Miscellaneous memorable material from Dion Fortune's occult novels

Each article in the series inspired by Dion Fortune's five occult novels seemed like the last one at the time, but, even though the returns diminish, a further trawl always produces a little more material to comment on. 

This article contains a few more particularly striking expressions and propositions, many of which speak for themselves. 

Psychology, pain and energy vampires
The Winged Bull mentions a 'psychological car crash', and that the victim is in need of a human 'breakdown lorry'.

This is a very neat way of describing a major internal disaster. It is spot on: people do sometimes feel as though they have been hit by a truck, and they may well need some assistance to get going again. 

The crash victim is called Ursula. She is in a bad way because she has been in the power of an energy vampire. Dion Fortune comes up with some very good images here: Ursula is described as being like a run-down battery and a sucked-out orange, while her vampiric victimiser swells up like a bullfrog!

This cover picture by Bruce Pennington shows Ursula the psychological car crash victim and the breakdown lorry:

These very true words are from Moon Magic:

“...there are no anaesthetics in psychology.”

Dion Fortune got that one right. Some people will have no idea what she is talking about; they are the lucky ones. Others will know only too well how excruciatingly painful dealing with the inner world can be; they will have learned the hard way that there is no pain relief so their agony just has to be endured.

More memorable material from Dion Fortune's occult novels

This is yet another article in the series inspired by Dion Fortune's occult novels. It contains a few more of her thought-provoking propositions.

Three essential qualities
The Demon Lover contains what might be called a person specification for advanced occult work:

“Dr Latimer had brains and kindness, but no strength; the hard-faced man had brains and strength, but no kindness; the newcomer had all three, and Veronica knew by this that he was a far greater man in every way than either of the others was ever likely to be.” 

Each of these qualities needs to be developed to a far greater than average degree. Finding people who meet two of the requirements must be difficult enough; good luck with finding someone who meets all three! Such people may exist in fiction, but how many are to be found in real life? 

Balancing the qualities
Assuming that kindness includes mercy and that strength includes justice, this further extract from The Demon Lover is of interest because it reminds me of of a very similar statement in a very different novel:

“...although unbalanced mercy is but weakness, unbalanced justice is cruelty and oppression.”

When I first saw this, I immediately thought of some words from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre that support the above proposition:

“Feeling without judgment is a washy draught indeed; but judgment untempered by feeling is too bitter and husky a morsel for human deglutition.”

Feeling that is not balanced with rationality may well be not much good to anyone on the receiving end, and judgement that is not balanced with compassion may indeed be too harsh for most people to digest.

Inspiration and creativity in Conan Doyle's Magic Door

This is yet another article in the series inspired by Through the Magic Door, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's little volume of essays about books, reading and associated topics.

This post highlights two propositions that Conan Doyle makes about inspiration and creative people: he suggests that inspiration comes from outside and that creative people are often frail and die young.  

It also mentions a few other writers in connection with these topics. 

Inspiration comes from outside
Conan Doyle says this about the source of inspiration:

“...the feeling which every writer of imaginative work must have, that his supreme work comes to him in some strange way from without, and that he is only the medium for placing it upon the paper...Is it possible that we are indeed but conduit pipes from the infinite reservoir of the unknown? Certainly it is always our best work which leaves the least sense of personal effort.”

That last sentence is often very true. Rudyard Kipling said something similar when he gave his Daemon credit for assisting and inspiring him in his work: he said that the writing he did under this influence was 'frictionless'. 

Conan Doyle's mention of a conduit pipe reminds me of another of Rudyard Kipling's Daemon-related images: he likens the end of a good run of genuine, friction-free creativity to “the water-hammer click of a tap turned off.”

Many other writers have speculated about where their inspiration might come from. 

Robert Louis Stevenson for example said that it came from vivid dreams caused by the Brownies!

Frances Hodgson Burnett thought of herself as just the custodian rather than the originator of her gift. So where did this gift come from then?

