Epic on the Riverbank: Revisiting The Wind in the Willows - Reactor

In 1908, a newly retired banker published a compilation of stories that he had told to his young son. Kenneth Grahame was already an eminent writer in among the demands of his day job, but every writer knows, you’re only as successful as your last book. This new work was rejected by his regular publisher, and reviews at first trended toward the negative.

This is a trope. Great work unrecognized at the time transforms into immortal classic. After its slow start, The Wind in the Willows became one of the most beloved children’s books of the twentieth century. It’s still going, a quarter of the way through the twenty-first.

I can’t remember the first time I read it. I do recall what was in it, and that edition was abridged. It contained the main set of stories but left out the shorter interludes. Mostly it was about Mole and Rat and the boat, and Mr. Toad’s adventures with motor cars.

Rereading it, with the missing parts now included, was an interesting experience. It didn’t shape my youth; it was one of a multitude of books that I read because they were there in the library, and I would read anything I could get my hands on. Its characters are familiar from other writers’ works and reviews as much as from their original appearance, not to mention such acts of homage as A. A. Milne’s play, Toad of Toad Hall.

This combination of characters and story resonates deeply with whole generations of English and English-adjacent writers and poets. Like all great children’s stories, it speaks to all ages. It takes them back to a time that probably never existed, but they dearly wish it had.

The series of linked stories recounts the adventures of a small cast of anthropomorphized animals. The Mole, bored with his annual spring-cleaning, gets it into his head to wander off until he finds the river. There he meets the Water Rat, a hospitable and obliging sort who invites him to share his house and join him in his forays in boats and along the river. There are frequent appearances by the Otter, a big, bluff fellow with a distinctly playful side, and the strong, often stern, but gentle and kind Badger.

And then there’s Toad. Toad lives in Toad Hall, on a great estate, and he has, not to put too fine a point on it, issues. He’s good-hearted, we’re frequently told, but he has no filters. He gets obsessions. He becomes addicted, and needs interventions. He gets himself into terrible predicaments, which his friends have to get him out of, but he never really learns anything (though he insists early and often that he is going to change, he is, he’s going to turn over a new leaf this time, really, seriously).

These are animals, we’re told explicitly. But they live in elaborate houses. They wear clothes and wield tools and carry weapons. They read books, write poetry, compose songs.

There are humans in this world. The animals live alongside them. When Toad steals a motor car and goes on a wild joy ride, the car belongs to a party of humans, and it’s humans who chase him, catch him, send him to trial, and lock him in a dungeon with a twenty-year sentence. He makes his escape by winning over the gaoler’s daughter and impersonating a washerwoman.

The impersonation is such a success that he has difficulty resuming his original identity. Clearly Toad is the same size as a human (hence his ability to steal a car and drive it recklessly across the country), and has a face and voice that convinces humans that he’s [a] one of them and [b] a woman.

When he is outed, he gets some blowback of the “Eeeuuuwww, slimy toad!” sort, but in general humans and animals coexist along parallel and mostly compatible tracks. They have their own spheres and concerns, but they’re not fundamentally in conflict. They’re all in the world together, if not usually in the same spaces.

Toad Hall may have originally been human-built. Toad’s father took it over and bequeathed it to his feckless son. Humans don’t seem to have contested the takeover.

The Badger’s Sett has a similar history. Badger and his family have expanded and renovated it, but originally they seem to have been colonists. They found it and claimed it.

This is very much a reflection of the late British Empire. Mole leaves the home he built himself and goes traveling, and moves in with Ratty, where he stays indefinitely except for a brief return to his old home. He realizes he missed it, once he sees it again, but he goes back to being an expatriate. He can go home when he wants to, but he prefers the wider horizons of the river and its environs.

So many of the underpinnings are invisible. Food and clothes mostly just appear. Money is almost always there, without a clear sense of where it comes from. We get an occasional glimpse of the infrastructure that has to exist in order to support these privileged animals, especially during Toad’s washerwoman era (and what an education that is for that son of the landed gentry), but for the most part it’s just there. All of these animals can go where they like, do what they like, help and hinder each other, go exploring, put on elaborate parties, and it’s all just part of the world they so comfortably live in.

It’s not a completely secure world. There are Things in the Wild Wood, which emerge and cause no little damage. Bad behavior has consequences, and sometimes they’re serious. But everything rights itself sooner or later.

Reading these stories as an adult is interesting not just because I see so much more of what’s underneath, but because of beloved authors and works that took inspiration from Grahame’s world and characters. There is so much of Grahame in C. S. Lewis’ Narnia. His Talking Animals are the direct heirs of Mole and Rat and Badger and Toad. He takes them to great lengths and overlays them with explicit Christianity, but they’re still recognizable.

Tolkien’s debt to Grahame is less obvious. He has a broad range of sources and inspirations, not to mention the whole concept of building a world on an invented language. And yet hobbits and the Shire have a distinct flavor of Grahame’s animals and their river and the dark Wood that borders it.

One little Easter egg is the fox in the Wood. In The Fellowship of the Ring, a fox sees the hobbits sleeping in the wild, wonders what on earth they’re doing there, but never learns any more about it. She’s in Grahame, too, in a similar, rather random scene.

Hobbits in some ways are an intermediate species between Grahame’s animals and human beings. They’re small, closer to the size of real rats and moles and badgers, with furry feet, but their land and their culture are quite like the world of Grahame’s stories. Mole, like Bilbo, sets off on an adventure that changes his life forever; he does go home eventually but he doesn’t stay there. He chooses adventure.

The Scouring of the Shire has certain echoes of the re-taking of Toad Hall—and it’s had the same history of mixed reviews. Some critics see it as a fizzle rather than a grand finale. They would prefer a more heroic ending, with a bigger apparent payoff.

I don’t doubt that Tolkien’s work would have existed without Grahame, but it might not have been quite the same. Grahame’s world is a distillation of the one he lived in, the end of the Victorian era and the beginning of the Edwardian, before the First World War broke that world in pieces. For Tolkien and Lewis, who lived through the war and then the one after it, it’s as remote and as poignant as Tolkien’s Elvenhome when the Two Trees were in flower.