Publisher's Synopsis
When Rudyard Kipling, in 1888, published in Calcutta the first edition of the Simple Tales of the Hills, he was only twenty-four years old and his literary baggage consisted of a single book, the Departmental Ditties ( Administrative Songs ), from circumstances and society, which had augured well for his literary future.Born in Bombay in 1864, he was, as we know, the son of John Lockwood Kipling, director of the Lahore School of Fine Arts. He had been brought up in England in North Devon and had only returned six years before to the Indies where he had joined, as assistant editor of the Lahore civil and military Gazette of which he was a moment the correspondent and the representative in Rajpaitana.Simla is still remembered for the verse account he inserted in his journal when the Gaiety-Theater opened .We did not forget the comic play of Miss Kipling, her sister, playing in Lady Roberts the role of the nurse of Lucie de Lammermoor, but to the brother we did not forgive Mrs Hauksbee, Mrs Reiver and others of his too exact portraits which abound in the Simple Tales .Almost ignored here, the resort of Simla is one of the most famous cities in the British East Indies on the other side of the Channel.Édouard Buck described, two or three years ago, the vicissitudes of Simla's fortune in the past and in the present.Its entire district, the Hills, foothills of the Himalayas, is a cordon of sanatoria, a veritable takeover by European civilization of the mountains which dominate the plain strewn with the ruins of the resplendent temples of the ancient Hindu civilization.Simla rises to the most picturesque point of this enchanting landscape. The most famous summer capital and sanatorium, it was the stays of the viceroys of India and their procession of officials who made the fortune of this station.Buck reproduces in his work, after a drawing of the time, the Kennedy-House, origin of the current Simla. It was a banal English cottage, as thousands of two hundred and fifty to three hundred pounds sterling today build cheap construction companies operating it in the London suburbs. The only chalet in 1819 had been succeeded by sixty houses when Jacquemont visited Simla. In 1881, there were eleven hundred and forty-one and the stable population, the winter population, amounted to 13,200 inhabitants
