kenneth grahame

The Wind in
the Willows

a n a n n o t at e d e d i t i o n
e d it e d by Seth Lerer

the b el k n a p p re ss o f h a rva rd u n ive r sit y p re ss

Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, En­gland  2009
Copyright © 2009 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America

Design by Annamarie McMahon Why

Line drawings by Ernest H. Shepard in the text, on the title page, and on
the half-title page: © E. H. Shepard, reproduced by permission of Curtis
Brown Group Ltd., London, and with the permission of Atheneum Books
for Young Readers, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing
Division, from The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame, illustrated by
Ernest H. Shepard. Copyright © 1933, 1953 Charles Scribner’s Sons; renewal
copyright © 1961 Ernest H. Shepard, 1981 Mary Eleanor Jessie Knox.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Grahame, Kenneth, 1859–1932.
  The wind in the willows : an annotated edition / Kenneth Grahame ; 
edited by Seth Lerer.
   p.  cm.
  Includes bibliographical references and index.
  ISBN 978-0-674-03447-1 (alk. paper)
  1. Animals—Fiction.  2. England—Fiction. 
  3. Friendship—Fiction.  4. Country life—Fiction.  5. River life—
Fiction.  I. Lerer, Seth, 1955–  II. Title.

PR4726.W515  2009b
8219.8—dc22    2008055734
 Contents

Texts and Editions

xiii

Introduction
1

The Wind in the Willows

a n a n n o t at e d e d i t i o n
45

Afterword: Illustration and Illusion

261

Bibliography
271
 Texts and Editions

The Wind in the Willows has been printed countless times since it first ap-
peared in 1908. The website for the Kenneth Grahame Society lists over fifty
illustrated editions of various kinds. The online bookseller Amazon.com has
one hundred and thirteen editions available. No doubt, there are others.
With the exception of adapted and abridged versions, the text of The Wind
in the Willows is remarkably stable, having varied little from its first publica-
tion. In preparing my edition, I have relied on the original 1908 text, con-
sulting subsequent editions published during Grahame’s lifetime and the ex-
cellently prepared edition of Peter Green, The Wind in the Willows (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1983; reprinted in 1999). Many readers will have
encountered the book in the edition illustrated by Ernest H. Shepard (New
York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1931; frequently reprinted), or in the version
illustrated by Arthur Rackham (London: Methuen, 1940; also frequently re-
printed). These editions vary from each other slightly in punctuation and
cap­italization. In order to remain faithful to the 1908 edition, I have retained
British spelling and punctuation.
For Grahame’s other works, I have relied on the following (listed in chron-
ological order of original publication):

Pagan Papers (London: John Lane, 1893). I quote from the 1900 reprint-
ing.
The Golden Age (London: John Lane, 1895). I quote from the edition il-
lustrated by Ernest H. Shepard (New York: Dodd and Mead, 1922).
xiv Texts and Editions

Dream Days (London: John Lane, 1898). I quote from the edition illus-
trated by Ernest H. Shepard (New York: Dodd and Mead, 1930).
The Cambridge Book of Poetry for Children (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2 vols., 1915, 1916). I quote from the combined edition of
1919.

All material from the Oxford En­glish Dic­tio­nary ­comes from the online
third edition (http://dic­tio­nary.oed.com). Literary quotations used to illustrate
word histories or usages in the OED are cited as such.
Quotations from the works of Shakespeare are taken from Stephen Orgel
and A. R. Braunmuller, eds., The Complete Pelican Shakespeare (New York:
Penguin Books, 2002). All other quotations from En­glish poetry come from
online versions via the Chadwyck-­Healey Data Base of En­glish Poetry (ac-
cessed from the Stanford University Libraries at https://dlib.stanford.edu:6521/
text/engpo.html). All other sources are cited in the notes to my Introduction
and in the annotations to the text.
 Introduction

