★★★★★ English history with a tiny bit of dark

Rewards and Fairies

Rudyard Kipling

Puck of Pook's Hill and its sequel Rewards and Fairies are, in my opinion, among the very best of Rudyard Kipling's books, and that is saying a great deal. They are Kipling's presentation for children of the early history of England. Rewards and Fairies begins on Midsummer's Eve, one year after Una and Dan broke the hills and released Puck to begin Puck of Pook's Hill. Puck appears to them and their memory of their dealings with Puck a year ago returns.

Una and Dan are a year older now, and in a sign of approaching maturity, wear boots rather than going barefoot. Perhaps recognizing that they're growing up, in this book Puck now shows them a tiny, tiny bit of the seamier side of English history. In fact, in the very first story, "Cold Iron", Una and Dan face England's history of slavery. We also face plague and tuberculosis and, in Neolithic England, wolves.

In my review of Puck, I mentioned that all the people conjured from England's past for Dan and Una's information and entertainment were common men, more or less upper middle class, if such a thing had existed so long ago -- all men, and no kings or princes. In Rewards we have two women from the past, one a young woman and the second a queen. Many of the men are criminals or something close to it. Two stories, indeed, take place in North America, to which one of the protagonists flees to get himself out of hot water.

The most surprising story, "Gloriana", is the one in which Queen Elizabeth I appears. This is not a queen from a Disney movie. Kipling's Gloriana is a cold, calculating operator. (Surely the real Elizabeth was such.) And the unfortunate poem "The Looking-Glass" tells of her dismay at the passing of her youthful beauty. Kipling seems to have chosen to present Good Queen Bess in a way calculated to offend the most people possible. Surely he knew what he was doing -- it would be interesting to know his reasons.

Rewards also saw the first publication of Kipling's most famous poem, and one of the best-known in the English language, If--.

We end at last with a story told by our old friend Sir Richard Dalyngridge from Puck, "The Tree of Justice". This, too, is a grim tale.

Rewards is still a book for young children, much in the style and with much the same purpose as Puck. It is a little darker, but only a little. It confesses a little more openly than Puck that there was a dark side to England.

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