The Wind in the Willows Read Free

copses, finding everywhere birds building, flowers budding, leaves thrusting—everything happy, and progressive, and occupied.... He thought his happiness was complete when, as he meandered aimlessly along, suddenly he stood by the edge of a full-fed river. Never in his life had he seen a river before.... All was a-shake and a-shiver—glints and gleams and sparkles, rustle and swirl, chatter and bubble. The Mole was bewitched, entranced, fascinated. By the side of the river he trotted as one trots, when very small, by the side of a man who holds one spellbound by exciting stories (p. 8).
    Unfortunately, Grahame’s stay at the Mount lasted only two years, for his grandmother moved to a new house in 1866, and soon after, his father summoned them home. That arrangement lasted less than a year; his father left them permanently and moved to France, where he died twenty years later, penniless in a boarding house. Grahame never saw his father again except to reclaim his body and plan his funeral.
    In 1868, at the age of nine, Grahame and his older brother, William, entered St. Edward’s School at Oxford. After adjusting to the rigors of English public school life, Grahame distinguished himself as a scholar and athlete. He did this despite the emotional blow of William’s death from a respiratory ailment in 1875. Grahame had every expectation of continuing his studies at Oxford after St. Edward’s, but his grandmother and uncle had different ideas. His uncle arranged for him to work in London in his own firm of parliamentary agents in Westminster and later, in January 1879, as a gentleman clerk at the Bank of England.
    Grahame made the best of a situation he did not choose or desire—he used his spare time afforded by banker’s hours to explore London and become part of a coterie of writers surrounding the scholar Frederick James Furnivall. Furnivall founded the Early English Text Society and the New Shakespeare Society, both of which Grahame joined; in 1880 he became the honorary secretary of the New Shakespeare Society and began writing poems and prose, ostensibly in a long-lost bank ledger. Furnivall, one of Grahame’s first critics, was as encouraging about his prose as he was discouraging about his verse.
    Grahame now had access to an intellectual milieu he had craved and an outlet for his creativity, even as he dutifully reported to the bank, rising in its ranks over the next two decades to the impressive position of secretary of the Bank of England. By the time he received this appointment in 1898, he had buried his father, who died in 1887, traveled extensively in Europe, and published the three volumes that established his reputation, first as an essayist in Pagan Papers (1893), and then as an authority on childhood in The Golden Age (1895) and its sequel, Dream Days (1898).
    The duality of Grahame’s life as a banker and writer and the degree to which these two worlds were separate is arresting, although duality was a condition he’d been familiar with as a Scot living in England and as a young outsider in his grandmother’s home. (It is said that when The Golden Age appeared, the governor of the bank thought Grahame was writing about bullion rather than the irretrievable days of childhood.) However much Grahame initially deplored working at the bank, he came to embrace it; it gave him a secure paycheck and freed him from any pressure of having to become a professional writer, which Grahame acknowledged would have been “torture.” When it came to writing, he was, by his own admission, “a spring not a pump” (Green, Kenneth Grahame [1859-1932], p. 113; see “For Further Reading”). Writing for neither money nor fame (he was an intensely private man), Grahame’s work grew out of personal need, which lent his enterprise a purity of motivation.
    Pagan Papers, which is hardly known today, is a collection of essays that originally appeared anonymously in the National Observer, home to significant writers of