Maybe some fiction writers really do channel or download their works and ideas from somewhere.

A few comments about life from a Dion Fortune occult novel

The first article in the series inspired by Dion Fortune's occult novels contains quotations relevant to the topic of operating from a position of weakness versus operating from a position of strength.

This article features three memorable statements from The Sea Priestess about what Douglas Adams called Life, the Universe and Everything. They seem both very true and very depressing to me.

A striking and very true description of life
It was this statement that inspired this article:

“It seemed to me that life is an all-in wrestling match without a referee. It had fairly got me down.“

It seems like that to many people!

Life does indeed often feel like one long fight for survival, one long battle against hostile forces with no one to see fair play.

The problems and attacks keep coming; they are unrelenting and never-ending and there is often no respite.

There is no justice in the world; no one is minding the store, so people who behave badly towards others do indeed often get away with it.

No wonder people get depressed!

All this reminds me of something that Marvin the Paranoid Android says in Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

“Life! Don't talk to me about life.”

If life gives with one hand it takes with the other
These quotations from The Sea Priestess suggest that there is a great price to be paid in return for a great advantage:

“It is said that the gods always make you pay the price for any great blessing, but in my case, having sent me a pretty unmitigated curse, they funded up handsomely in other directions.”

“Then I told her my idea that whereas the gods are always reputed to make mortals pay up for any great benefit bestowed, I, by virtue of my asthma, seemed to be running a kind of credit account with them. She agreed.”

The context of the speaker's remarks is not really relevant to this article; it is the proposition that great gifts come at a great price that is of interest here.

Oscar Wilde's interesting words about the colour green

The many occurrences of the colour green in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's essay collection Through the Magic Door  inspired an investigation into green references and connections in Conan Doyle's life and works.

I came across an interesting statement about the colour green by the poet and playwright Oscar Wilde along the way. His words have inspired yet another article about this colour. 

Oscar Wilde on the colour green 
As mentioned in the article about Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes and the colour green, Oscar Wilde, who incidentally often wore a green carnation, wrote an essay called Pen, Pencil, And Poison - A Study In Green about an art critic who was a secret poisoner. 

The artist, author and suspected serial killer in question was Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, who was mentioned by Conan Doyle in a Sherlock Holmes story and was a friend of Charles Lamb.

Wilde's descriptions of the man, his life and his crimes are mostly irrelevant here, but as a matter of interest Wainewright spent his boyhood at Turnham Green, he was educated at the Greenwich Academy, and he later had a pomona-green chair in his library.

Wilde's essay contains these thought-provoking words about Wainewright and the colour green:

“He had that curious love of green, which in individuals is always the sign of a subtle artistic temperament, and in nations is said to denote a laxity, if not a decadence of morals.“

Green has always been my favourite colour. Why is this curious? I like the idea of the artistic temperament though! 

Two green-loving peoples
When it comes to the love of green in nations, Wilde is probably referring to various Islamic countries and what is now the Irish Republic. Both Muslims and Irish Catholics favour the colour green, and Conan Doyle, who like Wilde was an Irishman, was well aware of this.

In Conan Doyle's Green Flag, Arab tribesmen capture the Irish regimental flag. One of their sheikhs says that by its colour it might well belong to the people of the true faith - i.e. Islam.

Rudyard Kipling and some green connections

Posts about Rudyard Kipling and Arthur Conan Doyle are very popular, so I am always looking for inspiration for more articles. 

After writing about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes and the colour green, I decided to investigate occurrences of this colour in the life and works of Rudyard Kipling. 

I didn't find anything amazing, but some connections are worth mentioning. The people and places that Kipling has in common with Conan Doyle are particularly interesting.

Roger Lancelyn Green
Writer Roger Lancelyn Green (1918 – 1987) was the father of Richard Lancelyn Green, the previously mentioned authority on Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes. He was editor of the Kipling Journal and wrote and edited books about Kipling: 

The school in Green Road
When Rudyard Kipling was staying in the House of Desolation in Southsea, he attended what he called 'a terrible little day-school'. 

