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King Demos and His Laureate

John Lee
Published online: 08 Jan 2014.

To cite this article: John Lee (2014) King Demos and His Laureate, Media History, 20:1, 51-66, DOI:
10.1080/13688804.2013.872414

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 Media History, 2014
Vol. 20, No. 1, 51–66, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13688804.2013.872414

KING DEMOS AND HIS LAUREATE

Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The White Man’s Burden,’
Transatlanticism, and the Newspaper Poem

John Lee

This article uses online archives of digitized American and British newspapers to examine the
importance of newspaper publication to Rudyard Kipling. Taking ‘The White Man’s Burden’ as its
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particular example, this article recovers the history of that poem’s publication and initial reception.
That history revises both the poem’s date and place of first publication, from Britain to America. In
the process, Kipling emerges as a more transatlantic poet than was previously thought, and as a
figure who is more influential in America. He is seen to have a sophisticated understanding of the
demands and nature of newsprint, of newspapers as a literary and poetic medium, and of
newspaper poetry as a journalistic genre. Many agencies and interested parties are seen to be
involved in the poem’s publication, and the nature of its cultural success offers further evidence for
a transatlantic press history.

KEYWORDS Rudyard Kipling; newspapers; transatlantic literary studies; digital

humanities; newspaper poetry; imperialism

Not once but at least half a dozen times in this room it has been said by men of all
kinds + sympathies that, all taken into account, there was no one life so valuable in the
English race.1
The ‘room’ is the editor’s office of The Times at Printing House Square; the ‘one life’ is
Kipling’s; and the author is The Times’s editor, Moberly Bell, writing to Kipling’s wife, in the
immediate aftermath of her husband’s near fatal attack of pneumonia, to express the
English race’s relief. He goes on to deny that he is exaggerating; one might, he says, argue
that there are more important men alive at present, but they are at the end of their
careers; Kipling’s ‘life is only beginning and his work is only begun + in that sense he is the
one we could spare least.’ The date is 3 March 1899, and Kipling is 33 years old.
This article began out of a desire to get a sense of how seriously one should take
Moberly Bell’s sense of Kipling’s stature, and turned out to be about Kipling the newspaper
poet. Explaining why this should be so is its argument. That it should be about Kipling the
poet, as opposed to Kipling the prose-writer, might in itself seem strange, given how little
poets’ voices are now heard. That it should be about Kipling the newspaper poet might
seem stranger still, as the little that poets now say is, almost always, not news. For a brief
period at the end of the nineteenth century, however, newspapers became, amongst
many other things, a poetic medium, whose material practices and literary conventions
interested, shaped, and were exploited by poets.2 Or at least, to keep to the limits of this
present article, newspapers became such a medium for Kipling, who exploited that

© 2014 Taylor & Francis

 52 JOHN LEE

medium with remarkable success. Key to that success was newspapers’ nature as a
transnational and ‘fast’ medium, characterized by iteration and reuse; to speak with
newsworthy success in the medium at one point was to speak, relatively quickly, in many
places.3
Others have considered the importance of the mass media to Kipling’s poetry. Anne
Parry’s The Poetry of Rudyard Kipling: Rousing the Nation (1992) and Robert MacDonald’s
The Language of Empire (1994) are the pioneering works here.4 For both, the size of
Kipling’s success was unprecedented. Parry did not believe that any other ‘political poet’
ever had the means or reputation to ‘appeal to the nation’ in the way Kipling did.5 For
MacDonald it is not possible to overstress ‘the importance of Kipling as the mythmaker of
the Empire.’6 Both, however, consider Kipling in a largely British or British Imperial context,
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and newspapers in largely static terms, as a particular place of publication, or a point from
which to ‘speak’ to an audience, rather than as a transnational medium, which influences
forms of textual expression, as well as the kinds of relationships possible between text and
audiences, and the nature of the text’s reception, consumption, and afterlives.
Moberly Bell, by contrast, is acutely aware of the nature of newspapers as such a
medium. It underpins his sense of Kipling’s importance to that transnational and mythical
category, ‘the English race,’ a category which lay at the heart of many of the political and
popular currents of both the Greater Britain project, and the less distinctively imperial
‘Anglo-Saxonism’ that flourished vigorously, if relatively briefly, at the turn of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries.7 This article attempts to begin the process of
recovering the importance of that medium to an understanding of Kipling’s poetry and,
what is connected, to an understanding of Kipling as author. Central to my sense of how
that is most productively done is the belief in the importance of following particular
objects around this transnational medium. To an extent this is a cautionary step; to look at
a particular object is to inject grit into what tend otherwise to become models of
frictionless flows of information (which models in turn are sometimes conceptualized as
being under the near god-like control of vested interest groups). More positively, it is to
follow a marker: to follow the particular object is to get a better sense of the complexity of
the systems of which the medium is itself a complex part, and of how the particular object
interacts—and is, to a degree, produced—by its interaction with its medium and the
larger systems.
The particular object, here, is ‘The White Man’s Burden,’ which was the poem
published just before Kipling’s near-fatal illness. The poem also owes its presence,
however, to what forms the second, if often implicit, large area of interest of this article:
the digital archive as research tool. Generally speaking, the digital archive here refers to
the digitized collections of newspapers which have recently become available.8 This article
would, in practical terms, have been unwritable without the ease of access, both to the
newspapers themselves, and to the information within the newspapers, which these allow.
These archives are, in a number of areas, transformative of literary studies.9 What
encouraged me to look particularly at ‘The White Man’s Burden,’ however, beyond its
closeness to Moberly Bell’s letter, and what shaped the directions my argument started
out from, was another, and more problematic, research tool, the Google Ngram Viewer.
The Ngram Viewer allows Google Books’ corpus (15 million books, reckoned to be about
12% of all books printed) to be searched for phrases of up to 5 concurrent words, and
 KING DEMOS AND HIS LAUREATE 53

