kenneth grahame
The W ind in the W illows
a n
a n n o tat e d
edition
Seth Lerer
edited by
the belknap press of harvard university press
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 Mar y 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 821 .8—dc22 2008055734 9
Contents
Texts and Editions xiii
Introduction 1 The Wind in the Willows a n
a n n o tat e d
edition
45
Afterword: Illustration and Illusion 261
Bibliography 271
Texts and Editions
The Wind in the Willows has been printed countless times since it first appeared 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 publication. In preparing my edition, I have relied on the original 1908 text, consulting subsequent editions published during Grahame’s lifetime and the excellently 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 reprinted). 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 chronological order of original publication): Pagan Papers (London: John Lane, 1893). I quote from the 1900 reprinting. The Golden Age (London: John Lane, 1895). I quote from the edition illustrated by Ernest H. Shepard (New York: Dodd and Mead, 1922).
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Texts and Editions
Dream Days (London: John Lane, 1898). I quote from the edition illustrated by Ernest H. Shepard (New York: Dodd and Mead, 1930). The Cambridge Book of Poetry for Children (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2 vols., 1915, 1916). I quote from the combined edition of 1919. All material from the Oxford En glish 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 En glish poetry come from online versions via the Chadwyck- Healey Data Base of English Poetry (accessed 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
A
after its initial publication, The Wind in the Willows still enchants. Over one hundred editions have appeared, and it has inspired adaptations 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 imitations 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 domesticity 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, unhappily married, taking solace in the stories for his son, a nd then retiring to English 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 century
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 social 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 ev ery 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 ca lled “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
Edwardian location has to do with the king himself. A fig ure of what Hynes calls “fleshly pleasures,” “overweight and overdressed,” aggressively “convivial,” 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 de cade also stimulated not just social form but scientific fantasy. Psychic research fostered a vogue for supernaturalism. In Hynes’s words, “After the social realism of the Victorians, from Dickens to George Moore, Edwardian novelists . . . turned toward the mysterious 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, science and technology were taking off. The airplane, the motorcar, and improvements 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 horsedrawn 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 example, just how much Romantic poetry stands behind Grahame’s purple passage 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 adventures and his theatrical posturing. Not ev ery annotation, however, is a direct source. Grahame’s prose chimes with a range of late-Victorian and Edwardian writing: history, technology, psychology, fiction, and poetry. Throughout this edition, therefore, I call attention to phrases that resonate with the kinds
3
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 beginning 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 a s more evocative than meaningful. I rely, therefore, on linguistic resources to explain Grahame’s words to modern readers. The Oxford En glish Dictionary is a primary resource here—for reasons both scholarly and historical. As the great historical 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 En glish in Grahame’s own lifetime. The OED, like The Wind in the Willows itself, is also a product of the lateVictorian 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 En glish language, to the relations between verbal 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 English 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
T
had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning 1 his little home. First with brooms, then with 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 longing. 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 calling 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 scrabbled 3 and scrooged 4 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. he mole
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 appears in quotation marks, indicating its recent or colloquial use). It clearly marks a turn in late- nineteenthcentury domestic habits, one keyed to the gradual move away from the domestic space defined by objects and clutter to a space defined by cleanliness. The symbolic resonances, 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 ma king a fresh start. But he also reveals one of the governing conceits of the stor y: 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 cla mber 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.
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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 hi s 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 polarity, 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 inquisitive 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 Nicholas Nickleby: “I don’t know how it is, but a fine warm summer day like this . . . always puts me in mind of roast pig, with sage and onion sauce and made gravy.”
the wind in the willows ‘This is fine!’ he said to himself. ‘This is better than white washing!’ The sunshine struck hot on his fur, soft breezes caressed 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 chaffing 6 the other rabbits 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 occupied. 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
He thought his happiness was complete when, as he meandered8 aimlessly along, suddenly he stood by the edge of a fullfed river. Never in his life had he seen a river before—this sleek, sinuous, full-bodied animal, chasing and chuckling, gripping things with a gurgle and leaving them with a laugh, to fling itself on fresh playmates that shook themselves free, and were caught and held again. All was a-shake and a-shiver—glints and gleams and sparkles, rustle and swirl, chatter and bubble. The Mole was bewitched, entranced, fascinated. By the side of the river he trotted as one trots, when very small, by the side of a man who holds one spell-bound9 by exciting stories; and when tired at last, he sat on the bank, while the river still chattered on to him, a babbling procession of the best stories in the world, sent from the heart of the earth to be told at last to the insatiable sea. 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.
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8. The word meander comes ultimately from the name of
the river Maeander in Asia Minor, known in antiquity for its serpentine course. Rivers meander, and beginning in the early nineteenth century, people could, too. The verb came to be applied, figuratively, to anyone or anything that wandered aimlessly. The OED quotes this passage from The Wind in the Willows to illustrate this usage. 9. As we ourselves are spellbound. Like many other chil-
dren’s book authors, Grahame calls attention to the act of storytelling, inviting his audience to pay attention. The word spellbound emerged in the nineteenth century to connote, in particular, the fascination that a listener feels for a great orator or storyteller. 10. A jewel or trinket, used as an adjective to describe a
cozy and elegant dwelling. The phrase “bijou residence” seems to have been a commonplace: note the OED ’s quotation from 1904, “The London pied-à-terre consisted . . . of a bijou residence in Mayfair.”
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11. A variant of “hello,” a word which emerged in the late
nineteenth century as a term of greeting or an exclamation of surprise. Under the in fluence of Thomas Edison, it came to be used as the standard way of answering the telephone 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 rowing—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.
the wind in the willows Small neat ears and thick silky hair. It was the Water Rat! Then the two animals stood and regarded each other cautiously. ‘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 boat 13 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 surprise 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 surveyed the cushions, the oars, the rowlocks, and all the fascinating 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
leant forward for his stroke. ‘Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing —absolutely nothing—half so much worth doing as simply messing about 14 in boats. Simply messing,’ he went on dreamily: ‘messing—about—in—boats; messing——’ ‘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. ‘—about in boats—or with boats,’ the Rat went on composedly, picking himself up with a pleasant laugh. ‘In or out of ’em, it doesn’t matter. Nothing seems really to matter, that’s the charm of it. Whether you get away, or whether you don’t; whether you arrive at your destination or whether you reach somewhere else, or whether you never get anywhere at all, you’re always busy, and you never do anything in particular; and when you’ve done it there’s always something else to do, and you can do it if you like, but you’d much better not. Look here! If you’ve really nothing else on hand this morning, supposing 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 blissfully 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
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14. The phrase “messing about” emerged in the 1880s to
connote pleasant time wasting. The OED quotes this passage 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 in quiry, “Have a good holiday?” with the response: “Awful. Nothing went wrong at all.” 16. “A rope attached to the bow of a (usually small) boat
for tying it to a ship, quay, etc.” (OED, s.v. painter, n.2). A highly specialized word from the technical vocabulary of boating. 17. A floating platform or little pier for boats. Grahame’s
vocabulary here evokes the technical terms of latenineteenth-century boating as a way of illustrating Rat’s commitment to his pastime. 18. The luncheon basket was a Victorian invention, first
appearing in the 1850s and then appropriated by the rail ways as a service to customers.
