21. The Wind In The Willows: How A Bedtime Story Became a Classic

Summary

The Book Club: The Wind In The Willows – How A Bedtime Story Became a Classic

Podcast: The Book Club
Episode: 21
Date: July 6, 2026
Hosts: Dominic Sandbrook & Tabitha (Tabby) Syrett

Overview of the Episode

In this episode, Dominic and Tabby take an engaging and layered journey through Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, unraveling how a father’s bedtime stories for his troubled son became both an enduring classic and a subtle window into Edwardian England—and Grahame’s own wounds. The hosts discuss the creation, deeper meanings, and cultural legacy of this beloved children’s book, while also shining a light on the sadness interwoven throughout the tale and its author's life.

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Episode Structure + Key Timestamps

• [02:07–04:15] Dramatic reading from Toad’s intervention scene
• [04:38–06:48] Why The Wind in the Willows endures: human nature in animal tales, childhood fantasy, and Englishness
• [09:54–13:14] Recap: recap and walk-through of the plot
• [15:45–20:43] Kenneth Grahame’s biography & the origins of the book
• [34:19–41:03] Adapting bedtime stories, the rocky road to publication, and early reviews
• [45:25–47:34] First exploration: escapism, nostalgia, the all-male Arcadia, and the fantasy of Edwardian rural life
• [53:12–62:29] Dissecting the book’s world: talking animals, deep inconsistencies, and the ambiguous audience
• [62:49–84:28] Deep Dive: characters & their symbolic meaning, political undercurrents, melancholy, and the edges of nostalgia
• [85:10–89:37] Ratings, personal connections, and discussion of which character the hosts most resemble

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Major Discussion Points & Insights

1. Origins: From Bedtime Story to Literary Classic

• The Wind in the Willows began life as bedtime tales for Grahame’s son, Alastair ("Mouse"), evolving during holidays and in a series of whimsical, phonetically-spelled letters. The tales were personalized for Mouse, who, astoundingly, was the model for the reckless Mr. Toad (34:48).
  • Quote, Tabby (32:21): “And people may have expected [Mouse] to be the inspiration for... Mole in The Wind in the Willows, but no, he’s actually the model for Toad. And it’s insane that Kenneth Grahame based Toad on his own son.”
• Grahame’s traumatic childhood, the loss of his mother, and a withdrawn, imagination-fueled adulthood gave the book its emotional power, with the riverbank representing an idyllic, lost childhood and escape from adult pain (14:12–21:48).

2. Plot Recap & Key Scenes

• The plot is recounted in stages:
  • Mole’s emergence and introduction to Ratty, their friendship, boating, and picnic adventures.
  • Mole’s frightening foray into the Wild Wood and rescue.
  • Mr. Toad’s mania for motorcars, subsequent adventures, imprisonment, escape, and the reclaiming of Toad Hall from the “Wild Wooders” (weasels and stoats).
  • The unusual mystical chapters (“The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” & “Wayfarers All”)—more on these below.

3. Why Does It Endure? Universal Archetypes, Friendship, and Nostalgia

• The hosts argue its appeal lies in capturing something “true about human nature,” with all personalities embodied in the quartet: Toad, Badger, Mole, and Rat (04:41).
  • Dominic (05:28): “It’s a celebration of male friendship... but, as we’ll discuss later... it’s a reworking of Homer’s Odyssey.”
• The book is both a children’s story and much more—a nostalgic vision of Edwardian England “threatened by modernity,” an escape from social and industrial anxieties, and a portrait of enduring male camaraderie.

4. A World of Inconsistencies—And Why They’re Charmingly Overlooked

• The book’s world is a riot of whimsy and “mad world building”—animals shifting sizes, eating ham and eggs (are they eating friends?), sometimes clothed, sometimes not, with shifting relationships to the human world (53:12–54:31).
  • Tabby (51:17): “What’s the social hierarchy there?... Hedgehogs eating pigs—are we dealing with cannibals here?”
  • Dominic (52:39): “A child will just take it all for granted... This is why the wrong people were reviewing The Wind in the Willows. They thought it was a work of natural history.”
• The language is sophisticated for children but, as Dominic notes, “Children read in ways we lose touch with... words they don’t know don't bother them.”

