Victorian Concepts in Kipling's 'A Matter of Fact'

Seminar paper from the year 2002 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,8, University of Hannover, language: English, abstract: The Victorian period (1835-1903) describes an important time span in English history in social, political and cultural matters. Terms like ¿splendid isolation¿ (in the field of foreign-policy) or ¿laissez-faire¿ (in the field of economy) and the philosophical theories of Utilitarianism and Intuitivism were fundamental concepts to influence life in the ¿Empire¿ in the second half of the 19th Century. During that time, the Industrial Revolution took place and the parliament was reformed three times (1830s ¿1880s). The Victorian period can be seen as the most glorious time of colonial England (if one thinks of colonialism and imperialism as glorious) but ironically also marks the decay of the ¿Empire¿, which many Englishmen had been so proud of.

In the literary world, English Romanticism dominated the early Victorian decades. Later on, Realism and Naturalism became more and more influential and in the 1890s, the New Realism and Aestheticism (including Decadence and Symbolism) took over.

One important author of Victorian literature was Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936). He achieved tremendous fame and his literary field stretched from newspaper-publications and essay-writing to novel writing and poetry. But the increasingly popular short story was the kind of literature he indulged in the most.

It is interesting to see that he went through quite an unusual educational career before he rose to fame: Kipling lived in India (a British Colony until 1950, when it became a federal state of the Commonwealth) and wrote newspaper-stories (so-called ¿turn overs¿). This is unusual, because most of the popular authors of the Victorian Age who came from the bourgeois middle-class, which was very powerful at that time, started out directly in their writing-career in England.. Some of those were Dickens, Stevenson, Thackeray, George Eliot, H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett and Thomas Hardy, who was an architect at first, though. Thus, Kipling¿s seven years of short story writing is comparatively exceptional. As a consequence of this Asian background, Kipling developed a special kind of literature, called Anglo-Indian prose.

Of his output of short stories, ¿A Matter of Fact¿ is not the most famous, and in secondary literature about Kipling the story plays a minor role, but it nonetheless explicitly portrays various features of Late-Victorian fiction. It is especially useful for discussing different conceptions of writing in that period.