F I N E B O O K S & M A N U S C R I P T S
RUDYARD KIPLING AND THE BOER WAR
21. Three Autograph Letters to Edmund Garrett KIPLING, Rudyard i. “Oct. 19. 1899”. An excellent, unpublished letter from Rudyard Kipling to Edmund Garrett. Three handwritten sides of letter paper (single sheet, folded twice, approxi- mately 480 words), signed “Rudyard Kipling”. [41808] £2,750 An exceptional and unpublished autograph letter, written at the outbreak of the Second Boer War to the influential journalist and up-and-coming politician in South Africa, Edmund Garrett. Garrett was a journalist and politician, editor of the influential Cape Times and a member of the Parliament of The Cape Of Good Hope. Around the time of this letter, however, he contracted tuberculosis and was forced to return to Britain. Garrett had been a rising star in South African public life in the late 1890s, and in him Kipling saw an heroic man of action that he could idolise in the same mould as Cecil Rhodes and Joseph Chamberlain. The timing of this letter is significant, being written just a week after the outbreak of the Second Boer War. Both Kipling and Garrett shared a view of the most favourable outcome of the war, that of “Federated States of South Africa” within the British Empire, but with its own independence. Kipling played an active literary role in the Boer War, writing poems and stories on the situation, with more success in the poetic form than prose, particularly in ‘Bridge-Guard in the Karroo’ and ‘The Old Issue’. The fundraising “music-hall song” he refers to here was ‘The Absent-Minded Beg- gar’, which was set to music by Edward Sullivan, and raised over £250,000 for soldiers’s families. His chief concern here, however, is that Garrett can rest and sufficiently recover so that he can play a leading role in the reconstruction of South Africa, and “the making of a new nation” after the war.
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