The Wind in the Willows

Kenneth Grahame

Jan 1915 · Cethial & Bossche Company

About this ebook

The Rat danced up and down in the road, simply transported with passion. You scroundrels, you highwaymen, you -- you -- road hogs! .... Toad sat straight down in the middle of the dusty road, his legs stretched oat before him, and stared fixedly in the direction of the disappearing motor-cat .... His face wore a placid, satisfied expression, and at intervals he faintly murmured, Poop poop!

Ratings and reviews

A very magical read,very enjoyable booklet. I saw someone reading it in a movie. I had never heard about it before, so I looked it up and found that I was very happy that I had.

Delightfully funny, anthropomorphic animal tale, with some nature mysticism, set in rural England of the Edwardian era. Sour notes: only a couple of female bit parts among large panoply of male characters; the outsize, comic main character Toad, with his blustery, manic personality, is likely based on author's own son, who had a short, troubled life.

This wonderful story should follow you through life. Read to you in your early years, skimmed through in your youth, and cherished with pause and reflections in your quiet evenings. In due time we shall all grow homesick for the quiet water lilies" as the swallows recalled and let these stories be there to transport us.

About the author

Kenneth Grahame was born in Edinburgh on March 3, 1859. When he was five years old, his mother died of scarlet fever and he nearly died himself, of the same disease. His father became an alcoholic and sent the children to Berkshire to live with relatives. They were later reunited with their father, but after a failed year, the children never heard from him again. Sometime later, one of his brothers died at the age of fifteen. He attended St. Edward's School as a child and intended to go on to Oxford University, but his relatives wanted him to go into banking. He worked in his uncle's office, in Westminster, for two years then went to work at the Bank of England as a clerk in 1879. He spent nearly thirty years there and became the Secretary of the Bank at the age of thirty-nine. He retired from the bank right before The Wind in the Willows was published in 1908. He wrote essays on topics that included smoking, walking and idleness. Many of the essays were published as the book Pagan Papers (1893) and the five orphan characters featured in the papers were developed into the books The Golden Age (1895) and Dream Days (1898). The Wind in the Willows (1908) was based on bedtime stories and letters to his son and it is where the characters Rat, Badger, Mole and Toad were created. In 1930, Milne's stage version was brought to another audience in Toad of Toad Hall. Grahame died on July 6, 1932.