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    Stalky and Co.
    Stalky and Co.
    Stalky and Co.
    Audiobook6 hours

    Stalky and Co.

    Written by Rudyard Kipling

    Narrated by Gideon Emery

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Stalky Co. is a book published in 1899 (following serialization in the Windsor Magazine) by Rudyard Kipling, about adolescent boys at a British boarding school. It is a collection of linked short stories in format, with some information about the charismatic Stalky character in later life. The character Beetle, one of the main trio, is partly based on Kipling himself. Stalky is based on Lionel Dunsterville, M'Turk is based on George Charles Beresford, Mr King is based on William Carr Crofts. The school, which is referred to as the College or the Coll. is based on the United Services College in Devon which Kipling attended. The stories have elements of revenge, the macabre (dead cats), bullying and violence, and hints about sex, making them far from childish or idealized, unlike the typical school story. The critic Edmund Wilson, in The Wound and the Bow, was both shocked and uncomprehending about them. For example, Beetle pokes fun at an earlier, more earnest, boys' book, Eric, or, Little by Little, thus flaunting his more worldly outlook.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateNov 13, 2015
    ISBN9781501908255
    Stalky and Co.
    Author

    Rudyard Kipling

    Rudyard Kipling was born in India in 1865. After intermittently moving between India and England during his early life, he settled in the latter in 1889, published his novel The Light That Failed in 1891 and married Caroline (Carrie) Balestier the following year. They returned to her home in Brattleboro, Vermont, where Kipling wrote both The Jungle Book and its sequel, as well as Captains Courageous. He continued to write prolifically and was the first Englishman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907 but his later years were darkened by the death of his son John at the Battle of Loos in 1915. He died in 1936.

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    Reviews for Stalky and Co.

    4/5

    116 ratings5 reviews

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    • 3/5
      One of my absolute favorite books when I was a child, though I understood perhaps a half of the language and little of the context. Stalky, McTurk, and Beetle conspire against their masters, cheat, bully their superiors, and exact revenge against the sanctimonious with a ferocious joy that makes them eternally appealing. Never mind that Kipling's worldview is irredeemably skewed. As I was rereading it now, decades later, I understand better how my own naive perceptions of the world were formed, It is the quintessential English public-school novel. And yet I still enjoy the book. "The bleatin' of the kid excites the tiger."
    • 5/5
      A rollicking read of three schoolboys in a small Victorian era public school on the Cornish coast of Britain. Follows on from Kipling's 'Many Inventions' and probably connects many of the characters with other Kipling tales. Most of the boys at the public school are army or navy children born, as Kipling describes, in barracks and on board ship and so, it is implied they have an inbuilt knowledge for the morals and ethics of the military and treatment of their fellow man. Each story is an illustration of 'fairness' as determined by Stalky and his two cohorts, Beetle and M'Turk.
    • 3/5
      The casual brutality of the late nineteenth century really comes through in this novel. But since the young people of the school in the book were all being trained up to be cannon-fodder, perhaps that was an appropriate way of rearing boys. Women don't feature in the story at all, except as a means of humiliating one of the characters and to be put in their place by Kipling as only having one role in life.But having said all that the story is entertaining, as Stalky and his friends use their brains to subvert the rules and frustrate their teachers, all in preparation for doing the same once they were in the army.
    • 4/5
      This book, besides being a rollicking good story, brings up a number of questions about education and the interactions among youths. By the lights of the early 21st century, Stalky is a bully, but then so is Robin Hood, who is obviously one of Stalky's role models. Is there a place for the righteous use of power in society? How do you know when you've moved off into unrighteous territory?It's also obvious that these boys know much better than their masters what they actually need to know to survive in adult life. Instead of doing their school work, they go off and learn the local dialect and morés, pick up bits of engineering, tactics and statecraft when and where they can, and learn the school material that is most useful to them as individuals. They're also comfortable being outsiders. It looks rather idyllic, but then we're seeing the success stories. What do you do with people who don't thrive in this kind of environment?Don't let my idle speculations get in the way of enjoying these stories the way Kipling meant you to.
    • 4/5
      This is at the same time a gloriously anarchic collection of schoolboy adventures and a political tract that argues that Britain's military and political strength relies on precisely the qualities of lateral thinking, resourcefulness and refusal to accept authority without good reason that are developed by spending ones teenage years engaged in guerrilla warfare against incompetent and self-important schoolmasters. Obviously, this argument has its weaknesses, but we can read and enjoy the book without taking it too seriously. In many ways, this is the template for the post-Victorian British school story, in which more attention is paid to fun and less to moralising. Stalky and his friends find plenty of opportunities in the course of the book to mock the Eric, or Little by little type of school story. One area in which other writers of school stories didn't follow Kipling's example is his utter lack of interest in team games. Cricket and rugby take place entirely off-stage and have no significant impact on the story. Later writers obviously heavily influenced by Stalky & co., from P.G. Wodehouse to J.K. Rowling, invariably take the easy way out and use The Big Match as the dramatic highpoint of their school stories. (Since I share Kipling's distaste for sports, this was one reason I quickly got bored with school stories and moved on to novels written for adults.)Something I didn't really notice when I read this as a child was how very specific the locations are. Although it is never named, there is doubt at all that this is Kipling's old school, the United Services College in Devon. Conventional school stories are set in old and distinguished institutions with long years of tradition; Kipling foregrounds the differences from such places. The "Old Coll" is of relatively recent foundation, it has no traditions, it exists primarily to make money for its shareholders, and it is designed specifically to get the sons of expat empire-builders into empire-building professions themselves - something it clearly does well. The Head is a man of taste with a good library, but does not appear to be especially scholarly. In moral and disciplinary matters he is a supreme pragmatist - Stalky and his friends take great care to cover themselves legally when they launch one of their escapades, but the Head just punishes them anyway if the result is that he has to listen to tedious complaints from masters. The escapades themselves are what you remember from the book, though. When Stalky gets even with someone, it isn't a matter of a bag of flour on top of a door: it is a subtle campaign of psychological warfare in which the victims are made to bring destruction upon themselves. You don't have to be 14 years old to appreciate these sories - most of them work just as well for adult readers.