Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett on The Wind in the Willows, the Edwardian Idyll, and the Refusal to Grow Up

Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908) looks like a nursery story about a riverbank. Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett treat it as a portrait of four permanent temperaments, and of an Edwardian England that can already hear the motor car. Grahame said the book had no second meaning. The hosts spend the episode showing the second meaning, and locating it in a man who would not grow up.

Key ideas

1. Four characters hold human nature, and the homecoming is kinder than Homer’s. Sandbrook’s case for the book is that Toad, Badger, Mole and Rat hold ‘all human nature’ between them, and that the riverbank is rural Edwardian England threatened by modernity, a celebration of male friendship, and a reworking of the Odyssey. Few books of 1908 are still in print, and this one is in the bookshops. ‘A bit of a Mr Toad’ still needs no gloss. The Penguin Classics introduction calls it an essential element of English childhood. Syrett had refused it, because she dislikes animals in human clothes. Her father loved it and gave her his battered 1959 copy, and she decided she had been wrong: cosy, funny, whimsical, and a parable of human nature that has not dated as other books of the period have. Mole is the shy middle-class way in, out of a dark hole into the daylight. Rat is the gentleman of leisure, boats and picnics, already a friend of Toad, the local landowner, and the one Syrett wants to be. Badger is elderly, aristocratic, gruff, and deferred to. Carpenter’s phrase for him, via Sandbrook, is the still centre the storms rage around. Sandbrook thinks he is living among ruins. Syrett’s line is that he is old England. Toad is the boastful lord of the manor who spends like new money. Syrett’s addition is that each person is made of all four. Once Toad steals a car, the plot is the Odyssey without a wife or a son: prison, escape, trials, and a hall occupied by weasels, who are the suitors. The difference both hosts press is that in Homer the home you recover has not stayed the cherished place, and in this book it has.

2. The idyll is built from a wound, and the denial of a second meaning does not survive it. An idyll, here, is a picture of country life as complete and unthreatened. Sandbrook cites Sam Leith’s The Haunted Wood: the children’s writers who last are almost always the ones who have invested most, often writing from a wound, taken in childhood or from having had to leave it. His own line is that a lost paradise is built in order to get away from unhappiness, and the unhappiness gets in. Leith’s claim on this novel, as Sandbrook reads it, is that one of the most closed worlds of innocence in children’s literature has that form because Grahame’s unhappiness powers it. A seven-year-old does not see the dark. P. G. Wodehouse is the contrast: a troubled life, and the darkness never seeps into the books. The riverbank is an Edwardian escapist fantasy, in a line Sandbrook runs back through John Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites, pastoral England as a refuge from the city and the factory, imagined by people who live in towns. Mole comes up from his hole and finds it ‘too good to be true.’ Sandbrook hears the same wish in the countryside Winston Smith and Julia escape to, in the hosts’ earlier conversation on 1984. In 1909 Grahame thanked Theodore Roosevelt: ‘It was a book with no problems, no sex, no second meaning. It is only an expression of the very simplest joys of life.’ Sandbrook grants the missing sex and the missing domestic complication. He refuses the claim that there is no second meaning. Grahame said the same of the animal cast: by using the animal, he wanted ‘to get away at once from weary sex problems’ and to ‘do jolly things’ without being suspected of preaching. Syrett hears a man who wants the pub, the friends and the river, and not the marriage.

3. The book’s own argument is the pull between adventure and the burrow. The open road, the sea and the stolen car sit on one side; the hearth, the burrow and a great deal of buttered toast on the other. Syrett pairs that comfort with Narnia, where everyone goes to bed well fed. Mole’s homecoming, in Dulce Domum, is her favourite chapter. He smells his house, weeps, and will not abandon the new life of sun and air, and is glad the shabby place is still his. She thinks him the most believable of the four, and the bravest, because he is frightened and goes on. Rat is talked down from the sea. Toad’s escapes rhyme with the flight of Grahame’s father, who left the children and died in a boarding house in Le Havre. Sandbrook rejects the Freudian claim that coming home is a return to the womb. Leaving and returning is, for him, a founding Western plot, and in this book a masculine one.

4. The Wild Wood is an Edwardian class nightmare, and nobody is allowed to grow up. Rat tells Mole that river-bankers do not go to the Wild Wood, where the weasels, stoats and ferrets live. Critics, as Sandbrook reports them, read that wood as the working class: a well-heeled man from the Home Counties lost in the East End of the 1900s. Humphrey Carpenter’s alternative, which he also reports, is the subconscious, the adult sexuality Grahame feared. Syrett keeps a third reading, and a sufficient one for a child: lost, then found, then tea at a hearth. The occupation of Toad Hall is, on Sandbrook’s reading, the French Revolution. The sans-culottes, the radical poor of that revolution, have broken in and are drinking the wine. It is the invasion fantasy of an age of trade unions, the new Labour Party, anarchism and socialism, and buyers in 1908 would have felt it. Badger’s verdict is ‘This is all your fault.’ Toad had let the side down and left them open to riot. The retaking of the hall is ‘a massive victory for the status quo for conservatism.’ A child reads the same scenes as a game. Sandbrook loved the tunnel and did not see the politics. Syrett sees a crocodile of schoolchildren being sent to the back and then to the front. The pistols and cudgels hurt nobody. He holds both readings at once, and does not dissolve the political one into the game.

