The Wind in the Willows
ENDNOTES
ENDNOTES
1 (p. 27) the magnificent motor-car: In 1904, when Grahame began telling his son, Alastair, the stories of Toad, the automobile was a recent invention. A Daimler motor syndicate opened in London in 1893, and in 1897 Motor Mills in Coventry began producing cars for sale. Grahame possibly identified the motor-car with social changes he feared: the loss of agrarian life and the rise of a materialistic middle class. Edward VII, Queen Victoria’s eldest son, who reigned from 1901 to 1910, popularized the motor-car when he became the first member of the royal family to ride in one. People with money soon followed suit. Toad’s view of the motor-car—“The poetry of motion! The real way to travel! The only way to travel!” (p. 28)—which Grahame satirizes, was typical of the time.
2 (p. 61) Garibaldi, and the infant Samuel, and Queen Victoria, and other heroes of modern Italy: Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807-1882) liberated and unified modern Italy. Samuel was a preeminent Jewish leader—judge, prophet, soldier, and seer—in the eleventh century B.C.; information about his life is found in the Bible’s first book of Samuel (also known as the first book of Kings). Queen Victoria ruled England from 1837 to 1901. Peter Green notes in his biography of Kenneth Grahame (pp. 163-164; see “For Further Reading”) that these idiosyncratic features of Mole End derive from the “old-fashioned Ligurian home” Grahame stayed in during the spring of 1905 while on holiday at Alassio on the Italian Riviera. The statues also suggest Mole’s dubious artistic taste. Through his friendship with Rat, Mole grows to have a greater appreciation for art and the imagination.
3 (p. 81) “Oddsbodikins!”: In having the sergeant speak this mild oath (“God’s little body!”), Grahame provides a parody of writer William Harrison Ainsworth (1805-1882), whose “Newgate” novels (named for the infamous London prison) sensationalized the lives and exploits of criminals.