Of course, it begins-and began-as a children’s book. Even more importantly, the book hardly ever addresses itself to an audience of children: as Humphrey Carpenter put it, “ The Wind in the Willows has nothing to do with childhood or children, except that it can be enjoyed by the young.” “These are animals who drink and smoke, own houses, drive (and steal) cars, row boats, escape from jail, yearn for gastronomic nights in Italy, eat ham and eggs for breakfast and write poetry.” Mole and his Mates.īut for the most part, the book is about a group of well-off, leisured English gentlemen.

Even the title is mysterious-the word “willows” never appears in the book: Grahame’s original suggestion for a title was Mr.

Nor is it an animal story: the characters are, as one of the original reviewers, the novelist Arnold Bennett, observed, “meant to be nothing but human beings,” or as Margaret Blount in her book on animals in fiction, Animal Land, put it, “for animals, read chaps.” And boats appear substantially in only two of the 12 chapters. What makes all this mysterious (apart from the fact that this quintessentially English book was written by a Scot) is that The Wind in the Willows is not a children’s book at all-neither the author nor the original publishers ever suggested that it was. Shepard’s illustrations have been used on national postage stamps and to advertise England itself in the 1980s English Tourist Board series, “Making a Break for the Real England.” The book has been the inspiration for a sculpture trail, one of the most successful rides in Disneyland and a musical adaptation (by Julian Fellowes) in 2016, which was the first London West End musical to raise £1 million through crowdfunding. There are sequels, such as William Horwood’s The Willows in Winter (1993), gospel meditations, a cookery book and Robert de Board’s Counselling for Toads (1998), an introduction to psychotherapy. Milne and Alan Bennett), films, picture books (with or without stickers), pop-up books, knitting patterns, graphic novels and scholarly annotated editions. It is currently available in well over 50 editions in English: there are versions in verse, graded readers for learning English as a foreign language, audio and video adaptations, plays (notably by A.A. Although it has never been quite the international icon that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has become, Kenneth Grahame’s eccentric masterpiece can be read in Afrikaans as Die Wind in die Wilgers, in Italian as Il Vento nei Salici, in Finnish as Kaislikossa suhisee, in Portuguese as As Aventuras de Senhor Sapo and in dozens of other languages.

The Wind in the Willows is one of the most famous English children’s books, one of the most famous books about animals, and a classic book about “messing about in boats.”įamous, it certainly is.

The wind in the willows book