Roger Lancelyn Green identified the school as Hope House in  Green Road, the same road that Conan Doyle's house stood opposite. Conan Doyle's younger brother Innes later came to live at this house and became a pupil at Hope House school. 

The Green, Rottingdean
Conan Doyle lived in Bush Villas, Elm Grove, Southsea; Rudyard Kipling stayed with his family at The Elms, The Green, Rottingdean near Brighton for a few years. The large garden and grounds of this house have been preserved, and as Kipling Gardens are now open to the public:

Greenhow Hill

Greenhow Hill is a village in North Yorkshire.

Rudyard Kipling's short story On Greenhow Hill was first published in Harper’s Magazine in 1890. It also appeared in Life's Handicap, a collection of Kipling's stories. 

What makes the story of additional interest is that Conan Doyle's editor at the Strand Magazine was Herbert Greenhough Smith; by coincidence the name Greenhough is derived from Greenhow Hill.

Conan Doyle's Magic Door and the amazing Kipling coincidence

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Rudyard Kipling have appeared in many posts on here, both separately and together.

These posts attract large numbers of readers. The article about Conan Doyle, Kipling and the Isle of Wight has, rather surprisingly, recently reached the top ten in terms of the number of viewings.

Another article lists some more common elements in the lives of these two great writers. That article was created some years ago; I have since learned of something else that Conan Doyle and Kipling had in common.

The first article inspired by Conan Doyle's Through the Magic Door, which I discovered only recently, introduces the book and lists a few minor topics and references that appear in both his book and my articles. 

This article features a fascinating story that Conan Doyle has to tell about a reputation-saving 'coincidence'. This incident in his life is of interest not only for its own sake but also because Rudyard Kipling had a very similar experience.

More about the Magic Door
While Through the Magic Door contains some relevant and quotable material, Conan Doyle is verbose – he says himself that he indulges in didactic talk and long digressions - his language is rather old-fashioned and much of his commentary doesn't hold my attention.

I said this about Joyce Collin-Smith's book Call No Man Master:

“...her work has a...duality: it is both very interesting and very boring. Some of the content fascinates me and resonates very strongly while some of it means very little so I skip over it.“

I feel much the same about Through the Magic Door!

While I am not for example particularly interested in the lives and works of many of the 18th and 19th century writers Conan Doyle thinks very highly of, some of the other material definitely gets my attention.

For me, one of the most riveting parts of the book is where Conan Doyle tells of his narrow escape from being accused of plagiarism. This story is all the more interesting because it closely matches a story told by Rudyard Kipling.

Stella Gibbons’s My American and writing: Part I

As previously mentioned, Stella Gibbons makes some insightful comments about writers, writing and the imagination in her novel My American, in which Amy Lee is the main character. Amy's love of reading, writing and research and her need for solitude as a young girl are all very typical of people who grow up to be writers. 

This article contains some particularly significant extracts with the commentary they inspire:

Freely flowing words and ideas

What Stella Gibbons says about Amy's writing is a good description of what it feels like when the ideas and words come easily:

“Her stories never stuck, but sometimes she enjoyed writing them more than she did at other times. When the pen flew and her hand ached, when there was nothing real in the world except the white paper before her and the flying tip of the nib, and the picture in her mind that she was describing turned so quickly into words that she could no longer tell at what instant the figures in it became marks on the paper—then the story was Beginning to Run, and unfortunate is the writer who has never tasted such a moment.”

Unfortunate indeed is the writer whose creations are never fluent and painless - or frictionless as Rudyard Kipling would say.

And yes, the whole outer world often does disappear for some people when they are engrossed in reading or writing.

More freely flowing words and ideas

After getting a job as an office girl, Amy is sent to collect some copy from a very famous writer who has produced many stories for the boys’ magazine she works for.

Some writers with Celtic connections

The starting point for this article was a line in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s novella The Parasite, which has been the subject of many articles.

