Life & Wisdom Quote by Rudyard Kipling

"I have struck a city - a real city - and they call it Chicago... I urgently desire never to see it again. It is inhabited by savages"

Rudyard Kipling, Writer

About this Quote

Kipling’s line lands like a travel diary written with a drawn blade: the doubled emphasis of "a real city - a real city -" is both astonishment and accusation, as if Chicago’s sheer modernity offends his sense of how civilization is supposed to look. The name drop that follows ("and they call it Chicago...") turns the city into a punchline, a place so brash it barely deserves the dignity of being taken at face value. Then comes the dagger: "I urgently desire never to see it again". Not disappointment, not critique, but recoil.

The word doing the dirtiest work is "savages". Kipling isn’t merely calling Chicago rough; he’s smuggling in an imperial hierarchy. As the poet-novelist of empire, he’s trained to sort the world into "civilized" and "primitive", and in this moment the New World’s industrial metropolis gets demoted into the category reserved for colonized peoples. The subtext is panic at a city that doesn’t behave like Europe: fast-growing, loud, commercially obsessed, less interested in tradition than in scale, speed, and money. "Real city" here isn’t praise; it’s a warning that modernity can be real and still feel monstrous.

Historically, this maps onto late-19th-century Chicago’s reputation: a boomtown metropolis of stockyards, railroads, brutal labor conflict, political corruption, and post-fire reinvention. Kipling’s disgust reads as culture shock sharpened into ideology: when the frontier becomes urban, and the urban becomes industrial, the imperial observer suddenly finds "civilization" arriving without his permission.

Quote Details

Topic	Travel
Source	Verified source: American Notes (Rudyard Kipling, 1891) Text match: 95.00% Provider: Cross-Reference Evidence: I HAVE struck a city, a real city, and they call it Chicago. The other places do not count. San Francisco was a pleasure-resort as well as a city, and Salt Lake was a phenomenon. This place is the first American city I have encountered. It holds rather more than a million of people with bodies, and stands on the same sort of soil as Calcutta. Having seen it, I urgently desire never to see it again. It is inhabited by savages. (Chapter V ("CHICAGO"); page number not verifiable from the online transcription). This is a primary-source passage by Kipling in his travel sketch "CHICAGO" within American Notes. The quote often circulates as a stitched-together excerpt; the exact wording includes “I HAVE struck a city, a real city, and they call it Chicago.” followed later by “Having seen it, I urgently desire never to see it again. It is inhabited by savages.” For the earliest book publication, a major cataloged first appearance in book form is the 1891 New York edition published by M. J. Ivers (86 Nassau Street), described by the Morgan Library as “the first appearance in book form of extracts from the letters written by Kipling to his home paper while on his first visit to America.” (Morgan catalog record: https://www.themorgan.org/printed-books/169712). However, the first publication overall was likely earlier as newspaper/periodical letters “contributed to the Pioneer” (i.e., Kipling’s ‘home paper’ in India), as noted by multiple reference sources; I did not retrieve and verify the specific Pioneer issue/date in this search session, so I cannot responsibly claim a precise first-appearance date beyond identifying the verified primary text in American Notes, Chapter V. Other candidates (1) Chicago Comedy (Margaret Hicks, 2011) compilation97.3% ... I have struck a city — a real city — and they call it Chicago ... I urgently desire never to see it again . It is...
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