A literary-linguistic map of the British Empire

In one of his reports from Japan published in the Indian daily newspaper The Pioneer in 1889, Rudyard Kipling describes the route to Mount Hakone in these terms: ‘We came into the Hakone mountains by way of some Irish scenery, a Scotch trout-stream, a Devonshire combe, and an Indian river running masterless over half a mile of pebbles.’¹ This domestication of a foreign landscape is far from unique in his Japan travel accounts, which were originally intended for an Anglo-Indian audience. On the contrary, rehearsing a well-worn trope of travel and colonial writing, he often draws similar parallels either to lament the increasing westernization of Japan in the Meiji era or to make the less and less unfamiliar Japanese country and people even more recognizable for his original readership.² The reason why I find this excerpt particularly noteworthy is that young Kipling’s domesticating description of the Japanese scenery evinces a rather peculiar interest in the geography of the British Empire — or, at least, in a heterogeneous group of geographical areas under the political control of Queen and Empress Victoria at the time and somewhat familiar to him. If this short extract alone implies that his concern is purely topographical, his multilingual written output, wherein Ireland, Scotland, Devon, and British India are all linguistically represented, rapidly shows that his interest is best described as ‘geolinguistic’.

‘The Kipling canon reveals, if not a mastery of dialect […], at least an extensive and, one would assume, premeditated employment of it over a wide range of character and subject’, but, Dennis Duffy legitimately asks, ‘what does the use of dialect add to [his] works […] that could not have been achieved by other means?’³ Although the considerable use of numerous language varieties in Kipling’s ‘linguistically adventurous’ literary production has been frequently commented upon by contemporary and subsequent readers, with some critics identifying ‘dialect’ as ‘Kipling’s greatest contribution to modern literature’, Duffy’s question arguably remains pertinent today.⁴ Without being explicitly concerned with Kipling, Jane Hodson helpfully outlines the context in which his deployment of literary dialects towards the end of the nineteenth century may also have fit when she writes that, ‘while there was considerable popular interest in regional dialects, this was accompanied by an increased sense that non-standard forms of the language carried social stigma’, which ‘enabled writers to employ dialect representation in much more nuanced and sophisticated ways than hitherto, but also, inevitably, presented a challenge for any writer wishing to deploy dialect in literary texts in ways that did not simply reinforce this stigma’.⁵ Specifically addressing the question as to whether Kipling’s rendition of different language varieties is a successful — or, at least, sincere — effort to overcome ‘“reader resistance” to dialect representation’, some of his contemporary and near-contemporary reviewers vehemently disagree about the ideological import of his attempt at transcribing non-standard linguistic features for literary purposes, especially in his Cockney military verse and fiction.⁶ For the Scottish poet Robert Buchanan — who depicts Kipling as waving ‘the flag of a Hooligan Imperialism’, ‘the coarse and soulless Patriotism of the hour’, as opposed to that of a ‘nobler’, ‘true Imperialism’ — and later, for George Orwell — who goes so far as to propose a standardized rewriting of the refrains of two barrack-room ballads to support his claim that the simple erasure of non-standardness often ameliorates Kipling’s poetry — Kipling’s attitude can only be described as mocking and patronizing.⁷ According to others, however, quite the opposite is true. Directly polemicizing against Buchanan, Walter Besant praises what he considers to be the factual, extralinguistic value of Kipling’s work, for it ‘has shown us below their rough and coarse exterior the manhood of soldier and sailor, of engine-man and lighthouse-man and fisher-man’.⁸ Far from merely being ‘the Jingo Rhymer’, in Besant’s view, Kipling truly deserves the title of ‘the Poet of the Empire’ because his literary works express ‘the deepest reverence for those who have built up the Empire’ and show ‘the most profound sense of responsibility’.⁹

Nearly a century after the polemic between Buchanan and Besant — the former contesting precisely what the latter would reaffirm, that is, the potential patriotic value of Kipling’s literary use of dialects — Phillip Mallett returns to the issue of the ideological implications of the literary rendition of different language varieties resulting from Kipling’s geolinguistic concern. Concurring with Besant rather than Buchanan, Mallett suggests that Kipling’s endeavour ‘in the stories and poems dealing with the common soldier, but elsewhere too’, may be seen as both ‘parallel’ and ‘opposed’ to the task of James Murray as the primary editor of the Oxford English Dictionary:

parallel in its attempt to map the various kinds of English — and in doing so, to explore the human experiences they arose from, or seemed to carry within them — but opposed in its desire to insist on the essential Englishness of even the most aberrant forms.¹⁰

In other words, the deployment of a considerable number of language varieties in his canon seemingly draws a literary-linguistic map which, Mallett continues, ‘seeks to readmit into the circle of Englishness those whom the barriers of region or class have relegated to the margins, and pushed into silence’ (p. 124).

