Stalky Co

Rudyard Kipling's book Stalky & Co. is about young men attending a British boarding school. Three young main characters in this collection of school stories have a smug, cynical attitude toward authority and patriotism. After the stories were featured in periodicals for the preceding two years, it was first published in 1899. Part I of ""Slaves of the Lamp."" Mr. King interrupts the three boys while they are practicing a pantomime of ""Aladdin"" because he has discovered jokes Beetle wrote about him. When the younger child who taught King the poems is there, he drags Beetle into his study and corrects him. Stalky gets an intoxicated carter to throw stones at King by shooting him with a catapult. In ""An Unsavoury Interlude,"" Mr. King makes fun of Beetle for once being frightened to take a bath in the ocean, which causes the boys from Mr. King's house to call the boys from Mr. Prout's house ""stinkers.""Many lads take part eagerly in order to train for their future professions as military officers. But when a member of parliament is asked to speak at the school on ""patriotism,"" he angers the lads by raising the Union Jack. The cadet corps left the next morning under Stalky's leadership. The majority of Kipling's characters, who are now about thirty, are soldiers or civil officials in India.

In this comparison of Mark Twain with six of his literary contemporaries, Leland Krauth looks anew at the writer's multifaceted creativity. Twain, a highly lettered man immersed in the literary culture of his time, viewed himself as working within a community of writers. He likened himself to a guild member whose work was the crafted product of a common trade--and sometimes made with borrowed materials. Yet there have been few studies of Twain in relation to his fellow guild members. In Mark Twain & Company, Krauth examines some creative "sparks and smolderings" ignited by Twain's contact with certain writers, all of whom were published, read, and criticized on both sides of the Atlantic: the Americans Bret Harte, William Dean Howells, and Harriet Beecher Stowe and the British writers Matthew Arnold, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Rudyard Kipling. Each chapter explores the nature of Twain's personal relationship with a writer as well as the literary themes and modes they shared. Krauth looks at the sentimentality of Harte and Twain and its influence on their protest fiction; the humor and social criticism of Twain and Howells; the use of the Gothic by Twain and Stowe to explore racial issues; the role of Victorian Sage assumed by Arnold and Twain to critique civilization; the exploitation of adventure fiction by Twain and Stevenson to reveal conceptions of masculinity; and the use of the picaresque in Kipling and Twain to support or subvert imperialism. Mark Twain & Company casts new light on some of the most enduring writers in English. At the same time it refreshes the debate over the transatlantic nature of Victorianism with new insights about nineteenth-century morality, conventionality, race, corporeality, imperialism, manhood, and individual identity.

'Stalky & Co.' is the hilarious tale of the coming of age of three roguish boys at an English public school. With a seemingly unending supply of practical jokes and ingenious japes to frustrate and thwart their long-suffering schoolmasters, the three pranksters eventually find their match in their wise and all-too-experienced headmaster. Based on his own school days, Kipling has captured the eternal spirit of the English public school and painted an intimate, and understanding, portrait of his young heroes.

Kipling portrays school as the first stage of a much larger game, a pattern-maker for the experiences of life. Implied throughout the stories is the question 'What happened to these fifteen-year-old boys, and how did the lessons they learned at school apply to the world of warfare and imperial government?' The stories are based on Kipling's own school, the United Services College at Westward Ho! in Devon, which prepared boys destined for the army or for colonial service; Kipling himself appears as the subordinate character, Beetle. This edition includes five Stalky stories which did not appear in the original volume, and thus constitutes a Complete Stalky & Co. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

This eBook features the unabridged text of ‘Stalky & Co. by Rudyard Kipling - Delphi Classics (Illustrated)’ from the bestselling edition of ‘The Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling’. Having established their name as the leading publisher of classic literature and art, Delphi Classics produce publications that are individually crafted with superior formatting, while introducing many rare texts for the first time in digital print. The Delphi Classics edition of Kipling includes original annotations and illustrations relating to the life and works of the author, as well as individual tables of contents, allowing you to navigate eBooks quickly and easily. eBook features: * The complete unabridged text of ‘Stalky & Co. by Rudyard Kipling - Delphi Classics (Illustrated)’ * Beautifully illustrated with images related to Kipling’s works * Individual contents table, allowing easy navigation around the eBook * Excellent formatting of the textPlease visit www.delphiclassics.com to learn more about our wide range of titles

This eBook features the unabridged text of ‘The Complete Stalky & Co by Rudyard Kipling - Delphi Classics (Illustrated)’ from the bestselling edition of ‘The Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling’. Having established their name as the leading publisher of classic literature and art, Delphi Classics produce publications that are individually crafted with superior formatting, while introducing many rare texts for the first time in digital print. The Delphi Classics edition of Kipling includes original annotations and illustrations relating to the life and works of the author, as well as individual tables of contents, allowing you to navigate eBooks quickly and easily. eBook features: * The complete unabridged text of ‘The Complete Stalky & Co by Rudyard Kipling - Delphi Classics (Illustrated)’ * Beautifully illustrated with images related to Kipling’s works * Individual contents table, allowing easy navigation around the eBook * Excellent formatting of the textPlease visit www.delphiclassics.com to learn more about our wide range of titles

The stories we read as children are the ones that stay with us the longest, and from the nineteenth century until the 1950s stories about schools held a particular fascination. Many will remember the goings-on at such earnest establishments as Tom Brown's Rugby, St Dominic's, Greyfriars, the Chalet School, Malory Towers and Linbury Court. In the second part of the twentieth century, with more liberal social attitudes and the advent of secondary education for all, these moral tales lost their appeal and the school story very nearly died out. More recently, however, a new generation of compromised schoolboy and schoolgirl heroes - Pennington, Tyke Tiler, Harry Potter and Millie Roads - have given it a new and challenging relevance. Focusing mainly on novels written for young people, From Morality to Mayhem charts the fall and rise of the school story, from the grim accounts of Victorian times to the magic and mayhem of our own age. In doing so it considers how fictional schools not only reflect but sometimes influence real life. This captivating study will appeal to those interested in children's literature and education, both students and the general reader, taking us on a not altogether comfortable trip down memory lane.