Life & Wisdom Quote by Rudyard Kipling

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.