In the same essay, which is largely devoted to the analysis of short stories exploiting Cockney and the Sussex dialect, Mallett also points the way forward for ‘a systematic account of Kipling’s use of the varieties of English’ (p. 124). Such an overview of Kipling’s literary Englishes, he envisages,

would examine the changes made to the stories in Plain Tales from the Hills between the Indian and the English editions, the versions of Irish and Scots provided for Mulvaney and McAndrew […], the schoolboy cant of the stories in Stalky & Co., and the use of technical terms and slang in (for example) his stories about the Royal Navy. (p. 124)

Over the past twenty-five years, significant advances have been made in the study of literary dialects in the long nineteenth century and now comprise ‘more comprehensive account[s] of this pivotal aspect of nineteenth century English literature’ in addition to ‘excellent work on individual authors or specific genres’.¹¹ Yet, to the best of my knowledge, the wide-ranging and rigorous description proposed by Mallett has not been attempted to this day.

Although the thorough account projected by Mallett remains long overdue, my article alone cannot embark on so ambitious an enterprise, which would become even more ambitious if other potentially interesting areas omitted in the previous list were to be charted. These would have to include, for instance, the Devonshire dialect rendition of Horace’s ode in ‘Donec Gratus Eram’ (1882) and the speech of the Yorkshireman John Learoyd in the short stories where he appears, as well as Kipling’s proficiency in and use of Indian ‘vernaculars’ (that is to say, Hindi, Urdu, and Hindustani), which has recently attracted renewed scholarly attention, especially with regard to Kim (1901).¹² Rather, taking its cue from Mallett’s perceptive remarks, my article shifts the focus away from Cockney onto Scots (a ‘nonstandard’ language variety spoken in Scotland and Northern Ireland, historically related to, but distinct from, English, ‘with the prestige of a national tradition’ and thus ‘special’ in nineteenth-century literature),¹³ and sheds more light on his geolinguistic ‘ventriloquism’ by revisiting an underexplored region of his literary-linguistic map of the British Empire.¹⁴

Kipling’s literary Scots

The only literary text exploiting Scots which is included in Mallett’s tentative list is ‘McAndrew’s Hymn’ (1894; 1896), but this is not the sole example of Kipling’s use of literary Scots. Despite being also deployed both in short stories such as ‘Brugglesmith’ (1891; 1893) and ‘Bread upon the Waters’ (1896; 1898), and in such diverse poems as ‘The Fall of Jock Gillespie’ (1886; 1888), ‘Tomlinson’ (1892), and ‘The Last Rhyme of True Thomas’ (1894; 1896), Scots has been comparatively neglected, perhaps because scholars have tended to share Henry Wells’s conviction that the first series of barrack-room ballads are where ‘his work becomes by all odds the most interesting to both the linguist and the literary critic’.¹⁵ Taken together, however, the literary works where Kipling variously capitalizes on Scots as a stylistic feature, ‘a sign whose presence […] generates meanings beyond those which the words alone convey’, also reveal his attitudes towards Scottish literature and deserve to be reassessed from a perspective carefully combining a linguistic description of their various renditions of Scots with a literary interpretation of the different extralinguistic functions performed by this language variety.¹⁶ In my article, therefore, I draw upon Kipling criticism and more recent studies on literary dialects in the long nineteenth century to survey these six texts drawn from Kipling’s massive output and provide an overview of the various uses to which his stylized Scots is put.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, ‘McAndrew’s Hymn’ has received comparatively more critical attention than any other Kipling example of literary Scots. Nevertheless, as my article shows, a survey of his other textual instances of literary Scots offers fresh insights into ‘McAndrew’s Hymn’ as well. Admittedly, ‘direct comparisons’ of poems with stories might seem ‘inappropriate’, even when all the texts in question feature Scots.¹⁷ After all, as Jane Hodson writes,

dialect functions differently when it is the voice of a first-person speaker in lyric poetry, that of the homodiegetic narrator of a novel, that of a minor character in a novel written in Standard English, and that of a character in a play who will be brought to life by an actor on the stage.¹⁸

Since the six literary works discussed in this article were all the product of the same author, however, a comparative approach to verse and prose, which would be dangerous elsewhere, is most likely justified here.