5. Themes: Escape vs. Home/Adventure vs. Security

• The fundamental tension is between yearning for adventure (Toad’s quests, Rat's wanderlust) and the longing for home (Mole’s homesickness, the security of Badger’s burrow).
  • Tabby (58:34): “It’s really moving... It does express, in a childlike way, the tension within all of us.”
  • Dominic (70:31): “As though Rat is being tempted by growing up... the travel represents leaving behind their childhood world.”

6. Character Analysis: Four Facets of Human (and English) Nature

• Mole: Shy, anxious, middle-class, driven by homesickness and loyalty.
  • Tabby (59:05): “I know it’s a shabby, dingy little place... but it was my own little home and I was fond of it.”
• Rat: Sociable, upper-middle-class, organized, but also idealistic, poetic, and dreamy.
  • Tabby (61:10): “He has a massive stockpile of weaponry... he’s also a dreamer and an idealist.”
• Badger: Wise, aloof, gruff; represents Old England, tradition, and wisdom.
  • Dominic (66:00): "His kitchen is described as like an Anglo-Saxon hall... There’s a sense that Badger represents kind of English history."
• Toad: Boastful, self-indulgent, comic, and (per the hosts) modeled partially on Grahame’s difficult son and literary types like Falstaff; a force of chaos but ultimately contained by the others.
  • Dominic (74:12): “He’s pure id—pure desire and impulse and self-indulgence.”
  • Toad’s climactic defeat by his friends is, in Dominic’s words, “a victory for the status quo, for conservatism,” paralleling political tensions of Edwardian England (77:30).

7. Deeper Currents: Melancholy, Longing, and the Pain beneath the Idyllic Surface

• Despite Grahame’s protestations that the book had “no problems, no sex, no second meaning” (45:25), the hosts see underlying nostalgia and melancholy.
  • The recurring sense that the idyllic world is “a dwindling age... a world that can’t endure for long” (84:28).
  • The two mystical chapters—“The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” (encountering the god Pan) and “Wayfarers All” (Rat's longing to migrate)—are interpreted as allegories for the conflict between innocence and experience, escape and belonging (66:37–70:31).

8. Real Life Parallels: Kenneth Grahame, Elspeth, and Mouse

• The tragic reality behind the fantasy: Grahame’s own unhappiness, desperation to remain a child, and the disastrous marriage to Elspeth, as well as their son Mouse’s alienation and suicide, cast a long shadow over the Arcadian vision (83:48).
  • Tabby (83:54): “I think there is real melancholy... I get the sense... this is a world that can’t endure for long.”

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the universality of the characters:
  • Dominic (05:03): “All human nature is there in those four characters.”
• On childhood wish-fulfillment:
  • Dominic (04:15): “You’ve promised to be good and your parents have swallowed your apology, and then you turn around immediately and say to them, I’m actually not sorry at all. And I would do it again.”
• On the strange, nostalgic pull of the book:
  • Dominic (47:34): “People like Kenneth Graham... see the countryside as a place you escape to, a sort of refuge from the modern world.”
• On Toad's irrepressibility:
  • Toad (03:22): “On the contrary, I faithfully promise that the very first motorcar I see—boop, boop!—off I go in it.”
• On the absence of women and adulthood:
  • Dominic (49:01): “He wanted to get away at once from weary sex problems and other problems and just do jolly things without being suspected of preaching or teaching.”
  • Tabby (72:09): “No hint that you could ever meet a woman animal in this book.”
• On melancholy and the threat of change:
  • Tabby (84:28): “This is a world that can’t endure for long. The motor cars are coming, and, you know, is it... the law, the humans, whatever it may be? There is a melancholy in that.”