Toad is Falstaff, the liar and braggart of Henry IV, forgiven because he is generous and funny; he is also Billy Bunter, and, on Syrett’s comparison, Horrid Henry, whose moment of atonement does not stick. He is an addict. After the friends lock him in, he pulls chairs into the shape of a car and shakes. He is Odysseus only in structure, which is as far as Syrett will go. At the end the book puts him back in his box. The cars are given up. He is not allowed the speech about himself at his own victory banquet. The phrase Sandbrook quotes, ‘an altered toad’, is the reform on the page. Syrett does not believe it. Toad knows the modesty will surprise his friends, and the modesty is calculated. Sandbrook agrees. Sandbrook has already made the same point with a child who, once believed, says ‘I’m actually not sorry at all and I would do it again.’ Across the turns that close the political reading, Badger is heard as Gladstonian, after William Gladstone, the Victorian prime minister: he tames Toad, stops Rat leaving, and restores the hall. Growing up does not happen.

5. One strange chapter has dated. The other is the temptation to leave childhood. There are no women. ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ sends Mole and Rat after a lost otter cub, Portly. At dawn they find the god Pan cradling him, and they kneel. Syrett finds the description of Pan homoerotic. Sandbrook calls it kitsch: rippling muscles, shaggy limbs. His judgement is that this is the part of the book that has dated. Edwardians loved Pan, paganism and nature gods, a mysticism that rejected the modern. Sandbrook notes that Peter Pan takes his name from the same god. To a later reader it looks bizarre, and he reports critics who call the chapter a ghastly error of taste and an error of judgement on a grand scale. Syrett liked it. She wants the ethereal note, and she thinks the writing beautiful. The comparison she offers is Tom Bombadil in The Lord of the Rings. Sandbrook accepts it and does not like Bombadil: a nature spirit whose chapter is hard to explain. She likes the sense of a force governing their lives. ‘Wayfarers All’ is the chapter that belongs. Rat grows restless as the birds leave, is thrilled by a seafaring rat’s Mediterranean voyages, goes into a trance like one of Odysseus’s sailors under the sirens, and is packing when Mole talks him down. He weeps, and consoles himself by writing bad poetry. Syrett reads the voyage as growing up, the women and the relationships outside the childhood world, and Mole as the voice that says stay. Sandbrook then makes a leap he owns as his, not as a fact about the text: the chapter is what Grahame wishes he had done. He wishes he had not been persuaded into the marriage. There are no female animals. The cub is looked for by his father, and the mother is never mentioned. Among humans, a jailer’s daughter and a comic barge-woman, both cartoons. The nearest approach to a woman is a male animal dressed as one, which Sandbrook plays as a child’s disguise.

6. The melancholy is a perfect season with the engines coming. The scores are ten and eight. Sandbrook asks whether the book has a melancholy, and thinks it does. Syrett agrees, and separates melancholy from mourning. She will not call it a man grieving a son, or a finished life. The son died in 1920. The book is 1908. Her comparison is Narnia, where the children always have to go back. She calls it a dwindling age, a world that cannot endure. He adds that it will not endure for long, because the motor cars will come and pick it all up. She hears every season at its height, and the engines, the humans and the law already on the way, and she hears longing in the strange chapters. He agrees there is a longing, and turns to the scores. He gives it ten. The world-building is mad and the tone inconsistent, and the book should not work. Animals change size, eat ham, and go to court, and a child accepts all of it. The book is charming and funny, the characters give you something to love, and the writing is far ahead of almost any other children’s book. He loved it as a child and on rereading. She gives it eight. She agrees about human nature, and about Roosevelt’s old friends. The stakes are not high. She was invested anyway, and moved: the otter waiting on the bank for his son, Mole’s homesickness, Toad’s occasional contrition, Rat’s wanderlust. The prose is above any children’s book she has read, and it is still not one of her favourites. He thinks eight is harsh.

Context

The life

Kenneth Grahame was born in Edinburgh in 1859, the son of a lawyer, and was taken early to rural Argyll. One memory, walking by a loch while his father told stories, returns when Mole walks beside Rat. At five his mother had another son, caught scarlet fever, and died after about two weeks. Her last words, as Sandbrook gives them, were ‘it’s all been so lovely.’ She was in her late twenties. Grahame caught the fever, nearly died, and kept a weak chest. The father could not cope. The children went to their grandmother at Cookham Dean in Berkshire, on the Thames, an interlude Sandbrook sets beside the rural childhood J. R. R. Tolkien had at Sarehole, outside Birmingham. A short return to the father failed. He was drinking, abandoned them, ran to France, and died in a boarding house in Le Havre. Grahame withdrew into a fantasy he never left. Syrett thinks that a comprehensible reaction. Sandbrook’s point, taken from Matthew Dennison’s Eternal Boy, is that he chose not to grow up: adulthood, for him, meant suffering, disappointment and grief. Syrett pairs him with J. M. Barrie, and with that generation’s cult of childhood.