While also acknowledging the important differences between the single texts and between the various genres to which each text may be ascribed, I work under the assumption, following Norman Page, that Kipling’s ‘verse […] demands serious consideration both in its own right and in its relationship to the prose’.¹⁹ Although the next two sections identify significant patterns in Kipling’s use of literary Scots more generally, they place great emphasis on ‘McAndrew’s Hymn’. Reading it as an ‘imperial poem’ and cross-pollinating literary criticism of late nineteenth-century fiction with historical linguistic insights about the literary use of Scots,²⁰ I argue that ‘McAndrew’s Hymn’ capitalizes on Scots not only for realism, but also as, in Marina Dossena’s words, ‘the language of the uncanny’, at least in a specific episode which is essential to the construction of the ideological framework of the whole text and which I interpret as a poetic instance of ‘imperial Gothic’.²¹ In teasing out the aesthetic and ideological implications of Kipling’s literary Scots within this particular poem, I offer an example of how the multifaceted relationship of style and ideology in his literary works may be productively studied.

Stylized Scots

Kipling’s own comments on dialect representation in fictional texts, as well as his multilingual literary output, indicate his agreement with Thomas Hardy when the latter wrote that ‘if a writer attempts to exhibit on paper the precise accents of a rustic speaker he disturbs the proper balance of a true representation by unduly insisting upon the grotesque element’.²² In an 1893 letter to Frederick Cowles, whose short story ‘Jim’ he had just revised for a compensation of five dollars to be sent to The Tribune Fresh Air Fund, Kipling similarly advised him against overindulging in dialect rendition. ‘All you have to do’, he explains to Cowles, ‘is to give the reader a notion of the dialect. If he knows it he will read in the rest. If he does not no amount of commas and elisions will help him.’²³ Such (remunerated) advice he could confidently offer on the grounds of his own literary practice. Indeed, rather than a painstakingly detailed representation of non-standardness, he equally attempts to provide his readers with ‘a notion of the dialect’, literary Scots being no exception in his search for ‘a balance between accuracy and accessibility’.²⁴

In the poems ‘The Fall of Jock Gillespie’, ‘Tomlinson’, ‘McAndrew’s Hymn’, and ‘The Last Rhyme of True Thomas’, and in the short stories ‘Brugglesmith’ and ‘Bread upon the Waters’, a limited number of phonetic, grammatical, and lexical features are selected and employed to render Scots.²⁵ In ‘McAndrew’s Hymn’, for instance, a series of respellings attempts to reproduce some of ‘what were perceived to be the most salient Scots features of vowel and consonantal production’ since the eighteenth century.²⁶ These comprise undiphthongized labial vowels (e.g., ‘doot’ (p. 340)), front mid/high vowel alternations (e.g., ‘lasceevious’ (p. 341)), rhoticity (e.g., ‘enorrmous’ (p. 339)), and syllable-final cluster simplifications (e.g., ‘exceptin’’ (p. 339) and ‘yoursel’’ (p. 341)).²⁷ The grammatical and lexical Scotticisms used include the pronoun ‘ye’ (pp. 339, 342–43), the possessive ‘thy’ (p. 339), the demonstrative ‘yon’ (p. 339), the verbs ‘gied’ (pp. 339, 345) and ‘mind’ (pp. 340–41), and expressions such as ‘a wee’ (p. 339) and ‘kirk’ (p. 343).²⁸ A phonetic, grammatical, and lexical ‘notion’ of Scots is thus provided.

Whereas these texts — all of which were first printed in periodicals and later reprinted in newspapers, magazines, and collections — exist in more than one version, Kipling’s rendition of Scots is relatively stable throughout their textual histories. Over the years, he added or removed Scots traits to his liking but never seriously upset the balance achieved in the previously published versions. The collation records in Thomas Pinney’s authoritative three-volume edition of Kipling’s poems (whose copy text is the 1937–39 35-volume Sussex Edition) suggest this. If, on the one hand, later reprints of ‘The Fall of Jock Gillespie’ and ‘Tomlinson’ only contain a few additional Scots markers (e.g., ‘fra’’ instead of ‘from’ in the former (p. 138); ‘ay’ instead of ‘and’ in the latter (p. 306)), on the other, the first periodical version of ‘The Last Rhyme of True Thomas’ features slightly more respellings (e.g., ‘mincin’’ instead of ‘mincing’ (p. 394)) and Scotticisms (e.g., ‘aboon’ instead of ‘above’ (pp. 393, 396) and ‘bane’ instead of ‘bone’ (p. 395)) than subsequent versions of the same poem. As for ‘McAndrew’s Hymn’, the notable variants registered by Pinney seem confined to the spelling of negatives (e.g., the verb forms ‘cannot’/‘canna’ (p. 339), ‘was not’/‘wasna’ (p. 341), and ‘dared not’/‘daredna’/‘dared na’’ (p. 342), and the particle ‘no’/‘na’ (p. 340)) and to a handful of other words in the second half of the text (e.g., ‘aaverage’/‘average’ (p. 342), ‘fra’’/‘from’ (p. 342), ‘ony’/‘any’ (pp. 342, 344), ‘warst’/‘worst’ (p. 343), ‘doon’/‘down’ (p. 344), ‘rockin’’/‘rocking’ (p. 344), ‘an’’/‘and’ (p. 345)), which are alternately rendered in Scots or English on the page. Despite a moderate degree of textual variation, then, Kipling appears to have relied on a rather ossified form of literary Scots.

