The tale is very tightly written. There are no flourishes in it; every sentence tells and matters. The writing is of that `infolded' sort which, at first reading, may seem to present a crumpled mass, but which gradually fills and spreads and tightens with the fullness and tension of its meanings, until it is a House of Life itself, a tent covering the erring and suffering spirit of man. The title offers us two handles. It is a phrase from the Chaucerian fragment that Manallace forges, as an instrument of his revenge on Castorley, the Chaucer specialist; it is also the condition of Manallace which has nourished that revenge. He is the oak-spray of 'Gertrude's Prayer', bruised and knotted and twisted on itself in youth through his unhappy love, which brings him nothing but the opportunity of nursing and supporting a deserted and paralysed woman, whose eyes look always for the husband who has left her. Thus his 'dawning goth amiss', and when she dies, after many years, his life is emptied, until it is filled by his secret hate for Castorley.

...an astonishing performance, a profound, obscure, and singularly unpleasant story about a vindictive feud between two expert bibliophiles, or rather the vindictive persecution of a sham expert by a genuine expert … But more engaging than the revenge-motif is the virtuosity with which a spurious poem by Chaucer is composed, a fifteenth-century manuscript is faked and the specious scholar is deceived. As if this involution were not enough, the progress of th plot is contrasted with the degeneration of the victim as disease wears him down, until the combined assault of pain and disillusion reveal his breaking strain.

It was just like R.K. to go through the whole process of faking a mediaeval manuscript with his own hands before writing the story.

'Dayspring Mishandled', the title of the story, has many meanings here, but one is certainly Manallace's inertia and failure to handle the dawn of inspiration in him. For his life is doomed, ironically, to turn into one long work of art, and that work malicious and evil. You don't, Kipling is telling us, escape the daimon so easily.

Forgiveness, or at least the fading away of the desire for revenge … one of the most complex of Kipling’s stories …. (he) weaves three further texts into this already complicated story. There is an epigraph , taken from a poem by Charles Nodier …. There is a frame story which involves a narrator who appears initially as a disinterested observer of events. And following the story proper there is a poem, ‘described as ‘Modernised from the “Chaucer? of Manallance’ called ‘Gertrude’s Prayer,’ which asserts the futility of all hopes of renewal: ‘Dayspring mishandled cometh not againe’. The three texts work subtly to shape our reading.

... this fine story is weakened by our not knowing what enormity Castorley said, for we are not allowed to be judge of Manallace’s justification, which is a centre to the story. Yet if, as I suspect, Castorley declared that her paralysis was syphilis contracted by whoring it is hard to see how a man like Kipling could have written it out, even in 1928.

He almost certainly borrowed the forgery idea from his friend Ian Colvin, who had once nearly pulled off a similar hoax on The Times with some 'early' Keats sonnets. However, the story's narrative obliquity and its moral and other dilemmas, owed a different debt, which was to Henry James's treatment of literary themes ... there was something eminently Jamesian about Kipling's reluctance to let the reader know what dreadful thing Castorley said to Manallace. In his last great story he had fully imbibed the lesson of the master. 'So long as the events are veiled, the imagination will run riot, and depict all sorts of horrors, but as soon as the veil is lifted, all mystery disappears, and with it the sense of terror'. [Leon Edel, Henry James, A Life, Harper & Row New York 1977, p. 467.]

... the desire for revenge; it is a triumph of ingenuity, but in nothing so ingenious as that Mr. Kipling stops short of the climax that would distract from the process. The avenger took endless pains to foist a forgery of his own manufacture on a Chaucer expert; and from what Mr. Kipling submits of the forgery and from what he tells us of the means by which it was authenticated one imagines that George Psalmanazar would have saluted him as brother.

[George Psalmanazar (c. 1679-1763) forged a passport while pretending to be an Irish pilgrim, and also claimed to be the first Formosan to visit Europe, but was later shown to be an impostor; Ed.]

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notes on the text "Dayspring Mishandled" (notes edited by John McGivering) [July 12 2008] Publication First published in McCall’s Magazine for March 1928 and the Strand Magazine for July the same year; collected in Limits and Renewals in 1932, and later in the Burwash and Sussex editions. The illustrations, four in number, were by C. E. Brock, R.I. It is accompanied by the verse