If an old-fashioned liberal humanist excuse were needed for revisiting Kipling’s “The Gardener” it could be found through combining Phillip Mallett’s contention that “Kipling is the greatest English writer of the short story” with Edmund Wilson’s roundabout confession that he is “not sure that [The Gardener] is not really the best story that Kipling ever wrote.” Greatness and hierarchies aside, the cultural materialist might find reasons enough for promoting a re-evaluation of the story in the wake of the centenary of the end of the First World War and renewed historical interest in Kipling’s work for the Imperial War Graves Commission. This was following the Commission’s unexpected announcement in 1992 that the grave of Kipling’s son John, missing in action since the Battle of Loos in 1915, had been found. The subsequent querying and then reaffirmation of this claim has further served to raise the status of the representation of the dynamics of wartime bereavement and the commemoration of the dead in “The Gardener” that can now more clearly be seen to underwrite the story. The motive for the present return to the text is, indeed, partly historicist, but it is also 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. 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. Taken together, these early publishing instances of “The Gardener” constitute, in editorial terms, what Jerome J. McGann calls “the social text” and show the work being socialized at the point in its history when it reached its largest synchronous Anglophone readership. There is also the problematic relationship between what is commonly construed as the “high art” aesthetic of the Modernist short story (or, more accurately perhaps, the aesthetic of canonical short stories composed during the high Modernist era) and the reality of their 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 seeks to articulate. *

Click links to download “ The Fool Next Door,” “ The Image-breaker,” and “ The Man Who Came Back.” The post-World War II novels of the Bengali writer S. N. (Sudhin or Sudhindra Nath) Ghose (1899–1965) received critical recognition in India, Europe, and the United States; however, the short stories and plays he published in London in the early 1920s have been largely neglected. He published stories in Sylvia Pankhurst’s East London newspaper, the Workers’ Dreadnought, and literary magazine , Germinal, which comprise some of the earliest examples of fiction written in English by a South Asian author and published in Britain. They appeared several years before his more famous contemporary Mulk Raj Anand published his first short story, “The Lost Child,” produced on Eric Gill’s handpress in County Buckinghamshire. While Anand’s interactions with writers in Britain have recently been recognized within modernist studies, Ghose’s literary activities in London in the 1920s have been almost entirely forgotten.