Children’s Classic Read 2021 February
Just So Stories for Little Children is a 1902 collection of origin stories by the British author Rudyard Kipling. Considered a classic of children’s literature, the book is among Kipling’s best known works.
Kipling began working on the book by telling the first three chapters as bedtime stories to his daughter Josephine. These had to be told “just so” (exactly in the words she was used to) or she would complain. The stories illustrate how animals obtained their distinctive features, such as how the leopard got his spots. For the book, Kipling illustrated the stories himself.
Joseph Rudyard Kipling was an English journalist, short-story writer, poet, and novelist. He was born in India, which inspired much of his work. He is still an author who can inspire passionate disagreement and his place in literary and cultural history is far from settled. But as the age of the European empires recedes, he is recognised as an incomparable, if controversial, interpreter of how empire was experienced. That, and an increasing recognition of his extraordinary narrative gifts, make him a force to be reckoned with.
He was labelled “a jingo imperialist” by George Orwell, who also described him as “morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting”.
I’ve never read these stories so I look forward to seeing how they read in 2021.
