We finally made it to Disneyland last week and got to experience some of the rides that differ from Disney World. As we were leaving the park we decided to hop on one with a short wait and opted for Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, which turned out to be pretty demented. It occurred to me that I had probably never read the original book, only Disney story books when I was a kid, based on their film The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad. Long out of copyright, it’s easy enough to find a version of the text on-line or an audio version (see below)

It’s a curious text, a children’s book that’s not necessarily for children. It is no surprise that Disney latched on to Toad, whose mania for going ever faster leads him to buying, and eventually stealing, cars to race around the country in, with predictably disastrous results.

The car stood in the middle of the yard, quite unattended, the stable-helps and other hangers-on being all at their dinner. Toad walked slowly round it, inspecting, criticising, musing deeply. “I wonder,” he said to himself presently, “I wonder if this sort of car starts easily?” Next moment, hardly knowing how it came about, he found he had hold of the handle and was turning it. As the familiar sound broke forth, the old passion seized on Toad and completely mastered him, body and soul. As if in a dream he found himself, somehow, seated in the driver’s seat; as if in a dream, he pulled the lever and swung the car round the yard and out through the archway; and, as if in a dream, all sense of right and wrong, all fear of obvious consequences, seemed temporarily suspended. He increased his pace, and as the car devoured the street and leapt forth on the high road through the open country, he was only conscious that he was Toad once more, Toad at his best and highest, Toad the terror, the traffic-queller, the Lord of the lone trail, before whom all must give way or be smitten into nothingness and everlasting night. He chanted as he flew, and the car responded with sonorous drone; the miles were eaten up under him as he sped he knew not whither, fulfilling his instincts, living his hour, reckless of what might come to him.

While these scenes are comical in their own right, Toad ends up in prison, with his magnificent abandoned home overrun by the weasels and stoats of the Wild Wood. This gets pretty dark and his friends are forced into stern measures to reform him before a battle to retake Toad Hall.

There are also quite beautiful musings about the pleasures of home and of nature. There’s even a famous chapter that is downright mystical: Piper at the Gates of Dawn, which was sometimes edited out of versions specifically geared towards kids.

All in all, it is a real pleasure to read and richly deserves its status as a classic.

(Reviewed:22-Apr-26)

Grade: (A+) Orrin C. Judd

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Kenneth Grahame Links:

    -WIKIPEDIA: Kenneth Grahame
    -FILMOGRAPHY: Kenneth Grahame (IMDB)
    -AUTHOR PAGE: Kenneth Grahame (Penguin Random House)
    -WIKIPEDIA: The Reluctant Dragon
    -WIKIPEDIA: The Wind in the Willows
    -ENTRY: Kenneth Grahame (Author Calendar)
    -ENTRY: Kenneth Grahame (Oxford Reference)
    -ENTRY: The Wind in the Willows author Kenneth Grahame (BBC: Countryfile)
    -ENTRY: Kenneth Grahame (Pook Press)
    -ENTRY: Kenneth Grahame (The Greatest Books)
    -ENTRY: Kenneth Grahame British author (Encyclopaedia Britannica)
    -ENTRY: Kenneth Grahame (Yellow Nineties)
    -ENTRY: Kenneth Grahame (More Than Our Childhoods)
    -ENTRY: Kenneth Grahame (The Literature Network)
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    -INDEX: Kenneth Grahame (Too Many Books and Never Enough)
    -ETEXT INDEX: Kenneth Grahame (Project Gutenberg)
    -INDEX: Kenneth Grahame (The Guardian)
    -INDEX: Kenneth Grahame (LitHub)
    -INDEX: Kenneth Grahame (Slightly Foxed)
    -INDEX: Kenneth Grahame (All Poetry)
    -INDEX: Kenneth Grahame (American Literature)
    -AUDIO INDEX: Kenneth Grahame (LibriVox)
    -INDEX: Kenneth Grahame (Internet Archive)
    -UNABRIDGED STORY: The Reluctant Dragan by Kenneth Grahame (American Literature)
    -STORY: The Reluctant Dragon by Kenneth Grahame
    -ETEXT: The Reluctant Dragon by Kenneth Grahame (Project Gutenberg)
    -ETEXT: Dream Days by Kenneth Grahame (Project Gutenberg)
    -AUDIO: The Reluctant Dragon by Kenneth Grahame (LibriVox)
    -VIDEO: The Reluctant Dragon: Illustrated and Subtitled (MARISSA RIVERA READ ALOUD BOOKS)
    -AUDIO: The Reluctant Dragon
    -PODCAST: The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame, Adapted by Dina Gregory, Read by a Full Cast (Behind the Mic with AudioFile Magazine)
    -PODCAST: The Wind in the Willows (The Literary Life)
    -VIDEO DISCUSSION: The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (Comfort Book Club)
    -VIDEO: An Awfully Big Adventure Kenneth Grahame (BBC Four, 30th April 2007)
    -STUDY GUIDE: Kenneth Grahame (Grade Saver)
    -ESSAY: Guide to the classics: The Wind in the Willows — a tale of wanderlust, male bonding, and timeless delight (Kate Cantrell, January 6, 2021, The Conversation)
    -ESSAY: The Piper at the Gates of Dawn – the England of Kenneth Grahame (Stuart Millson, November 21st, 2013, Imaginative Conservative)
    -ESSAY: Dark-hearted dreamer: the double life of Kenneth Grahame: Kenneth Grahame charmed readers with The Wind in the Willows – but his personal life left tragedy in its wake. (Lyndall Gordon, 11/07/2018, New Statesman)
    -ESSAY: Kenneth Grahame: The Late Bloomer Behind The Wind in the Willows: His life was touched by tragedy from an early age. Yet he retained a sense of joy and nostalgia, and wrote one of the most beloved children's tales of all time. (Later Bloomers)
    -ESSAY: Kenneth Grahame: Lost in the wild wood (John Preston, 10 February 2008, The Telegraph)
    -ESSAY: The tragedy of Mr Toad: Wind in the Willows author's own son inspired obnoxious Toady (Barbara Davies, 26 September 2008, Daily Mail)
    -ESSAY: My hero: Mr Badger by Patrick Barkham: The welcome arrival of Kenneth Grahame's Mr Badger marked a turning point in human relations with the brave and elusive creature (Patrick Barkham, 6 Dec 2013, The Guardian)
    -ESSAY: Fun Facts Friday: Kenneth Grahame (Man of la Book, March 8, 2019)
    -ESSAY: Messing About in Boats, Kenneth Grahame (Fowey Cornwall, Return of a Native)
    -ESSAY: Natural Mysticism in Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows (J. R. Wytenbroek, Winter 1996, Mythlore)
    -ESSAY: The Wind in the Willows Isn’t Really a Children’s Book: Nor, Mysteriously, Does it Contain Any Willows . . . (Peter Hunt, August 8, 2018, LitHub)
    -ESSAY: Butchering Books… The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame: There ought to be a law against it… (Fiction Fan Blog)
