Batchelor, who places the Just So Stories directly in the context of Kipling's private and public life, acknowledges that the stories contain traces of racism and imperialism, traits which were much more evident in Kipling's later works.
He highlights the stories for their humour and the deliverance of moral lessons, such as in "How the Camel got his Hump", "How the Leopard Got Its Spots" and "The Cat That Walked By Himself".
Award-winning children's author and historian of children's literature Gillian Avery has commented that "it is Kipling's triumph that in Just So Stories he found a vein of humour that captivates both the old and the young".
Batchelor writes that Kipling, who visited Australia in 1891,"retained an interest in and enthusiasm for Australia and its settlers". In "The Sing-Song of Old Man Kangaroo', Batchelor comments that the story is "printed as prose but sounds like blank verse".
He notes the message of the story is that "it is a mistake to seek popularity: the need for adulation in the playground is the error of a small child. We are reminded that the young Kipling desperately needed to draw attention to himself".
Batchelor, on the last page of How the Just So Stories Were Made, affirms that Kipling's "talking animals, alternative versions of the creation myth, patterns, riddles and structural inventiveness", allowed him to enter "the free imaginative world" of small children to create "a much-loved classic".