then graphs the results over time, year by year. Importantly, searches of sub-corpora, two
of which are British English and American English, are possible. Substantial caveats need to
be borne in mind concerning the robustness of the corpus and the assumptions which
underlie what counts and does not count as a result.10 Yet the Ngram Viewer, used
cautiously, remains very useful for suggesting and nurturing hunches about cultural
presence. Thinking about ‘The White Man’s Burden,’ I had been wondering where the
poem was more influential, in America or in Britain. Searching for the poem’s more and
less famous phrases, the latter being perhaps the more telling, and alternating between
the American English and British English corpuses, suggested strongly that the poem was
of more interest to American writers than to British writers. The poem, that is, looked likely
to have made more of a cultural impact in America, than in Britain.
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What started as an attempt to understand Kipling’s stature better, then, not only
ended up as an article about Kipling as a newspaper poet, but as an American newspaper
poet. As that will suggest, one of the limits the particular object of study here suggests is a
reduced focus; while newspapers are a transnational medium, even perhaps (in a
particular and circumscribed sense) a global medium, my interests, in this instance, are
in the transatlantic nature of the medium.11 The wider horizon, though, should not be
forgotten. John Darwin has recently argued, as part of an argument for global history, that
empires exist to exploit connections between social groupings and, in fact, that the
exploitation of such connections is one of the three prime constitutive forces, or ‘Ur-drives’
in the creation of empires.12 The larger argument to which this article tends is that Kipling,
on an individual level, is one of the greatest exploiters of the connectedness of his age,
which perhaps makes him a particularly intense example of imperialism as it is
operationalized, and may be more important to our understanding of Kipling as an
imperialist than any particular political position he takes up. Such larger questions aside,
however, it is time to turn to the poem at hand, and its publication in the newspapers, and
how that may relate to the notion of an American Kipling.
*****

Kipling’s Appeal to America

------------

There can be no mistaking the motive of Rudyard Kipling’s last poem. It needs no
printed words ‘To the American Peo-ple’ to point its appeal to us to ‘Take up the
White Man’s Burden.’ It is a missionary song that can be sung to the tune of
‘Greenland’s Icy Mountains.’ It is a call to us –

To seek another’s profit

And work another’s gain.

It is said that the copy for ‘The White Man’s Burden’ arrived in New York unexpectedly
after the forms for McClure’s Magazine for February had gone to press. But at the first
glance the publisher saw that here was a message to the American nation that must
be delivered at once. Instantly the presses were stopped, the first few pages of the
magazine were torn to pieces and readjusted so as to permit this great poem to take
the place of the frontispiece and half of the next page. Then the forms were locked up
 54 JOHN LEE

a second time and the presses set flying to make up for lost time, so that the magazine
could be delivered in every part of the union on the first day of the month as usual,
which was accomplished.

Wichita Daily Eagle, 5 February 189913

The publication history of ‘The White Man’s Burden’ seems, up to now, to have been
misdescribed. That it should have been so speaks, in part, to the late arrival of newspapers
in the academic consciousness.14 The world of Kipling studies has recently been very
substantially enriched by David Richards’s new bibliography and Thomas Pinney’s new
edition of the poems.15 Within academia more generally, the poem itself has gained
considerable attention as Kipling’s impact on American, as distinct from British,
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imperialism has become of greater interest. Not all of this new work has been positive
in its judgment of this impact. Eric T.L. Love, a historian, has cited the poem as one of a
‘small number of favored, often-repeated, and ambiguous’ quotations used, or mis-used as
he argues, to support the long-held and prevailing thesis that racial ideology lay behind
the development of American imperialism at the end of the nineteenth century.16
Gretchen Murphy and Susan Harris, by contrast, both literary critics, are more attentive to
the poem’s reception, and more persuaded of the significance of the poem’s cultural
impact, especially in the context of the American decision to take control over the
Philippines. For Murphy, this impact is largely because of the deeply problematic nature of
the phrase ‘white man’ in an American, multi-ethnic context. In her account, this phrase
works in ways quite unintended by Kipling to expose the contradictions inherent in the
projects which sought to unite the English-speaking races, because it spoke to a way of
constituting America, by ethnic group, that failed to make good sense.17 Kipling, speaking
from a British position, is, then, according to Murphy, a rather poor judge of his American
audience. For Harris, this impact is particularly shaped by the religious element in the
poem’s reception, though she also sees that religious interest amongst American
audiences as unintended by Kipling and, indeed, external to the poem.18 Both Murphy
and Harris, that is, see ‘The White Man’s Burden’ as first and foremost British, and, indeed,
for Harris, it is in Britain that the poem is most enthusiastically received.
The column from the Wichita Daily Eagle casts doubt on important parts of all of
these arguments, and not only because of what is said here, in this column, but because
properly understanding what is said asks us to pay attention to the poem’s publication as
a complex event involving many agents, agencies and locations, and which, importantly,
has a developing existence through time. To start, though, with factual issues. All the
above sources, and all the treatments I know of take the date of the poem’s first
publication as that of the poem’s appearance in The Times, and its periodical offshoot,
Literature, on 4 February 1899, and either talk of, or assume, its subsequent appearance in
America. This is either held to be in McClure’s Magazine, which is typically undated, though
Harris gives a date for this of 12 February (which Murphy seems to share),19 or, more
usually, as in Richards and Murphy, in The New York Sun and The New York Tribune on the 5
February. 20 In fact, as the Wichita Daily Eagle makes plain, the poem appears in America
‘on the first day of the month,’ 1 February. Dating matters, of course, in and of itself, but
how much does it matter here? To begin with, it strengthens an argument of Murphy
against Love’s dismissal of the poem’s political significance. She argues that Love’s
 KING DEMOS AND HIS LAUREATE 55