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Host Ratings & Closing Reflections (85:10–88:36)

• Dominic: 10/10 “poop-poops.”
  • “It expresses something quite profound about the human condition and is beautifully written, far in advance of almost any other children’s book.”
• Tabby: 8/10 “poop-poops.”
  • “I genuinely think it expresses something profound about the different facets of human nature. The characters become your friends, the writing is just beautiful.”

Which character are the hosts?

• After playful analysis, both decide everyone is a mix, but Tabby is “very much Rat with a pronounced inner Mole” and Dominic, despite hopes to be Rat, confesses he’s “got a massive Mr. Toad side.”

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Episode Summary Table

| Timestamp | Topic/Segment | Key Quote/Insight | |-------------|------------------------------------------------------------------|-----------------------------------------------------------------| | 02:07–04:15 | Dramatic "intervention" reading | "No, I'm not sorry. And it wasn't folly at all..." (Toad) | | 15:45–21:48 | Kenneth Grahame's trauma and retreat into fantasy | "He emotionally rejects the adult world and adult interests..." | | 34:19–41:03 | Publication struggle and early bafflement | "As a contribution to natural history, the work is negligible." | | 53:12–54:31 | World-building inconsistencies and their charm | "A child will just take it all for granted." | | 66:37–70:31 | The mystical chapters and Edwardian pagan nostalgia | "It's like a mad chapter, you can't understand what it's doing."| | 77:30 | Political allegory, the occupation of Toad Hall | "A massive victory for the status quo, for conservatism." | | 83:54–84:28 | Final real-life melancholy and the evanescence of paradise | "This is a world that can't endure for long..." |

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Conclusion

Dominic and Tabby’s exploration goes far beyond nostalgia, uncovering the bittersweet personal history and social anxieties written between the lines of The Wind in the Willows. Through dramatic readings, personal stories, literary analysis, and playful banter, the hosts convincingly argue that the book's enduring magic isn't mere escapism—it's anchored in the comedy, pathos, and longing that, like the riverbank itself, run just beneath the surface.

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Next up: The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, followed by Madeline Miller’s Circe, and more.

Transcript

[Tabby]

This episode is brought to you by the Folio Society.

[Dominic]

The Wind and the Willows is a story that has lasted and it's lasted for a reason. It's a tale in which friendship is the anchor, but adventure is the spark.

[Tabby]

It actually started as a series of bedtime stories that Kenneth Grahame would write to his son and it is rooted in the English countryside and it paints a world that is both grand and rich, but cozy and warm.

[Dominic]

I love the lazy boating days with Ratty from Much, my character, and Mole, who's very much you, Tabby. There's the expedition to the Wild Wood. There's the fighting the weasels and the stoats. I love all that stuff.

[Tabby]

Then we have the legendary Toad hall. And that is home to the reckless and motor car obsessed Mr. Toad Sandbrook.

[Dominic]

Very, very good banter there. Well done.

[Tabby]

Thank you.

[Dominic]

Lots of people will know the story, however, you won't know it in this amazing edition. It's the Folio Society edition. Genuinely, it's the most beautiful book. It's like one of the most beautiful books I own.

[Tabby]

I yeah, it absolutely is. It's something that you can treasure for the rest of your life.

[Dominic]

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[Tabby]

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[Dominic]

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[Tabby]

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[Dominic]

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[Tabby]

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[Dominic]

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[Tabby]

There's only one more thing to be done, said the gratified badger. Toad, I want you solemnly to repeat before your friends hear what you fully admitted to me in the smoking room just now. First you are sorry for what you've done and you see the folly of it all. There was a long, long pause. Toad looked desperately this way and that while the other animals waited in grave silence. At last he spoke. No, he said a little sullenly, but stoutly.

[Dominic]

Im not sorry. And it wasn't folly at all. It was simply Glorious. What?

