Soldiers Three - Publication History

Publication History

The first publication of a collection of seven stories called Soldiers Three was as No 1 of A.H. Wheeler & Co.’s Indian Railway Library, a slim volume of 97 pages printed at the “Pioneer” Press, Allahabad in 1888 called Soldiers Three: a collection of stories setting forth certain passages in the lives and adventures of Privates Terence Mulvaney, Stanley Ortheris and John Learoyd, done into type and edited by Rudyard Kipling. In 1899, it became part of the book Soldiers Three and Other Stories, known to most people by the simpler title Soldiers Three. It is this collection whose contents are listed here. To the original Soldiers Three were added nos 2 and 3 of the Indian Railway Library, The Story of the Gadsbys, which is written in dramatic form, and In Black and White, looking more at the native Indians than the British. Both of these were also published in 1888. (The phrase 'Soldiers Three' may be used in writings about Kipling to group the three heroes of this collection: see Learoyd, Mulvaney and Ortheris.)

Soldiers Three (in the Indian Railway Library edition) became the second collection of short stories by Rudyard Kipling to be published, after Plain Tales from the Hills (in which the 'Three Soldiers' also appear). Like it, it was collected from some of the fiction he had published in journals; but while Plain Tales was mostly collected from the Civil and Military Gazette, this was "Reprinted in chief from the Week’s news", an Allahabad paper.