“I will show you where your son lies”: relocating Kipling’s “The Gardener” in 1920s print culture

Abstract

This article is concerned with the theoretical and methodological implications of reading “The Gardener” in the three print formats in which it made its first appearance: namely in the short story collection Debits and Credits (September 1926), where it was deliberately placed by Kipling as the final story; in the columns of The Strand Magazine (May 1926), and, earliest of all, in McCall’s Magazine (April 1926). On each occasion a more or less identical text of “The Gardener” is accompanied by complementary material in another medium or genre: in the volume edition, by Kipling’s own lyric poem “The Burden,” and, in the case of the magazines, by multiple illustrations by established artists and various kinds of editorial sign-posting. It is the primary contention of the article that this paratextual material—which has hitherto remained buried under the critical history of the story—is significant in ways that call for a re-evaluation of how the story should be approached, received, or presented. Subsequent contentions of the article relate to the problematic relationship between what is commonly construed as the “high art” aesthetic of the Modernist short story and the reality of such stories' frequent first appearance in mass-circulation magazines and cheap, illustrated miscellanies. Observing their textual transition from multi-authored periodical into monograph form involves a radical accommodation of differing print cultures no less than of critical approaches, which the article also seeks to articulate