Guardian Review

If the Edwardian age is not remembered as a decade of social discontent and growing international tension when the cracks in the British empire began to show, but as an idyllic last summer bathed in golden sunshine, the reason is largely to be found in children's literature. It was the age, if not of innocence, then of Jemima Puddleduck, Peter Pan and Mr Toad. Most of what became the canon of English writing for children appeared in a mere nine years. The Tale of Peter Rabbit , the first of the stories that Beatrix Potter modestly referred to as her "little books", came out in 1902 and was rapidly followed by six more. Peter Pan was first staged in 1904, E Nesbit's The Railway Children was published two years later, and then, in 1908, came Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows , soon to become one of the best loved of them all. The riverbank adventures of Mole, Ratty and Badger have now taken their place among the earliest memories of four generations and seem timeless, while the impossible, irrepressible Mr Toad got his own stage show, written by AA Milne, as early as 1929 and is still going strong. Yet Grahame's story and indeed the whole Edwardian renaissance of books for and about children were peculiarly the products of their own uneasy time. If The Wind in the Willows inspires nostalgia now, that is because it is itself saturated in longing for other times and other places. A year older than JM Barrie and a year younger than E Nesbit, Grahame was, like them, middle-aged when he produced his most enduring work. He was 49 when the book appeared, and described himself, accurately, as a "mid-Victorian". His was the generation that had known no other monarch than Victoria and that felt with her death in 1901 that they had lost "a sustaining symbol", as Henry James put it, adding, "the wild waters are upon us now". The Wild Wood and the Wide World are the twin menaces that loom over The Wind in the Willows . The sensible Water Rat wants nothing to do with either; it is only the Mole's naivety and Toad's hubris that force him to encounter them from time to time. The Mole soon learns his lesson. He is a creature, as he comes to understand, of the "frequented pasture" and the garden plot. "Nature in the rough" is not for him. The life of the riverbank, of messing about in boats, of ample picnics and long rambles, is essentially the life of suburbia, a rapidly growing but not entirely benign sign of the Edwardian times. The railway, which facilitates Toad's daring escape from prison, had by now brought the branch lines deep into the shires, but with them came the commuters and the red-brick villas that Grahame so disliked. His typically English ambivalence towards suburban life runs like the river through the book. On the one hand, there's the love of comfort and security, on the other, the chafing at its limitations and the sense that the pursuit of rural bliss may destroy the very thing that it desires. Grahame was himself part of the phenomenon. Having spent the happiest years of his childhood at Cookham Dene in Berkshire, he returned, shortly before he started work on The Wind in the Willows , with his family and took a house there, grumbling, like Ratty, about incomers and over-crowding. In the episode where Toad's caravan is overturned by a speeding motor car, the new Norton edition tells us that Grahame's original version had Ratty shouting after it: "Stockbrokers!" Grahame changed it later to "road hogs". As a recently retired secretary of the Bank of England he may have felt he was on thin ice. Other social nuances of home-counties life in the early 20th century are reflected along the river bank. Toad Hall, with its secret passages and Tudor mullions, was given up some time ago by the original family and sold to a Victorian magnate. It is now in the hands, like Britain itself, of a spendthrift, headstrong eldest son who indulges one fad after another and is treated with the respect his pretensions deserve by the older tenantry. Rat points out to Mole the place where they will moor their boat at Toad Hall, next to "That creek on the left, where the notice-board says, 'Private. No landing allowed'". Toad blithely sees his non-ancestral home as a desirable commercial property. He describes it as it might be advertised in the new magazine, Country Life, founded in 1897 in London to cater largely to the aspirations of the stockbroking classes: "an eligible self-contained gentleman's residence . . . dating in part from the 14th century but replete with every modern convenience . . . Five minutes from church, post-office, and golf-links." Like Beatrix Potter, Grahame was a keen observer of his characters' domestic arrangements. The opulence of Toad Hall contrasts with Mole End, where the humble collection