dismissal of the poem’s influence comes in part from his belief that it was first published in
McClure’s (which she dates to the 12th), so making it impossible for the poem to have
effected the Senate’s debate, on 6 February, over whether or not to ratify the Treaty of
Paris, in which Spain ceded control of the Philippines to America.21 That point is made far
stronger when the poem’s date of publication is taken back a further four days, to 1
February.
The date of the poem relative to the Senate discussion, however, is only a part of the
significance of the redating. For it is not just that the poem appears earlier, but that it
appears nationally, ‘in every part of the union,’ rather than in The New York Sun and The
New York Tribune. This is only in part a function of its appearance in McClure’s. McClure’s
was one of the largest American monthly journals at this date, with a circulation of around
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369,000 copies.22 However, the poem was simultaneously published on 1 February in a

variety of newspapers, as a search of Chronicling America and The Newspaper Archive
makes clear.23 This includes The New York Sun (misdated above to the 5th) and The Saint
Paul Globe (Minnesota) in full, and, in part, in the Cedar Rapids Daily Republican (Iowa),
Davenport Daily Republican (Iowa), Lebanon Daily News (Pennsylvania), and the Wichita
Daily Eagle (Kansas).24 My use of ‘includes,’ here, is important. Chronicling America, for
example, may contain 5 million page images, which sounds a large number, but for
February 1899 it only holds around 50 newspapers—a small proportion of the total. (In
1899, there were some 18,793 newspapers, of which 2226 were dailies.25) What is more,
the present limitations of optical character recognition software means that electronic
searches within those papers are not reliably successful. A keyword search for ‘White Man’s
Burden,’ for example, does not return The New York Sun, even though—as it prints the
poem in its entirety—it has seven repetitions of the phrase.26 The poem’s publication is
likely to have been far more widespread, then, than this very small sample suggests.
Equally importantly, the poem begins immediately to be republished in other papers,
commented on in editorials, which editorials are then commented on in other news-
paper’s editorials. Such currency and breadth of impact offer evidence of the poem’s
political and cultural significance.27
Indeed, the poem’s publication becomes a matter of interest for the ‘British’ press,
and it does so quickly. By the 4th, which was the date of the poem’s first English
publication (in The Times), the Aberdeen Journal (Scotland) is running a cable report,
received via the Daily Mail, from a correspondent in New York, noting that the poem had
made a ‘profound impression and is widely quoted.’28 The poem is an event in America,
and so becomes British American news, almost before it is published in England. The
nature of newspapers as a ‘fast’ and ‘transnational’ medium is, here, clear.29 What this
example also suggests is the closeness of the two English-speaking audiences. This is not
quite the regional transnationalism that Meredith McGill argued for as a defining aspect of
Antebellum literary culture in America, but it might be seen to represent a development
of it.30
It may even be that the British publication of the poem is then picked up by the
American press. At the start of the extract from the Wichita Daily Eagle, the columnist
avers, ‘It needs no printed words’ To the American People’ to point its [the poem’s] appeal
to us to “Take up the White Man’s Burden.”’ This may be a simple statement that the
poem’s meaning is clear to its audience, though, if so, it seems to be unusually
 56 JOHN LEE