Acentury after its initial publication, The Wind in the Willows still
enchants. Over one hundred editions have appeared, and it has inspired ad-
aptations for the stage and cinema from A.  A. Milne’s Toad of Toad Hall
(1929) to Disney cartoons, BBC animations, and the ministrations of Monty
Python’s Terry Jones. Though the book originally appeared without pictures,
generations of readers have grown up with the illustrations of Ernest Shepard
(1931) and Arthur Rackham (1940), just to mention the two most prominent
of the book’s many illustrators. Its characters and con­flicts have inspired imi-
tations and responses from Jan Needle’s Wild Wood (1982), which retells the
book’s story from the point of view of the rebellious stoats and weasels, to
William Horwood’s Willows sequels in the 1990s. Because of the richness of
Grahame’s narrative—the sensitivity of Mole, the mania of Toad, the domes-
ticity of Rat—the book has permeated the imaginative lives of both children
and adults. Along with Milne’s Winnie the Pooh, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s
The Secret Garden, J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, and J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the
Rings, Grahame’s Wind in the Willows testifies to the continuing hold that
early-­twentieth-­century fantasy has had on the canons of modern children’s
literature. And like the authors of those other works, Grahame himself has
long stood as an icon of the children’s author: the displaced banker, unhap-
pily married, taking solace in the stories for his son, and then retiring to En­
glish rural isolation.
Given the deep impress and worldwide popularity of Grahame’s work,
why offer up another edition? Much has been written about the story, with
great feeling and great appreciation, and the past two de­cades in particular
2 Introduction

have seen Grahame absorbed into academic literary study. But unlike, for
example, Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland or Baum’s Wizard of Oz, The Wind in
the Willows has not been the object of close textual study. Perhaps because
Grahame himself was not a university scholar like Carroll, Tolkien, or C. S.
Lewis, his work has not been subject to the explications of more modern
scholars, seeking to find history and philology, knowledge and insight in his
writings.
This new edition brings The Wind in the Willows, and Grahame’s work
more generally, into the ambit of contemporary scholarship and criticism on
children’s literature, while at the same time exploring the historical and so-
cial contexts for the novel’s origins. It does so in three ways. First, I offer an
extended introduction, synthesizing the best and most recent research into
Grahame’s life and work. Rather than simply seeing The Wind in the Willows
as an extension of Grahame’s family experience or personal imagination, I
locate it in the larger trajectory of his publications—from the early magazine
pieces and fantasy tales, such as “The Reluctant Dragon” (1898), to his later
work as the editor of The Cambridge Book of Poetry for Children (1916). Rat
and Mole, Toad and Badger all have their antecedents and their afterlives
throughout Grahame’s career. But they all have their sources in Grahame’s
reading. I stress throughout this volume that Grahame, though denied the
university experience he craved, received a rich classical education at St. Ed-
ward’s School in Oxford. He was remarkably well read in ancient legend,
En­glish poetry, Shakespeare, the novel, and the history of Western culture.
He saw himself as sharing in a tradition of En­glish prose writing going back
to the great Renaissance scholar Sir Thomas Browne, and almost ev­ery page
of his early essay collections (The Golden Age, Dream Days, and Pagan Papers)
as well as The Wind in the Willows itself bristles with learned allusion.
Second, this edition locates Grahame’s work in the unique social moment
of its writing—what the critic Samuel Hynes has called “the Edwardian turn
of mind.”1 It is no accident that much of our modern canonical children’s
literature emerges from this period, or that many recent children’s books
evoke the En­gland of the de­cade just before the First World War. Part of this
Introduction 3