    -ESSAY: Kenneth Grahame and the true meaning behind The Wind in the Willows Matthew Dennison, December 26, 2018, Country Life)
    -ESSAY: the politics of Wind in the Willows (Peter Levine: A blog for civic renewal, October 20, 2008)
    -ESSAY: Voices from the Riverbank (Sue Gee, Slightly Foxed)
    -ESSAY: Holy mole: Published 100 years ago, Kenneth Grahame's Wind in the Willows was both an elegy for a bygone age and a fascinating work of imaginative genius (Alex Larman, 11 Mar 2008, The Guardian)
    -ESSAY: Of Home and Hearth: Tolkien and The Wind in the Willows (Daniel Stride, A Phuulish Fellow)
    -ESSAY: A Centenary Study: Kenneth Grahame - 1859-1932 (Neville Braybrooke, January 1959, Elementary English)
    -ESSAY: The Wind in the Willows: A New Source for Animal Farm (JEFFREY MEYERS, Summer 2009, Salmagundi)
    -ESSAY: 'Wild waters are upon us': If Kenneth Grahame's riverbank idyll inspires nostalgia, it's because The Wind in the Willows is itself saturated in longing. The tale of Ratty and Toad was, Rosemary Hill argues, a product of its own uneasy times (Rosemary Hill, 12 Jun 2009, The Guardian)
    -ESSAY: Heartbreak behind Wind in the Willows: Author was failure as a father (Tamara Cohen, 24 November 2010, Daily Mail)
    -ESSAY: Tolkien, Lewis, and The Wind in the Willows: Kenneth Grahame’s famed novel celebrates home and yet it ends bathetically, in stark comparison to the Narnia books and The Lord of the Rings. (Roy Peachey, 10/21/19, The Dispatch)
    -AUDIO: Teddy And Toad: The true story of how Teddy Roosevelt intervened to get The Wind in the Willows published in America, where its success story began. (BBC, March 2019)
    -ESSAY: Kenneth Grahame and the Wild Wooders (Tessa Arlen, February 19, 2014)
    -ESSAY: Eye on Millig: Story of Wind in the Willows author Kenneth Grahame (Leslie Maxwell, 20th January 2021, Helensburgh Advertiser)
    -BOOK LIST: The 100 best novels: No 38 – The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (1908): The evergreen tale from the riverbank and a powerful contribution to the mythology of Edwardian England (Robert McCrum, The Guardian)
    -VIDEO ARCHIVES: “kenneth grahame” (YouTube)
    -REVIEW INDEX: Kenneth Grahame (Kirkus)
    -REVIEW INDEX: Kenneth Grahame (Publishers Weekly)
    -REVIEW ESSAY: Messing About with ‘The Wind in the Willows’ (Michael Dirda, August 13, 2009, NY Review of Books)
    -REVIEW ESSAY: The Wound in the Willows: Rewriting Kenneth Grahame’s classic children’s story. (Robert Minto, March 8, 2018, LA Review of Books)
    -REVIEW: of The Reluctant Dragon by Kenneth Grahame (Emily Jenkins, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW: of Reluctant Dragon (Publishers Weekly)
    -REVIEW: of Reluctant Dragon (The Rarest Kid of Best)
    -REVIEW: of Reluctant Dragon (Margot Quotes)
    -REVIEW: of Reluctant Dragon (Vintage Kids’ Books My Kids Love)
    -REVIEW: of Reluctant Dragon (Brandy Vencel, AfterThoughts)
    -REVIEW: of The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (Catriona Tudor Erler, NY Journal of Books)
    -REVIEW: of Wind in the Willows (gary Kamiya, Salon)
    -REVIEW: of Wind in the Willows (Alan Jacobs, First Things)
    -REVIEW: of Wind in the Willows (Charles McGrath, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW: of Wind in the Willows (Poetry Dispatch)
    -REVIEW: of Wind in the Willows (Liam Sullivan, Panorama of the Mountains)
    -REVIEW: of Wind in the Willows (Justin Taylor, The Gospel Coalition)
    -REVIEW: of Wind in the Willows (The Happy Wonderer)
    -REVIEW: of Wind in the Willows (Martin Crookall)
    -REVIEW: of ETERNAL BOY: The life of Kenneth Grahame by Matthew Dennison (Marion Rankine, Times Literary Supplement)
    -REVIEW: of
    -REVIEW: of The Making of The Wind in the Willows by Peter Hunt (Jeffrey Meyers)
    -REVIEW: of

