Kipling-Lewis Letters

Ten letters from Kipling to Lewis, while the latter was on military service in South Africa, Germany and India.

William Herbert Lewis (b 1884) was a career Army officer who retired as a lieutenant colonel, with the D.S.O. and M.C. He met Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), the author, through a mutual friend, Charles Leonard, a South African lawyer, in or shortly before 1905 and corresponded with him until days before his death. (See A. Lycett, Rudyard Kipling (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999), 396, 433.)

Items in the collection may be consulted for the purpose of private study and personal research, within the controlled environment and restrictions of The Keep's Reading Rooms.

Deposited by the Kipling Society, November 1996.

Prepared by John Farrant, July 2002.

An online catalogue is available on The Keep's website .

Facsimiles are in the Kipling Society's Library and in the Kipling Room at The Grange, Rottingdean, East Sussex.

COPIES FOR PRIVATE STUDY: Subject to copyright, conditions imposed by owners and protecting the documents, digital copies can be made.

PUBLICATION: A reader wishing to publish material in the collection should contact the Head of Special Collections, in writing. The reader is responsible for obtaining permission to publish from the copyright owner. The National Trust is the owner of the copyright in the works of the Kipling family.

Presented to the Kipling Society by Major T. S. Lewis in memory of his father, to whom the letters had been addressed. Several others received between 1914 and 1936 were destroyed during the 1939-1945 War, when stored in the Army and Navy Stores in London.

This collection supplements the main collection of the papers of Rudyard Kipling, his parents, his wife and his daughter, which accumulated at Wimpole Hall, near Cambridge and which are deposited at the University of Sussex as SxMs 38, Kipling Papers - Wimpole Archive. The record for that collection includes a list of all the supplementary collections.

Some items have been published in Thomas Pinney (ed.), The letters of Rudyard Kipling , in progress (London: Macmillan, 1990-).