Edwardian location has to do with the king himself. A fig­ure of what Hynes
calls “fleshly plea­sures,” “overweight and overdressed,” aggressively “conviv-
ial,” he was in many ways the eternal child of the Victorian era. It was under
his aegis, as well, that many of the rites and rituals that form the heart of
children’s narrative originated: the tea party, the lawn game, the hunt, the
feast, the excursion. The Edwardian de­cade also stimulated not just social
form but sci­en­tific fantasy. Psychic research fostered a vogue for supernatu-
ralism. In Hynes’s words, “After the social realism of the Victorians, from
Dickens to George Moore, Edwardian novelists . . . turned toward the mys-
terious and the unseen.”2 Such a turn inflects Edwardian children’s literature
with a distinct sense of the secret, especially in visions like the Wild Wood of
The Wind in the Willows or the Secret Garden of Burnett’s tale. So, too, sci-
ence and technology were taking off. The airplane, the motorcar, and im-
provements in the telephone, the train, and the electric light filled the first
years of the twentieth century with visions of technological possibility. There
is something brilliantly childlike, or child-­inspiring, in the fig­ure of Thomas
Edison as “the Wizard of Menlo Park,” or of Nikola Tesla as a magician of
light. Men raced planes and autos, X-­rayed bodies, and imagined (as H. G.
Wells did) instruments of unspeakable destruction. This is the world in
which Grahame’s novel appeared, the world that breaks into the easy lope of
late-Victorian wandering much as the errant motor car upsets the horse-­
drawn carriage that Mole, Rat, and Toad drive early in the book.
Finally, this edition offers complete annotations to the language, contexts,
allusions, and larger texture of Grahame’s prose. These annotations identify
quotations, references, and parallels. It is fascinating to discover, for exam-
ple, just how much Romantic poetry stands behind Grahame’s purple pas-
sage work; how much John Ruskin informs his aesthetics of both nature and
domestic life; how much of Gilbert and Sullivan there is in Toad’s adven-
tures and his theatrical posturing. Not ev­ery annotation, however, is a direct
source. Grahame’s prose chimes with a range of late-Victorian and Edward-
ian writing: history, technology, psychology, fiction, and poetry. Throughout
this edition, therefore, I call attention to phrases that resonate with the kinds
4 Introduction

