A Room of His Own: A Literary-Cultural Study of Victorian Clubland by Barbara Black

Author:Barbara Black [Black, Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-12-20T02:23:00+00:00

(Verse, 768, lines 1-4)

Kipling's belief in English brothers as great men is at the heart of his poem "England's Answer," in which England addresses the "Sons of the Blood":

(Verse, 177, lines 27-30)

Kipling's particular fascination with the intense bonds between soldiers, which he felt to be a brotherhood more intimate, more sacred than mere familial or biological ties, charges his stirring tribute to fraternal affection, "Follow Me 'Ome," in which a comrade mourns the loss of a fellow soldier (Verse, 444-45). His book of tales Stalky and Co. (1899), yet another memorial to brotherly ties, is Kipling's late project of imperialist nostalgia that takes readers back to the antics-filled school culture (one critic calls it a "miniature gentlemen's club" [Bristow, 8o]) of Stalky, M'Turk, and Beetleall three boys from the landed classes and, thus, destined rulers. Kipling's serious business behind these schoolmates' shenanigans rests with the belief that the socialization of males is invariably tied to male socializing, for group loyalty to the peer cohort builds a corporate identity and identification that yields a potent fraternalism (a.k.a. Woolf's "world of men").

Kipling's legacy was a fascination for boys being boys as well as an interest in the developmental steps necessary to transform boys into men. This legacy made of his corpus a kind of club experience that motivated readers and authors alike to sign up. As anyone who reads him today must acknowledge, Kipling wrote for his epoch. He inspired such works as Robert Baden-Powell's Scouting for Boys (19o8), which was directly influenced by Kipling's Kim (19oi), and Tom Hughes's Tom Brown's School Days (1911), which features Tom, "the free and equal comrade of other decent boys" (xi). Baden-Powell's and Hughes's shared project is Kipling's: to track a boy as he acquires new social identities by belonging to something greater than himself and, therefore, to groom potentially all boy readers into an imperial class of leaders and heroes. For Baden-Powell, corporate culture is paramount: a single boy scout is a most potent figure because he is one member tied to his band of brothers. Indeed, one of Baden-Powell's first recommendations in his "foreword to instructors" is to locate a clubhouse. Furthermore, this clubhouse "must be well-lit and warmed" because it will teach boys a corporate culture of cleanliness, organization, governance, and sociality (308-10), as Baden-Powell explains later. Instructing his instructors, Baden-Powell insists that scouts be able to communicate secretly with one another and recognize each other by means of secret signs. This Holmesian mastery (which Kipling's Kim also possesses, of course) of a system of "secret signs by which [scouts] can communicate with each other" is a necessary first step in forming "small permanent groups" (Baden-Powell, 16). That the group is permanent and, more important, "small" will help to cultivate a tradition of masculine excellence and fitness built on the social dynamics of group pride that will prove crucial to the nation's future.

Despite the heroic bent of much of his writing and the triumphal works and cultural movements it inspired, Kipling's short

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