If Kipling’s selective delivery of Scots remains virtually unaltered in the available versions of the same poem or story, the internal distribution of Scots traits tends to vary from one text to another, which at times produces significant differences between the speakers in the same text or between the narrator and some characters in a short story, where Scots is represented alongside other language varieties. Indeed, whereas the chosen Scots markers seem evenly distributed among the narrators and speaking characters in ‘The Fall of Jock Gillespie’ and ‘The Last Rhyme of True Thomas’, this is not always the case. In ‘Tomlinson’, for instance, the speech of the Devil abounds with markedly Scots features, such as ‘o’er-sib’ (pp. 304, 306–07), ‘trow’ (p. 304), and ‘spirk’ (p. 307), in comparison with St Peter (‘ye’ and ‘ha’’ (pp. 302–03)) and, to some extent, Tomlinson (‘a carl in Norroway’ (p. 303); ‘ye’ (p. 304); ‘ha’’ (pp. 304–05); ‘mind’ (p. 305); ‘Nay’ (p. 305); ‘Ay!’ (pp. 305–06)). The coexistence of Scots with other language varieties in some of these texts is also remarkable. In ‘Brugglesmith’, standard English, Cockney, and German English co-occur with Scots. In ‘Bread upon the Waters’, the English narratorial voice frames and sometimes interrupts McPhee’s tale in Scots. Similarly, in their first periodical publications and in some of their early reprintings, both ‘The Last Rhyme of True Thomas’ and ‘McAndrew’s Hymn’ featured paratexts in English. In the Scribner’s Magazine version, ‘McAndrew’s Hymn’, which is almost entirely written in Scots, was preceded by an ‘Extract from private letter’ fictitiously penned by a passenger (Fig. 1).²⁹ These paratextual materials, however, disappeared when the poems were collected in The Seven Seas, which caused linguistically more homogeneous versions of Scots-dominated texts to be part of a highly multivocal volume.³⁰ The possible significance of the uneven scattering of Scots markers and the potential implications of the interaction between Scots and other language varieties in the same text are addressed in the next section, which is devoted to the functions performed by Kipling’s literary Scots.

Fig. 1: ‘McAndrews’ Hymn’, Scribner’s Magazine, December 1894, p. 667. © Courtesy of the British Library Board. Shelf mark P.P.6383.ac.

Polysemous Scots

After observing how Kipling’s ballad writing in the 1890s ‘was strongly affected by the Scottish tradition’, Charles Carrington adds that he tends ‘to slip into Scotticisms (for example in “Tomlinson”) where there seems no need for that dialect in particular’.³¹ Other commentators have noted the scattered presence of Scots terms in the Kipling canon.³² In a 2015 list of difficult words deployed in Kipling’s poetry, nonetheless, Pinney includes some Scots expressions because, he writes, ‘they have attracted less attention.’³³ Indeed, with the sole exception of ‘McAndrew’s Hymn’, those Kipling texts in which Scots is more extensively used have been seldom discussed at great length. Moreover, although the influence exerted on Kipling by Scottish literature, particularly the oeuvre of Robert Burns and Walter Scott, has been rightly acknowledged, his stylistic choice of Scots in verse and prose alike has rarely been the object of more than passing remarks.³⁴ With a view to redressing this imbalance, I start from the assumption that Kipling must have carefully considered the numerous ‘pitfalls’ with which ‘the use of non-standard language’ in a literary work is fraught,³⁵ even when that language variety seems ‘exempt from the snobbery which attaches to other dialects’,³⁶ partially because of the existence of ‘an important Scottish literature’.³⁷ Building upon the linguistic description in the previous section, I now examine the multifarious purposes that, also in light of its associations with major Scottish authors such as Scott and Burns, Scots serves in ‘The Fall of Jock Gillespie’, ‘The Last Rhyme of True Thomas’, ‘Tomlinson’, ‘Brugglesmith’, and ‘Bread upon the Waters’, as well as ‘McAndrew’s Hymn’. This final section thus contends that, rather than a whimsical and ultimately unjustified recourse to Scotticisms, Kipling’s is a deliberate exploitation of literary Scots.

