Stalky & Co.

Stalky & Co. is a novel by Rudyard Kipling, about adolescent boys at a British boarding school. It was first published in 1899 (following serialisation in the Windsor Magazine). Reflecting its origins, the novel is episodic in nature, with self-contained chapters. It is set at an unnamed school referred to as the College or the Coll., which is based on the United Services College in Devon, which Kipling attended. The character Beetle, one of the main trio, is partly based on Kipling himself, while the charismatic character Stalky is based on Lionel Dunsterville, M'Turk is based on George Charles Beresford and Mr King is based on William Carr Crofts.

The stories have elements of revenge, the macabre, bullying and violence, and hints about sex, making them far from childish or idealised. For example, Beetle pokes fun at an earlier, more earnest, boys' book, Eric, or, Little by Little, thus flaunting his more worldly outlook. There is also some information about Stalky in later life. In his essay entitled “What We Can Expect of the American Boy,” Teddy Roosevelt disdained this novel, calling it “a story which ought never to have been written, for there is hardly a single form of meanness which it does not seem to extol, or of school mismanagement which it does not seem to applaud.”

The novel is a "fix-up" compilation of eight previously published stories, with a prefatory untitled poem beginning "Let us now praise famous men".

Different sources give conflicting information, unfortunately. It is unlikely, for example, that "Slaves of the Lamp, Part II" preceded "Part I." At times, both citations are given.

A Stalky story manuscript, believed to have been written in 1897, was found in an English school library in 2004:

The "missing chapter" of Rudyard Kipling's celebrated book Stalky and Co has been found in a school library.
The manuscript, believed to have been written in 1897 - two years before the book's publication - was found in the archives of Haileybury, a private school in Hertfordshire, by Jeremy Lewins, a former Kipling Fellow at Magdalene College, Cambridge.
The work tells the "entirely new" story of three schoolboys who taunt an elderly major who cheats at golf near Appledore in North Devon, Dr Lewins said.
Kipling intended it to be the first chapter of Stalky and Co ...
The manuscript was given by the Kipling Estate to the United Services College after he died in January 1936. It was acquired by Haileybury School in 1962 when it merged with the United Services College and lodged in the archives, where it remained unnoticed.

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