'Wild waters are upon us'
If Kenneth Grahame's riverbank idyll inspires nostalgia, it's because The Wind in the Willows is itself saturated in longing. The tale of Ratty and Toad was, Rosemary Hill argues, a product of its own uneasy times

The Guardian, Saturday 13 June 2009

If the Edwardian age is not remembered as a decade of social discontent and growing international tension when the cracks in the British empire began to show, but as an idyllic last summer bathed in golden sunshine, the reason is largely to be found in children's literature. It was the age, if not of innocence, then of Jemima Puddleduck, Peter Pan and Mr Toad.

Most of what became the canon of English writing for children appeared in a mere nine years. The Tale of Peter Rabbit, the first of the stories that Beatrix Potter modestly referred to as her "little books", came out in 1902 and was rapidly followed by six more. Peter Pan was first staged in 1904, E Nesbit's The Railway Children was published two years later, and then, in 1908, came Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, soon to become one of the best loved of them all.
The Annotated Wind in the Willows
by Kenneth Grahame
Norton,
£26
The riverbank adventures of Mole, Ratty and Badger have now taken their place among the earliest memories of four generations and seem timeless, while the impossible, irrepressible Mr Toad got his own stage show, written by AA Milne, as early as 1929 and is still going strong. Yet Grahame's story and indeed the whole Edwardian renaissance of books for and about children were peculiarly the products of their own uneasy time.

If The Wind in the Willows inspires nostalgia now, that is because it is itself saturated in longing for other times and other places.

A year older than JM Barrie and a year younger than E Nesbit, Grahame was, like them, middle-aged when he produced his most enduring work. He was 49 when the book appeared, and described himself, accurately, as a "mid-Victorian". His was the generation that had known no other monarch than Victoria and that felt with her death in 1901 that they had lost "a sustaining symbol", as Henry James put it, adding, "the wild waters are upon us now".

The full review here.