First English edition, revised and corrected. The Day’s Work is a collection of twelve short stories by Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), most of which were written by the young author in Brattleboro, VT (where Kipling and his wife had settled after their marriage in 1892), at a time when his critical and popular reputation was firmly established (during this period Kipling also wrote The Jungle Book and The Second Jungle Book). The stories collected here – ‘The Bridge-Builders’, ‘A Walking Delegate’, ‘The Ship that Found Herself’, ‘The Tomb of his Ancestors’, ‘The Devil and the Deep Sea’, ‘William the Conqueror’, ‘.007’, ‘The Maltese Cat’, ‘“Bread upon the Waters”’, ‘An Error in the Fourth Dimension’, ‘My Sunday at Home’, and ‘The Brushwood Boy’ – had all been published in magazines between late 1893 and December 1897, and the book was first published in the United States in 1898.

The present, English edition appeared in September 1898, and ‘[t]he English edition was set up from the corrected proofs of the American edition; but the proofs were corrected a second time for the English edition, and a comparison shows many changes. In “The Brushwood Boy” many passages which were printed in The Century Magazine are omitted. The Academy, October 15, 1898, printed a facsimile of the first page of the manuscript of “.007,” showing many omitted portions’.

Livingston 170; Martindell 65.