As this fantasy book begins, two children have finished performing bits of Shakespeare’s “Midsummer’ Night’s Dream” and meet Puck on Pook’s Hill, which was originally named Puck’s Hill.
Puck tells the children he is “the oldest Old Thing in England,” and he entertains them with stories about English history, which he magically plucks characters out of history to tell. The stories range from Roman times to the fifteenth century.
The combination of history and fantasy has made this book a beloved favorite of both children and adults since it was first published in 1906.
Rudyard Kipling was a poet, short story writer, and novelist. He was born in Bombay, educated in England, and lived in both India and England as an adult. His best-known works for children include The Jungle Book, Kim, and Just So Stories as well as Puck of Pook’s Hill. His best known poems include “Gunga Din,” “The Road to Mandalay,” and “If.”
In 1907, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first writer in the English language to receive the prize.
In addition to facsimiles of the stories as they were published in The Strand, with illustrations by Claude Allen Shepperson, this edition contains poems that Kipling added when Puck of Pook’s Hill was published in book form. About this Series Heritage Facsimile Editions are reproductions of classic works of literature as they first appeared in illustrated magazines. In the days before electronic media, illustrated magazines were one of the most common forms of popular entertainment, filled with stories and serialized novels. The illustrations were a key part of the reader’s experience. There was a delay before these stories and novels were published in book form, to give people an incentive to subscribe to the magazines. The books often omitted the illustrations to reduce costs. This series publishes the books using facsimiles of the magazine articles, including the original illustrations.
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was born in India, and spent the first six years of his life there, acquiring Hindustani as a second language and living in a bungalow like that in The Jungle Book. He was then sent to a boarding house in England with his sister Alice, where he had a miserable time until he was sent to The United Services College at Westward Ho! in Devon, the model for Stalky & Co. He left school at sixteen to return to India and work on The Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore, and his familiarity with all classes of society provided him with material for Barrack Room Ballads and Plain Tales from the Hills. In 1889 he returned to England and in 1891 published his novel The Light That Failed, and married Caroline (Carrie) Balestier the following year. They returned to her home Brattleboro, Vermont, where Kipling wrote the two Jungle Books and Captains Courageous. In 1896 the family returned to England, where Kipling continued to write prolifically, and was the first Englishman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907. His later years were darkened by the death of his son John at the Battle of Loos in 1915. Kipling's long association with Macmillan began in 1891, with the publication of Life's Handicap and continued with most of Kipling's prose and children's works, available in multiple editions long after his death in 1936.
