Harry Ricketts' biography
gives details of the event. The opening pronoun here refers to Alice and Lockwood Kipling, Rudyard’s parents.
12/29/2015
A hundred and fifty years ago tomorrow, December 30th, saw the birth in Bombay, India of Rudyard Kipling, one of the half-dozen best English-language poets.
Harry Ricketts' biography
Their son was born at ten o'clock on the evening of 30 December 1865, after six days of labour — "as long as it took for the creation of the world," as Alice later quipped. The servants sacrificed a goat to assist a safe delivery and quick recovery. [Ricketts op. cit., page 7.]Six days! That would get you a handsome medical-malpractice settlement nowadays, though perhaps not in India.
I reviewed Ricketts' Kipling biography, along with Andrew Lycett’s and some related books, for The New Criterion back in 2000.
That review — it is really an extended essay on Kipling — turned out to belong to a genre dear to the hearts of us poor Grub Street hacks: the genre of literary productions that yield a trickle of revenue for ever after via reprint requests. I must have made a couple of thou from it altogether these past 15 years.
I reviewed a different book about Kipling here.
And speaking of The New Criterion: the forthcoming (January 2016) issue carries my review of Matt Ridley’s new book The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge. My review has a scathing (I hope) on-topic (for VDARE.com, that is) flourish at the very end.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.