[Tabby]

Cried the badger, greatly scandalised. You backsliding animal. Didn't you tell me just now, in there? Oh, yes, oh, yes, in there, said Toad impatiently.

[Dominic]

I'd have said anything in there. You're so eloquent, dear Badger, and so moving and so convincing, and you put all your points so frightfully well. You can do what you like with me in there, and you know it. But I've been searching my mind since and going over things in it, and I find that I'm not a bit sorry or repentant, really. So it's no earthly good saying I am now, is it?

[Tabby]

Then you do promise, said the badger, never to touch a motor car again? Certainly not, replied Toad emphatically.

[Dominic]

On the contrary, I faithfully promise that the very first motorcar I see, boop, boop, off I go in it.

[Tabby]

So that was, of course, from Kenneth Graham's the Wind in the Willows, first published in 1908. And joining us on the show, Toad of Toad Hall. Hello, Dominic.

[Dominic]

Tread carefully, Tabby. Tread carefully.

[Tabby]

So in that scene, Badger, played by me and the other animals who live by the river, have staged an intervention to persuade the iconic Mr. Toad to give up his enthusiasm, his addiction for fast cars. And Toad initially promises Badger that he'll kick this bad habit, but he was only pretending. He was only saying that to shut Badger up and worm his way out of the room. So totally unrepentant, totally shameless. And he's now exulting in having tricked the dignified and honorable Badger.

[Dominic]

He is. So I always remember that scene from when I first read this book, which was when I was a child. And it's. I think it's every kind of little boy or little girl's fantasy that you've promised to be good and your parents have swallowed your apology, and then you turn around immediately and you say to them, I'm actually not sorry at all. And I would do it again. I would do it in a heartbeat. It's also a very good preview, actually, Tabby of married life.

[Tabby]

That's good to know. That is good to know.

[Dominic]

So I think even in that little scene, you get a clue to the Wind in the Willows is incredible success. Because there's something. I mean, I'm only half joking about that. So there is something in those characters in Toad and Badger, and then, of course in Mole and Rat, who are the other sort of members of the quartet, that I think captures this sort of truth about human nature. All human nature is there in those four characters.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic]

So even Though it's a book about. It's a children's book about the animals who live by the riverbank. I think it's actually much deeper than that. And that's the reason for its appear and that's why it merits its place on the show because, among other things, it's a portrait of kind of rural Edwardian England threatened by modernity. It's a celebration of male friendship and male kind of camaraderie. But actually, as we will discuss later, I mean, lots of people will be amazed to hear this. It's a reworking of Homer's the Odyssey.

[Tabby]

I actually couldn't believe it when I stumbled across that in your notes. I'm delighted, but I'm shocked.

[Dominic]

Well, you love the Odyssey.

[Tabby]

I do.

[Dominic]

And actually Toad is a much more interesting character than Odysseus.

[Tabby]

I know, and I just couldn't agree more. I think Odysseus is the most interesting of the Greek heroes. But then again, Toad has a certain flamboyance to him.

[Dominic]

He does, he does.

[Tabby]

He wears a lot more tweed than Odysseus and even than you.

[Dominic]

Yeah, come on. I don't wear any tweed as well, you know, so it's now, what, almost 120 years old. The Winds in the Willows.

[Tabby]

Which is strange if. Because it feels so present everywhere. You know, it's had such a lasting impact that I. I forgot it was so old.

[Dominic]

There are very few books published in 1908 that are still in print.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic]

And there are very, I mean, children's books or adult books. And there are very few books from that era who've left such a mark on the world's imagination. So Mole rats, especially Toad, are colossal figures, even to people who've not read the books. I mean, everybody, if you say to somebody, he's a bit of a Mr. Toad, everybody really knows what you mean. If you go into any bookshop in the English speaking world, you can find copies of the book. There's a historian of children's fiction, Gillian Avery, who wrote the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition. She calls it an essential element of English childhood, part of the background of the reading adult. A book whose importance is unquestioned. And there have been adaptations on the stage. Best of all, Tabby on tv.

