Description:


(1865 - 1936) English writer and Nobel Prize winner. Among his works are 'The Jungle Book', 'Captains Courageous' and 'Kim'. Fine content T.L.S., 2pp. 4to., Burwash, Oct. 6, 1916, to author Frank Wynne. In part: '...Thank you very much for your kindness in sending me a copy of the Ganges Pilot. Now the mystery deepens. All that I quoted of it, I found in Vol. I of Busteed’s Echoes of Old Calcutta, published at Simla in 1882 (I came out to India as a boy of 16, in the autumn of that year). Busteed says of the poem that it refers to the episode of Job Charnock rescuing a Hindu widow from the pyre just as she was about to become sati. He lived with her for the rest of her life, and grieved over her when dead. The incident is supposed to have occurred on the banks of the Hugli, 1678. Here is Busteed textually on the poem itself:--...Then follows the four verses which I have quoted in The Light that Failed. They differ slightly from your version; e.g. about the arquebuses: Kate's eyes and 'young Joe you’'re nearing sixty' (By the way, 'sand-drift' is a misprint for 'scud-drift,' of course.) I do not believe for one instant that these verses are eighteenth century work, as Busteed implies. May I ask from what source you got them? As I remember Sir Henry Wood said that he thought they appeared first in The Times of India about 1882. Was Busteed mislead: were they a deliberate fake? Was there any tombstone at all; and is the song complete as it stands now? I don’t quite understand the Sussex verses being interpolated with so little explanation. It looks to me like a fragment of a long ballad. But who was the writer?...' Stain at top of both pages, else very good. 'The Light that Failed' was Kipling's first novel, written when he was 26 years old, and was based upon his own unrequited love for Florence Garrard as a teenager. Many of his early poems, published and unpublished, reflect his rather tortured relationship with her.

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February 9, 2021 10:00 AM EST
Elkton, MD, US

Alexander Historical Auctions LLC

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