Although not a colonial official himself, Rudyard Kipling, when he returned to India in 1882 to become sub-editor of the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore and begin his career as a serious writer of fiction, found himself among hordes of English who were. In fact, the note of defensive self-assertion which sounds through Kipling's “know-it-all” attitude in his early writing seems to serve a dual purpose: to represent in fictional form the attitudes so common among the types of English officials he knew in India, and to express a more complicated, if somewhat transparently desperate, longing for the expert knowledge usually available only to credentialed bureaucrats. Not only do many of Kipling's tales center themselves on the figure of the solitary administrator, a bureaucrat who is essentially alone yet the center of a complex web of power and information systems, but his work often presents an “official” view of the cosmic order as a seemingly suitable metaphor for cosmic order itself.