[Tabby]

Oh, God. Yeah.

[Dominic]

So, I mean, this is the great trauma of your life.

[Tabby]

I've been seeking serious counseling in advance of this episode.

[Dominic]

You couldn't bring yourself to watch the itv? Is it the ITV adaptation?

[Tabby]

Yeah. Well, actually, I did, like, I've seen little bits of it I saw it as a child when I was staying with my aunt and uncle in England, and I thought it was a truly terrifying thing. You know, it's full of these garishly grinning puppets gallivanting across the screen in a sinister fashion with their eyes, like, really raised. And they do have kind of big eyes. Yeah. They have like a. Almost like a religious fervor in the way that their eyes are constantly upraised. It's nightmare. Provoking. But then equally sinister and perhaps even more sinister.

[Dominic]

Yeah.

[Tabby]

Was the 1996 adaptation starring Steve Coogan, I believe, in the role of Mole.

[Dominic]

Yeah. Steve Coogan was Mole.

[Tabby]

Steve Coogan was Mole. Friend of the show.

[Dominic]

Hold on, who's the friend of the show there, Mole or Coogan?

[Tabby]

Partridge, actually. So neither.

[Dominic]

Exactly. Alan Partridge is the friend of the show.

[Tabby]

I don't know about. Who cares about Coogan? Yeah. Philomena. What? Yeah. And the thing is, the thing that's terrible about that is they're humans. They look like humans, but they're slightly animalized. So they look like kind of bastardized versions of animals and humans. So all of this I. I find to be shudder inducing. And it's taken a lot of courage for me to be here today with you.

[Dominic]

So the book I read as a child, several times, and then I read it to my son and we watched the TV series a lot. Tabby, which will terrify you.

[Tabby]

Poor Arthur, honestly. Yeah.

[Dominic]

Well, he's a big fan. He is a big fan. And I've always been, you know, had a massive sentimental fondness for it and also always thought, well, certainly when I started thinking about it as a grown up, thought how interesting it was and how many layers there were and how much there would be to unpick if I ever wanted to look into it. So actually doing this episode, I really, really enjoyed this. And there's loads of fascinating stuff under the surface, I think.

[Tabby]

Yeah. I was excited, actually, to read it, in part because of your enthusiasm for it. I know that it's a. It has a massive sentimental spot for you, but I'd actually never read it because I'm not a big fan of animals dressed in human clothing.

[Dominic]

Right.

[Tabby]

I can't get behind them. I'm not invested. Like Beatrix Potter never really did it for me. But then my dad is a massive, massive fan of the Wind in the Willows. Huge emotional attachment to it from childhood. So then when I was on holiday recently, he gave me his kind of battered 1959 edition with, like, all the original illustrations. And I have to confess I think I was wrong to have turned up my nose at it for so long, because it's cozy, it's funny, it's whimsical. It's the very best kind of parable about human nature. Because so many books of that era, as you said, are slightly out of fashion now, because, you know, when it's humans playing in that way, because children don't really play like that anymore. Whereas this, because it genuinely, I think, does say something about human nature. I think that's part of the reason it's endured. And I love the way, you know, a little bit like Narnia or something, everyone always goes to bed well fed, cozy and content.

[Dominic]

There's a lot of buttered toast.

[Tabby]

There's so much buttered toast. You can't have enough buttered toast.

[Dominic]

Correct.

[Tabby]

So I really enjoyed it.

[Dominic]

So before we get into some of the themes and we get into Kenneth Graham, the author, who's a fascinating character, and we get into his world, why don't we give people a little reminder of the story? So we kick off with Mole, don't we?

