For all the upheaval and unrest that characterized the beginning of the
twentieth century, the 1900s remain in the popular imagination an era of
innocence, with the Decadence of the 1890s cast off and the slaughter of the
First World War yet to come. It seems appropriate, therefore, that it should
also be regarded as (to borrow the titles of one of Kenneth Grahame’s books)
the “Golden Age” of children’s literature. It forms the background to The
Children’s Book, the recent novel by A. S. Byatt, who comments that “it was
seriously suggested that the great writing of the time was writing for
children, which was also read by grown-ups”. There was of course plenty of
other great and grown-up writing going on, but many of the children’s books
published during this period are of a quality to satisfy the most discerning
of adult readers.
The first decade of the twentieth century saw the publication of Beatrix
Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit and five of E. Nesbit’s books, including
The Phoenix and the Carpet and Five Children and It, Rudyard Kipling’s
Just-So Stories, Puck of Pook’s Hill and Rewards and Fairies, while J. M.
Barrie’s Peter Pan was first staged in 1904, and W. Graham Robertson’s
hugely popular though now forgotten Pinkie and the Fairies premiered in
1908. It was Robertson who in that same year provided illustrations for the
first edition of his friend and neighbour Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the
Willows.
Alan Bennett, one of several writers who have adapted the novel for the stage,
had read several of Grahame’s books as background to his earlier play, Forty
Years On: “I left The Wind in the Willows until last because I thought I had
read it already – this being virtually the definition of a classic: a book
everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have done so”. Like
Peter Pan, it has entered the collective consciousness, and this is one of
the reasons it has attracted the attention of scholars. Unlike, say,
Potter’s books, which are miniature masterpieces of economy and sharp wit
and attract little literary-critical or psychoanalytical attention,
Grahame’s novel is both expansive and elegiac, its chapters alternating
between lyrical mysticism (“The Piper at the Gates of Dawn”) and broad farce
(“Toad’s Adventures”). Arnold Bennett described it as “an urbane exercise in
irony at the expense of the English character and of mankind”, and Seth
Lerer, the editor of one of these two new centenary reissues, goes so far as
to describe it as “first and foremost an essay in English style” – though
this is not perhaps how most of us initially encounter it. Rereading the
work in the light of these two annotated editions, one recognizes not only
how sophisticated it is, but also how odd, notably in its long digressions
from the main narrative into mysterious evocations of the Great God Pan or
the contrasting episodes in which Mole is assailed by numinous intimations
of the meaning of “home”, and Ratty is pitched into the throes of cabin
fever after encountering the Sea Rat, a rodent cross between John Masefield
and the Ancient Mariner.
Oddness in children’s literature is something the intended readership tends to
relish unquestioningly. Adults are more knowledgeable, or perhaps just
knowing, intrigued less by the stories themselves than by what they suppose
lies behind them. The intention of both these editions is to place Grahame’s
book in a literary, social and biographical context and to explain terms and
allusions which may have been familiar to readers in 1908, but have since
fallen into obscurity. Like most annotated editions of children’s classics,
starting with Martin Gardner’s invaluable The Annotated Alice in 1960, both
books originate in the United States, and so specifically British words or
notions have also been annotated for American readers – not always
correctly. Whereas Seth Lerer’s volume stands alone, Annie Gauger’s joins a
list of Norton titles which includes The Wizard of Oz, The Hunting of the
Snark, The Secret Garden, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and several collections of
fairy tales. “The study of children’s literature has become an important
academic discipline in its own right”, Lerer observes. The advantages and
disadvantages of this development are apparent in both editions. While many
of the textual glosses add to our understanding and enjoyment of The Wind in
the Willows, others fall into the literary-theory trap of being merely
ingenious rather than genuinely illuminating.
