The Man in the Willows

Matthew Dennison

• Publisher: Pegasus Books
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781643130071
• eBook ISBN:
  9781643130972
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: Literature

During his regular days in London, Kenneth Grahame sat behind a mahogany desk as Secretary of the Bank of England; on weekends he retired to the house in the country that he shared with his fanciful wife, Elspeth, and their fragile son, Alistair, and took lengthy walks along the Thames in Berkshire, "tempted by the treasures of hedge and ditch; the rapt surprise of the first lords-and-ladies, the rustle of a field-mouse, the splash of a frog."The result of these pastoral wanderings was his masterful creation of The Wind in the Willows, the enduring classic of children's literature; a cautionary tale for adult readers; a warning of the fragility of the English countryside; and an expression of fear at threatened social changes that, in the aftermath of the World War I, became a reality. Like its remarkable author, the book balances maverick tendencies with conservatism. Kenneth Grahame was an Edwardian pantheist whose work has a timeless appeal, an escapist whose withdrawal from reality took the form of time travel into his own past.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• 1. ‘Brown sails, blue water and Highlanders’
• 2. ‘Happy, heedless victims’
• 3. ‘Rubs and knocks and competition’
• 4. ‘The huge world that roars hard by’
• 5. ‘Journeymen in this great whirling London mill’
• 6. ‘The memory of the glades and wood’
• 7. ‘I liked to get my meals regular and then to prop my back against a bit of rock and snooze a bit, and wake up and think of things going on’
• 8. ‘Woman as but a drab thing’
• 9. ‘I hardly feel I tread the earth I only know that thou art mine’
• 10. ‘I wish – Oh how I wish – I had married an Indian half-breed’
• 11. ‘There was a story in which a mole, a beever, a badjer and a water rat was characters’
• 12. ‘It’s much more sensible to pretend the world is fairy-land than an uninteresting dust heap’
• 13. ‘The somewhat inadequate things that really come off’
• 14. ‘Noble ideals, steadfast purposes’
• 15. ‘The Fellow That Walks Alone’
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Bibliography
• Notes
• Index
• By the same Author
• Copyright