The Kipling archive
Rudyard Kipling (1865 - 1936)
Category
Archive Collections
Date
Unknown
Materials
Collection
Bateman's, East Sussex
NT 761776
Summary
Papers of the Kipling archive. A large collection with relation to Rudyard Kipling' himself and his family, including his father (John Lockwood Kipling), his wife (Caroline Starr Balestier) and his children. The archive includes correspondence, sketches and drawings, as well as Rudyard's literary, personal and legal manuscripts. The Kipling Archive was deposited at the University of Sussex by the National Trust in 1978. The papers were accumulated by Rudyard Kipling, his wife Carrie and their daughter Elsie Bambridge. Elsie was Kipling’s only surviving descendant and, with the help of Kipling’s former secretary Cecily Nicholson, she began to sort the documents she had inherited. To ease the task of the official biographer, Mrs Bambridge regained possession of further letters in the sale-room and had copies made of others which remained in private hands. When she died in 1976, a childless widow, Wimpole Hall (her Cambridgeshire home) and its archive passed to the National Trust.
Makers and roles
Rudyard Kipling (1865 - 1936), creator