Rudyard Kipling's Uncollected Speeches: A Second Book of Words

A Book of Words, Kipling s own selection of his speeches published in 1928, reflects a variety of topics and audiences. He spoke to schoolboys about literature, to Brazilians about the spirit of the Latin, to the Royal Geographical Society about travel, to navy men about sailors, to ship owners about shipping, to university students about independence. Before the end of his life Kipling added a few more speeches to the version of the book that appeared, posthumously, in the splendid Sussex Edition of his collected works. Even so, many of his speeches have remained uncollected and virtually unknown. A Second Book of Words collects what Kipling left uncollected. The speeches in this new book date from 1884 to 1935. We see Kipling at different moments before different audiences. This new book adds another forty-eight speeches to the thirty-eight that Kipling chose to make public, printing all the known uncollected speeches long or short, carefully meditated or spontaneous, tendentious or diplomatic. Another twenty-five for which no text has so far been found are identified, as are the speeches that he is known to have written for members of the royal family. Professor Pinney, editor of the six-volume The Letters of Rudyard Kipling (Palgrave Macmillan, 1990 2004), brings his extensive knowledge of Kipling s life and writings to the volume with an informative introduction, headnotes to contextualize each speech, and a complete checklist of all the speeches. Altogether, the edition is a considerable contribution to Kipling s canon and to an important but neglected area of the Kipling bibliography.