‘The Fall of Jock Gillespie’ and ‘The Last Rhyme of True Thomas’ are two examples of modern ‘border ballads’ relying on the traditional ‘question-and-answer technique’.³⁸ While both feature Scots-speaking narrators and characters — ‘oor mon Jock’ and ‘an elder mon’ in the former (p. 138); True Thomas and the King in the latter — the two poems starkly differ in their temporal and spatial settings: the former taking place in a ‘Club’ in nineteenth-century British India, as indicated by passing references to ‘the stirrup-peg’ and ‘Trichi’ (pp. 138–39); and the latter in Fairyland (pp. 392–93).³⁹ Despite their different contents, the ballads resonate with ‘McAndrew’s Hymn’ in subtle ways, as the paramount concerns adumbrated in each ballad resurface in the dramatic monologue, where they are addressed particularly in those lines in which readers have often claimed to hear Kipling’s voice overlap with McAndrew’s and express the author’s take on stylistic or ideological issues.

‘The Fall of Jock Gillespie’ has been mainly read as a ‘humorous ballad’ or as a ‘delicious squib’ that Scott would have cherished.⁴⁰ In Philip Mason’s interpretation, however, it ‘vulgarly and brutally’ voices ‘the creed proclaimed in the club and the mess’ according to which a happy ‘marriage […] might lead to […] a self-indulgent breakdown of the discipline’ demanded by work. As a representation of female ‘influence […] on men’s work’, Jock’s comic fall ‘fra the band | O’ cantie single men’ (p. 139) precedes, in a colonial context, the expression of an ideological preoccupation which emerges in the more serious ‘McAndrew’s Hymn’.⁴¹ For example, in the line ‘Law, Orrder, Duty an’ Restraint, Obedience, Discipline!’ (p. 345), the Glaswegian Calvinist engineer conflates different registers and articulates his professional, religious, and inadvertently political ethos, perhaps self-reassuringly, in an attempt, as Nora Crook argues, to drive away the thought of the exotic ‘sexual transgressions in his youth’.⁴²

Collected in the same volume as McAndrew’s monologue after their respective periodical publications, ‘The Last Rhyme of True Thomas’ employs Scots to treat metapoetical concerns. Indeed, this ballad, which was possibly inspired to him by Scott’s ‘Thomas the Rhymer’ (1803), allegorically reads as a ‘meditation by Kipling on his own position as a poet […] in relation to secular power’.⁴³ The demonstration, in Scots, of True Thomas’s ‘powers […] of a higher and stronger nature’ as he plays ‘his harp, | The fairy harp that couldna lee’ (p. 395) in front of the King,⁴⁴ whose offer of knighthood he has declined, merits comparison with the metapoetical and metalinguistic moment in ‘McAndrew’s Hymn’ when, prompted by the memory of a Scots-free question posed to him by ‘our Viscount loon’, the monologist invokes ‘Robbie Burns’ as the master of ‘Scotia’s noblest speech’:

The bairns see what their elders miss; they’ll hunt me to an’ fro,
Till for the sake of — well, a kiss — I tak’ ’em down below.
That minds me of our Viscount loon — Sir Kenneth’s kin — the chap
Wi’ Russia-leather tennis-shoon an’ spar-decked yachtin’-cap.
I showed him round last week, o’er all — an’ at the last says he:
‘Mister McAndrew, don’t you think steam spoils romance at sea?’
Damned ijjit! I’d been doon that morn to see what ailed the throws,
Manholin’, on my back — the cranks three inches off my nose.
Romance! Those first-class passengers they like it very well,
Printed an’ bound in little books; but why don’t poets tell?
I’m sick of all their quirks an’ turns — the loves an’ doves they dream —
Lord, send a man like Robbie Burns to sing the Song o’ Steam!
To match wi’ Scotia’s noblest speech yon orchestra sublime
Whaurto — uplifted like the Just — the tail-rods mark the time. (p. 344)

