Just So Stories

The first stories were printed in magazines for American children before they were a book. "How the Camel got his Hump" appeared in St Nicholas Magazine in January 1898.[1] "The Elephant's Child" followed in the Ladies' Home Journal in April 1900, and "How the Leopard got his Spots" in October 1901.[2][3] Macmillan collected them in London in 1902, with Kipling's own illustrations, and Doubleday, Page published them in New York the same year.[4]

Kipling had been collecting ideas for a long time. In November 1892 he wrote to Mary Mapes Dodge, the editor of St Nicholas, with a list of animal stories he might write, a camel among them.[1] Some of the stories were suggested by a small boy. Nelson Doubleday, the son of Kipling's American publisher, wrote to him with a list of animals, including the leopard and the elephant. He asked for a royalty of a cent a copy, and his father later said he got it for twenty years.[3]

The book also carries a loss. Kipling's eldest child, Josephine, died in March 1899. According to Carrie Kipling's diary, "The Elephant's Child" was the first creative writing he did afterwards, in August 1899.[2] Taffy, the little girl of the two stories about writing, is followed in the poem "Merrow Down" by a father who comes alone to find her. The Kipling Society's notes read those last lines as his grief for Josephine.[3]

The first stories are animal origins. A whale eats every fish in the sea, then swallows a shipwrecked sailor who builds a grating in his throat, so whales can only eat small fish ever after. A camel who says nothing but "Humph!" and will not work is given a hump by a Djinn. A rhinoceros steals a cake, and the cake-crumbs in his skin make it itch and fold.[5]

In "The Elephant's Child", a young elephant full of "'satiable curtiosity" asks what the crocodile has for dinner. He is spanked by all his relations and finally goes to the Limpopo River to find out. In "How the Leopard got his Spots", a leopard and an Ethiopian hunter change their colouring to hide in the forest. Other stories explain the kangaroo's legs and the armadillo, a hedgehog and a tortoise who learn each other's tricks.[5]

Two stories are about Taffy and her father Tegumai, a family of cave-people on the river Wey. In one, Taffy draws a picture message that goes badly wrong. In the next, the two of them invent the alphabet. "The Crab that Played with the Sea" explains the tides. "The Cat that Walked by Himself" tells how the dog, the horse and the cow were tamed while the cat made his own bargain. "The Butterfly that Stamped" is set in the court of King Solomon.[5]