of material that Grahame’s contemporaries would have read and known—

not necessarily to identify Grahame’s own reading, but to recover something
of what readers of the time would have recalled and felt as they worked their
way through his book.
That verbal world is largely lost to us. Grahame’s prose has, by the begin-
ning of the twenty-­first century, become encrusted with the patina of age
and affect. Though The Wind in the Willows has been read continuously for
the past hundred years, many of its words are opaque to today’s children and
their parents. Locutions of a century or more ago come off as more evocative
than meaningful. I rely, therefore, on linguistic resources to explain Graha-
me’s words to modern readers. The Oxford En­glish Dic­tio­nary is a primary
resource here—for reasons both scholarly and historical. As the great histori-
cal lexicon of the language, the OED records the forms and meanings of
words over time; each change and nuance is illustrated with quotations from
literature, historical documents, and intellectual writing. To look up a word
in the OED is to find a social history of En­glish life, and very often it is the
best guide to new words coming into En­glish in Grahame’s own lifetime.
The OED, like The Wind in the Willows itself, is also a product of the late-
Victorian and Edwardian imagination.3 Underway by the end of the 1870s, it
reached its initial completion in 1928 (supplements followed in 1933, 1968,
and 1989, and the whole work is now available, with continuous updates,
online). The OED and The Wind in the Willows are both products of an age
attentive to the history of the En­glish language, to the relations between ver-
bal form and aesthetic effect. And, though its editors were scholars of great
learning and, for the most part, university training, the bulk of the work
on the Dic­tio­nary was done by volunteers, who sent in slips of paper with
words, quotations, and usages gathered from reading a millennium of En­
glish writing. The OED is thus a testimony not just to scholarly lexicography
but to Victorian habits of reading, and in this aspect it bears directly on the
ways in which Grahame himself was a Victorian reader and writer. Indeed,
The Wind in the Willows is itself part of the OED—it shows up in illustrative
quotations more than twenty times.
 Chapter 1
The River Bank
The mole had been working very hard all the morning,
spring-­cleaning his little home. First with brooms, then with
1
dusters; then on ladders and steps and chairs, with a brush and
a pail of whitewash;2 till he had dust in his throat and eyes, and
splashes of whitewash all over his black fur, and an aching back
and weary arms. Spring was moving in the air above and in the
earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and
lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and long-
ing. It was small wonder, then, that he suddenly flung down
his brush on the floor, said ‘Bother!’ and ‘O blow!’ and also
‘Hang spring-­cleaning!’ and bolted out of the house without
even waiting to put on his coat. Something up above was call-
ing him imperiously, and he made for the steep little tunnel
which answered in his case to the gravelled carriage-­drive
owned by animals whose residences are nearer to the sun and
air. So he scraped and scratched and scrabbled3 and scrooged4
and then he scrooged again and scrabbled and scratched and
scraped, working busily with his little paws and muttering to
himself, ‘Up we go! Up we go!’ till at last, pop! his snout came
out into the sunlight, and he found himself rolling in the warm
grass of a great meadow.
1. This phrase emerged in the late Victorian period.
Houses and apartments would have been turned out and
cleaned at least once a year, but the earliest example of the
phrase “spring cleaning” in the OED is 1857 (where it ap-
pears in quotation marks, indicating its recent or collo-
quial use). It clearly marks a turn in late-­nineteenth-­
century domestic habits, one keyed to the gradual move
away from the domestic space de­fined by objects and clut-
ter to a space de­fined by cleanliness. The symbolic reso-
nances, too, are obvious: spring is the time of renewal, of
clearing out the past, and of refreshment. The OED offers
this quotation from The Pall Mall Gazette of 1889: “There
are few points of mutual sympathy between the poet and
the spring cleaner.” Grahame begins the story, then, by
clearing out the past and making a fresh start. But he also
reveals one of the governing conceits of the story: that his
main characters, even though they are animals, live in a
comfortably familiar domestic world.
2. A mix of lime and water, sometimes with chalk added,
that remained the basic material for wall painting from
the eigh­teenth through the early twentieth century. The
metaphors came early: to “whitewash” something was to
cover up the suspect with a seemingly pristine coat.
3. A verb meaning to clamber along on all fours. The OED
offers a more spe­cific defi­ni­tion (2): “Of an animal: to
scratch hurriedly with the claws or paws.” It quotes from
an 1863 essay that associates the verb explicitly with moles:
“The mole . . . then scrabbled about until he came upon
the rest of the worm.”
4. A variant of the verb scrouge, meaning to crowd or push
ahead. The OED quotes this passage from The Wind in
the Willows to illustrate this form.
48 the wind in the willows
5. Readers may notice a similarity between the opening of
The Willows and J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Mole leaves
the comfort of his home to explore the wider world, just
as Bilbo Baggins sets out from his cozy hobbit-­hole (as we
will learn later, “Mole End” is the Mole’s abode; “Bag
End” is Bilbo’s). See Michael D.  C. Drout, ed., J. R. R.
Tolkien Encyclopedia (New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 375:
“Tolkien commended The Wind in the Willows . . . as ‘an
excellent book’ in an aside in ‘On Fairy-­stories.’ Its polar-
ity, with underground coziness at one point and outdoors
adventures on the other, may have contributed to The
Hobbit.”
6. From the verb chaff, meaning to banter or rail at. The
OED presents it as a slang term of the nineteenth century,
and cites no appearances after 1885. Grahame’s use is odd
(Mole is not chaffing at or with anyone), and implies that
Mole is probably talking down to or brushing off the in-
quisitive rabbits as he hurries along.
7. The Mole’s equivalent of “hogwash.” By the nineteenth
century, onion-­sauce had come to represent the simplicity
of home cooking, in contrast to the fancy cuisine of court
or the Continent. The OED quotes from Dickens’s Nicho-
las Nickleby: “I ­don’t know how it is, but a fine warm sum-
mer day like this . . . always puts me in mind of roast pig,
with sage and onion sauce and made gravy.”
‘This is fine!’ he said to himself. ‘This is better than white-
washing!’ The sunshine struck hot on his fur, soft breezes ca-
ressed his heated brow, and after the seclusion of the cellarage
he had lived in so long the carol of happy birds fell on his
dulled hearing almost like a shout. Jumping off all his four legs
at once, in the joy of living and the delight of spring without
its cleaning, he pursued his way across the meadow till he
reached the hedge on the further side.5
‘Hold up!’ said an elderly rabbit at the gap. ‘Sixpence for the
privilege of passing by the private road!’ He was bowled over
in an instant by the impatient and contemptuous Mole, who
trotted along the side of the hedge chaffing6 the other rab-
bits  as  they peeped hurriedly from their holes to see what
the row was about. ‘Onion-­sauce! Onion-­sauce!’7 he remarked
jeeringly, and was gone before they could think of a thoroughly
satisfactory reply. Then they all started grumbling at each other.
‘How stupid you are! Why ­didn’t you tell him——’ ‘Well, why
­didn’t you say——’ ‘You might have reminded him——’ and
so on, in the usual way; but, of course, it was then much too
late, as is always the case.
It all seemed too good to be true. Hither and thither through
the meadows he rambled busily, along the hedgerows, across
the copses, find­ing ev­erywhere birds building, flowers budding,
leaves thrusting—ev­ery­thing happy, and pro­gres­sive, and oc-
cupied. And instead of having an uneasy conscience pricking
him and whispering ‘whitewash!’ he somehow could only feel
how jolly it was to be the only idle dog among all these busy
citizens. After all, the best part of a holiday is perhaps not so
much to be resting yourself, as to see all the other fellows busy
working.
The River Bank 49

