Special Collections
Book of the Month, September 2006
Puck of Pook's Hill
Rudyard Kipling
London: Macmillan, 1906
[S.L.] I [Kipling - 1906]
Puck of Pook’s Hill, part of the canon of children’s literature, was first published 100 years ago, in September, 1906, and has undergone numerous editions since. Despite Kipling’s Englishness and the English subject of the story, it has additionally been translated into several foreign languages, including German, Polish, Danish, Italian and Russian. The renaming of a hill near Kipling’s Sussex home from “Perch Hill” to “Puck’s Hill” further testifies to the book’s popularity. To this academic accolade has been added, with the historian G.M. Trevelyan in 1953 praising Kipling’s “marvellous historical sense”.
The work is a collection of stories based on English history linked by a frame narrative and punctuated by poems. In the frame narrative, two children, Dan and Una, accidentally summon Puck from the nearby Pook’s Hill (“Puck’s Hill”) while they are acting scenes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream in an old fairy ring in a field near their home in Sussex. Narratives from the times of the Normans, Romans, Tudors and King John follow, told in terms which reflect Kipling’s standard values: for example, an ancient Roman commends the emperor Gratian’s uprightness by describing him as a sportsman. Puck is inspired at least partly from Kipling’s purchase of Bateman’s in 1902, a country house near Burwash in Sussex near which, in 1904, Kipling himself acted scenes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream with his children, John and Elsie.
Stories from Puck of Pook’s Hill appeared in various magazines before the entire book was serialised in the Strand Magazine from January, 2006. The illustrator is H.R. Millar, familiar to many from his illustrations of E. Nesbit’s works.
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