FILM:
    -FILMOGRAPHY: Kenneth Grahame (IMDB)
    -FILMOGRAPHY: The Reluctant Dragon (1941) (IMDB)
    -ENTRY: The Reluctant Dragon (Don Markstein's Toonopedia)

Book-related and General Links:

    -WIKIPEDIA: Kenneth Grahame
    -FILMOGRAPHY: Kenneth Grahame (IMDB)
    -ENTRY: Kenneth Grahame (More than our Childhoods)
    -ENTRY: Kenneth Grahame (The Victorian Era)
    -ENTRY: Kenneth Grahame (Pook Press)
    -ENTRY: The Wing in the Willows (Cathy Lowne, Apr. 3, 2026, Encyclopaedia Britannica)
    -ENTRY: Kenneth Grahame (Encyclopaedia Britannica)
    -ENTRY: Kenneth Grahame (Good Reads)
    -ENTRY: The Wind in the Willows (Good Reads)
    -WIKIPEDIA: The Wind in the Willows
    -WIKIPEDIA: Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride
    -EXHIBITION: The Original Wind in the Willows (Bodelian Library, 1 March 2007)
    -INDEX: Kenneth Grahame (The Guardian)
    -ENTRY: Kenneth Grahame: The Late Bloomer Behind The Wind in the Willows: His life was touched by tragedy from an early age. Yet he retained a sense of joy and nostalgia, and wrote one of the most beloved children's tales of all time. (Late Bloomers)
    -ENTRY: Kenneth Grahame (American Literature)
    -ENTRY: Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (British Library)
    -ENTRY: The Wind in the Willows (Encyclopedia.com)
    -
    -
    -
    -
    -INDEX: Kenneth Grahame (Internet Archive)
    -VIDEO INDEX: “wind in the willows” (YouTube)
    -PODCAST INDEX: “wind in the willows” (Listen Notes)
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    -
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    -ETEXT: The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (Project Gutenberg)
    -AUDIO: The Wind in the Willows (BBC: Bite Size)
    -AUDIO: The Wind in the Willows (LIbrivox)
    -EBOOKS: Books by Grahame, Kenneth (Project Gutenberg)
    -AUDIO: The Wind in the Willows- Kenneth Grahame (Narration Line)
    -FILM: The Wind in the Willows (FamilyTime, Apr 20, 2025)
    -EXCERPT: Chapter 1 from Wind in the Willows (Penguin Random House)
    -AUDIO: The Piper At The Gates of Dawn from The Wind in The Willows by Kenneth Grahame (Tony Walker, Mar 21, 2021, Classic Ghost Stories Podcast)
    -
    -
    -
    -STUDY GUIDE: The Wind in the Willows (eNotes)
    -STUDY GUIDE: Wind in the Willows (LitCharts)
    -STUDY GUIDE: The Wind in the Willows (SparkNotes)
    -STUDY GUIDE: The Wind in the Willows (eNotes)
    -STUDY GUIDE: THe Wind in the Willows (Bookrags)
    -STUDY GUIDE: THe Wind in the Willows (A Novel Study by Joel Michel Reed)
    -STUDY GUIDE: THe Wind in the Willows (Grade Saver)
    -STUDY GUIDE: THe Wind in the Willows (Lit Charts)
    -STUDY GUIDE: THe Wind in the Willows (The Hobby)
    -STUDY GUIDE: THe Wind in the Willows (Super Summary)
    -STUDY GUIDE: THe Wind in the Willows (Course Hero)
    -
    -PODCAST: The Wind in the Willows (1908) by Kenneth Grahame | Analysis & Commentary (Ear Read This, Apr 16, 2020)
    -PODCAST: Episode 131: “The Wind in the Willows” by Kenneth Grahame, Part 1 (The Literary Life, May 17, 2022)
    -PODCAST: The Wind In The Willows (A Reading Life, A Writing Life, with Sally Bayley, Mar 29, 2023)
    -PODCAST: The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (Good Stories Podcast, Oct. 7, 2025)
    -PODCAST: The Chapter Too Dark for 'Wind in the Willows' (The Resurrectionists, Sep 6, 2025)
    -PODCAST: AL Kennedy on The Wind in the Willows: As a six-year-old, the only hardback AL Kennedy owned was Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Now, she imagines what happened to Mole, Badger and Rat after the book's end. (The Essay, Open Endings Episode 3 of 5)
    -
    -BOOK LIST: Children’s and Young Adult Fiction (recommended by Melvin Burgess, 5 Books)
    -BOOK LIST: The best books on Equality (recommended by Trevor Phillips, 5 Books)
    -ESSAY: My hero: Mr Badger (The welcome arrival of Kenneth Grahame's Mr Badger marked a turning point in human relations with the brave and elusive creature (Patrick Barkham, 6 Dec 2013, The Guardian)
    -ESSAY: THE ANIMALS OF THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS (Inside Out, 1/10/05, BBC)
    -ESSAY: The Wound in the Willows: Rewriting Kenneth Grahame’s classic children’s story. (Robert Minto, March 8, 2018, LA Review of Books)
    -ESSAY: Wisdom in the Willows (Joseph Pearce, 10/10/25, The Imaginative Conservative)
    -ESSAY: How the Class, Nostalgia, and Social Order in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows Reflect the Edwardian Era (The Wildflower Journal, Apr 7, 2025)
    -ESSAY: The Wind in the Willows and the Moral Imagination: So much of life's meaning centers around the humble dinner table. (Emily Finley, Jan 20, 2025< The Christian Imagination)
    -ESSAY: The Wind in the Willows: "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" and "Wayfarers, All" (Lost in the Movies)
    -ESSAY: Kenneth Grahame and the true meaning behind The Wind in the Willows: The Edwardian author Kenneth Grahame’s adoration of Nature and landscape made him passionate about conservation and inspired him to create some of Britain's best-loved characters, says his biographer Matthew Dennison. (Matthew Dennison, 26 December 2018, Country Life)

In the aftermath of his mother’s death, together with his three siblings, five-year-old Grahame left Scotland. He travelled 500 miles south, to the home of his maternal grandmother in Cookham Dean. The Mount was a higgledy-piggledy old house, with leaded windows, half-timbering, towering chimney-stacks and its roof of clay tiles well weathered.

