Grahame's Classical Education
From ancient Attic tragedians to modern graphic novelists, the characters and plot points of Homeric epic are an enduring source of inspiration for the storyteller. Epic themes and tropes, no less, imbued the masterpieces of English Romantic, Victorian, and Edwardian literature, including The Wind in the Willows, whose author, Kenneth Grahame, was born in 1859 into a life of material comfort. As the son of a lawyer, Grahame would have enjoyed the standard education for boys of his social class, including education in classical literature, Latin, and Greek. Even as a child, Grahame was drawn to literature, reciting Shakespeare, Macaulay, and Tennyson. Macaulay’s The Lays of Ancient Rome (1842) were a particular favorite (Green 1959: 28), including four that recount heroic episodes from Roman history: “Horatius,” “Verginia,” “The Battle of Lake Regillus,” and “The Prophecy of Capys” (Capys was the grandfather of Romulus and Remus). Grahame’s own “The Roman Road” responded to Macaulay, with visions of the Coliseum and quotes from Marcus Aurelius, indicating a life-long fascination with the culture of antiquity.
Grahame attended St Edward’s School at Oxford in 1868–76, where the curriculum was restricted to Latin, Greek, scripture, “and a smattering of other subjects” (Prince 1994: 29). Despite “the barrack-like school, and the arid, cheerless class-rooms,”1 Grahame succeeded in athletics (Rugby) and academics. He received prizes for Divinity and Latin Prose in 1874, and he took the sixth form class prize in 1875.2 Grahame, however, resented the formal authority and structure of traditional education. In “The Twenty-First of October” (DD), Grahame’s narrator laments, “one of us would be singled out at any moment … to wrestle with the inflections of some idiotic language long rightly dead.” Grahame was no philologist, but his opprobrium derived from a mistrust of an academic system that imposed harsh capital punishments. Grahame observed, for example, that the discipline-obsessed headmaster at St Edward’s School “could not really have studied that immortal work, the Republic of Plato, in which the principles of ideal justice are patiently sought out” (Chalmers 1933: 16). In “Lusisti Satis” (GA), the narrator imagines that, for the majority of young pupils, formal schooling constitutes a “private and peculiar Hades.”
Grahame, unfortunately, says little overtly about his schooling at St. Edwards (aside from an invited address to the pupils at “Speech Day”: Prince 1994: 26), and direct evidence for his formal classical education is “sketchy” (Green 1959: 44). But he does acknowledge his debt to the Classics:
The education, in my time, was of the fine old crusted order, with all the Classics in the top bin—I did Greek verse in those days, so help me! But the elements, the Classics, the Gothic, the primeval Thames, fostered in me, perhaps, the pagan germ …3
Green observes that Grahame has singled out his own particular pleasures (the Classics, the Gothic, and rural, riverine England). But Green also dismisses Grahame’s engagement with the Classics as limited to “well-worn tags” and second-hand exposure, through Andrew Lang, William Morris, Matthew Arnold, and others.
Nonetheless, the academic curriculum of the day was rooted solidly in Latin and Greek (both in translation and the original languages), and Green (1959: 43) also remarks that Grahame was “soaked in” Vergil’s Georgics and Horace’s Satires. On the evidence of his prize for Latin prose, Grahame was a talented Latinist, who—well beyond his school years—could dash off a quick rhymed triplet paraphrase of Horace, Odes 1.4.1–24:
Gone are the snows and April come is she;
The West Wind blows and, down loud beaches, we
Once more our prows propel to their blue sea.
Graham was also familiar enough with Greek poetry to quote Sophocles in Greek.5 Grahame’s preference may have been for Latin, as inferred by provocative chapter titles in Latin, including “Dulce Domum” in The Wind in the Willows, “Dies Irae” (DD), “Exit Tyrannus,” and “Lusisti Satis” (GA). Other titles also suggest the writer’s strong interest in the classical tradition, including “The Lost Centaur” and “Orion” (PP), and “The Olympians,” “Young Adam Cupid,” “The Argonauts,” and “The Roman Road” (GA). Grahame’s body of work, at least superficially, indicates an interest in and engagement with classical literature and tradition.