[Tabby]

Yes, we do. So we start with Mole, and he is doing a spot of spring cleaning. And then he rushes out onto the riverbank and there he meets the water rat. And they have great fun. They're messing around with boats. They have a picnic. It's just a bucolic fairy tale. And then in the next few chapters, we come across the other principal characters. So, of course, there's Mr. Toad, obsessed with fads of various kinds. When we start, it's a caravan. Then he has a car crash and he falls in love with the newfangled motorcar because cars have been on the roads since the 1890s. And then this is when he starts yelling his. His famous poop, poop that you demonstrated in the opening reading. And then we come across Badger. He is kind of venerable and dignified. He is a bit older. He lives in the wild wood and Molecules goes into the wildwood because he's never been there. And he's curious and it all goes terribly wrong. It's quite frightening. He gets lost in the wood. And this bit is actually. Even this time. I could see that as a child, be very frightening.

[Dominic]

No, it's scary when he's lost in the wood.

[Tabby]

It's genuinely frightening.

[Dominic]

One of a child's greatest fears is always being lost.

[Tabby]

Yeah. In the woods with eyes. You know, like in the original Snow White. There's this bit when she's rushing through the woods and there's eyes everywhere. It's just like that. And then we have this lovely, reassuring homecoming when Rat goes and finds him and they go and take shelter with the ultimately kind Badger. And then there are these two slightly odd, very different chapters, which are very lyrical and slightly strange. And these feature Rat and Mole. So there is the Piper at the Gates of Dawn and Wayfarers all. And the first one is where they encounter the God Pan bizarrely. And then later the Rat is tempted by the call of the sea. And we'll be digging into that a little bit more later.

[Dominic]

And then you've got the second half of the book, and that really belongs to Mr. Toad. So Toad, you know, he's promised Badger that he'll give up cars, but he doesn't mean it. He escapes. They try to lock him up and he escapes. He steals a car, he's sent to prison. Tremendous adventures escaping from prison. And then he returns to find that Toad hall has been invaded and occupied by the animals who live in the wild wood. Who are the weasels, the stoats and the ferrets. And then the great climax, which I loved when I was reading it when I was kind of six or seven or something. Mole and Rat and Badger and Toad kind of join forces. They tool up. They infiltrate Toad hall through a tunnel.

[Tabby]

Rat is sitting on a disturbing armament pile. He has so many weapons. He's like an arms dealer.

[Dominic]

But I love that. But that would obviously appeal to a child because children love to have, you know, toy pistols and toy swords and all of that.

[Tabby]

Yeah. And you can never, if you go questing or something, you can never have enough.

[Dominic]

Exactly. Right. Exactly. And the idea of sneaking through a tunnel. Brilliant, brilliant. Speaks to you when you're under 10 years old.

[Tabby]

And the cross dressing, of course. Well, yes, I bet I spoke to you as a 10 year old boy.

[Dominic]

There is a bit of cross. Well, disguises. Kids love disguises.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic]

So they sneak in, they liberate Toad hall, they have celebratory banquet. Toad is slightly reformed, so he gives up on his plans to sing a song and to give an incredibly bombastic speech. And he surprises everybody at the end of the book by appearing to be, and I quote, an altered Toad because he's a little bit better behaved than he was when the book began.

[Tabby]

Well, he's still slightly one upping them, isn't he? Because he realizes that it'll have this reaction from everyone. He'll surprise everyone. So it's kind of calculated, which is kind, by the way.

[Dominic]

Yes.

[Tabby]

You feign some kind of, you know, atonement or reform in order to still be making a statement.

[Dominic]

I don't want to. I don't want to give too much away, Tabby. But basically I found in my life that feigning modesty, yes, is very satisfying and effective.

[Tabby]

Totally.

[Dominic]

So. So where does it all come from? Does it mean anything more than just a children's story? There's a brilliant book about children's fiction that came out last year by a friend of mine called Sam Leith, and it's called the Haunted Wood. And he points out early on in this book, he says, the most effective writers for children almost always seem to be the ones who've most invested in it emotionally. Often they're writing from a wound, whether a wound sustained in childhood or the wound of having to. Had to leave it behind in the first place.

