TLS, two pages, 8 x 10.5, Burwash, Etchingham letterhead, October 6, 1916. Letter to Frank Wynne, in part: “Thank you very much for your kindness in sending me a copy of the Ganges Pilot. Now the mystery deepens. All that I quoted of it, I found in Vol. I of Busteed’s Echoes of Old Calcutta, published at Simla in 1882 (I came out to India as a boy of 16, in the autumn of that year). Busteed says of the poem that it refers to the episode of Job Charnock rescuing a Hindu widow from the pyre just as she was about to become sati. He lived with her for the rest of her life, and grieved over her when dead. The incident is supposed to have occurred on the banks of the Hugli, 1678. Here is Busteed textually on the poem itself:—…Then follows the four verses which I have quoted in The Light that Failed. They differ slightly from your version; e.g. about the arquebuses: Kate’s eyes and ‘young Joe you’re nearing sixty’ (By the way, ‘sand-drift’ is a misprint for ‘scud-drift,’ of course.) I do not believe for one instant that these verses are eighteenth century work, as Busteed implies. May I ask from what source you got them? As I remember Sir Henry Wood said that he thought they appeared first in The Times of India about 1882. Was Busteed mislead: were they a deliberate fake? Was there any tombstone at all; and is the song complete as it stands now? I don’t quite understand the Sussex verses being interpolated with so little explanation. It looks to me like a fragment of a long ballad. But who was the writer?” In fine condition. Accompanied by the original mailing envelope bearing an ink notation by another hand. Centered around the life and globe-trotting travels of a painter who goes blind, The Light That Failed was first published in the January 1891 volume of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, marking the debut novel from a then 26-year-old Kipling. Pre-certified PSA/DNA.
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