Something of Themselves by Sarah LeFanu

Author:Sarah LeFanu
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2020-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

* Some commentators have suggested that the book is an account book, but if that were the case you might expect her to be holding a pen or pencil in her other hand. Perhaps the book is a volume of her husband’s poetry?

† Two people read and made annotated excerpts from Carrie Kipling’s diaries before they were destroyed: Douglas Rees, who was researching for Lord Birkenhead’s Kipling biography, and Charles Carrington. Their excerpts and annotations are amalgamated in the Diaries published on the Kipling Society website. Douglas Rees provided a summary of the contents of each diary year. Throughout, Rees expresses considerable sympathy for Carrie. He points out how much time Kipling and his father spent together, how frequently Lockwood came to stay with his son and daughter-in-law, and indeed how frequently Alice came to stay with them, despite her barely concealed animosity towards Carrie. Rees speculates that Lockwood and Alice were not happy together. He also notices the constant stream of friends and relations washing through The Elms, and later on through Bateman’s. I would suggest that Carrie’s difficulties with servants, often ascribed to her own difficult nature, may be related to the inordinate amount of hospitality she was obliged to provide.

‡ The three would be published the following year in the April, May and June issues of the Ladies’ Home Journal, with a note at the end of ‘The Sing-Song’ which read, ‘Other stories will be published as soon as Mr Kipling resumes his work, upon his return from South Africa.’

* Two earlier, widely reproduced portraits of Kipling—William Nicholson’s colour lithograph (1897) and William Strang’s pencil drawing and etching (1898)—show him as more troubled and intensely inward-looking than in the Philip Burne-Jones oil. Strang drew him with his arms folded defensively across his chest.

* There is a discrepancy in the Kipling Society online edition of the Diaries, where in the Rees version ‘One year ended’ is attributed to Kipling rather than to Carrie.

* The anti-typhoid vaccination developed by Almroth Wright was still in its infancy. After the end of the South African War Wright worked to improve its efficacy and, having seen the terrible loss of life to preventable disease, became determined that the military authorities would in future take vaccination and immunisation with utter seriousness. Coincidentally one of Almroth Wright’s brothers, an officer in the Royal Engineers, was also aboard the SS Oriental.

† ‘Exceptional’, Dr Christopher Collins informs me.

* As the sailors sing in Frederick Marryat’s 1856 novel The Dog Fiend, or Snarleyyow:

At Fiddler’s Green, where seamen true

When here they’ve done their duty

The bowl of grog shall still renew

And pledge to love and beauty.

* In many versions of this sea shanty ‘homeward bound’ refers to Liverpool.

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