First British edition, ‘English and English colonial’ issue, revised by Kipling. After spending his earliest years in India, the young Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) travelled to England with his family in 1871, where he and his sister were placed with a family in Southsea, while their parents returned to Bombay. In 1878 Kipling entered the United Service College, Westward Ho! (which provided much of the material for Stalky & Co.), and, after he left the school in 1882, he returned to India. His parents, who had moved to Lahore in 1875, were both occasional contributors to the city’s Civil and Military Gazette, and they obtained a position for their son as a sub-editor at the newspaper. Kipling started in October 1882, and became a prolific contributor, while also publishing his first book, Departmental Ditties, in 1886. ¶¶

In November 1887 Kipling, ‘now recognised as one of the best journalists in India’ (ODNB) was transferred by the proprietors of the Civil and Military Gazette to another major title they owned, The Pioneer, which was published in Allahabad. In early 1888 the newspaper’s proprietors, ‘confident of their star young employee’s productive power, made him editor of new weekly supplement to The Pioneer called the Week’s News, which provided a page to be filled each week with a new fiction. Kipling now began to pour out the stories that, collected and reprinted in the series of paperbacks called the Railway Library, made his name in India and, soon enough, in England and America as well’ (op. cit.). ¶¶

This collection was first published in Allahabad by A.H. Wheeler & Co. in 1889 under the title Wee Willie Winkie and Other Child Stories, and it formed the sixth and final volume in the ‘Indian Railway Library’ series. The volume collects four stories by Kipling – ‘Wee Willie Winkee’, ‘Baa, Baa, Black Sheep’, ‘His Majesty the King’, and ‘The Drums of the Fore and Aft’ – of which the first three had been published in The Week’s News, and ‘The Drums of the Fore and Aft’ was first published in this collection. The first edition was followed by the second Indian edition later in the same year, and a third Indian edition in 1890. ¶¶

The sheets of the present, first British edition were printed in an edition of 10,000 copies, which were ordered on 13 June 1890 and divided into two issues: 7,000 copies were bound up for the ‘English and English colonial’ issue (as here, identifiable by the presence of the London imprint on the title-page and the advertisement for British editions of Kipling’s works), and the Indian issue of 3,000 copies (which forms the fourth Indian edition). Richards notes that the ‘text for this edition (with the word “Child” dropped from the title) was revised, but the approximately 130 changes are slight in substance: most of the 97 word differences are merely translations of Indian terms into English (Kipling marked up for the printer a First Indian Edition [...])’. ¶¶

F.V. Livingston, Bibliography of the Works of Rudyard Kipling, 45; E.W. Martindell, Works of Rudyard Kipling (1881-1923), 37 (mis-dated ‘1888’); D.A. Richards, Rudyard Kipling, A36; J.McG. Stewart, Rudyard Kipling: A Bibliographical Catalogue, 56. ¶¶

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