Departmental Ditties, Barrack Room Ballads and Other Verses.

KIPLING, Rudyard.

Item Number: 121888

New York: John H. Lovell Company, 1890.

First American edition of the poetry collection that established Kipling’s fame with Lovell on the foot of the spine. Octavo, original cloth. In very good condition.

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.