IF-.
London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1914. First English separate edition, pamphlet issue. Pamphlet. This is the pamphlet issue of the British first stand-alone publication of Kipling’s most famous poem, “IF-”, published the first month of the First World War.
These are scarce on the market, rendering mere survival noteworthy. This copy is in very good condition. The gray card covers remain complete and firmly attached to the contents. There is a contemporary owner name (initials and an indecipherable surname) inked at the upper right front cover corner, just above the double-ruled border. The covers show lightly toned extremities, the front cover shows some small spots and moderate soiling, and the fore edge corners are lightly bumped. The contents are clean with a touch of trivial spotting.
“IF-” was first published in October 1910 in Rewards and Fairies, Kipling’s collection of eleven stories and twenty-three poems that was a continuation of the Puck stories first told in 1906’s Puck of Pook’s Hill. To capitalize on the “immediate and immense popularity” of “IF-”, the publisher of the American edition of Rewards and Fairies, Doubleday, Page & Company, swiftly followed with a separate publication in 1910. This British edition followed in 1914.
There were two issues of this first separate British edition. Macmillan published “IF-“ in July 1914 as both a leaflet and “a pamphlet bound in card stock of various shades of gray or brown” measuring 16.2 x 11.4 cm, lettered and ruled in deep purplish-red.” In this pamphlet issue, the front cover served as the title page and the text was printed on both sides of two paginated leaves, with “COPYRIGHT" at the foot of p.4 and advertisements for Kipling’s works on the recto and verso of the back cover. Kipling’s bibliographer notes three printings of this pamphlet issue, the second in September 1914 and third in August 1915, noting that “for later issues, the year at the bottom of the front cover changes.”
Although the poem was not collected and published until 1910, inspiration for the poem occurred 15 years earlier, in the person of Leander Starr Jameson (1853-1917), leader of the failed Jameson Raid of that year against the Boer Republic of Transvaal that helped precipitate the Second Anglo-Boer War. “Despite the fiasco, much of the British public treated Jameson as a dashing hero… Kipling admired him greatly, and in his autobiography, Something of Myself, Kipling said that "If—" was drawn from Jameson's character.” The character flaws of the poem’s muse are an irony. The poem’s association with the collective, anonymized slaughter of the First World War is another.
It seems hardly coincidental that this first separate British edition was issued during the first month of the First World War. Indeed, a later, 1916 edition of the poem “was produced in an edition of 30,000 as ‘a Xmas and New Year card’ from the Ladies’ Buffet staff to the soldiers embarking for the front through Waterloo Station; Kipling waived his royalty, cutting the reprint cost”. The poem’s enshrinement of firmness of character and temperament in the face of adversity became inextricably linked to the patriotic offering and sacrifice of so many British sons to the inglorious trenches of the First World War.
The association was undoubtedly difficult for Kipling. Fourteen months after this copy of “IF-“ was published, Kipling lost his own and only son to the war. “John Kipling, who had been commissioned in the Irish Guards at the outset of the war, had gone to France in August 1915; in September, a month after his eighteenth birthday, he was reported wounded and missing in the battle of Loos. His body was never found in Kipling's lifetime: the grave was identified in 1992. John's death coincided with the onset of Kipling's suffering from the undiagnosed duodenal ulcer that tormented the last twenty years of his life and that at last killed him.”
None of the ironies attendant to the poem’s inspiration and application diminish its beautifully lyrical and enduringly compelling exhortations.
References: Richards A269; ODNB. Item #009008
Price: $1,750.00