Within walking distance of its large garden lay dense, dark, thickly carpeted Quarry Wood, the model for the Wild Wood, and a broad ribbon of the Thames, slowed by weirs and overhung by alders and willow trees.

Too young to understand the fullness of his grief for his mother, at The Mount, Grahame retreated from overwhelming sadness into an imaginary world inspired by Nature. He became a daydreamer, his surrounds the catalyst for his dreams. ‘If you lay down your nose an inch or two from the water,’ he wrote later, remembering his grandmother’s lily pond, ‘it was not long ere the old sense of proportion vanished clean away.

The glittering insects that darted to and fro on its surface became sea-monsters dire, the gnats that hung above them swelled to albatrosses, and the pond itself stretched out into a vast inland sea.’

Grahame and his siblings spent two years at The Mount, before a storm brought down one of its chimneystacks, forcing the family to move. He retained the memory of this short interlude his whole life and returned to it repeatedly as a balm to heal his suffering. It was at The Mount that, like Rat in The Wind in the Willows, he became ‘a self-sufficing sort of animal, rooted to the land’.

    -ESSAY: Guide to the classics: The Wind in the Willows — a tale of wanderlust, male bonding, and timeless delight (Kate Cantrell, January 6, 2021, The Conversation)

Perhaps the most famous scene in Willows — now also a popular ride at Disneyland — is Mr Toad’s Wild Ride. In the novel, the incautious Toad, who is oddly large enough to drive a human-sized car, is frequently in trouble with the law and even imprisoned due to his addiction to joyriding.

At times delusional, the self-proclaimed “terror of the highway” writes off several vehicles before spiralling into a cycle of car theft, dangerous driving, and disorderly behaviour.

Eventually, Toad’s motorcar mania becomes so unmanageable that his exasperated friends are forced to stage “a mission of mercy” – a “work of rescue” that contemporary readers might recognise as an intervention. This subtext of addiction underpins the arc of recovery, and is crucial for understanding the novel’s key themes: the limits of friendship, the loss of pastoral security, and the temptations of city life.

    -ESSAY: Wind in the Willows ‘is a gay manifesto’ (Jack Malvern, January 27 2018, Times uk)
    -ESSAY: Exploring Pastoral Themes in The Wind in the Willows: A Celebration of Animal Life in Educational and Riparian Contexts (Ravindra Neupane, June 2024, The Creative Launcher)
    -ESSAY: Reading The Wind in the Willows as an adult – not the simple idyllic tale it seems? (Raincoat Ginger)
    -ESSAY: More than Nostalgia? Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (Maria Vigornia's Journal, March 28, 2019)
    -ESSAY: Voices from the Riverbank: Sue Gee on Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows (Sue Gee, Slightly Foxed)
    -ESSAY: Jillian Caddell on Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (Jillian Caddell, October 23, 2020, The Rambling)
    -ESSAY: What on Earth is The Wind in the Willows? (Peter Hunt, 8/18/10, OUP Blog)

First, it’s a snapshot of a literary age. Grahame took the fashionable genres of his time and stitched them together: the boating book (there are many resemblances to Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat), the caravanning book, and the motor-car thriller, with nods to Gilbert and Sullivan, and a whole chapter of fin de siecle pseudo mysticism. (Quite apart from the in-jokes: Toad Hall as described in The Wind in the Willows is the same house that Henry James describes in the first chapter of Portrait of a Lady.)

Secondly, it’s the portrait of a worried generation of males, faced with the destruction of the rural way of life by the motor car, the rising power of women (who are feared or excluded from the book), and the fear of a rebellious underclass, lurking on the horizon in the Wild Wood. For them, the idyll would be rural, leisured, ‘clean of the clash of sex’ – perhaps compensated for by orgies of food, and rebellion could be crushed by a little violence and superior military intelligence. Is this actually ‘innocent’?

Perhaps most of all, The Wind in the Willows is an allegorical self-portrait: all the main characters can be seen as facets of Grahame – the Banker seduced by the warm south, the outsider trying to become an insider, the man among men who loved messing about in boats, and male rather than female company. Literary psychologists have, of course, had a field day.

