The Wind in the Willows
Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on March 8, 1859. Grahame was five when his mother, Bessie Grahame, died of scarlet fever, leaving her husband to care for their four children. James Cunningham Grahame, who suffered from depression and alcoholism, was ill-equipped for this role. He promptly sent Kenneth and his siblings, Helen, William, and Roland, to live with their maternal grandmother, an emotionally aloof but capable woman. Her home, called the Mount at Cookham Dene, was situated in Berkshire on the Thames River. There, as only a child thrown back on his resources can do, Grahame found compensatory joy in the countryside (as an adult he likewise would find joy in the recuperative power of words). Nature became his companion; it offset his feelings of dislocation and abandonment, and fueled a rich, imaginative inner world. In Berkshire, he experienced, like Mole in the book’s opening chapter, “the joy of living and the delight of spring” (p. 7) and came face to face with the river, the book’s central symbol of earthly paradise and, arguably, something even greater, the imagination:
It all seemed too good to be true. Hither and thither through the meadows he rambled busily, along the hedgerows, across the copses, finding everywhere birds building, flowers budding, leaves thrusting—everything happy, and progressive, and occupied.... He thought his happiness was complete when, as he meandered aimlessly along, suddenly he stood by the edge of a full-fed river. Never in his life had he seen a river before.... All was a-shake and a-shiver—glints and gleams and sparkles, rustle and swirl, chatter and bubble. The Mole was bewitched, entranced, fascinated. By the side of the river he trotted as one trots, when very small, by the side of a man who holds one spellbound by exciting stories (p. 8).