THERE was a story in which a mole, a beever, a badger & a water rat was characters & I got them terribly mixed up as I went along,’ wrote Kenneth Grahame to his wife, Elspeth, in 1903, in the Cockneyfied baby talk in which this unhappily mismatched couple communicated. He was describing a walk in London’s Kensington Gardens with the Grahames’ only child, three-year-old Alistair, known as ‘Mouse’. Five years later, and much altered, the story invented for Mouse on wintry afternoon sorties from the Grahames’ house in Durham Villas, Campden Hill, was published to overwhelmingly negative reviews as The Wind in the Willows. It would be Grahame’s only full-length novel.
To the novel’s illustrator, Grahame confessed: “I love these little people”
‘Children should read of the joy of life,’ he wrote later, in a foreword to. Early reviews notwithstanding, an encapsulation of life’s joys was, indeed, what he himself had achieved in. To the of 1895 and of 1898—proved short lived. For 115 years, Grahame’s tale of anthropomorphic animals behaving remarkably like Edwardian bachelors (his own first title for the book was) has delighted readers of all ages. It has inspired sequels, postage stamps, knitting patterns, a cookery book and, 40 years ago, an animated film almost as popular as the book itself. For its devotees, it has also transformed the woods and riverbanks associated with its inspiration, notably what Grahame described as ‘a sequestered reach of the crowded Thames’, into places of pilgrimage.
