The Wind in the Willows
by Kenneth Grahame
Summary
Along a gentle English riverbank, Mole abandons his spring cleaning on impulse and falls in with Ratty, whose devotion to messing about in boats sets the book's unhurried pace, and later with the gruff, reclusive Badger and the endlessly reckless Toad. Toad's obsession with the newly invented motor car drives most of the plot that follows: he wrecks car after car, gets arrested and sentenced to twenty years in prison for theft and reckless driving, and escapes disguised as a washerwoman, blundering his way home through a series of comic near misses. He returns to find Toad Hall itself occupied by a gang of weasels and stoats who moved in during his imprisonment, and the book's climax has Mole, Ratty, Badger, and a chastened Toad reclaiming the house together through an underground tunnel raid rather than through any change of heart in Toad himself, who is made to give up his boasting and host a banquet for the riverbank animals with uncharacteristic modesty, then to compensate the gaoler's daughter, the engine driver, and the barge woman he had wronged on the road.
Grahame writes with unhurried warmth about home, friendship, and the pull between quiet contentment and the call of the open road, and the book's two moods sit side by side without apology, slapstick Toad chapters next to a hushed, near mystical encounter with the god Pan in the chapter The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. It reads gently and reflectively for a children's book, closer in places to a prose poem about the English countryside than to an adventure story, and adult readers often find it holds up better on a second visit than the plot summary suggests.
Grahame told the animal stories first as bedtime tales to his young son Alastair, nicknamed Mouse, and kept developing them in letters home during a family boating holiday before shaping the material into a novel after retiring early from his position as secretary of the Bank of England.
Historical Context & Significance
The book predates both the Newbery Medal, established in 1922, and the Carnegie Medal, established in 1936, so no children's book prize existed anywhere that could have recognized it. Methuen published it in Britain on October 8, 1908, after several publishers had already turned the manuscript down, and early reviewers gave it largely negative notices, expecting something closer to Grahame's earlier essay collections for adults.
Readers overruled the critics; the book required repeated reprints within a few years and had reached its hundredth British edition by 1951. Theodore Roosevelt wrote to Grahame in 1909 that he had read and reread it until he had come to think of its characters as old friends. It has since drawn A. A. Milne's 1929 stage adaptation Toad of Toad Hall, Disney's 1949 animated film, a Tony nominated 1985 Broadway musical, and enough later reimaginings to keep Toad ranked among the best loved comic characters in English fiction.