[Tabby]

So apt that I think. I think that's. That's very well observed.

[Dominic]

Well, I think what it is is writers create a fantasy world of this kind because they're trying to get away from unhappiness, some form of unhappiness, but they create the escape. They create this sort of lost paradise, but the unhappiness somehow finds its way in, or finds a reflection. It's the tension between those two things that often gives these books their. Their power. And I think that's definitely true of the Wind of the Willows. So Sam Lee says it's one of the most hermetically kind of closed worlds of innocence in the history of children's literature. But the reason it exists as it does is precisely because it's powered by Kenneth Graham's own personal unhappiness and his very strange kind of conflicted response to the traumas of his early life. So there's actually a lot of darkness under the surface in the winter, the wilderness, which you spot when you read it when you're seven years old or

[Tabby]

something, kind of like, unlike PG Wodehouse, those, you know, the Jeeves and Worcester books, they genuinely are as light as they appear, but, you know, they have elements of quite a troubled childhood, his own troubled childhood in them, and yet it never. The darkness never seeps in, I suppose, which is kind of interesting.

[Dominic]

Boris, I think there is more obvious darkness here. Well, we'll go into it, won't we? So Kenneth Graham's life, I mean, on the one hand, what happens to him is not so outlandish, but I guess it's the way he responds to it that makes this quite strange and sad, don't you think?

[Tabby]

Yeah, there's a sad kind of Passivity to him, I think. Yeah, completely, which is possibly slightly of the times. But it's always sad, I think, the way that, you know, men of that generation reacted. And it was just the done thing. And in a way it's very brave, but it is sad.

[Dominic]

So tell us, take us through what happened to him, Tammy.

[Tabby]

Yeah. So he's born in Edinburgh in 1859. His father is a lawyer. And then they move to rural Argyleshire when he's small. And one of his few memories of these early years is walking beside a lock with his father. And his father's telling him a story. And this makes its way into the Wind in the Willows, when Mole is walking by Rat. And it says, as one trots, when very small, by the side of a man who holds one, spellbound by exciting stories. And then when he's five, the first tragedy strikes and this is when his mother. His mother has another son. She then catches scarlet fever. She lingers on for about two weeks and then she dies. And her final words, which are so incredibly moving, I think, are, it's all been so lovely. Like, I think we should all be so lucky on our.

[Dominic]

Well, she was only, I think, late 20s when she died.

[Tabby]

I mean, she was very young. Yeah, it's very sad. And then Kenneth Graham himself catches it too. He nearly dies. So many of the authors we've done on this show had terrible illnesses at some point in their lives, I think. I wonder if that kind of lends itself to writing or something, you know,

[Dominic]

I always think, like, the loss of a parent. It's so striking how many of the great writers lost a parent when they were young.

[Tabby]

Yeah. Anyway, he recovers, but he's left with bronchial issues for the rest of his life and his father just can't cope with. With these children. So it's two brothers and one sister. So he sends them south to live with his mother in law, Mrs. Ingalls, in the Berkshire village of Cookham Dean on the bank of the Thames. And this is a really idyllic time in his life and it gives him inspiration for the riverbank in the Wind in the Willows. And it reminded me of J.R. tolkien, J.R.R. tolkien's time living in Sohol, I think, which is a really idealised period of life, kind of in the countryside.

[Dominic]

Yeah. Just outside Birmingham. Exactly the same thing. So similar period of time, Victorian, Edwardian, sort of the rural idyll.

[Tabby]

Exactly that, yeah, totally. And then after a couple of years with his mother in law, he moves to a smaller cottage and Then there's a brief and really unhappy interlude when he goes back to live with his father. But by this point his father is drinking far too much and it just doesn't work out at all. And his father then runs away, abandons them. He runs away to France and dies years later in a boarding house in Le Havre, which is miserable.

[Dominic]

Drinks himself to death, basically.