Austin Gilroy thinks that the witch Helen Penclosa got her hooks deep into him because of his Celtic origin and that his colleague Charles Sadler got off lightly because of his phlegmatic Saxon temperament.

This made me wonder if people of Celtic origin really are more open to unseen influences than those of other ancestries. I have Irish connections on one side and Scottish on the other, so this topic is of great interest to me.

I remembered that some of the writers featured or mentioned in this blog had Cornish, Irish, Scottish or Welsh connections; I decided to do a quick investigation and list any more people on here who are known or appear to be of Celtic descent on one or both sides.

People of interest with Celtic connections
Conan Doyle may have been born in Edinburgh, but he had Irish Catholic parents.

Joan Aiken’s Canadian-born mother was a MacDonald, which suggests Scottish ancestors.

J. M. Barrie was a Scotsman.

Enid Blyton had an Irish grandmother on her father’s side.

Angela Brazil had a Scottish grandfather on her mother’s side.

The Brontës had an Irish father and a Cornish mother.

John Buchan was a Scotsman.

Taylor Caldwell was of Scottish origin on both sides. She was descended from the MacGregor clan on her mother’s side.

James Cameron has remote Scottish connections.

Andrew Carnegie, whose public libraries have inspired many writers, was a Scotsman.

The family of Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) had some Irish connections.

Eoin Colfer is Irish.

Marie Corelli’s real father was almost certainly the Scottish poet Charles Mackay.

Context and the total picture: Part I

Sometimes a painful experience doesn’t feel quite so bad when we learn that other people, some very well known, have had a similar experience.

One example comes from the life of the artist Pauline Baynes, best known for her illustrations of the Narnia books.

Her family broke up when she was five years old. She returned to the UK from India with her mother. She was sent to a convent school where she was given a hard time by strict, unsympathetic nuns because of her fantastical imagination, her unusual handmade clothes and her ability to speak Hindi.

She later learned that Rudyard Kipling, whose work she greatly admired, had as a boy been sent back from India to a place where he was treated badly. Learning that she was not alone, that she was in very good company, made her feel a little better.

Then there was Napoleon, reduced to living on crumbs of hope in exile. Anyone who knows what subsisting on remote possibilities is like might well feel a little better or even gratified when they learn that they have something in common with the great emperor. 

However, putting painful experiences into the context of other people’s lives in this way can be a two-edged sword. 

L. M. Montgomery and Rudyard Kipling’s Cat

The Cat That Walked by Himself is one of the stories in Rudyard Kipling’s children’s classic Just So Stories (1902). 

This book contains tales about various wild animals:

“...the wildest of all the wild animals was the Cat. He walked by himself, and all places were alike to him.”

The Cat walks through the Wet Wild Woods, waving his wild tail and walking by his wild lone.

L. M. Montgomery knew this story, and it meant a lot to her. Her heroine Emily Starr mentions it after her friend Dean warns her about the pressure to conform at school:

“"...Don't let them make anything of you but yourself, that's all. I don't think they will.’

"No, they won't," said Emily decidedly. "I'm like Kipling's cat--I walk by my wild lone and wave my wild tail where so it pleases me. That's why the Murrays look askance at me. They think I should only run with the pack."”
From Emily Climbs (1925)

Later in the book, Emily gets the chance to go to live in New York. She is very torn, thinking about what she might gain and what she might lose:

“Would the Wind Woman come to her in the crowded city streets? Could she be like Kipling's cat there?”

She decides to remain with her people and the old farm on her beloved Prince Edward Island, even though it means missing many opportunities to broaden her horizons and have a career. 

Lucy Maud Montgomery made some very different decisions, and she came to regret them as terrible mistakes.

Diana Wynne Jones and the shortage of reading material

Diana Wynne Jones is yet another writer who was a voracious reader as a child. Unfortunately, she never had nearly enough books to satisfy her appetite for reading material. As she put it, she suffered from a perpetual book famine.

