The Wind in the Willows

About this book

The Wind in the Willows is Kenneth Grahame’s novel about four animals who live along an English river: the shy Mole, the hospitable Water Rat, the gruff Badger and the vain, impulsive Toad. It was published in 1908, and it grew out of bedtime stories and letters Grahame wrote for his young son. Grahame was Secretary of the Bank of England at the time and had published two earlier books about childhood, The Golden Age and Dream Days, but this was his only full-length work of fiction for children.

The book has stayed in print for more than a century because it does two different things well. The chapters about Toad are farce, with stolen motor cars, a prison escape and a pitched battle. The chapters about Mole and Rat are something else: slow, affectionate descriptions of messing about in boats, of a winter walk, of a meal by the fire. Most readers love one strand first and come to the other later.

The story

Mole, fed up with spring cleaning, abandons his underground home and wanders to the riverbank, where he meets the Water Rat. Rat introduces him to life on the river and to the neighbors: Otter, the reclusive Badger who lives in the Wild Wood, and Toad of Toad Hall, who takes up one expensive craze after another. When Toad discovers motor cars, his friends try to save him from himself, with limited success.

Toad’s adventures take him away from the river and into trouble with the law. Meanwhile, the quieter chapters follow Mole and Rat through the seasons. The strands come together when the friends must deal with what has happened to Toad Hall in its owner’s absence.

Themes and historical context

Grahame wrote at a moment when the motor car was new and loud, and the book’s distrust of speed and novelty is plain. The river and its community stand for an older, settled way of life; the Wild Wood and the Wide World beyond it are places of risk best avoided. Readers have long noticed that the animals behave like a particular slice of Edwardian England, gentlemen of independent means with time for boating and large meals.

The book’s central subject is friendship as a practical matter: who turns up when you are lost in the snow, who tells you an unwelcome truth, who puts up with you. Mole’s homesickness in the chapter “Dulce Domum” and the strange, reverent episode “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” give the book a seriousness that the Toad chapters do not prepare you for. Some editions and adaptations omit these two chapters; the Gutenberg text includes them.

The Wind in the Willows was adapted for the stage by A. A. Milne as Toad of Toad Hall in 1929, and it has been filmed and televised many times since. The familiar illustrations by E. H. Shepard date from 1931 and are not part of the public domain text.

Who should read it

At around 60,000 words the book is short, and the chapters are nearly self-contained, which makes it easy to read aloud over a couple of weeks. The vocabulary is more demanding than the plot suggests; Grahame liked long sentences and a formal, slightly mock-heroic register, and some children find the descriptive chapters slow. Adults often enjoy it more on a second reading. It belongs with Peter Pan and The Secret Garden as one of the three best-known children’s books of the years just before the First World War.

Edition notes

The Project Gutenberg edition was prepared by Mike Lough and David Widger. It is the text alone, without illustrations.