#WANDERING WILLOWS SEQUEL SERIES#

Toad: charming and impulsive but wildly arrogant and lacking self-control. All of Grahame’s animals return to their “proper” place. Similarly, Mole and Ratty are afflicted by wanderlust, but inevitably retreat to their cosy, subterranean homes. In the end, he is punished for his foolish behaviour and forced to forgo his flamboyant egotism in humble resignation at Toad Hall. Toad is a recognisable type of schoolboy, charming and impulsive but wildly arrogant and lacking self-control. Badger, for instance, resembles a gruff headmaster whose paternal concern for his friends extends to an earnest attempt to reform the inebriate Toad. Whether we read Willows as a simple animal story or a social satire, the narrative reinforces the status quo. Guide to the classics: Petronius’s Satyricon – sex, satire and naughty boys In one scene, for example, Mole and Rat “shake off their garments” and “tumble in-between the sheets in great joy and contentment”.Įarlier, while sharing a bed in the open air, Mole “reaches out from under his blanket, feels for the Rat’s paw in the darkness, and gives it a squeeze.” “I’ll do whatever you like, Ratty,” he whispers.įor this reason, and others, some critics suggest that Willows is not a children’s book at all, but a novel for adults that can be enjoyed by children. Indeed, Hunt ventures to call the book “a gay manifesto”, reading it as a gay allegory heavy with suppressed desire and latent homoeroticism. After back and forth correspondence with Grahame, his publisher Sir Algernon Methuen wrote to say he had settled on The Wind in the Willows because of its “charming and wet sound”.Ī retouched illustration from a 1913 edition of the book. First published in 1908 - the same year as Anne of Green Gables and Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz - the novel was initially titled The Mole and the Water-Rat. Guide to the Classics: The Secret Garden and the healing power of natureīiographical readings are a staple in children’s literature, and the criticism surrounding The Wind in the Willows is no exception. Upon his death in 1932, he was buried in Oxford next to his first reader, Mouse.

In his will, he gifted the original manuscript of Willows to the Bodleian Library, along with the copyrights and all his royalties. He became increasingly reclusive, eventually abandoning writing altogether.

Kenneth Grahame, by all accounts, never recovered from the loss of his only child. An inquest determined his death a likely suicide but out of respect for his father, it was recorded as an accident. The next morning, railway workers found his decapitated body on tracks near the university. In the spring of 1920, while a student at Oxford, he downed a glass of port before taking a late night stroll. Unlike Toad’s recuperative ending, however, Alastair’s story did not end happily. His concerned friends must intervene to restrain his whims, teaching him “to be a sensible toad”. But when the daredevil, Toad, takes up motoring, he becomes entranced by wild fantasies of the road. In peaceful retreat from “The Wide World”, Rat, Mole, Badger, and Toad spend their days chatting, philosophising, pottering, and ruminating on the latest fashions and fads. In the story, a quartet of anthropomorphised male animals wander freely in a pastoral land of leisure and pleasure - closely resembling the waterside haven of Cookham Dean where Grahame himself grew up.

#WANDERING WILLOWS SEQUEL SERIES#

The Wind in the Willows evolved from Alastair’s bedtime tales into a series of letters Grahame later sent his son while on holiday in Littlehampton. His rapture in the fantastic was later confirmed by his nurse, who recalled hearing Kenneth “up in the night-nursery, telling Master Mouse some ditty or other about a toad”. Small, squinty, and beset by health problems, he was bullied at school. Like several classics penned during the golden age of children’s literature, The Wind in the Willows was written with a particular child in mind.Īlastair Grahame was four years old when his father Kenneth - then a secretary at the Bank of England - began inventing bedtime stories about the reckless ruffian, Mr Toad, and his long-suffering friends: Badger, Rat, and Mole.Īlastair, born premature and partially blind, was nicknamed “Mouse”.

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