Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)
Autograph letter signed (‘Rudyard Kipling’) to Rev. Mr Wyatt, Vermont, 10 February 1895
Four pages, 225 x 174mm, bifolium. Envelope. Provenance: Sotheby's, 14 December 1989, lot 141.

‘I’m doing a new set of Jungle tales to finally end the series and remove from me the temptation of keeping plugging the same target and I have much verse that I want to get into book form but one can’t hurry metre’. The letter concerns most notably The Jungle Book, giving news of his latest literary work and his progress toward it: ‘work goes on steadily with me (when I can refrain from playing with the baby)’. Kipling discusses his other current literary ventures: ‘Did you by any chance come across a long set of verses in the December Scribner (I don’t know whether I told you about this) the tale of an engineer on a steamer? I was rather pleased with it’. He vividly describes the current weather in Vermont: ‘Can you imagine seven days of wind at some forty miles an hour; thermometer from zero to -20 or 28 and a fine sand like snow eternally driving and swishing and whirling and wheeling?’. He concludes by congratulating Wyatt on his recent ecclesiastical appointment before characterising the people of Vermont: ‘I live and move and eat and sleep among an absolutely undisciplined people – just raw naked, unbroken man scuffling around in the face of raw unabashed nature – who are rather more Radicals than your well balanced mind has ever dreamed of. They oppress one another; they steal they lie, and they go under the bondage of their own tears and superstitions exactly as all our noble breed have done since the days of Adam’.

The Second Jungle Book, referred to here, was published in 1895. It is likely that Kipling was also referring to his collection of verses The Seven Seas, published a year later. Kipling spent several years living in Vermont, having moved there in 1892 soon after marrying Carrie Balestier; they returned to England in 1896.