How to write a wrong

‘When young lips have drunk deep of the bitter waters of Hate, Suspicion and Despair, all the Love in the world will not wholly take away that knowledge.’

‘When young lips have drunk deep of the bitter waters of Hate, Suspicion and Despair, all the Love in the world will not wholly take away that knowledge.’

This is the conclusion of Kipling’s harrowing story of child abuse, ‘Baa-Baa Black Sheep’, and it reminds us that the Victorians knew all that one can know, or need to know, about the misery that may be inflicted on children. They also knew where best to deploy that knowledge: in a fictional narrative. No biographer has ever doubted that this story came from Kipling’s own painful experience as a child. No critic has ever supposed that he might have written it more effectively as what we now call a ‘misery memoir’.

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