In size and scope (and indeed title) Lerer’s volume is the more modest affair,
intended as “a guide to words and contexts, an adventure for the reader and
the scholar in the byways of meaning, the open roads and wild woods of
allusion, idiom and theme”. Illustrations within the text are restricted to
the pen-and-ink drawings Ernest H. Shepard supplied for the book’s
thirty-eighth edition in 1931, but a section of colour plates and an
afterword on “Illustration and Illusion” shows how other artists have
depicted the novel’s scenes and characters. A stimulating and scholarly
introduction is divided into sections investigating “Life on the Margins”,
“The Animal Worlds”, “Romanticism, Ruskin and the Mole” and “The Theater of
Toad”, themes Lerer expands on in his notes, which are generally more
succinct and more literary than Gauger’s. In pursuit of his belief that the
book is an essay in style, he identifies the texts – Homer, Milton, the
Romantic poets, Ruskin, Gilbert and Sullivan, Jerome K. Jerome, Conan Doyle
– which he detects lying behind Grahame’s prose. Less persuasive is his
contention that the chapter in which Badger attempts to put a stop to Toad’s
motoring escapades “needs to be understood through the works of both Richard
von Krafft-Ebing and Sigmund Freud, whose writings were appearing in English
in the first decade of the twentieth century and whose work contributed to
the fascination with new ways of assessing mental illness”. It might be
argued that whether or not Grahame actually read Krafft-Ebing’s Textbook of
Insanity, on which Lerer draws heavily, is beside the point because these
ideas were in the air. It is nevertheless somewhat reductive to treat the
gloriously anarchic Toad as a casebook study, something Gauger does even
more dogmatically and succinctly: “Toad has a bipolar personality”.
More interesting is the notion that Toad is an unholy amalgam of Oscar Wilde,
Horatio Bottomley and Grahame’s purblind, tantrum-prone son Alastair, for
whom the book was written. Grahame’s choice of a toad for his vainglorious
comic character was a stroke of genius, one brilliantly exploited by
Shepard, whose illustrations remain unrivalled. Toads by their very nature
give the impression of being puffed up, and the carriage of their heads
unwittingly suggests snootiness. Strutting down the steps of his country
manor, stuffed into his preposterous driving togs; supplied with funds to
buy the latest shiny toy, or take up and as quickly discard every passing
fad; writing his appalling invitations on stationery “with ‘Toad Hall’ at
the top in gold and blue”: Toad is the embodiment of nouveau riche vulgarity
and bumptiousness. Ludicrously vain, utterly shameless and horribly
self-pitying, he nevertheless remains endearing. Mole and Rat may be the
real focus of Grahame’s narrative, but A. A. Milne recognized who had
elbowed his way to the front of readers’ affections when he titled his 1929
stage adaptation of the book Toad of Toad Hall.
Clearly, some of these characteristics do recall Oscar Wilde, and Lerer and
Gauger detect additional elements of the great man in Toad, from his
aphorisms and his imprisonment to his middle-parted hair – a biological
anomaly that did not impress that meticulous naturalist Beatrix Potter.
Curiously, however, neither editor comments on the biographical link to
Grahame provided by the book’s first illustrator, W. Graham Robertson, who
as a beautiful young man had been one of Wilde’s protégés. And neither
comments on the scene in which Toad is taken in chains from the courthouse
to the prison through crowds who assail him with “jeers, carrots and popular
catch-words; past hooting school children, their innocent faces lit up with
the pleasure they ever derive from the sight of a gentleman in
difficulties”. This passage is strongly reminiscent of the notorious
occasion when Wilde was transferred by rail from Wandsworth Prison to
Reading Gaol and was obliged to stand on a platform at Clapham Junction,
handcuffed and in convict dress, surrounded by a jeering mob.
There is not much else that the editors miss, though their eagerness to
elucidate occasionally results in absurdities. For example, Gauger, whose
annotations are far more extensive than Lerer’s, is inclined to detect the
shadow of Wilde falling elsewhere across the text. Grahame famously declared
that his book was “clean of the clash of sex”, by which he meant the
disruption he believed to be the natural consequence of the mingling of the
sexes. Although married, he aspired to the popular (masculine) Edwardian
ideal of bachelorhood, and was disinclined to allow females of whatever
species anywhere near the riverbank. The “homosocial” world in which his
characters move appears to Gauger to teeter on the edge of the homosexual,
leading to a silly note about Rat showing Mole into the “best bedroom” on
his first night on the riverbank: “If this were a novel for adults, Mole and
Rat would perhaps consummate their relationship amorously”.