Although Scots is used when other people’s speech is sporadically reported in the rest of the poem (pp. 340–43, 345), the recollected question that inflames McAndrew here is exceptionally in English. If ‘McAndrew’s Hymn’ has often been understood as Kipling’s own attempt to compose ‘the poetry of Steam’ precisely in Scots,⁴⁵ his short fiction had already inaugurated, and would continue to establish, the same connection between ship engineers and the use of Scots through the character of McPhee, McAndrew’s ‘fellow in prose’.⁴⁶

While also featuring McPhee, the farcical ‘Brugglesmith’ clearly differs in tone from ‘Bread upon the Waters’, the story which he protagonizes. The first-person narrator in ‘Brugglesmith’ repeatedly contrasts him, ‘the most tidy of chief engineers’, with his ‘friend’, ‘who was a boiler-maker at Greenock when McPhee was a ‘prentice’ (p. 158) and whom the narrator eventually calls ‘Brugglesmith’ based on his mispronunciation of the address Brook Green, Hammersmith, adding ‘I know not his other name’ (p. 167). Whereas McPhee is represented as a respectable character whose reputation even surpasses the credentials of the narrator in front of a sergeant (p. 162), his old drunk friend is subject to verbal and physical abuse, as the narrator not only defines him as a ‘ruffian’ (pp. 159, 167) and an ‘infamous acquaintance’ (p. 163) but eventually wreaks vengeance on him in what has been defined as ‘the most perfect example of what happened when Kipling embarked on slapstick’.⁴⁷ A more serious ‘revenge story’,⁴⁸ ‘Bread upon the Waters’ additionally underlines the contrast when Brugglesmith is described as an ‘improper friend’ (p. 428) at the beginning.

Brugglesmith’s ‘consummate descent into indignity’ is also a linguistic collapse.⁴⁹ The narratorial metalanguage registers the moment when Brugglesmith loses ‘his fine fluency in his guttural northern tongue’, switching ‘from clear cut dialect to wild and drunken jumble’ (p. 169). Contrasting with the more sober initial rendition of both McPhee’s and Brugglesmith’s Scots, the several renditions of the latter’s intoxicated speech (p. 170) suggest that the divergence between the two characters plays out on the level of language, with the narratorial remarks on McPhee in the two short stories ultimately restricted to his coarseness (‘Brugglesmith’, p. 158) and warped sense of humour (‘Bread upon the Waters’, p. 431).

Besides the correlation between ship engineering and Scots embodied by McPhee and even hymned by McAndrew, other interesting patterns recurring in the stylistic representation of the Scottish characters in the two short stories and in the dramatic monologue concern biblical and Burns references. ‘Brugglesmith’ combines biblical pastiches with a direct misquotation from Burns’s ‘A Bard’s Epitaph’ (1787) and the intonation of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ (pp. 161–63). In ‘Bread upon the Waters’, where the scriptural echoes begin from the very title, McPhee’s veneration of Burns is made explicit in the first paragraph (p. 428). However, in ‘McAndrew’s Hymn’, whose connections with Burns’s ‘Holy Willie’s Prayers’ (1789) have been traced elsewhere,⁵⁰ not only is the Scottish poet summoned by an irate McAndrew, but the latter conflates ‘the special terminology of a Scottish Calvinist theology’ and the technological, nautical jargon of the marine engineer from its opening lines.⁵¹ Adding further nuances to his linguistic characterization, McAndrew’s blend of technology and religion produces the effect of a ‘jumble of mechanics and metaphysics’.⁵²

While the competent chief engineers equally cherish their machines (‘Brugglesmith’, p. 158; ‘Bread upon the Waters’, p. 428; ‘McAndrew’s Hymn’, p. 339), McAndrew’s heavier reliance on the specialized language of the technologist reflects intriguing differences between the two. Although the wealthier McPhee is ostensibly ‘resolute to go to sea no more […] except as a passenger’ at the end of his own tale in ‘Bread upon the Waters’, the first-person narrator eventually discloses that he will only be ‘a passenger for exactly twenty-four hours’ because, after departing on a journey with his wife Janet, the ‘highly certificated engineer’ is unable to resist the temptation of providing his ‘unpaid services’ (p. 450). Yet the whole text is ‘saturated with references to material wealth and the price of absolutely everything’.⁵³ McPhee’s ‘materialism’ is not shared by McAndrew, who, on the contrary, discards, one by one, a series of schemes which would potentially increase his income (p. 343).⁵⁴ Perfectly content with his current position, the eponymous speaker in ‘McAndrew’s Hymn’ is less interested in profit; he is ‘maître de la machine’, not ‘esclave de la haute finance’.⁵⁵ Indeed, McAndrew’s monologue, or ‘steam of consciousness’, reads as a hymn less to financial progress than to physical and spiritual mobility.⁵⁶

