[In the following review of nine Kipling books that were reprinted in 1987, Sullivan explicates the reasons for Kipling's success and universal appeal.]

Now out of copyright, Kipling's works are finally accessible to the common reader for whom he wrote, and to a more specialized audience that might not remember why high praise was once accorded to the ‘hooligan’ Kipling by such unlikely bedfellows as Oscar Wilde, Henry James, T. S. Eliot, Randall Jarrell, and Jorge Luis Borges. In 1907, James Joyce wrote to his brother: ‘If I knew Ireland as well as R. K. seems to know India, I fancy I could write something good.’ These volumes give an ample sense of the complexity of the young Kipling's understanding of a very special India, one not exactly scrupulous in its attention to truthful revelation, but rather an India created out of the anxieties of Imperial fantasy and imagination.

In the fifty years since his death, Kipling's work has become increasingly difficult to come by in modern editions. Teaching Kipling in college was therefore particularly problematic. Irving Howe's most welcome Portable Kipling (New York, 1982) still needed to be supplemented with stencilled stories and could not possibly do justice to the man who also wrote ‘The Phantom Rickshaw’, ‘Beyond the Pale’, ‘To Be Filed for Reference’, ‘Thrown Away’, ‘The Bridge Builders’, ‘The Dream of Duncan Parrenness’, and ‘The Brushwood Boy’. Kipling wrote in so many voices about so many subjects that any collection must necessarily omit favourites. Sandra Kemp reminds us that ‘the subjects of his stories find an idiom and a voice in the literary canon for the first time: Indian natives; the British professional classes (soldiers, sailors, aviators and engineers); social misfits and outcasts (male and female), and children’.

Except for Stalky & Co, complete for the first time, all eight volumes in The World's Classics series are connected to Kipling's experience in India. Each has a general preface by Andrew Rutherford, a critical introduction by another well-known Kipling scholar, a select bibliography, a chronology of Kipling's life and works, and useful explanatory notes. The Everyman Classic volume is a selection of sixteen stories chosen from eleven volumes, accompanied by a chronology, end notes, and a provocative introduction that focuses on the many inarticulate creatures for whom Kipling provided a voice, and on the distinctive characteristics of Kipling's evasive and allusive style that combines ‘secrecy and explanation’, scepticism and belief.

Andrew Rutherford's general preface reminds us that Kipling was, for at least thirty years, the most popular English writer in the English-speaking world, and the last whose appeal defied boundaries of class, caste, and culture. For the common reader, he was an ‘epic poet’, giving ‘expression to a whole phase of national experience’, ‘a spokesman for his age, with its sense of imperial destiny, its fascinated contemplation of the unfamiliar world of soldiering, its confidence in engineering and technology, its respect for craftsmanship, and its dedication to Carlyle's gospel of work’. Kipling's Indian stories question that aspect of English Imperialism whose foundation was the notion of ‘character’—something ephemeral which disintegrates in the heat of drugs, duty, loneliness, and passion. His stories, like those of his contemporary Joseph Conrad, are about the defences and the lies that sustain the Imperial enterprise abroad. Kipling's ubiquitous narrator, like Marlow, recognizes the fragility of the line between sanity, civilization, and ‘the horror’, and his Kurtz is his story-telling double who goes recklessly into the abyss, there to meet ghosts, insanity, and death.

All the introductory essays, as appropriate for paperbacks designed for general circulation, are balanced and illuminating readings that place the stories in the context of Kipling's life and artistic development, summarize their content, highlight themes, and remind us of the main threads of Kipling criticism. Rutherford's preface focuses on Kipling as an ‘innovator and a virtuoso in the art of the short story’, extending the range of English literature in form and content, expressing his multiplicity in his ‘anthropological’ interest in the many voices of India and England, from the most trivial and cynical of Plain Tales from the Hills to the ‘stoical nobility of the later stories’. Isabel Quigly draws attention to the complex ways in which the Stalky stories reflect the psychology of colonial education. Louis Cornell's splendid introduction discusses the seventeen stories in his collection as an anatomy of Kipling's struggle with literary and personal survival in India, a struggle which, like those of his protagonists, was a ‘lonely battle in a moral universe that allows for little or no complexity of feeling’. W. W. Robson reminds us of main threads in approaches to The Jungle Books, acknowledging their political implications but preferring to read them in terms of Kipling's ‘Law’ of rationality, restraint, responsibility to duty and work. That law—man-made and necessarily fragile—is Kipling's only defence against a hostile and fundamentally chaotic, savage world from which he is essentially alienated. It is that pathological sense of alienation that requires the repeated building of bulkheads ‘twixt despair and the edge of nothing’, writes Alan Sandison, in the most loving and eloquent of essays on Kim. He is, I think, the first critic to write convincingly of the unconscious influence of Kipling's father and uncles (Edward Burne-Jones and Sir Edward Poynter) and to read Kim as pastoral composition, a series of narrative or parable pictures, dependent for its meaning and impact on ‘pictorial narrative structure rather than a linear or discursive one’.

Readers of Kipling owe a considerable debt to Andrew Rutherford for his general editorship of The World's Classics Kipling, the high quality of the series, the elegance of its printing, its textual thoughtfulness and accuracy, and its modern critical apparatus.