The book of eternal youth is 100 years old

By Melanie McDonagh
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 18/05/2008

A neat publisher’s trick for selling yet more copies of a book that has been a bestseller for years is the replica anniversary edition.

This year, the field is held by The Wind in the Willows, which was published, to no popular acclaim, in 1908.

It was a golden age for children’s stories – we’ve just had the centenary of Peter Pan and The Railway Children – but The Wind in the Willows surpasses them all. Actually, I’m not sure I care to be reminded that it’s a century old – it has, I’d say, exactly the same effect on the gentle and inquiring reader now as it would have done at any point. As Kenneth Grahame’s contemporary Richard Middleton remarked defiantly at the time, it is “the best book ever written for children and one of the best books ever written for grown-up people”.

It is a masterpiece of English prose, something that strikes you again when you open it at almost any page. The haunting chapter “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” is perfect in its way. But besides celebrating a literary achievement, the anniversary reminds us of the extraordinary potency of children’s books, a genre in which the English are pre-eminent. Nothing ever affects you quite like the stories you read before the age of 12.


First Edition


2008 Edition

The Wind in the Willows has had a formative effect on the imagination of generations – millions of us carry inside us the Arcady that is the world of Ratty, Mole, Badger and Toad, all the more because the real English countryside is so much tamer and smaller than it was then. Indeed, it is hard to see many of the people we meet as anything but Rattys, Moles, Toads and Badgers. They’re a template that you can use to categorise acquaintances; at least, the nicer people.

The ebullient late newspaper editor Stewart Steven, for instance, always struck me as the re-incarnation of Toad. (He even looked rather like him, in a good way.) Right now there is mourning because JK Rowling has finished writing about Harry Potter. We are probably past the silly idea that adults may not read children’s books – though it might be a bit worrying if that were all they read. But admirable as the Potter books are, they don’t have the literary qualities of The Wind in the Willows. Grahame may have been a bank clerk — well, Secretary of the Bank of England — but he was in a great tradition of English writing, and he knew it.

He talked once about the “pleasurable agony of attempting stately sentences in English prose”. And because the book is so well written, it is lightly and easily read. The Wind in the Willows, like so much good children’s literature, derives from stories told to a small child, in this case, the author’s little boy, Alistair, whom his parents called Mouse. Grahame’s wife, Elspeth, recalled in her memoirs that her maid once mentioned that her husband was “up in the night nursery, telling Master Mouse some ditty or another about a toad”. And, fortunately, the little boy was insatiable, forever wanting to know “what the mole and water-rat did annuver day”.

Indeed, he refused to go away on holiday to Littlehampton with his governess on the grounds that he would miss the adventures of Toad. So his father wrote him letters from Cornwall and London about what happened to his friends. An American literary agent, Constance Smedley, made her way to the Grahames’ house in Cookhame Dene to persuade Grahame to write a book for the magazine for which she worked — he was already a well known children’s author.

He refused, but Elspeth Grahame had the idea of using the letters as the basis for a new work — which, on completion, the magazine promptly turned down. So it was offered to an English publisher and appeared in 1908 to a chorus of disappointment. The Times declared that “as a contribution to natural history the work is negligible”. Which just goes to show how much store authors should set by critics.

Actually, perhaps there is another reason why its full success did not come until later. One element of our present pleasure in The Wind in the Willows has nothing to do with its centenary; namely, the delightful, definitive pictures drawn by Ernest Shepard, which first appeared in a 1931 edition. As Pauline Baynes – whose wonderful illustrations similarly defined CS Lewis’s Narnia books – said to me about Shepard’s relationship to The Wind in the Willows, “he is the book”.

But perhaps it’s best to leave the essence of The Wind in the Willows to Grahame himself, a man who never quite left off being a little boy and, on balance, preferred animal friends to humans. He wrote: “It is a book of Youth and so perhaps chiefly for Youth, and those who still keep the spirit of youth alive in them: of life, sunshine, running water, woodlands, dusty roads, winter firesides.” A hundred years on, it’s time to climb on a chair and fetch down The Wind in the Willows from the shelves.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main ... do1805.xml