The Wind in the Willows
Unfortunately, Grahame’s stay at the Mount lasted only two years, for his grandmother moved to a new house in 1866, and soon after, his father summoned them home. That arrangement lasted less than a year; his father left them permanently and moved to France, where he died twenty years later, penniless in a boarding house. Grahame never saw his father again except to reclaim his body and plan his funeral.
In 1868, at the age of nine, Grahame and his older brother, William, entered St. Edward’s School at Oxford. After adjusting to the rigors of English public school life, Grahame distinguished himself as a scholar and athlete. He did this despite the emotional blow of William’s death from a respiratory ailment in 1875. Grahame had every expectation of continuing his studies at Oxford after St. Edward’s, but his grandmother and uncle had different ideas. His uncle arranged for him to work in London in his own firm of parliamentary agents in Westminster and later, in January 1879, as a gentleman clerk at the Bank of England.
Grahame made the best of a situation he did not choose or desire—he used his spare time afforded by banker’s hours to explore London and become part of a coterie of writers surrounding the scholar Frederick James Furnivall. Furnivall founded the Early English Text Society and the New Shakespeare Society, both of which Grahame joined; in 1880 he became the honorary secretary of the New Shakespeare Society and began writing poems and prose, ostensibly in a long-lost bank ledger. Furnivall, one of Grahame’s first critics, was as encouraging about his prose as he was discouraging about his verse.