Rudyard Kipling published The Jungle Book in 1894, following it with a Second Jungle Book in 1895. The original collection contains the three Mowgli stories, in which a human infant raised by wolves in the Indian jungle grows up under the protection of Baloo the bear and Bagheera the black panther, and learns the Law of the Jungle, the code of behavior that governs the animals of the Seeonee hills. The other stories in the collection are independent: "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi," about a mongoose defending a colonial household from cobras; "Toomai of the Elephants," about a mahout's son who witnesses the elephants' secret dance; and "The White Seal," set in the Bering Sea.
The Law of the Jungle, first articulated in the second book but implicit throughout the Mowgli stories, is Kipling's most explicit expression of a belief in natural hierarchy and earned authority. Mowgli's superiority over the wolves and eventually over the jungle itself is presented as both natural and earned. The Bandar-log, the Monkey People who have no law, are the novel's image of democratic disorder, they are amusing, untrustworthy, and incapable of sustained action. The political implications of this were not subtle in 1894, when Kipling was becoming the most prominent literary voice of British imperialism, and have been the center of critical debate about the Jungle Books ever since.
The Mowgli stories remain compelling as fiction for the specificity of Kipling's jungle, the animal voices, the seasonal rhythms, the geography of the Seeonee hills, and for the particular emotional texture of Mowgli's position as someone who belongs fully to neither the human world nor the animal world. The political context cannot be ignored in an adult reading, but attending to it need not prevent engagement with what the stories actually do: they are among the most technically accomplished jungle narratives in English, and Kipling's ear for animal speech creates a world that is internally coherent enough to have generated its own cultural mythology.
Treasure Island grew from a map Stevenson drew to entertain his 12-year-old stepson on a rainy afternoon.
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