interpretative for this column. There seem to be two more likely possibilities to me. One is
that ‘It needs no printed words’ refers to the fact that, as published in The Times, the poem
had a subtitle: ‘An Address to the United States.’ The Wichita Daily Eagle, in this case, is
returning to the poem in the light of its reading of the poem’s publication in England,
perhaps from having read a syndicated telegraph report on the 4th. The other possibility is
that some other American newspaper had by now added such a descriptive line in, either
as subtitle or running head (although this is true of none of the examples I have seen). The
presence or absence of such a subtitle is worth stressing in part as, again, the present
history overlooks this.31 More importantly, it is worth stressing because, whichever option
is chosen, the Wichita Daily Eagle clearly believes the absence of a subtitle is worth
stressing. A newspaper, then, is here valuing the unprinted; Kipling’s poem reveals an
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intimacy between poet and audience by what it does not say. Its original lack of a subtitle
is an intimacy that is not available between Kipling and his British audience. As this
suggests—although this is not the place for them—newspaper publication poses
interesting questions for editors of poetry; should the newspaper publication take
precedence over the volume publication of the poem in providing the copy text for the
title? and, if so, which newspaper publication should take precedence, American or British?
A great deal may hang on such decisions. The current picture of a London-published
poem later going to America with explanatory subtitle supports a sense of Kipling’s
poem’s (foreign) Britishness. If, however, we recognize this as a poem first published in
America which appears later in England, where it needs explanation, and if we take our
cue from the Wichita Daily Eagle’s sense of pride in the intimacy of understanding between
poem and audience—a pride which challenges the thrust of both Murphy’s and Harris’s
sense of Kipling’s as outsider lacking an understanding of American culture and idiom—
the poem looks far more American. Indeed, how American a poem and a poet ‘The White
Man’s Burden’ and Kipling might then appear, becomes a question.
This moves the argument beyond this particular newspaper column, and this
particular day. The story of the poem’s publication, which the column supplies, functions
as a kind of paratextual apparatus—as, it is worth noting, does the fact that this is the
editorial page of a Sunday edition, and the fact that the column comes at the top of the
page. Most importantly, the story gains the poem visibility, by making it newsworthy.
Newspapers are ‘fast’ mediums if various conditions of newsworthiness are met, otherwise
they are an ephemeral medium. Here, the story of the poem’s arrival stresses the poem’s
unexpectedness and the immediate recognition of its importance (this also was another
distinctively American quality, as there would be no reason to stop the presses in London,
because there was no ‘best before’ date of a Senate debate), but it stresses most those
qualities which typify its own medium: speed, expense, ubiquity. A monthly journal is here
recognized as a kindred spirit of the newspaper, and quite properly so, given the
complicated, and highly competitive, interrelationships between journals and newspapers
produced in what was the golden age of syndication.32 The poem, meanwhile, becomes
identified with its form, as a kind of representative event; this is a poem which would be
pointless, effectively impossible, were it not for the possibilities of its medium.
The story itself looks in equal measures to be true and not true. The February edition
of McClure’s does seem to have been reset; certainly, the poem replaces the usual
frontispiece.33 What seems unlikely to be strictly true is that the poem reached the editors
 KING DEMOS AND HIS LAUREATE 57

unexpectedly, after the magazine had gone to press. For one thing, news of its impending
arrival had begun to leak out long before.34 The Scranton Tribune (Pennsylvania) of the
26 January notes that Kipling ‘has written a poem on expansion.’ Its source seems to be
E.C. Martin’s literary column in one of the New York papers. He had mentioned, in a column
reprinted in The Salt Lake Herald on the 23rd, a poem containing Kipling’s ‘instructions in
regard to our disposition of our foreign conquests’ which would be appearing ‘about
Feb. 1.’ (That column itself mentions having described the poem in a column of the previous
week; I have as yet been unable to find this.) Then there is the private evidence of Kipling’s
correspondence. In a letter dated 10 January, Kipling warns Robert Barr (an English
correspondent with a similar Anglo-American background and interests), to look out for a
poem in the February edition of McClure’s.35 (Tellingly, there is no mention at this point of any
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plan for English publication.) Moreover, we also know that he had, by this date, sent a copy of
the poem to Theodore Roosevelt, as Roosevelt writes about the poem to Henry Cabot Lodge
by the 12th.36 Roosevelt, by then Governor of New York, and Lodge, a distinguished and
powerful Senator, were highly interested parties in the Spanish-American war; indeed some
would claim that the two, and Lodge especially, had been in large part responsible for its
prosecution. When Roosevelt’s relationship with William Randolph Hearst, the great American
media baron, and Lodge’s closeness to President McKinley are taken into account, Kipling’s
poem can be seen to be circulating within some immensely influential, and supportive,
private and elite American networks, as well as within the public networks of the newspaper
and periodical press—and, of course, those networks need not be separate.37
Publication rarely just happens. Kipling had such networks of friendship and
influence in large part because of the success of his writing, but also, in this case, because
a significant part of his life had been passed in America, and because his wife, Carrie (more
properly Caroline) was American, and from a family with significant literary contacts. On
their marriage, they had left England, and, a little later, set up home amongst Carrie’s
family, in Vermont. They would live there from 1892 to 1896, build their own house,
Naulakha, and have the first two of their three children. Much of this time seems to have
been intensely happy, and also productive for Kipling the writer. As a working adult, then,
Kipling had spent six and a bit years in India, a year and a half in lodgings in England, the
next four years in Vermont, most spent in Naulakha, and an unsettled two and half years,
in three different houses, in England. It is not obvious, in other words, that, in early 1899,
without the benefit of hindsight, the Kiplings are set to be an English family. Even in his
prose writing, Kipling is as American as he is English in his interests, where he is not Anglo-
Indian. That is a substantial caveat, but there is not yet any English equivalent to the
American, state of the nation-esque novel, Captains Courageous (1896).
Kipling, I believe, knowingly exploited his own potential Americanness, on behalf of
this poem, by traveling to America. The timing of the trip has been, up to now, puzzling. It
is known that Kipling made it against the strong advice of his mother, and that Barr offered
similar warnings against traveling in midwinter is clear; Kipling’s letter to him, quoted
above, is part defence of the trip. Charles Carrington, Kipling’s authorized biographer,
described it as a contentious and rather spur-of-the-minute decision.38 As Harry Ricketts, a
more recent biographer, has pointed out, a trip to a hot South Africa in January, as the
family had made the previous year, was understandable; a trip to North America was not.39
 58 JOHN LEE