Her book Reflections: On the Magic of Writing contains some interesting - although very painful to read - autobiographical material; it was the source of an amusing anecdote, and it also provides some information about the vital part that books and reading played in her early life.

A few extracts will show what she was up against when trying to obtain more books to read. 

A starvation diet of books
Diana Wynne Jones’s father was stingy and tight-fisted in the extreme: 

“...birthdays were the one occasion when my father could be persuaded to buy books. By begging very hard, I got Puck of Pook’s Hill when I was ten and Greenmantle when I was twelve. But my father was inordinately mean about money. He solved the Christmas book-giving by buying an entire set of Arthur Ransome books, which he kept locked in a high cupboard and dispensed one between the three of us each year.”

So she too liked Rudyard Kipling and John Buchan! 

I would have felt very short-changed indeed if all I was given for Christmas was one Arthur Ransome book - and he is not one of my favourite authors anyway!

L. M. Montgomery on Rudyard Kipling and writing to order

It came as no great surprise to learn recently that L. M. Montgomery was familiar with the works of Rudyard Kipling: as mentioned in previous articles, she was a great reader. 

What was unexpected was that she singled out Kipling’s Barrack Room Ballads for special praise - perhaps this was because she was given the poems as a Christmas present. 

Her actual words about the poems surprised me too:

“They are capital — full of virile strength and life. They thrill and pulsate and burn, they carry you along in their rush and swing, till you forget your own petty interests and cares, and burst out into a broader soul-world and gain a much clearer realization of all the myriad forms of life that are beating around your own little one. And this is good for a person even if one does slip back afterwards into the narrow bounds of one’s own life. We can never be quite so narrow again.”

From The Complete Journals of L. M. Montgomery: The PEI Years, 1900-1911

I certainly know what it is like to be thrilled and taken out of myself and swept into another, wider, world by certain poems, Rudyard Kipling’s in particular, but the Barrack Room Ballads are not among them. They have on the whole a negative effect.

This enthusiasm was so surprising that I went to Project Gutenberg to refresh my memory of the Ballads in the hope of understanding why L. M. Montgomery felt this way about them.

More about Rudyard Kipling’s Daemon

There is a little more Daemon-related material of interest in Rudyard Kipling’s autobiographical work Something of Myself.

His anecdotes provide some recommendations and guidance that other writers might find useful.

Give the Daemon the tools it wants
When it comes to writing, the best approach is to use tools and materials that attract and encourage the Daemon and avoid anything that the inner companion says it dislikes.

Kipling’s Daemon had a strong preference for deep black ink:

“For my ink I demanded the blackest, and had I been in my Father's house, as once I was, would have kept an ink-boy to grind me Indian-ink. All 'blue-blacks' were an abomination to my Daemon...”

It is strange what a big difference these little things make. It is definitely good practice to humour whatever it is that makes the ideas flow. It is merely a matter of doing what feels right; it is easy to sense when the Daemon is comfortable and when not.

Do your share of the work
One thing the writer can do that the Daemon can not is to research and check some basic information. Not only does this improve the quality of the work and the authority of the writer, getting started may attract the attention of the Daemon and encourage it to make its own contribution.

In Rudyard Kipling’s own words:

“In respect to verifying one's references, which is a matter in which one can help one's Daemon. Take nothing for granted if you can check it. Even though that seem waste-work, and has nothing to do with the essentials of things, it encourages the Daemon. There are always men who by trade or calling know the fact or the inference that you put forth. If you are wrong by a hair in this, they argue 'False in one thing, false in all.' Having sinned, I know. Likewise, never play down to your public--not because some of them do not deserve it, but because it is bad for your hand.”

Rudyard Kipling and his Daemon

This article was inspired by a short anecdote in Rudyard Kipling’s autobiographical work Something of Myself (1937).

This is where he tells us about his Daemon, a kind of personal muse who he says inspired his writing. He tells us some very interesting and significant things about this supernatural being.