of prints and popular plaster busts, the outdated Gothic lettering on the house sign and the peculiar garden ornament made of cockle shells, mark Mole out as the Mr Pooter of the riverbank. Badger's arts and crafts interior, complete with English oak settles and plain brick floor, shows a more cultivated taste. Indeed his home, with its central hall surrounded by "stout oaken comfortable-looking doors", is in the old English style of suburban country-house design pioneered by architects such as Norman Shaw and admired by connoisseurs at home and abroad. The trouble with Edwardian suburbia was that it was, as Grahame knew, an optical illusion. With its need for the golf club and the water closet as well as nature and history, it could best be found in the pages of Country Life where Gertrude Jekyll's artfully planned landscapes dissolved the garden boundaries, while Edwin Lutyens's houses turned newspaper magnates and mill-owners into county gentry. Great gusts of longing for something wilder and wider, whatever the risk, blow through The Wind in the Willows , as they stirred among many of Grahame's contemporaries. The fantasy of the "open road", which troubles Toad and even sometimes Ratty, found expression in a fashion, which Grahame followed, for long cross-country walks. "Tramping", as it was sometimes called, suggested a possible temporary change of class as well as scene. The poet WH Davies's The Autobiography of a Supertramp was published in the same year as The Wind in the Willows and was also a great success. It told of Davies's travels across thousands of miles of America, living rough and doing menial jobs, as he later recollected them in the tranquillity of Sevenoaks. For the riverbankers, however, there is no such possibility. Their caravan trip ends abruptly when they collide, literally, with modernity in the form of the car. Later, when Ratty is tempted by the sea rat to yield to the call of the Mediterranean, Mole rapidly talks him out of it. England itself in the early 20th century was suffering from a similar timidity or failure of nerve - what Hermann Muthesius, the shrewd German observer of English life and architecture, called in 1904 "a certain hardening of the arteries". The 1890s had been very different. Then it was possible briefly to belong to both suburbia and bohemia, and Grahame had. While rising smoothly through the ranks at the Bank of England to become its youngest ever secretary, he was also part of the literary set surrounding Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde. He had written regularly for The Yellow Book, a magazine devoted to modern decadence in the persons of Max Beerbohm, Walter Sickert and WB Yeats. It was in its second issue that he published the story that made his name, "The Roman Road", a narrative cast as a conversation between a child and an adult, its message that only the artist and the child are imaginatively free. Reviewing Grahame's collection of stories The Golden Age , which was about, but not for, children, the arch-aesthete Algernon Swinburne found it "too praiseworthy for praise" in its lack of sentimentality about its subject. Then came the arrest of Oscar Wilde, the demise of The Yellow Book and a change of mood. Grahame's Dream Days , another collection of stories published in 1899, was followed by nine years of silence before The Wind in the Willows, which, when it appeared, disconcerted some critics who had admired his earlier work and were not expecting a children's book. The editors of the latest editions are not the first to detect a comic echo of Wilde's tragedy in the rise and fall of Mr Toad. Grahame's Berkshire home was not far from Reading Gaol, George Gilbert Scott's turreted Gothic revival prison, where Wilde was incarcerated. Reading is undoubtedly where Toad is taken from court, loaded with chains, having been sentenced to 20 years for being rude to a policeman. "Across the hollow-sounding drawbridge, below the spiky portcullis, under the frowning archway" Toad recedes. He is disappearing, though, not only into prison but into the Victorian fiction of the past that Reading Gaol represents. As he passes them, the prison warders sprout medieval halberds, there is a rack-chamber and a thumbscrew-room, and the police sergeant suddenly starts to talk in impenetrable Walter Scott Gothic: "Oddsbodikins . . . and a murrain on both of them!" Toad finds he is immured in the darkest dungeon in "the stoutest castle in all the length and breadth of Merry England". Merry England, Grahame knew, was a fiction, and it was finished. It could no longer offer a resort for the imagination as it had to the writers of the early 19th century who sought respite from their own times in the pious middle ages. The Edwardians knew much more about history and they were much