There are a surprising number of errors and misapprehensions in Gauger’s
annotations, but her edition is far fuller than Lerer's. Although it lacks
plates, it is sumptuously produced with many colour illustrations, and she
is particularly good on visual representation and the problems of clothes
and scale that Grahame’s text presents. The supporting material is
excellent, apart from an extraordinarily self-congratulatory introduction by
the children’s author Brian Jacques.
Gauger herself provides a detailed biographical preface and a good account of
Alastair Grahame and his nursery magazine, The Merry Thought. She reproduces
the letters Grahame wrote to his son, on which parts of the novel are based,
and fifty-seven letters written to Alastair’s mother by his governess Naomi
Stott between 1907 and 1908, when the boy and his parents were apart. The
appendices include extracts from original reviews of The Wind in the Willows
(many of them unflattering); a note on Grahame’s view of abridgement, which
he rightly felt could not be done “without a loss of quality”; the essay
“The Rural Pan” from Pagan Papers (1893), which relates to “The Piper at the
Gates of Dawn”; and the catalogue Alastair made of his own books in around
1911, in which his father’s novel nestles inconspicuously within an
impressive library of juvenile literature alongside A Child’s Garden of
Verses, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Children of the New
Forest.
The notes in both editions are often fascinating, but sometimes fussy and
distracting and not always helpful, or indeed right. Neither editor is
strong on ornithology: Gauger glosses swifts as “plain-looking birds related
to hummingbirds yet resembling swallows”, which may be factually correct but
doesn’t really tell you much about these masters of aerobatics, while Lerer
believes that “dabchicks” and “moorhens” are “regional dialect words” used
by Rat “to describe birds from outside of the southern English, Thames
valley landscape”. In the moving chapter “Dulce Domum”, both editors get
sidetracked by the development of telegraphy, rather than concentrating on
Grahame’s knowledge of the common mole’s sensitivity to vibration and to its
surroundings. Lerer is better than Gauger on the technical aspects of
boating but doesn’t appear to know what a weir is. Food and drink are vital
elements of the novel, and while Gauger supplies a delightful history of
Burton’s Ale as well as a recipe for Captains’ Biscuits from Robert Wells’s
Bread and Biscuit Baker’s and Sugar-Boiler’s Assistant (1890), and
reproduces instructions for making “Mr Grahame’s Coffee” to his exacting
standards, she supposes Palermo to be the home of a famous sherry, and her
description of trifle, with its “layers” of, among other things, ice-cream
and gelatin, is inauthentic as well as disgusting. She also occasionally
gets into chronological muddles: in depicting Otter as a “gentleman
adventurer”, Grahame can hardly have had in mind T. E. Lawrence, who was an
obscure undergraduate at the time, and the horse in Milne’s Toad of Toad
Hall cannot be “an early version of Eeyore in the Pooh books”, since these
books predate the play.
Annie Gauger and Seth Lerer’s handsome editions nicely complement each other
in their strengths as well as their weaknesses. If the editors occasionally
seem simply to be messing about in texts, they also provide a wealth of
information that will be welcomed by anyone who wants return to the
riverbank and discover just how enduring and endearing Grahame’s masterpiece
remains a century after it was published.
Kenneth Grahame
THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS
An annotated edition
Edited by Seth Lerer
288pp. Belknap Press. £25.95 (US $35).
978 0 674 03447 1
THE ANNOTATED WIND IN THE WILLOWS
Edited by Annie Gauger
384pp. Norton. £28 (US $39.95).
978 0 393 05774 4
Peter Parker’s book The Old Lie: The Great War and the public-school
ethos has recently been reissued with a new introduction. He has written
Lives of J. R. Ackerley, 1989, and Christopher Isherwood, 2004.
