Rudyard Kipling's If

The Dalhousie Rudyard Kipling Collection was assembled by James McGregor Stewart. It was Stewart's intent to collect every version of Kipling's work from the manuscript, through the serialized form, on to each edition of the published monographs, and into the revised collected sets. Any additional material directly related to Kipling and his work was also carefully collected.

He was very successful in his quest as he collected forty-one literary manuscripts; 773 letters written by Kipling to family, friends, relatives and editors; 2,600 published books and pamphlets; 2,375 newspaper issues; 1,288 periodical issues in which Kipling material appeared; eighty-three original illustrations used in Kipling's works; selected contemporary criticism; Kipling autographs, photographs and sketches; forty pieces of sheet music for Kipling's poems put to music; fifteen recordings; and Kipling ephemera such as wall hangings, publicity posters and calendars.

Recent grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada have allowed for the purchase of microfilm backfiles of British and American literary journals that carried Kipling's work; three London newspapers, in which he published or had editorial influence; and microfilm business files of two Kipling publishers, Macmillan and Harper's.

A research collection of international significance and reputation, the Dalhousie Kipling Collection has been described by prominent Kipling scholar Dr. Thomas Pinney as "the single most comprehensive collection." British bibliographer Barbara Rosenbaum, after spending ten years locating and describing Kipling papers for the Index of English Literary Manuscripts, noted, after her visit to the Dalhousie Kipling Collection, that "in terms of Kipling materials as a whole--including printed matter--I would be hard-pressed to say that Dalhousie's collection is surpassed at all." Over the years, these and other researchers have been the appreciative and somewhat awed benefactors of Mr. Stewart's abilities as a collector and bibliographer, and of his generosity in presenting to a public institution his world-class collection.