The Victorian and Edwardian eras saw not only a flowering of talent writing for
children but also a period when animal characters featured prominently in these
stories. Even fantasy writers like Lewis Carroll and A.A.Milne employ animals to act out
their plots (although Pooh and his friends are technically toys, they display many of the
characteristics of the ‘human beings as animals’ which is a major feature of the animal
story).
Rudyard Kipling created two supreme examples of the animal story in which a human
being is able to communicate with creatures. The Jungle Book (1894) and The Second
Jungle Book (1895) introduce the reader to a myriad of wild animals and to the complex
social structure of their world. Inspired by a sentence in Rider Haggard’s Nada the Lily,
Kipling created a world approximate to an Eden in which the animals inhabit an idyllic
home, yet are still prey to the complexities of reality, such as killing, death and old age.
The boy Mowgli is saved from the clutches of the tiger, Shere Khan, by Mother and
Father Wolf and is brought up as one of their cubs (parallels can be drawn with the
Tarzan stories). He is introduced to the patterns of jungle life, their rituals and to the
influence of animals such as Baloo, the sage, and Bagheera. The animals’ conversation
is almost a formal transcript of Urdu, with their references to ‘thou’ and addressing
Mowgli as ‘Little Brother’. Mowgli himself discards the human world and refers
dismissively to the squalid life of the Indian villagers dwelling around the jungle. The
relationship between animals and the human, Mowgli, is central. As Robson notes:
Mowgli spends his whole life among animals. But as he approaches manhood he
begins to find that he is not like the animals. A central symbol for this is Mowgli’s
eyes. They are a source of his power over the beasts, who cannot meet his gaze...
Mowgli has passed through a preliminary training which in many ways is like that
suitable to animals. But a time comes when he must move beyond his animal
‘brothers’ and realise the truth about himself, and accept the responsibility of being
a man, and the recognition that it sets him apart.
Robson 1987: xvii-xviii‘The spring running’, the last story in the Mowgli cycle and the last of the sequence
which Kipling wrote, is almost unbearably poignant as Mowgli, young and healthy,
returns to his animal friends who are growing old and dying. Kipling is not afraid to
show that in the animal world there is death and murder.
The two jungle books also contain a number of other fablesque creations, such as
‘Rikki-Tikki-Tavi’, the famous story of a mongoose. Kipling extended his use of the
animal fable in his Just So Stories (1902), written for and loved by younger children,
with favourites like ‘The elephant’s child’ in which human foibles are depicted through
animal characters.
The tradition which Kipling embodies of portraying realistic situations in the animal
kingdom while also adopting the fantasy of animals talking and communicating with
humans continues in the work of one of its greatest exponents, Beatrix Potter. Potter’s
early life has been well documented. A lonely child who found her only comfort in the
world of natural history and who kept a coded diary in her adolescent years would seem
a ripe candidate for the imaginative world of writing for children.
282 ANIMAL STORIES