He thought his happiness was complete when, as he mean- 8. The word meander ­comes ultimately from the name of
dered8 aimlessly along, suddenly he stood by the edge of a full-­ the river Maeander in Asia Minor, known in antiquity for
its serpentine course. Rivers meander, and beginning in
fed river. Never in his life had he seen a river before—this sleek,
the early nineteenth century, people could, too. The verb
sinuous, full-­bodied animal, chasing and chuckling, gripping came to be applied, figuratively, to anyone or anything
things with a gurgle and leaving them with a laugh, to fling it- that wandered aimlessly. The OED quotes this passage
self on fresh playmates that shook themselves free, and were from The Wind in the Willows to illustrate this usage.
caught and held again. All was a-­shake and a-­shiver—glints 9. As we ourselves are spellbound. Like many other chil-
and gleams and sparkles, rustle and swirl, chatter and bubble. dren’s book authors, Grahame calls attention to the act
The Mole was bewitched, entranced, fascinated. By the side of of storytelling, inviting his audience to pay attention. The
word spellbound emerged in the nineteenth century to
the river he trotted as one trots, when very small, by the side connote, in particular, the fascination that a listener feels
of a man who holds one spell-­bound9 by exciting stories; and for a great orator or storyteller.
when tired at last, he sat on the bank, while the river still chat-
10. A jewel or trinket, used as an adjective to describe a
tered on to him, a babbling pro­ces­sion of the best stories in the cozy and elegant dwelling. The phrase “bijou residence”
world, sent from the heart of the earth to be told at last to the seems to have been a commonplace: note the OED’s quo-
insatiable sea. tation from 1904, “The London pied-­à-­terre consisted . . .
of a bijou residence in Mayfair.”
As he sat on the grass and looked across the river, a dark hole
in the bank opposite, just above the water’s edge, caught his
eye, and dreamily he fell to considering what a nice snug
dwelling-­place it would make for an animal with few wants
and fond of a bijou10 riverside residence, above flood level and
remote from noise and dust. As he gazed, something bright
and small seemed to twinkle down in the heart of it, vanished,
then twinkled once more like a tiny star. But it could hardly be
a star in such an unlikely situation; and it was too glittering
and small for a glow-­worm. Then, as he looked, it winked at
him, and so declared itself to be an eye; and a small face began
gradually to grow up round it, like a frame round a picture.
A brown little face, with whiskers.
A grave round face, with the same twinkle in its eye that had
first attracted his notice.
50 the wind in the willows
11. A variant of “hello,” a word which emerged in the late
nineteenth century as a term of greeting or an exclama-
tion of surprise. Under the in­flu­ence of Thomas Edison, it
came to be used as the standard way of answering the tele-
phone by the mid-­1880s.
12. In a childish and bad-­tempered way.
13. For Edwardian readers, a journey in a little boat could
not but recall Jerome K. Jerome’s novella, Three Men in
a  Boat, first published in 1889 and reprinted frequently
thereafter. Jerome (1857–1929) chronicled the humorous,
but often trivial, misadventures of three young men on
the Thames River. By the 1880s, the Thames had become
a kind of riverine playground, and the fashion for row-
ing—stopping off for picnics, pub excursions, and the
like—fueled the popularity of Jerome’s work. By offering
an adventure story set not in the far reaches of Empire but
close to home, by writing in a chatty colloquial style, and
by focusing on the foibles of his heroes, Jerome set the
pattern for a generation of popular writers. Together in
their boat, Mole and Rat replay much of this kind of
story.
Small neat ears and thick silky hair.
It was the Water Rat!
Then the two animals stood and regarded each other cau-
tiously.
‘Hullo,11 Mole!’ said the Water Rat.
‘Hullo, Rat!’ said the Mole.
‘Would you like to come over?’ enquired the Rat presently.
‘Oh, it’s all very well to talk,’ said the Mole, rather pettishly,12
he being new to a river and riverside life and its ways.
The Rat said nothing, but stooped and unfastened a rope
and hauled on it; then lightly stepped into a little boat13 which
the Mole had not observed. It was painted blue outside and
white within, and was just the size for two animals; and the
Mole’s whole heart went out to it at once, even though he did
not yet fully understand its uses.
The Rat sculled smartly across and made fast. Then he held
up his forepaw as the Mole stepped gingerly down. ‘Lean on
that!’ he said. ‘Now then, step lively!’ and the Mole to his sur-
prise and rapture found himself ac­tually seated in the stern of a
real boat.
‘This has been a wonderful day!’ said he, as the Rat shoved
off and took to the sculls again. ‘Do you know, I’ve never been
in a boat before in all my life.’
‘What?’ cried the Rat, open-­mouthed: ‘Never been in a—
you never—well I—what have you been doing, then?’
‘Is it so nice as all that?’ asked the Mole shyly, though he was
quite prepared to believe it as he leant back in his seat and sur-
veyed the cushions, the oars, the rowlocks, and all the fascinat-
ing fittings, and felt the boat sway lightly under him.
‘Nice? It’s the only thing,’ said the Water Rat solemnly, as he
The River Bank 51

