Stalky & Co.

Stalky & Co. is a novel by Rudyard Kipling about adolescent boys at a British boarding school. It is a collection of school stories whose juvenile protagonists display a know-it-all, cynical outlook on patriotism and authority. It was first published in 1899 (following serialisation in the Windsor Magazine). It is set at a school dubbed "the College" or "the Coll.", which is based on the actual United Services College that Kipling attended as a boy. The character Beetle, one of the main trio, is partly based on Kipling himself, while the charismatic character Stalky is based on Lionel Dunsterville, M'Turk is based on George Charles Beresford, Mr King is based on William Carr Crofts, and the school Head, Mr. Bates, is based on Cormell Price.

The stories have elements of revenge, the macabre, bullying and violence, and hints about sex, making them far from childish or idealised. For example, Beetle pokes fun at an earlier, more earnest, boys' book, Eric, or, Little by Little, thus flaunting his more worldly outlook. The final chapter recounts events in the lives of the boys when, as adults, they are in the armed forces in India. It is implied that the mischievous pranks of the boys in school were splendid training for their role as instruments of the British Empire.

Teddy Roosevelt disdained the novel, calling it "a story which ought never to have been written, for there is hardly a single form of meanness which it does not seem to extol, or of school mismanagement which it does not seem to applaud."

Contents

The novel is a compilation of nine previously published stories, with a prefatory untitled poem beginning "Let us now praise famous men".

Several of the stories appeared in more than one magazine before being collected in book form. The stories are listed below in the order in which they appeared in the book, along with the date and location of their magazine appearances:

• "In Ambush" (August 1898, McClure's Magazine; December, 1898, Pearson's Magazine)
• "Slaves of the Lamp, Part I." (April 1897, Cosmopolis: A Literary Review;)
• "An Unsavoury Interlude" (January, 1899, McClure's Magazine and Windsor Magazine)
• "The Impressionists" (February, 1899, McClure's Magazine and Windsor Magazine)
• "The Moral Reformers" (March, 1899, McClure's Magazine and Windsor Magazine)
• A Little Prep." (April, 1899, McClure's Magazine and Windsor Magazine)
• "The Flag of Their Country" (May 1899, McClure's Magazine; July, 1899, Pearson's Magazine)
• "The Last Term" (May, 1899, Windsor Magazine)
• "Slaves of the Lamp, Part II." (May 1897, Cosmopolis: A Literary Review)

Rare and missing materials

Kipling expert Flora Virginia Milner Livingston, of Houghton Library, Harvard College Library, wrote in a 1972 Kipling bibliography:

No. 1 of the Stalky & Co. series in the Windsor Magazine was entitled "Stalky" and appeared in the "December, 1898" number of that Magazine. It was not included in the book, nor has it ever been reproduced.

However, as the Kipling Society states, it was indeed collected in 1923, as one of the Land and Sea Tales for Scouts and Guides.

An expanded version of "Stalky & Co." called "The Complete Stalky and Co." was published by Doubleday and Company (New York) in 1946. It contains all of the 1899 stories plus five more. They appear in the following order:

• "Stalky" (originally published 1898)
• "In Ambush" (1898)
• Slaves of the Lamp (Part I) (1897)
• An Unsavory Interlude (1899)
• The Impressionists (1899)
• The Moral Reformers (1899)
• The United Idolaters (1924)
• Regulus (1917)
• A Little Prep. (1899)
• The Flag of Their Country (1899)
• The Propagation of Knowledge (1926)
• The Satisfaction of a Gentleman (1929)
• The Last Term (1899)
• Slaves of the Lamp (Part II) (1899)

Characters

Boys

• "Stalky" (real name: Arthur Lionel Corkran). He knows that he is destined for Sandhurst, so he does not care about many academic subjects. Stalky later turns out to be brilliant in battle.
• Reginald (or Reggie) Beetle
• William "Turkey" M'Turk (pronounced McTurk; he comes from a landed estate in Ireland)