less sure about God. Those of them who went on searching for the divine often found it enveloped in clouds of pantheism and neo-paganism, spiritualism and theosophy, the faiths of the doubtful. It is this diffuse but potent supernaturalism that appears in The Wind in the Willows in one strange, unsettling chapter, "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn". It is a section that abridgers of the book have always been quick to drop, though Grahame himself thought it essential. In it, Rat and Mole, searching for the Otter's lost child, are granted a vision of the great god Pan, a muscular, horned god, "the Friend and Helper", before whom the animals, "crouching to the earth, bowed their heads and did worship". Whether it is the latent homo-eroticism of the vision or simply the sudden change of tone that makes the scene so uncomfortable, it is certainly a failure. But while artistically it is the weakest part of the book, it is at the same time the key to it. Pan's parting gift to Rat and Mole is "forgetfulness". They will not remember the pure happiness of their vision because if they did the memory would grow until it overshadowed and spoiled the rest of their lives with the knowledge that it could never be regained. The "little animals" would never be "happy and light-hearted" again. At Edward VII's coronation in 1901 Kipling's great fin-de-siecle poem, "Recessional", was read with its tolling refrain "Lest we forget - lest we forget". But for Grahame and his contemporaries the problem was that they couldn't forget. The enemy without, the stoats and the weasels from the Wild Wood, might be driven from Toad Hall with sticks, but memory, the foe within, haunted them along with all that they had lost or might be about to lose. And so they turned aside, as one view of history has it, from modernism and went back to the nursery. What they found there, though, was not so much a second childhood as the first, the ideal one, which they preserved forever for their readers - childhood as we may all remember it and as it never was. To order The Annotated Wind in the Willows , by Kenneth Grahame (Norton, pounds 28) for pounds 26 or The Wind in the Willows , edited by Seth Lerer (Harvard, pounds 25.95) for pounds 23.95, both with free UK p&p, call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846. Caption: article-willows.1 The Wild Wood and the Wide World are the twin menaces that loom over The Wind in the Willows . The sensible Water Rat wants nothing to do with either; it is only the Mole's naivety and Toad's hubris that force him to encounter them from time to time. The Mole soon learns his lesson. He is a creature, as he comes to understand, of the "frequented pasture" and the garden plot. "Nature in the rough" is not for him. The life of the riverbank, of messing about in boats, of ample picnics and long rambles, is essentially the life of suburbia, a rapidly growing but not entirely benign sign of the Edwardian times. The railway, which facilitates [Toad]'s daring escape from prison, had by now brought the branch lines deep into the shires, but with them came the commuters and the red-brick villas that [Kenneth Grahame] so disliked. His typically English ambivalence towards suburban life runs like the river through the book. On the one hand, there's the love of comfort and security, on the other, the chafing at its limitations and the sense that the pursuit of rural bliss may destroy the very thing that it desires. Grahame was himself part of the phenomenon. Having spent the happiest years of his childhood at Cookham Dene in Berkshire, he returned, shortly before he started work on The Wind in the Willows , with his family and took a house there, grumbling, like Ratty, about incomers and over-crowding. In the episode where Toad's caravan is overturned by a speeding motor car, the new Norton edition tells us that Grahame's original version had Ratty shouting after it: "Stockbrokers!" Grahame changed it later to "road hogs". As a recently retired secretary of the Bank of England he may have felt he was on thin ice. Those of them who went on searching for the divine often found it enveloped in clouds of pantheism and neo-paganism, spiritualism and theosophy, the faiths of the doubtful. It is this diffuse but potent supernaturalism that appears in The Wind in the Willows in one strange, unsettling chapter, "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn". It is a section that abridgers of the book have always been quick to drop, though Grahame himself thought it essential. In it, Rat and Mole, searching for the Otter's lost child, are granted a vision of the great god Pan, a muscular, horned god, "the Friend and Helper", before whom the animals, "crouching to the earth, bowed their heads and did worship". - Rosemary Hill.