The City is of Night; perchance of Death,
But certainly of Night.

...In my absence (in Rajputana in November and December 1887 with results that appeared as Letters of Marque) the Pioneer had started a new weekly paper and I, as the author of Plain Tales from the Hills was advertised as the writer of a series of "Anglo Indian Studies". On my return to Allahabad—the place where the Pioneer is printed—I had to turn to and hatch out stories; for they had told me nothing of this new departure.

One of my proprietors made me welcome for a month and I worked like a nigger, because I love him, and would do anything for him and went to all the dances and dinners that were going for thirty days. Then they cut me adrift afresh, bidding me chuse my own ground for exploration. I have taken the 19th century and the Railway colonies in India, and the opium factories and the out of the way life of Calcutta, and Benares, and a relic of the Mutiny for my subjects and am come here to Jamalpur, which is a sort of Crewe of Eastern India, where men make locomotives and control many hundreds of miles of lines.

Jan. 26th. Been out on business all day in soft warm drenching rain and return to you now, having competely lost the thread of my egoistical argument. Where was I? At Jamalpur. It's a wonderful place and I see that I shall have my work cut out to describe it. I've got my first harvest of notes and have been writing out for three hours continuous...

Jan. 27th. Be shot if it is. The blot has runned away all down the page and I'll get you another as soon as ever I get to Calcutta if I live. I've had a riotous day cutting about over the "shops" and inspecting 120 diseased locos, a quarter of a million of pound's worth of stock and goodness knows what all. It's all down in a notebook somewhere but I'm too dead fagged to write it out (and there is an "interesting" tale for the week after next to be written) and so I fly to you for consolation. Tomorrow I go to a big meeting of the local Masonic Lodge. Curious thing to think that though I've come south 980 miles I am certain tomorrow of finding men who will talk to me as though they had known me all their lives on subjects on which both I and they will be able to discourse about with freedom and camaraderie. Let us hope they'll give me some decent material for Studies. I'm in low water again...

Chapter Title First Published Location I A Real Live City 2 March 1888 Pioneer II The Reflections of a Savage 5 March 1888 Pioneer III The Council of the Gods 18 February 1888 Pioneer IV On the Banks of the Hughli 9 March 1888 Pioneer V With the Calcutta Police 14 March 1888 Pioneer VI The City of Dreadful Night 22 March 1888 Pioneer VII Deeper and Deeper Still 5 April 1888 Pioneer VIII Concerning Lucia 9 April 1888 Pioneer

One of his more strongly held opinions – his hostility to educated Indians – could not have been more blatantly expressed when he reached Calcutta ... A visit to the debating chamber of the Bengal Legislative Council only confirmed his prejudices, as he heard a babu spouting John Stuart Mill in a live version of his nightmare in “The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes”.

Profoundly suspicious of Calcutta’s openness to new ideas and values, Kipling turns his attentions to liberalism and policies of native self-government, ridiculing the contribution of the Bengal Legislative Council to the running of the city. The ‘ferocious stench’ of refuse, bad water, and sewage is taken by Kipling as a metaphor of the corruption of the Council and the city.

This deeply unpleasant attack on Calcutta and its Bengali inhabitants extended over seven articles, afterwards republished under the title of The City of Dreadful Night and Other Places. The heading of the last chapter, ‘Deeper and Deeper Still’, is an allusion to Dante’s Inferno. Calcutta is depicted as a hell on earth and Kipling sees himself as a modern Dante, touring one circle of hell after another, albeit with a police escort rather than Virgil.