Staff

• Mr. Bates - the Headmaster
• Mr. Prout – a housemaster in charge of Stalky's House
• Mr. King – a housemaster who sometimes bedevils the boys; "generally held to be based on W. C. Crofts"
• Mr. Hartopp – a housemaster, President of the Natural History Society; a naive young man, he rather likes Stalky and his friends
• Foxy – a "subtle red-haired school Sergeant"

Sources and allusions

Kipling portrays the boys as being widely read, at least in the literature available to them. Much of their casual talk is held in Latin, not unusual for schoolboys of the time, and they quote or purposefully misquote the classical authors such as Cicero and Horace. Other texts appearing in dialogue include:

• The Boy's Own Paper
• Eric, or, Little by Little (referred to often in mockery) Example: "Wasn't it glorious? Didn't I Eric 'em splendidly?" (Stalky: Ch. 8, "The Last Term")
• Fors Clavigera, by John Ruskin
• "The Gold-Bug", by Edgar Allan Poe
• Jabberwocky, by Lewis Carroll (M'Turk uses the phrase 'frabjously immoral')
• A Jorrocks novel, probably Handley Cross (1843), by Robert Smith Surtees. Stalky quotes the line, "Hellish dark and smells of cheese." (Stalky: Ch. 8, "The Last Term")
• Julius Caesar, by William Shakespeare. Stalky, accusing another student of betrayal, says, "And Tulkus ... is an honourable man."
• The Last of the Mohicans, by James Fenimore Cooper. Stalky and friends often refer to a school officer as "Chingachgook".
• Oliver Twist, by Charles Dickens (an allusion to Fagin)
• Wisdom of Sirach. ("Let us now praise famous men...")
• Uncle Remus and His Legends of the Old Plantation, by Joel Chandler Harris, London edition, 1881. The principal basis for "The United Idolaters."

The youths also discuss the painting "A Day With Puffington's Hounds", by caricaturist John Leech, which outrages them.

Further stories

More tales about Stalky & Co. appeared in magazines and later in collections: "Regulus" and "The Honours of War" in A Diversity of Creatures (1917); "Stalky" in Land and Sea Tales for Scouts and Guides (1923); "The United Idolators" (first published in magazine form in 1924) and "The Propagation of Knowledge" in Debits and Credits (1926); and "The Satisfaction of a Gentleman" (with the others) in The Complete Stalky & Co (1929). Kipling describes "Stalky" as the first of the Stalky & Co tales to be written: it was originally published in The Windsor Magazine and McClure's Magazine in 1898.

Posthumously published manuscript

Kipling wrote an additional story about Stalky and Co., "Scylla and Charybdis", that remained unpublished in his lifetime. It depicts Stalky and his friends catching a colonel cheating at golf near Appledore in North Devon. The story existed only in manuscript form, attached to the end of the original manuscript of Stalky & Co.: it may have been planned as the opening chapter. On his death in 1936 Kipling bequeathed the manuscript to the Imperial Service Trust, the body that administered the Imperial Service College (successor institution to the United Services College). That school merged with Haileybury in 1942 to form Haileybury and Imperial Service College. The manuscript was displayed at Haileybury in 1962, in an exhibition to mark the school's centenary; and in 1989, after spending many years in a bank vault, was transferred to the College archives.

While the story "Scylla and Charybdis" was known to exist, it had never been transcribed or widely discussed. It was "discovered" in 2004 by Jeremy Lewins, a former Kipling Fellow at Magdalene College, Cambridge. The school subsequently decided to publish it, in association with the Kipling Society.

Television adaptation

The tales were adapted for television by the BBC in 1982. The six-part series starred Robert Addie as Stalky and David Parfitt as Beetle. It was directed by Rodney Bennett and produced by Barry Letts.

External links

• Stalky & Co. public domain audiobook at LibriVox
• Project Gutenberg e-text, stalky.com e-text, Words e-text
• Stalky & Co. on IMDb