The inspirational anecdote in summary is that a man told Kipling a horror story that he said was a personal experience. Kipling wrote it up but something stopped him from sending it to a publisher. He was really glad about this when, ‘by chance’, he found the story, identical in every way, in an old magazine. He gives credit to his Daemon for preventing a charge of plagiarism, which would not be good for such a famous writer’s reputation and would have been very stressful for him.

This may sound far-fetched, but other people have had similar experiences although they may not attribute helpful inner promptings and warnings to a daemon but, for example, to Providence, the Universe or their subconscious minds. I have given examples of such positive inner guidance in various articles.

Two more writers who were discouraged from reading

This article was inspired by a quotation in the previous one, which is about L. M. Montgomery and writing:

“Reading stories is bad enough but writing them is worse.”

-From Anne of Green Gables

Marilla’s words to Anne may well have come from someone L. M. Montgomery knew in real life, a grandparent perhaps.

Marilla is not alone in her views; her words have reminded me of two other writers who in childhood encountered people with this dismissive attitude and met with disapproval or worse just because they loved to read.

John Masefield, whose children’s books have been featured on here, had a horrible domineering aunt who disapproved of his love of reading and thought that it was a disgusting habit that should be broken. When he was 13, in an attempt to cure his addiction she sent him away to train for a life at sea.

A few words from Rudyard Kipling on his birthday

Words are one of the greatest of the unseen influences that affect our lives.

In February 1923, Rudyard Kipling gave a speech at the Annual Dinner of the Royal College of Surgeons in London. This well-known quotation comes from his address:

“I am, by calling, a dealer in words; and words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind…”

He is right. Words are a supremely powerful force that can affect people very strongly. Words help people to escape into another world.

While ‘tool’ would perhaps be a better word than ‘drug’, I remember reading that Dennis Wheatley got large numbers of letters from people in hospital who said that his books helped them to forget their pain.

Some of Kipling’s words are not so much a drug as a tonic and an inspiration:

“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. To be your own man is a hard business. If you try it, you’ll be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”

This quotation has been attributed to Nietzsche, but Rudyard Kipling said it at an interview in 1935.

He was right about the price for being an individual too.

The potion of poetry

In Stalky & Co., Kipling says that a book of poetry borrowed from the Headmaster’s library makes McTurk completely drunk for three days. Beetle, who is Kipling himself, reads avidly whenever he gets the chance. He disappears for days into another world while reading a book that a master threw at him; it takes some hammering on his head with a spoon and a threat to drop a pilchard down his neck to make him stop reading and bring him back down to earth!

Some people don’t use or need alcohol or other stimulants; words and the images they evoke can inflame their imaginations, induce trances and intoxicate them. Rudyard Kipling was both a recipient of and a contributor to this phenomenon.

The weaving of words

I would call Kipling a weaver of words; some of his poetry is like a spell of enchantment.

Puck's Song from Puck of Pook's Hill, which demonstrates Kipling’s love of England and English history, is a very good example of his power to create magical pictures in people’s minds.  It mentions Gramarye, which has associations with magic and occult learning.  Isle of Gramarye has been used as an alternative name for Britain.

The entire poem can be read here here. These are the final two stanzas:

Trackway and Camp and City lost,
     Salt Marsh where now is corn;
Old Wars, old Peace, old Arts that cease,
     And so was England born!

She is not any common Earth,
     Water or wood or air,
But Merlin’s Isle of Gramarye,
     Where you and I will fare.

Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, and the Isle of Wight

When I visited Portsmouth and Southsea earlier this year, I thought about extending my explorations to another, nearby, seaside town - Ryde on the Isle of Wight. After walking around Southsea looking at places of interest, I didn’t have enough energy or inclination left, so I decided to leave it for another day. I had hoped to go much sooner, but I have finally made the trip.

Significant dates

Geoffrey Stavert, the author of A Study in Southsea: The Unrevealed Life of Doctor Arthur Conan Doyle, did some detective work and was reasonably confident that Conan Doyle arrived at Clarence Pier in Southsea on Saturday, June 24th 1882.