Kipling, through 1898, had been watching the Spanish-American war with general
approval.40 To Kipling, it showed a new maturity within American political life, which
meant that America was also, as he put it in a letter of the 19th August, now ‘worth talking
to.’ In several such letters Kipling returns, with particular force, to one point: ‘if you don’t
annex and administer the Phillipines [sic], you ought to be hung.’41 Through a series of
negotiations, culminating in The Treaty of Paris on 10 December, Spain was forced to cede
control of the Philippines to America. All that remained necessary was for the Senate to
ratify the treaty. Kipling, I would suggest, saw his chance to intervene to maximum effect.
At some point in late 1898, he had returned to ‘The White Man’s Burden,’ a poem possibly
begun in 1897, and revised it.42 He now decided to publish it; and, at more or less the
same time—our first knowledge of Kipling’s trip is its announcement in The Times of
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4 January, an announcement which ties in with the date of Kipling’s letter in reply to
Barr—he decided to accompany it. E.C. Martin’s column of the 23 February, in which he
announced the poem’s publication on ‘about Feb. 1,’ notes also that Kipling will be
arriving in America more or less simultaneously. For Martin, this is a (noteworthy) matter of
serendipity which will allow Kipling to see the poem’s impact in person. Perhaps, though,
it is not only a question of Kipling’s wanting to be present to see the poem’s effect, but
also wanting to use his own presence to increase the poem’s effectiveness.
The trip, if presented appropriately, would allow Kipling to speak to America, if not
from within, then at least not from without, as an outsider. This was, indeed, a kind of
standard practice. Charles Dickens provides perhaps the most famous previous example of
writers using a visit to America to advance their political aims. Dickens’s concerns—
slavery, temperance, world peace—were rather different from Kipling’s. Yet both writers’
trips relied upon there being what Amanda Claybaugh has described as a shared culture
of social reform, which itself was in part the product of a transatlantic literary culture.43
Such shared notions may not only have made nationality less important in constructing
Americanness or Britishness but also have made the place of residence more important.
Dickens went by himself on tour. Kipling returned and did so with his family. This might
almost look like—lent itself to?—portrayal as a homecoming, and whether or not that was
Kipling’s intention, that was how the news of his trip was repeatedly covered. The 26
January Wichita Daily Eagle had carried a report that when ‘asked if he was going to
America soon,’ Kipling had replied, ‘“Yes, I am going home”.’ ‘What a world of delight,’ the
paper went on, ‘it brings the literary crowd that Kipling should call America home.’ That
sense of Kipling’s returning home became a second context for the new poem. The 4th
February Titusville Herald (Pennsylvania), printing ‘The White Man’s Burden’ in full,
introduced it not with the story of the poem’s arrival at McClure’s, but with the story of
Kipling’s arrival in America: ‘Rudyard Kipling arrived in New York Thursday–coming home,
the author of ‘The Day’s Work’ calls returning to America–to resume his residence in this
country.’
The shared transatlantic culture of literature and reform should not be pushed too
far. Claybaugh rightly notes that by the end of the nineteenth century many influential
figures were attempting to nationalize the two literatures. Nor had the two literatures
been wholly undifferentiated earlier in the century. She notes that George Eliot, while
normally making no distinctions on national grounds in her discussions of British and
American authors and works, does on one occasion suggest that American literature may
 KING DEMOS AND HIS LAUREATE 59

be differentiated from British literature by ‘“certain defects of taste [...] a sort of vague
spiritualism and grandiloquence”.’44 Where, then, does Kipling and his poem sit in terms of
style?
*****
So here’s to you, Rudyard Kipling, and we thanks you for the past,
Though you ain’t no Billy Shakespeare, yet you’re gainin’ on him fast.
We’ve had hard times and fightin’ ever since you went away–
And you comes back with prosperity–do bring your trunk and stay.

The jungle and the ocean are his homes;

He’s a brother to the tiger and the tar.
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He can jingle every lingo where he roams;

He can read your heart and tell you what you are.

The stanzas above come from a poem of welcome by Francis James MacBeath, ‘Rudyard
Kipling,’ which was published in the New York Sun of 5 February. Rather interestingly, it is
itself working within a kind of mini-genre of newspapers poems of welcome: Edgar Wallace
had, the year before, written a poem to welcome Kipling to South Africa, ‘An Experiment in
Imitation.’45 As the title suggests, the point was to welcome Kipling if not quite in his own
words, then at least in his own idiom. That idiom is demotic, both in subject and
vocabulary; there is little spiritual or grandiloquent in Kipling as brother ‘to the tiger and the
tar,’ able to ‘jingle every lingo.’ It was not, though, Kipling’s only idiom; Kipling had first
gained large-scale public attention with his soldier-poetry but, later, he wrote a quite
different public and political poetry. ‘Recessional’ was the most famous example. Published
just after Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, which had been regarded as far too
triumphalist by many, it was seen, as Wallace put it in his poem, as having ‘in a Patriotic
Craze [...] made a chortlin’ nation squirm an’ shrink.’ MacBeath, with his sense that Kipling
‘can read your heart and tell you what you are,’ may be referring to that poem, or he may,
possibly, be thinking of ‘The White Man’s Burden’ itself. In either case, animating
MacBeath’s, and Wallace’s, poem is the sense of a popular and demotic Kipling who
guarantees another, prophetic Kipling. Though they do not mention it, this a Kipling who
does not speak like the people, but who can both speak for and to them. This Kipling
speaks in a quite different idiom, which has little to do with any recognizable dialect, class,
or country, but which is recognizeably spiritual, and has perhaps a measure of
grandiloquence. This is an English which takes its reference points from an English idiom
related to the King James Bible, in its diction and its verbal forms. This is particularly obvious
in ‘Recessional,’ which opens with, ‘God of our fathers, known of old—/ Lord of our far-flung
battle-line.’ ‘The White Man’s Burden’ lacks the direct address to God, for the good reason
that it speaks not to God but to Americans (and, more precisely, white, perhaps Anglo-
Saxon, Americans). Otherwise, however, it shares a similar, Biblically influenced idiom. It
deals in imperatives, and mock-Hebraic imagery; it has its allegorical figures of ‘Famine’ and
‘heathen Folly’; it uses ‘ye’s in place of ‘you’s, and terms peoples as ‘hosts,’ as well as seeing
imperial rule as an ‘exile’ in the service of others, in which one does not wait but ‘abide[s]’ in
patience. Most importantly, it mixes the language of religious service with imperial
obligation in the same way as ‘Recessional.’ The Wichita Daily Eagle’s description of ‘The
White Man’s Burden’ as ‘a missionary song which can be sung to the tune of “Greenland’s
 60 JOHN LEE