McAndrew’s version of Scots differs from McPhee’s in another interesting way. Whereas Kipling believed that ‘a Scotch engineer is a type by himself altogether’, he made every effort in order for McAndrew to be unambiguously identified as a Scot.⁵⁷ His correspondence at the time of the sale of the poem to Scribner’s reveals his eagerness to provide the illustrator of ‘McAndrew’s Hymn’ with his ‘suggestions’.⁵⁸ When he does offer his advice to Howard Pyle, the appointed illustrator, in an 1894 letter, he writes that he imagines his engineer as ‘a Scot of the Scots — clean shaven or with a torpedo beard […] and his uniform would be pretty dingy after a three month voyage’.⁵⁹ If his insistence on making McAndrew’s Scottishness apparent — visually as well as verbally, albeit stereotypically (Fig. 2) — has been ascribed to the high reputation of Scots as imperial technologists, the general consensus seems that Kipling’s stylistic choice of Scots contributes ‘to the truth of the characterisation’.⁶⁰

Fig. 2: ‘McAndrews’ Hymn’, Scribner’s Magazine, December 1894, p. 668. © Courtesy of the British Library Board. Shelf mark P.P.6383.ac.

But ‘what’, if anything, ‘beyond verisimilitude, does dialect add?’, asks Dennis Duffy (p. 345). According to some, Scots would enormously appeal to non-Scots-speaking readers. ‘To the non-dialect speaker, at least’, Craig Raine insinuates, ‘the Scots variant [of words such as ‘lascivious’] is infinitely more seductive than its less wheedling standard English version’ (p. xviii). I argue that the allure of Scots also lies in its traditional associations with the supernatural, which are exploited in other Kipling poems and in one of Pyle’s illustrations.

If most of the texts deploying Scots discussed thus far indicate that, especially in prose, Kipling follows the established practice of using this language variety for ‘older or comic characters from “lower-class” backgrounds, often seen as representing honest, rather conservative (“common sense”), “salt of the earth” viewpoints’, ‘Tomlinson’ clearly shows how his verse occasionally draws upon the literary tradition of the Scottish Gothic, represented by such texts as Burns’s ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ (1791), to name but one.⁶¹ Marina Dossena has recently provided an insightful overview on the use of ‘Scots as a generic marker in Gothic stories’ written by Scottish authors in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where she discusses, among others, examples taken from the works of Burns and Kipling’s contemporary Robert Louis Stevenson (p. 15). Usually read as an attack on the Aesthetic Movement,⁶² ‘Tomlinson’ also qualifies as an uncanny poem in which, I would maintain, Scots is primarily mobilized as a Gothic marker.⁶³ The poem begins with an otherworldly apparition.⁶⁴ Even though he is denied access to Heaven and Hell alike, Tomlinson’s supernatural journey first to ‘Heaven’s Gate’ (p. 302) and then to ‘Hell-Mouth Gate’ (p. 304) is not so dissimilar to that of the King in ‘The Last Rhyme of True Thomas’, when True Thomas gives him a taste of his ‘other-worldly’ power:⁶⁵ ‘I ha’ harpit ye up to the Throne o’ God, | […] | I ha’ harpit ye down to the Hinges o’ Hell’ (p. 398). Further to that, the depiction of the third belt of infernal stars as ‘black with clinkered sin that cannot burn again’ (p. 303) seems verbally echoed by McAndrew’s representation of his own ‘sins’ as ‘marks’ lying ‘deep in [his] soul an’ black’ (p. 340). The uncanny echoes in ‘McAndrew’s Hymn’ do not stop here, however.

If McPhee ‘would guide your forefinger through his short iron-grey hair and tell you how he had come by his trade-marks’ (‘Bread upon the Waters’, p. 428), McAndrew admits to having ‘marks o’ more than burns’ to explain. By this phrase, he means his moral ‘trespasses’ (p. 340), the greatest of which (his ‘crownin’ sin’ (p. 341)) he recollects in uncanny terms:

