Barrack-Room Ballads, Departmental Duties, and The Seven Seas.

KIPLING, Rudyard.

$800.00

Item Number: 96168

London: Methuen and Co. and George Newnes, 1899.

Finely bound early printings of Kipling’s collections of songs and poems regarding the late-Victorian British Army and voyages on the high seas. Octavo, three volumes, bound in three quarters morocco over marbled boards with gilt titles and tooling to the spine in 6 compartments within raised gilt bands, top edge gilt, others uncut, marbled endpapers. In near fine condition. Bookplate to each pastedown.

Written in vernacular dialect, Kipling's The Barrack Room Ballads contains some of Kipling's most well-known work, including the poems "Gunga Din", "Tommy", "Mandalay", and "Danny Deever" which established his early fame as a poet. The first poems were published in the Scots Observer in the first half of 1890, and collected in Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses in 1892. Kipling later returned to the theme in a group of poems collected in The Seven Seas under the same title. A third group of vernacular Army poems from the Boer War, titled "Service Songs" and published in The Five Nations (1903), can be considered part of the Ballads, as can a number of other uncollected pieces.