Icy Mountains”’ placed the effect almost perfectly—justifying, as it did so, the newspaper’s
return to the poem in a Sunday edition. The Chicago Record, one of the papers which
published the poem on 1 February, gave a more literary critical account: it saw the poem as
having ‘added another to the series of remarkable poems in which [Kipling] seems fairly to
voice the political spirit of the Anglo-Saxon races’; there was ‘something of the same accent’
of ‘Recessional.’ That accent, of course, is not a particularly English accent, no more than
‘Greenland’s Icy Mountains’ is an English missionary song. E.C. Martin had also noted as a fact
of interest about Kipling that both his ‘grandfathers were ministers, and one of them was
Wesleyan.’ This was of more than biographical interest, Martin suggested, since ‘the Wesleyan
strain, if one looks closely, appears quite unmistakeably in much of Mr. Kipling’s later work.’
Such a strain, which one could well imagine would appear a defect of taste to Eliot,
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with her active antagonism to non-conformist religion, had found its time in America.
Harris, in God’s Arbiters, argues that the evangelism which followed the Second Great
Awakening shaped, and was a part of, American expansionist imperialism. Kipling, in no
way a Methodist himself, indeed antagonistic to missionary evangelism, used an idiom
which appealed to American non-conformist evangelists. As an English newspaper, The
Daily News, put it on the day of the poem’s first publication in England: ‘The “Manifest
destiny” movement which is impelling the United States to become a conquering and
civilizing Power has found its “sacred bard” in Mr. Kipling.’ Three days later, on 7 February,
the Washington Post noted that, ‘If this country should finally decide that it is bound in
honor to “take up the white man’s burden” in the Far East, that decision will be very
largely due to the pulpit and the religious press, or, rather, to their fidelity in representing
the convictions of the religious masses behind them.’ That pulpit and religious press, and
the believers behind them, were largely low church, and more precisely Methodist, as
Methodism was, ‘the largest Protestant denomination in the United States.’ When Martin
observed a Methodist strain in Kipling’s works, then, he was noting their potential
relationship to an American populist movement at its height.

*****

Kipling was a poet who self-consciously took care to produce, or allow to be

produced, an American persona, and who wrote in a transatlantic idiom, inflected to an
American taste, and did so within the literary medium best fitted to exploit his political
aims—the newspaper. How effective, though, was such newspaper poetry? ‘The White
Man’s Burden’ was a highly topical intervention into an American debate concerning who
should control the Philippines. One might note details such as the poem being given near
equal space with the report of the Senate’s arguments over the forthcoming ratification of
the Treaty of Paris on the front page of the 1 February St. Paul’s Globe. Kipling and the
Senators, one might argue, could be seen here speaking to the American public, in effect,
as equals. Then there is the question of how one wins Senate votes, and the degree to
which public opinion matters in changing senators’ minds, particularly when, as here, the
approval of the treaty was within a single vote of defeat. To what extent the poem had an
influence, though, is hard to prove (or disprove); and there are many other matters to take
into account, such as the fighting which broke out between American and Filipino forces
on the 4 and 5 February. What can be said is that it was seen to have had decisive
influence in many quarters—including those unfriendly to Kipling’s position. The editor of
 KING DEMOS AND HIS LAUREATE 61