    -ESSAY: Of Home and Hearth: Tolkien and The Wind in the Willows ( A Phuulish Fellow)
    -ESSAY: Retreat & Return: Pastoral Spaces in THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS (The Literary Bluestocking, May 5, 2025)
    -ESSAY: An Absolute Necessity to Move (London Magazine)
    -ESSAY: "a different sort of book": Today's selection -- from The Wind in The Willows by Kenneth Grahame. Introductions by Theodore Roosevelt and A.A. Milne. (Delancey Place, 8/30/19)
    -ESSAY: Accepting the Characters as Old Friends: Theodore Roosevelt’s Encounter with The Wind in the Willows (Rachel Lane, Mar 01, 2023, Missing Pieces)
    -
    -
    -
    -REVIEW: Beyond the Wild Wood (Alan Jacobs, October 8, 2009, First Things)
    -REVIEW: The 100 best novels: No 38 – The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (1908): The evergreen tale from the riverbank and a powerful contribution to the mythology of Edwardian England (Robert McCrum, 9 Jun 2014, The Guardian)

Within the text, the reader discovers two tales, interwoven. There are, famously, the adventures of Mole, Ratty, Badger and Toad with the canary-coloured caravan, the succession of motor cars, and the climactic battle for Toad Hall. At the same time, there are Grahame's lyrical explorations of home life ("Dulce Domum"), river life ("Wayfarers All") and childhood itself ("The Piper at the Gates of Dawn"). In most theatrical adaptations of Grahame's book, these lyrical elements are ruthlessly subordinated to the demands of the plot.

    -REVIEW ESSAY: Messing About with ‘The Wind in the Willows’ (Michael Dirda, August 13, 2009, NY Review of Books)
    -REVIEW ESSAY: “The Wind in the Willows” at 100: Mole, Rat, Toad and Badger kept me up late reading as a kid. Now I love Kenneth Grahame's classic even more. (Gary Kamiya, December 16, 2008, Salon)
    -REVIEW: of Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame* with illustrations by Robert Ingpen (Yeah Lifestyle, August 21, 2024)
    -REVIEW: As Winter Rolls In, One Critic Recalls 'The Wind In The Willows’ (Parul Sehgal, 12/27/13, NPR: All Things Considered)
    -REVIEW: of Wind in the Willows (The Mythopoeic Society)
    -REVIEW: Second Wind for a Toad and His Pals (Charles McGrath, July 9, 2009, NY Times)
    -REVIEW: of Wind in the Willows (Classics Book Club)
    -REVIEW: of The Wind In The Willows (Michael J Ritchie, 8/10/14, Fell From Fiction)
    -REVIEW: of Wind in the Willows (James Topham, February 27, 2020, ThoughtCo)
    -REVIEW: of Wind in the Willows (Beth Jones, 8/05/21, Books are Everywhere)
    -REVIEW: of
    -REVIEW: of
    -REVIEW: of The Making of the Wind in the Willows review – Toad, Ratty and a manifesto for gay living: Peter Hunt’s elegant account of the genesis of Kenneth Grahame’s classic only hints at the revelations the author has discussed in promotional interviews (Kathryn Hughes, 28 Mar 2018, The Guardian)

Scholars have long speculated about the identity of those scoundrels. The literal answer is that they’re the weasels and stoats who in chapter 11 swarm out of their dank, rooty realm, break into Toad Hall and trash the place. Reading biographically, it’s impossible to overlook the fact that in 1903 Grahame was ambushed in his office at the Bank of England and shot at by a madman with a gun. The fact that the would-be assassin identified himself as a socialist placed him firmly on the side of chaos, along with the anarchists, suffragettes and the increasingly belligerent Kaiser. For a mid-Victorian like Grahame, it must have felt as if the world was coming undone.

    -REVIEW: of ‘The Making of The Wind in the Willows’ and ‘The Man in the Willows’ Review: The River and the Wild Wood: In May 1904, Kenneth and Elsie Grahame were late to a dinner party because, according to a maid, Kenneth was “up in the night-nursery telling Master Mouse some ditty or another about a Toad.” Master Mouse was the family name for the Grahames’ only child, Alastair, and the story that his father concocted that night was destined to become a children’s classic. (Meghan Cox Gurdon, Feb. 8, 2019, WSJ)