He was shy at St Edward’s, made the rugby first fifteen, and became head boy. An uncle blocked university and put him, aged nineteen, into the Bank of England in 1879, as a gentleman clerk. Sandbrook finds the blocked degree the sad fact. Syrett objects that the Bank was a good job. Carpenter’s picture of that decade, as Sandbrook paraphrases it, is pandemonium: heavy drinking and pet animals on the premises. Grahame became Secretary in 1898. The regiment, the boats and the walking holidays are, for Sandbrook, the riverbank company in real life. He published as a gentleman amateur — Pagan Papers, then The Golden Age and Dream Days — and Roosevelt admired him. There is, Sandbrook says, never the slightest suggestion that Grahame was gay, and he asks listeners not to reach for that. Both hosts prefer the childishness. Sex and women do not fit the world he retreats to.

Near forty he married. Carpenter calls his wife ‘a ferociously flirtatious blue stocking.’ Sandbrook anticipates the charge of misogyny, and sets Carpenter next to the Penguin Classics introduction. On his telling, Grahame fell ill, she nursed him, and he could not face the conversation that would end it. His sister saw the announcement and asked if he meant to go through with it. He answered, in a tone of the deepest gloom, ‘I suppose so. I suppose so.’ They married in 1899. She wanted an affection he would not give. They wrote to each other only in baby talk. A son, nicknamed Mouse, was born in 1900: premature, nearly blind in one eye, sickly, spoiled and neglected at once, boastful, and friendless. Leith’s phrase, as Sandbrook quotes it, is ‘a conceited, spiteful, and spoiled little brat.’ Readers would expect this child to be Mole. He is the model for Toad, and Sandbrook calls that insane. The joke of the bedtime stories, once the boy was four, was that Toad was him.

The letters of 1907

A baby-talk letter of 1903, when Mouse was three, already has a mole buy a motor car. Animal stories were in fashion. Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit had appeared in 1902, and Grahame read Potter to the boy. In the spring of 1907 the parents were in Cornwall and Mouse was at Littlehampton with his governess. Grahame wrote about fifteen letters of Toad’s adventures, the police, the court, the jailer’s daughter, a picaresque romp that passes almost unchanged into the second half of the book. He was not writing for another reader. The governess kept the letters, and they are reprinted in the Penguin Classics edition. That August an American journalist, sent by Everybody’s Magazine, came after him for the American market on the strength of The Golden Age. She heard a bedtime story, asked for a book, and was told that writing was physical torture. She found the Toad letters, the child wanted them published, and Grahame gave in. In the autumn the book took its shape: Mole and Rat on the river; Toad’s brush with the law and the return to an occupied house; and the chapters he added, Mole pining for home, Rat pining for the sea, and the meeting with Pan.

The reception in 1908

An agent and the magazines refused it. Publishers asked why the characters were not children. Methuen took the book with no advance and a steeply sliding royalty, a scale that later enriched Grahame and, as his heir, the Bodleian. Advertisements had called it ‘the wind in the reeds’, from the Pan chapter, until Methuen found that too close to W. B. Yeats’s The Wind Among the Reeds. The Wind in the Willows came out in 1908 to a damp squib. It now sits on lists of famously wrong reviews because of the Times Literary Supplement: ‘As a contribution to natural history, the work is negligible’; ‘a book with hardly a smile in it’; a reader left ‘in a haze of perplexity’. Sandbrook thinks the reviewer’s question is the fair one: whom the book is for. The prose sits far above a child’s reading level, and dressed animals did not look like a book for adults. The first readers had no reassurance that it was a classic. Word of mouth carried it, and so did Roosevelt, who wrote that he had come to accept the characters as old friends. It was reprinted every year for the next two decades, sometimes twice a year. In 1929 A. A. Milne, the author of Winnie-the-Pooh, made a stage version, Toad of Toad Hall, which cut the mystical chapters, kept the adventure, and became a Christmas staple.

Afterwards, and the son’s death

Grahame lost the Bank post just before the book appeared. He was well off, lonely, without purpose, and shut in with a wife he disliked. Dennison’s account, as read here, is of days overwhelmingly empty, and of hours walked alone. Mouse was sent to Rugby and left after six weeks. Friends suggested home schooling. The mother insisted on Eton, which failed too. A breakdown followed, then home schooling after all, then Oxford, where the expectation that he was something special crushed him. He failed his exams and made no friends. One morning in May 1920 his body was found on a railway line. He had been killed by a train, and it was almost certainly suicide. The parents, Sandbrook says, responded in the classic Grahame way: they ran, to Italy. Dennison calls the last phase a recessional, a dying fall. The wife grew eccentric. Grahame died of a stroke in 1932, with no heir, and the royalties went to the Bodleian. That death is not the mood of the 1908 book.

Related

• Dominic Sandbrook — co-host
• Tabitha Syrett — co-host
• Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett on 1984, Newspeak, and Orwell's Vision of Power for Its Own Sake — the countryside Winston Smith and Julia escape to, which Sandbrook recalls from that earlier episode