the San Francisco Call, on 3 October 1899, looking back over the year, noted how Kipling
was ‘in the habit of illuminating every serious situation with a flash of his poetic genius,
which lights the whole world at once.’ This, in the editor’s opinion, was no good thing. The
‘Czar’s peace conference’ (the 1898 peace conference at the Hague), he notes, was
doomed to failure from the moment Kipling published ‘Adam Zad the Bear’ (‘The Truce of
the Bear’). Next came the Philippines, and as America hesitated between a policy of
unselfish temporary intervention, and a new-born greed for the glories of empire, ‘In that
pause Kipling published his “White Man’s Burden,” and what to millions had seemed a
national crime appeared as a national duty.’ This is to give Kipling too much (dis-)credit,
but it testifies to the size of the influence Kipling was seen to have with the American
audience, especially when compared to the same paper’s editorial dismissive of the poem
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nine month’s earlier, on the day of the Senate vote. Then, the very fact that it was a poem
of Kipling’s making the appeal, the editor felt, would be ‘sufficient warning to all intelligent
Americans to avoid imperialism.’ Such confidence is a world away from the shaken belief
in the American people to be seen in the October piece. A political cataclysm seems to
have occurred, which has changed the editor’s sense of his audience; where once he
spoke for America and Americans, he is now speaking for an America he feels many
Americans have lost sight of; America, for the editor, now seems to have a new sense of
itself, and one that is far too Kiplingesque for his liking.
Kipling, with ‘The White Man’s Burden,’ had entered the political narrative through
which Americans understood themselves. He had also crafted what was in effect a set of
common-places for those wishing to argue for, or against, expansionist imperialism.46 The
poem, with its short lines and short, in-line paradoxical phrases, lent itself to editing, reuse
and republishing, within newspapers. The phrases themselves have a liturgical quality,
playing on key contemporary values, and allowing themselves to be made resonant by
the experiences of their editors and readers. Kipling, who had been a newspaper editor
himself in India for his ‘six years hard,’ once wrote to Edmund Gosse that he was ‘not in
debt for style to anything or anybody but the telegraph system.’ It is an interesting
statement, and one discussed usually in terms of the relationship between Kipling’s style
and the telegraph. What is more telling, I believe, is Kipling’s use of ‘system.’ Kipling’s
newspaper poems are designed to circulate, within their medium, and in the larger
cultural systems of which that medium was a literary part.47
One might imagine the success of ‘The White Man’s Burden’ would have been a
triumph for Kipling. Yet, successful as ‘The White Man’s Burden’ was, the trip as a whole
was a personal disaster. Those who argued against the wisdom of a transatlantic voyage in
mid-winter were proved, not that they would have wished to have been, triumphantly
right. Kipling’s daughters were ill on arrival in America. Carrie became ill a little later; and
then, around 20 February, Kipling and his eldest daughter, Josephine, became very
seriously ill with pneumonia. Kipling, whose life had seemed to Moberly Bell the most
‘valuable in the English race,’ recovered, but his daughter did not. The poem’s success, one
might imagine, seemed rather hollow compared to that; and perhaps Kipling may have
felt a measure of guilt, if it was his political seriousness and enthusiasm which had, in large
part, brought his family to America in January. One poor pleasure his brush with death
gave him was that of reading what were, in effect, rehashes of his obituaries in the papers.
One of the best of these was by W.T. Stead, that great, idiosyncratic, successful British
 62 JOHN LEE

journalist and Anglo-American voice. Stead began the March edition of the international
Review of Reviews, by quoting from The New York Sun’s announcement on 3 March that
Kipling was out of danger. ‘We cannot speak for England,’ the Sun said, ‘but we think we
can speak for America in saying that there is no living man out of office for whom an
entire community, doctors, merchants, lawyers sailors, soldiers, policemen, firemen and
elevator boys, loafers and laborers, of all ages, sizes, kinds and circumstances, would have
felt the personal anxiety and concern excited in this country by the illness of Rudyard
Kipling.’ Stead answers: ‘We cannot speak for America, but we think we can speak for
England, and we say without hesitation that if all our contemporary English poets had lain
a-dying, from the Poet Laureate downwards, their fate would have excited less interest
among the English folk, high and low, rich and poor, cultured and uncultured, than that
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which was felt in Rudyard Kipling’s illness.’48 Kipling’s voice, Stead continues, is various; he
is a ‘revolving mirror reflecting many moods of myriad men.’ He is also a ‘vates sacer,’ ‘a
prophet with a message of his own.’ That prophet, with a soul ‘Methodist to the core,’ is
best seen, according to Stead, in the imperialism of ‘The White Man’s Burden.’ It is an
imperialism, Stead believes, that has captured nations. ‘Poet Laureate he may never be by
grace of Her Majesty the Queen. But Poet Laureate he is to-day by virtue of the supreme
will and sovereign pleasure of His Majesty King Demos, whose dominions extend over the
whole of the territories at present occupied or administered by the British Empire and the
American Republic.’49

Acknowledgement
This article has benefited greatly from the contributions of the two anonymous readers.

Notes
1. See the Kipling Papers, Wimpole Archive, University of Sussex, SxMs38/2/2/2/1/2/1/2/2.
2. For a study of the newspaper as important medium for prose fiction, see Brake, Print in
Transition, 1850–1910. Johanningsmeier, Fiction and the American Literary Marketplace,
provides a more narrowly focused and American account.
3. See Wiener and Hampton, eds, Anglo-American Media Interactions, 1850–2000, and Wiener,
The Americanization of the British Press, 1830s–1914.
4. Parry, The Poetry of Rudyard Kipling; MacDonald, The Language of Empire.
5. Parry, The Poetry of Rudyard Kipling, 80.
6. MacDonald, The Language of Empire, 161.
7. See, for example, Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain.
8. The following are used in this article: Chronicling America, 19th Century British Library
Newspapers 1800–1900, and Newspaper Archive.
9. For the impact of digitization on the study of past texts, see Mussell, The Nineteenth-Century
Press in the Digital Age. Other useful starting points are the Journal of Victorian Culture
(2008) and (2012), and, with particular emphasis on pedagogical issues, the Victorian
Review (2012).
10. See Michel et al., “Quantitative Analysis of Culture,” 176–82. (The supporting online material
is important.) Two caveats which I would stress are that size of the print run is not taken
into account, and that the underlying assumptions by which the corpora are constituted
 KING DEMOS AND HIS LAUREATE 63

and results returned may change (as they did between 2012 and 2013); the Ngram Viewer,
as its developers make clear, is a work in progress.
11. This article is part of what Lawrence Buell, reflecting on the influence of the work of Paul
Giles, has called the ‘boom time’ for transatlantic studies. Buell, “Rethinking Anglo-
American Literary History,” 66.
12. Darwin, “Why Global History is Imperial History,” 2013.
13. American newspapers are generally quoted from Chronicling America. Where that is not the
case, it will be noted.
14. This has not been the case in some countries, such as France. MacKenzie considers why
this might be so as part of “The Press and the Dominant Ideology of Empire,” 23–38.
15. Richards, Rudyard Kipling: A Bibliography, 2010; Pinney, The Cambridge Edition of the Poems
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of Rudyard Kipling, 2013.

