Buy on Amazon
View on Biblioguides
I don’t think that one’s childhood can be complete without either reading The Wind in the Willows or hearing it read aloud. If you missed it in your childhood, then you can correct this omission by reading it aloud to your children or just reading it for yourself. If you are not good at reading aloud, then get one of the several audio versions where an excellent reader reads every word expressively.
The Wind in the Willows is a delightful children’s book but it is also a book for adults, full of meaning and deep feeling. Kenneth Grahame, the author, seems to have had the same love for the English countryside that Tolkien expresses when describing the Shire in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The Wind in the Willows is fantasy, in the sense that animals talk and wear jackets and have houses and cars and adventures. But the story is solidly rooted in the real world of rural England. Written in 1933, the story gives a sense of an older setting than 1933, although there are motor cars in it. Perhaps that is because in England, beneath the modern soil in many areas, are buried structures that go back for thousands of years of civilization.
The four main characters of the book are: the Mole, a down-to-earth (pun intended) simple soul, the Water Rat, a dreamer, poet, and brave friend, the Badger, rooted in the soil but with a keen sense of justice and fierce friendship, and Toad, a vain, somewhat silly rich animal whose delusions almost bring him to a bad end, who learns humility by the end of the book with the help of his three brave friends. Ernest Shepard beautifully brings these four to life with his famous illustrations (Shepard also did the original illustrations for the Winnie-the-Pooh books). The villains are foxes, weasels, and stoats. Sometimes it seems to me that Brian Jacques, author of the popular (and quite good) Redwall series, must have been inspired by reading The Wind in the Willows, since he has the good animals – mice, otters, badgers, and squirrels – constantly being threatened by the evil animals – rats, stoats, weasels, and foxes.
Kenneth Grahame (1859 – 1932) was a Scottish writer in that he was born in Edinburgh but lived most of his life in England, where he was a banker who wrote in his spare time. The Wind in the Willows was written after he retired early from the bank and was seemingly based on some animal stories he told his son in letters when they were apart one summer. Another story by Grahame, not a full novel, is the very funny The Reluctant Dragon.