By coincidence, June 24th 2017 was a Saturday too, and I first intended to visit the island on that day; it seemed fitting that I would leave Clarence Pier on the same day and date that Conan Doyle arrived. However, it was a day when the weather was not very good and I didn’t feel like going anywhere.

I kept postponing this trip in favour of other things, until I realised that autumn was upon us. September 22nd was the day of the Autumn Equinox, so I thought that would be a good day to go.

Journey to Ryde on the Isle of Wight

I returned to Southsea, then travelled by Hovercraft over the Solent to Ryde.

I have made this journey before, but on those occasions Kipling and Doyle were not involved. I lived in Ryde for a short time when I was four years old, and I went back there just for personal reasons. This time, I was aware of some relevant associations.

Unseen influences on the Isle of Wight

The Isle of Wight has a bad reputation. There are allegations of Satanism, black magic and mysterious goings on. Freemasons in business and local government are alleged to have inordinate influence on the island’s affairs. David Icke, who lives in Ryde, is one of the many people who have written about this.

I will never know why my family moved to Ryde – and some other places with interesting and sinister connections. I suspect that someone was following some kind of psychic trail.

Rudyard Kipling and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: some common elements

While reading about the lives of Rudyard Kipling and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, I noticed that they had a few elements in common in addition to having lived in Southsea  - in Kipling's case suffering terribly in the House of Desolation there and in Conan Doyle's case thriving in his doctor's practice.

Artistic fathers

Both men had fathers who illustrated their books.

Conan Doyle’s father Charles Altamont Doyle was one of the first artists to depict Sherlock Holmes. His drawings were used for the 1888 edition of A Study in Scarlet.

John Lockwood Kipling illustrated his son’s Jungle Books.

Bereaved wives

Both Rudyard Kipling and Conan Doyle married women they met through the women’s brothers, brothers who both died young.

Conan Doyle met fellow Southsea resident Louise Hawkins when her brother Jack became a patient of his. He took the young man into his care at his house in Elm Grove, but the patient soon died. He was only 25 years old. Dr Doyle and Louise soon became engaged and then married. Unfortunately, she too died young and Conan Doyle remarried.

Rudyard Kipling met American-born Caroline Starr Balestier when her brother Wolcott, a writer and publisher who wrote a book jointly with Kipling, introduced her to his famous friend. Wolcott died two years later at the age of 29, and Kipling proposed to Caroline soon afterwards.

Defence Against the Dark Arts Part VIII: Two school stories

My investigation of Rudyard Kipling's early life has stirred up memories of two good books about life in boys' schools, one of them written by Kipling himself:

Stalky & Co. by Rudyard Kipling

The Compleet Molesworth by Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle.

The Molesworth books are much lighter than the Stalky stories; they are greatly enhanced by Ronald Searle's cartoons.

Rudyard Kipling is a great writer; Ronald Searle is a great illustrator.

Both books are very funny; they have brought great enjoyment to large numbers of people. I am very glad that I read them when I was young enough for them to make an indelible impression.

Reading in childhood

Children may read to escape, to fill gaps in their lives, to exercise their imaginations, to learn directly and indirectly and for enjoyment; whatever the cause, they may remember what they read for the rest of their lives.

Ayn Rand for example read a story in a magazine in 1914, when she was nine years old.  Her biographer Barbara Brandon managed to locate a copy of the magazine in 1982, and discovered that Ayn, who had recounted the story to her at considerable length, had remembered almost every detail, both major and minor, of this work that she had not read since the age of nine.

As a small boy in Southsea, Rudyard Kipling escaped from his unbearable life by reading. He never forgot some of the stories and poems that he read in books and magazines during this time. He wrote about them and his efforts to identify some of them in Something of Myself.

I can remember most of what I read as a child very vividly. Some of it was buried for many years but it was still all there, including these two books about school life. They have their critics; they may seem dated, irrelevant and politically very incorrect, but they are part of my life and I feel privileged to have read them.