16. Love, Race Over Empire, 6.
17. Murphy, Shadowing the White Man’s Burden, 54–6.
18. Harris, God’s Arbiters, 151–3.
19. Harris, God’s Arbiters, 145; Murphy, Shadowing the White Man’s Burden, 45.
20. Richards, Rudyard Kipling: A Bibliography, 116; Murphy, Shadowing the White Man’s Burden,
45. Richards, with customary meticulousness, notes that a copyright edition of 10 copies is
published on 27 January.
21. Murphy, Shadowing the White Man’s Burden, 45.
22. The figure is for January 1900, placing it a little ahead of Cosmopolitan. See Landers, The
Weekly War, 29.
23. McClure also ran one of the most successful galley-proof fiction syndication services for
newspapers, and the extent to which that service influences the poem’s initial publication
in newspapers would make an interesting study. For McClure, see Johanningsmeier, Fiction
and the American Literary Marketplace, passim.
24. Lebanon Daily News, Davenport Daily Republican, and Cedar Rapids Daily Republican are to
be found in the Newspaper Archive.
25. Johanningsmeier, Fiction and the American Literary Marketplace, 2.
26. The British Library calculates the accuracy of its 19th Century British Library Newspapers
1800–1900 at 78% (as compared to the 18th Century Burney Collection at 65%). See
Nicholson, “The Digital Turn,” 60.
27. This is also an excellent example of the deeply interrelated, if antagonistically competitive,
nature of newspaper, serial, and book publication at this time. See Brake, Print in Transition,
1850–1910, 27.
28. This ‘routing’ is most likely to be explained by the ways in which papers grouped together
in order to moderate the costs of telegraphic material. For examples see Potter, News and
the British World, 27–35.
29. For more prosaic (but more representative, and slower) examples of such transatlantic
circulation, and the importance of digital archives in allowing us to see such, see Nicholson,
“‘You Kick the Bucket; We Do the Rest!’,” 273–86.
30. McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–53.
31. The poem is usually given with the subtitle in The Times, or with that given in the poem’s
later (1903) publication in the Five Nations: ‘The United States and the Philippine Islands.’
 64 JOHN LEE

See, most recently, Pinney, The Cambridge Edition of the Poems of Rudyard Kipling, vol.
1, 528.
32. For an argument that galley-proof syndication helped produce the Sunday newspapers
which shaped the magazine format, see Johanningsmeier, Fiction and the American Literary
Marketplace, 223.
33. McClure’s Magazine is available from the Hathi Trust Digital Library.
34. Richard’s mention of a copyright printing on the 27th, mentioned in note 20 above, might
also be considered.
35. Pinney, The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, vol. 2, 359–60.
36. See Lycett, Rudyard Kipling, 834.
37. For details of Lodge and Roosevelt in the context of America’s expansionism, see Thomas,
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War Lovers.
38. Carrington, Rudyard Kipling, 284–5. Carrington notes Kipling’s mother’s reaction.
39. Ricketts, The Unforgiving Minute, 249. Ricketts’s here also quotes a letter from Kipling’s
mother to her sister which confirms Carrington’s account.
40. See Lycett, Rudyard Kipling, 420.
41. The quotations are from Kipling’s letter to George Cram Cook, in Pinney, The Letters of
Rudyard Kipling, vol. 2, 347. See also the letters of 9 August and 13th September, to Charles
Roswell Bacon and Theodore Roosevelt respectively.
42. See Carrington, Rudyard Kipling, 258; Newsom, “‘Recessional’ and ‘The White Man’s
Burden’,” 13–27.
43. Claybaugh, “Towards a New Transatlanticism,” 439–60.
44. Ibid., 441.
45. MacDonald, The Language of Empire, 148, and for further details see The Belfast News-Letter,
2 March 1898, 6. The poem is usually referred to as “Tommy to his Laureate,” the title under
which an expanded version was published in England in Writ in Barracks. I quote from this
1900 text.
46. Both Murphy, Shadowing the White Man’s Burden, and Harris, God’s Arbiters, are very
illuminating on this aspect of the poem’s reception.
47. For arguments concerning the impact of the development of the speed of news
transmission on newspaper style, see Wiener, The Americanization of the British Press,
1830s–1914. For the impact on newspaper style on prose fiction see Rubery, The Novelty of
Newspapers.
48. Stead, “Mr. Rudyard Kipling,” 319.
49. Stead’s (positive) sense of an American destiny lying ahead for Britain—in a sense his own
version of the notion of a Greater Britain—is here evident. See Wiener, The Americanization
of the British Press, 1830s–1914, 171.

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John Lee Department of English, University of Bristol, 3/5 Woodland Road, Bristol BS8 1TB,
UK. Tel: +0117 9288298; Fax: +0117 3317933; E-mail: j.lee@bristol.ac.uk