Stalky and the Language of Education

When he wrote Stalky & Co. (1899),¹ Rudyard Kipling had become a master stylist. The book retains its appeal nearly a century later but no longer as a manual for training administrators of the British Empire, which is how many early critics interpreted it. Rather, it can be read as a celebration of language, boys' language—how they sift and assimilate both their cultural heritage and their immediate experiences through it, and how this prepares them to confront the challenges of adulthood. The book is about education, and a reader's experience with its language constitutes the very process of education as Kipling envisions it.

Stalky & Co. tells the story of three English schoolboys in about 1880. The school, the United Services College at Westward Ho! was a corporation established in 1874 by military officers who could not afford distinguished schools but who wanted their sons well enough educated to pass entrance exams into military academies. Operated "on the cheap" (Smith 8), the school occupied a row of connected buildings facing the Atlantic in North Devon. Kipling immortalized those "twelve bleak houses by the shore" where the boys endured plenty of raw weather and never much food (Something 46).

Because the three boys (Stalky, M'Turk, and Beetle) and all other characters are modeled on real people, the book is often treated solely as a roman à clef. Indeed, the three (L. C. Dunsterville, G. C. Beresford, and Kipling himself) later wrote autobiographical accounts augmenting or revising their fictional selves. But exclusively biographical readings seem inadequate. Kipling's imagination ran with a free rein once he escaped the bonds of journalism during his "seven years' hard" in India (Something 56). Moreover, he developed a "poetic" process of composition that emphasized the sound and rhythm of language. This polyglossic (and polysonic) style coupled with his high-speed imagination radically transformed events and people, blurring fact and fantasy. The distance between fictive language and "reality" became Shakespearean, which explains why a gap opens between form and content and tempts critics to treat him sometimes as a photographic realist and sometimes as a verbal magician.

Few critics undervalue Kipling's skill with language.² It is his morality or ideology that antagonizes. But if one approaches his style first in terms of recent "orality-literacy" theory, then a special claim can be made for Stalky & Co.'s value to teachers and students. Walter J. Ong, one of the best known advocates of this theory, calls attention to the primacy of orality ("written words are residue," Orality 11), dramatizes its evolving relationship with the "technologies" of writing, printing, and electronic texts, and warns against the "impoverishment" resulting from our "addiction" to unreflective visualization in literary criticism (Interfaces 103). The theory is especially applicable to Stalky & Co., which re-creates the old oral-rhetorical tradition that survived in English schools. It illustrates the study of Latin as a "puberty initiation rite" reserved for boys (Ong, Presence 251, Rhetoric 120-24). The book is a virtual case study of oral and literate "language acquisition," exhibiting the full range of competencies that empower skillful users. In "The Last Term," Beetle's "shouting and declaiming against the long-ridged seas" like Demosthenes concentrates in a momentary image the book's "acoustic" appeal.

Further, a second claim for the book's value can be made based on the relationship between language and morality or ideology that Kipling may have discovered in Friedrich Froebel's theory that genuine knowledge derives from "mind-world-language," which is threefold, yet in itself one.

In "The Propagation of Knowledge," Beetle was reading about mad Elizabethan beggars in Isaac D'Israeli's Curiosities of Literature (1791-1823):

Then, at the foot of a left-hand page, leaped out on him a verse—of incommunicable splendour, opening doors into inexplicable worlds—from a song which Tom-a-Bedlams were supposed to sing. It ran:

With a heart of furious fancies    Whereof I am commander,With a burning spear and a horse of air,    To the wilderness I wander. With a knight of ghosts and shadows    I summoned am to tourney...