Grahame and His Literary Milieu
With the rediscovery of the remains of classical antiquity in the mid-eighteenth century, together with the burgeoning field of archaeology which redistributed ancient treasures to the royal collections of Europe, the Romantic era saw a growing interest in the ancient Mediterranean world, permeating political inquiry, philosophical discussions, architectural aesthetics, and literature. Poets of the Romantic era reworked the themes and imagery of ancient Athens and Rome. Lord Byron, for example, was drawn to the romantic image of a ruined landscape (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto 2), and he condemned the plundering of Greek antiquities (Protopsaltis 1947: 78). Percy Bysshe Shelley, furthermore, considered fifth-century Athens a cultural golden age: “of no other epoch in the history of our species have we records and fragments stamped so visibly with the image of the divinity in man” (A Defense of Poetry). Keats, who translated the entire Aeneid as a schoolboy, often set his works in Greek antiquity (or the Carolingian Renaissance), and he employed aesthetic elements from Greek myth to forge his own mythology (e.g., “Ode to Psyche”; “Ode on a Grecian Urn”), as would Grahame would (as JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis would do later).
A natural outgrowth of the Romantic tradition, the Victorian engagement with classical antiquity was complex and varied at a time when even the bourgeoisie were indulging in “Cook’s tours” in Europe (especially Italy). The world of classical antiquity, ancient Greece in particular, “was actively reimagined by Victorians for their own purposes” (Prins 2009: 55; see also Richardson 2013)—including aesthetic historicism and the reconceptualization of classical mythology (Maxwell 2008)—as the past and present were projected onto each other. For Grahame, the English rural countryside is reconfigured into an idealized Arcadia (that never existed), the realm of Pan celebrated in antiquity by Theocritus, Vergil, and Longus.
This engagement included all levels of society where even poor stonemasons were eager to study Latin and Greek at University (Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure 1895; cf. Hall and Stead 2020). By the mid-1800s, some 50 or so partial and complete English translations of Homer had been produced, including a tongue-in-cheek burlesque translation by Caustic Barebones (Thomas Bridges), “Homer Travestie” (1762), whose fight scenes may have inspired Grahame’s battle to take back Toad Hall. Among the translations, Keats admired Chapman’s iambic pentameter Odyssey (1616). For Matthew Arnold, those who would translate Homer bore the responsibility of attracting a new readership for classical texts. Translations, he argued, must be readable but yet remain true to the original text in spirit. Such texts must be “plain and direct both in the evolution of thought and in the expression of it” (On Translating Homer, Oxford 1860). Homer was widely read, and Homeric epic was part of the late Victorian cultural fabric, as models of heroism and masculine strength (Iliad) or feminine domesticity (Odyssey).
Homer and other authors of classical antiquity invited response and reinterpretation from contemporary artists. Tennyson, the “English Vergil,” aimed to reproduce the rhythms of ancient meters in his own works (Markley 2004: 41, 87). Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s works were replete with classical allusion and diction (Falk 1988). George Eliot was also greatly versed in classical authors (Wiesenfarth 1982), and Oscar Wilde’s relationship with the Classics was profound and impactful (Riley et al. 2018).
Grahame was steeped in this literary culture of his era. Although Grahame was unable to attend Oxford University, perhaps because of the family’s declining finances,6 his deeply allusive works reflect an intimate knowledge of the Classics of western literature (Hunt 1994: 33). Among Grahame’s close friends was FJ Furnivall, a champion sculler and a “living and talking library” whose broad interests included philology. Grahame became the Honorary Secretary of Furnivall’s New Shakespeare Society in 1880, and through Furnivall Grahame participated in the edges of a literary society that included Tennyson and Browning (Green 1959: 64–7).
Grahame’s works, therefore, unconsciously provide the reader with a rich intertextual experience. For example, Mole’s emergence from his burrow (“The sunshine struck hot on his fur”) evokes the opening lines of Wordsworth’s The Prelude (“Oh there is blessing in this gentle breeze, a visitant that while it fans my cheek doth seem half conscious of the joy it brings from the ...
