Stalky & Co. is a novel by Rudyard Kipling about adolescent boys at a British boarding school. It is a collection of school stories whose three juvenile protagonists display a know-it-all, cynical outlook on patriotism and authority. It was first published in 1899 after the stories had appeared in magazines during the previous two years. 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 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. George Orwell wrote in 1940 that Stalky had "had an immense influence on boys' literature".

Characters

Boys

Staff

Contents with summaries

The novel is a compilation of nine previously published stories, with a prefatory untitled poem beginning "Let us now praise famous men" (Sirach 44:1). 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:

Other stories

An expanded version of Stalky & Co. called The Complete Stalky and Co. was published in 1929. It contains all of the stories in the 1899 book plus five more, most of which had appeared in magazines in the 1920s. They appear in the following order: Other Stalky stories:

Criticism

When the stories were published, some critics praised them, including most of those in the daily papers. The Athenaeum, for example, emphasised the stories' humour and realism. On the other hand, many reviews were harsh, notably Robert Buchanan's essay on Kipling in The Contemporary Review, in which Buchanan saw Kipling's work as a sign of British culture's reversion to barbarism, and said of the book, "The vulgarity, the brutality, the savagery reeks on every page." Henry James called the book "deplorable"; Somerset Maugham, "odious". Teddy Roosevelt said it was "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." Other harsh criticisms have come from George Sampson in The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature, A. C. Benson, and Edmund Wilson. H. G. Wells called Stalky and his friends "mucky little sadists". In his Outline of History, noting that a master incites the three boys to bully the two bullies with "gusto" (shared by the author) and that the Head seems to approve it, he saw authority and supposed morality as the typical justification for cruelty. He added, "In this we have the key to the ugliest, most retrogressive, and finally fatal idea of modern imperialism; the idea of a tacit conspiracy between the law and illegal violence." [Italics in original.] He compared the boys' actions to the Black Hundreds' massacres in tsarist Russia, the Jameson Raid, and "the adventures of Sir Edward Carson and F. E. Smith (now Lord Birkenhead) in Ireland". On the other hand, Richard Le Gallienne called it "perhaps the best school story ever written" and replied to its detractors by quoting the story "An Unsavoury Interlude": "It's not brutality... It's boy; only boy."

Language and allusions

The stories contain a good deal of language, from slang and Devon dialect to legal Latin, that is unfamiliar to modern readers, especially those outside Britain. Also Kipling portrays the boys as being widely read in the literature available to them. Their casual talk includes Latin and French (often distorted), not unusual for schoolboys of the time, and they quote or purposefully misquote classical authors such as Cicero and Horace. At least two editions have provided notes to help modern readers understand these words and references. Allusions include:

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 "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.