He may have been similarly influenced by the writings of Sterndale’s 1877 book, Seonee: Or, Camp Life on the Satpura Range and Robert Armitage Sterndale, Mammalia of India. Certainly Kipling had never visited the jungle area in India and appears to have been inspired by photographs and stories of his friends who had been there. He admitted to one colleague that he called upon nearly everything he had “heard or dreamed about the Indian Jungle” to write the stories. The Jungle Book stories was purely sourced out of Kipling’s imagination and his talents as an acute observer and story teller of life may have been honed in his apprenticeship as a journalist in Lahore, Pakistan. According to Kipling’s surviving daughter, Elsie, Kipling used to recite from the Jungle Books with the lights out in a semi-darkened room. The deaths left Kipling brokenhearted and he wrote in 1920 that “the pain gets acuter when peace comes because one thinks what might have been”. Kipling’s loss was only heightened when he lost his son, John, in the first World War.

She lived at Wimpole Hall from 1938 to 1976 and the book is now on display in Cambridgeshire there. A rare proof edition which was dedicated to his daughter was found in a collection of Kipling’s works that belonged to his second daughter, Elsie. Five years later, both she and her father came down with pneumonia and tragically Josephine succumbed to the illness. Kipling dedicated the book to his baby daughter Josephine in 1894 who was, by then, just one year old. After living in Pakistan and London he was settling down to domestic bliss in Vermont with his new wife. It seems as if becoming a father inspired Kipling to write for children as he began writing the Jungle Book when he was expecting his first child. The release of a new film about The Jungle Book has generated a good deal of interest in Rudyard Kipling’s tales of the jungle and allows an opportunity to reflect on the original story and influences behind this classic tale.

The jungle book first published