leant forward for his stroke. ‘Believe me, my young friend,
there is nothing—absolutely nothing—half so much worth
­doing as simply messing about14 in boats. Simply messing,’
he  went on dreamily: ‘messing—about—in—boats; mess-
ing——’
‘Look ahead, Rat!’ cried the Mole suddenly.
It was too late.15 The boat struck the bank full tilt. The
dreamer, the joyous oarsman, lay on his back at the bottom of
the boat, his heels in the air.
14. The phrase “messing about” emerged in the 1880s to
connote pleasant time wasting. The OED quotes this pas-
sage to illustrate this usage.
15. A classic misadventure, right out of Jerome. Indeed,
the idea of the adventure or vacation constantly beset by
infelicities had become so much a part of late-Victorian
and Edwardian expectation that the editor of Punch, Basil
Boothroyd, could reply to the in­quiry, “Have a good holi-
day?” with the response: “Awful. Nothing went wrong at
all.”

‘—about in boats—or with boats,’ the Rat went on compos- 16. “A rope attached to the bow of a (usually small) boat
edly, picking himself up with a pleasant laugh. ‘In or out of for tying it to a ship, quay, etc.” (OED, s.v. painter, n.2). A
highly specialized word from the technical vocabulary of
’em, it ­doesn’t matter. Nothing seems really to matter, that’s
boating.
the charm of it. Whether you get away, or whether you ­don’t;
17. A floating platform or little pier for boats. Grahame’s
whether you arrive at your destination or whether you reach
vocabulary here evokes the technical terms of late-­
somewhere else, or whether you never get anywhere at all, nineteenth-­century boating as a way of illustrating Rat’s
you’re always busy, and you never do anything in particular; commitment to his pastime.
and when you’ve done it there’s always something else to do, 18. The luncheon basket was a Victorian invention, first
and you can do it if you like, but you’d much better not. Look appearing in the 1850s and then appropriated by the rail-
here! If you’ve really nothing else on hand this morning, sup- ways as a ser­vice to customers.
posing we drop down the river together, and have a long day
of it?’
The Mole waggled his toes from sheer happiness, spread his
chest with a sigh of full contentment, and leaned back bliss-
fully into the soft cushions. ‘What a day I’m having!’ he said.
‘Let us start at once!’
‘Hold hard a minute, then!’ said the Rat. He looped the
painter16 through a ring in his landing-­stage,17 climbed up into
his hole above, and after a short interval reappeared staggering
under a fat, wicker luncheon-­basket.18
‘Shove that under your feet,’ he observed to the Mole, as he