I wasna four-and-twenty then — Ye wadna judge a child?
I’d seen the Tropics first that run — new fruits, new smells, new air —
How could I tell — blind-fou wi’ sun — the Deil was lurkin’ there?
By day like playhouse-scenes the shore slid past our sleepy eyes;
By night those soft, lasceevious stars leered from those velvet skies,
In port (we used no cargo-steam) I’d daunder down the streets —
An ijjit grinnin’ in a dream — for shells an’ parakeets,
An’ walkin’-sticks o’ carved bamboo an’ blowfish stuffed an’ dried —
Fillin’ my bunk wi’ rubbishry the Chief put overside,
Till, off Sambawa Head, Ye mind, I heard a land-breeze ca’,
Milk-warm wi’ breath o’ spice an’ bloom: ‘McAndrew, come awa’!’
Firm, clear an’ low — no haste, no hate — the ghostly whisper went,
Just statin’ eevidential facts beyon’ all argument:
‘Your mither’s God’s a graspin’ deil, the shadow o’ yoursel’,
Got out o’ books by meenisters clean daft on Heaven an’ Hell.
They mak’ Him in the Broomielaw, o’ Glasgie cold an’ dirt,
A jealous pridefu’ fetish, lad, that’s only strong to hurt.
Ye’ll not go back to Him again an’ kiss His red-hot rod,
But come wi’ Us’ (Now, who were They?) ‘an’ know the Leevin’ God,
That does not kipper souls for sport or break a life in jest,
But swells the ripenin’ coconuts an’ ripes the woman’s breast’.
An’ there it stopped — cut off — no more — that quiet, certain voice —
For me, six months o’ twenty-four, to leave or take at choice.
’Twas on me like a thunderclap — it racked me through an’ through —
Temptation past the show o’ speech, unnameable an’ new —
The Sin against the Holy Ghost? … An’ under all, our screw.
That storm blew by but left behind her anchor-shiftin’ swell.
Thou knowest all my heart an’ mind, Thou knowest, Lord, I fell —
Third on the Mary Gloster then, and first that night in Hell!66

The spectral, infernal, and nightmarish notes of an uncanny poem such as ‘Tomlinson’ reverberate through McAndrew’s reminiscence of his momentary individual regression in the tropics at the age of 24, which I read as the interpolation of a short narrative in the mode of the imperial Gothic, to whose flourishment Kipling contributed with short stories such as ‘The Mark of the Beast’ (1890; 1891).⁶⁷ Such recognizably Gothic tropes as ‘ghostly or demonic apparitions’ are deployed to chronicle McAndrew’s juvenile tropical ‘degeneration’,⁶⁸ which strategically paves the way for the other ideologically charged part in which the older McAndrew reassures himself by expounding his technological, spiritual, and imperial doctrine (p. 345). Attributed to a spectral woman in Pyle’s other full-page illustration (Fig. 3), the ‘land-breeze ca’’, the exotically tantalizing voice which urges McAndrew to ‘come awa’’, rapidly turns into a ‘ghostly whisper’. In the same way as the images accompanying the poem in Scribner’s combine stereotypical portraits of McAndrew as a Scottish engineer with an illustration of the tropical uncanny, I would conclude, Kipling’s use of literary Scots not only mobilizes the type of the Scottish imperial technologist but also momentarily taps into the tradition of the Scottish Gothic in order to offer a largely unnoticed poetic contribution to the subgenre of the imperial Gothic. It is on this linguistic (and, at least in its first periodical edition, visual) invocation of two competing stereotypes of Scottishness — one grounded in extratextual reality, the other in literary precedents — that the ideological import of ‘McAndrew’s Hymn’ as an imperial poem crucially hinges.

Fig. 3: ‘McAndrews’ Hymn’, Scribner’s Magazine, December 1894, p. 671. © Courtesy of the British Library Board. Shelf mark P.P.6383.ac.

My article has explored a relatively uncharted region of Kipling’s literary-linguistic map through the study of his polysemous Scots in selected examples from his poetry and short fiction. In my scrutiny of ‘McAndrew’s Hymn’ alongside other texts where literary Scots is deployed, I have examined the interface of linguistic forms and literary functions more carefully than has usually been the case for these and many other literary works by Kipling. Whereas this has enabled me to interpret an episode in ‘McAndrew’s Hymn’ as a significant but hitherto overlooked verse example of imperial Gothic, further research on the interplay between style and ideology in other areas of his multilingual output is necessary to heed Mallett’s call for painting a more comprehensive and nuanced picture of Kipling’s geolinguistic endeavour. In any case, whether Kipling’s or other (Victorian) authors’ literary languages are attended to, future efforts to combine literary-linguistic historicization and fine-grained interpretation may have the same potential for casting new light on the aesthetic and ideological dimensions of the text(s) providing the focus of the analysis.