[Tabby]

Yeah. And so his children end up being shuffled around various relatives all the time, which would give you such a sense of kind of not belonging and abandonment.

[Dominic]

I think so. And I think what Kenneth Graham does is he withdraws, doesn't he, into a fantasy world of his imagination from which he never really emerges.

[Tabby]

Yeah, but I actually think that's just the most understandable, in a way. Quite a healthy reaction.

[Dominic]

Yeah, I think so. I mean, lots of children live in their heads, but as you grow up, you leave the world of. I mean, we never entirely leave the world of daydreams behind, do we? But we, you know, you. You at least meet the real world halfway. And I think there's an argument with Kenneth Graham. I mean, his biographers kind of say he. He really is somebody who chooses deliberately never to grow up. So this biography of him, a really nice book actually about him, very sad book by Matthew Dennison called Eternal Boy. And the theme of that is about how basically he wants to be, you know, an eight year old boy all his life. He. He shuns the adult world. Yeah. And. And he's frightened of it because it means he equates it with suffering, disappointment, you know, being grief, all of those kinds of things.

[Tabby]

Bit like J.M. barry, actually. Interesting.

[Dominic]

Yeah, yeah. And I think there's definitely a cult of childhood at that age.

[Tabby]

Anyway, I think you're right.

[Dominic]

And so I think there's a. Well, lots of critics think that the Heart of the Wind and the Willows. There is this tension between wanting to escape and have adventures on the one hand, and something we've already mentioned, wanting to come home to the kind of hearth and the buttered toast and the cozy world of your burrow on the other. And you're on the characters constantly being pulled between these two things. You can see that escape he would equate, you know, Toad escaping Toad Hall. A little bit like his father running away to France or something.

[Tabby]

Yeah. At one point the rat is actively tempted by the prospect of running away and living a carefree kind of responsibility free life. And it's. And it's.

[Dominic]

Yes, of course, irresistible almost exactly. And then on the other hand, that the houses of the different Animals, you know, you mentioned they're living in Cookham Dean by the Thames. The houses of the animals by the riverbank are massively important to them. And again and again, you have these scenes where they come back to their house and they love their house and they. They snuggle down and all of this sort of stuff. And, you know, some critics sort of say in a very Freudian way, oh, this is the kind of return to the womb or something like that. I know.

[Tabby]

I think that's mad. I think that's. I think that's massively deeping it also, for one thing, it's quite a masculine book, you know.

[Dominic]

Yeah, it is a very masculine book. Well, we'll talk about that. But it's also. It's. That is the theme of the Odyssey, one of the foundational texts of Western literature, is going far from home and coming back and finding perhaps your home may have been taken from you.

[Tabby]

Well, yeah, that's what I was going to say, though. I mean, definitely that massively applies to one animal's arc. But the difference is that, you know, in the Odyssey, home, you know, he goes back and it's not this kind of cherished perfect place he's been fighting for all these years. Home really is as good as one hopes it will be in the Wind and the Willows.

[Dominic]

Yes, it is, exactly. It completely is. And I think, you know, these are common themes in children's literature, but Kenneth Graham seems to have taken that retreat into fantasy to a. To an extreme not matched by most other writers. So, I mean, a huge theme of his life. He emotionally rejects the adult world and adult interests, and he finds such comfort in his kind of schoolboy imagination that he never, ever wants to leave it. And as somebody who, like, loved being a child and loves kind of children's books, I actually do find that quite relatable. I mean, I ever. I never. I mean, I never suffered all the sort of the losses that he did, but I think there's a bit of all of. All of us, deep down, that sentimentalizes and is nostalgic about the world of chop. Don't you tell me. Or is this just me?

[Tabby]

Yeah, no, I totally. And also, you know, I've always. When. Even now, whenever there's something slightly daunting or unnerving or something on the horizon, I'll always retreat into the books of my childhood for a little bit, for, like, comfort. Right. I totally relate to that. But the thing is, this all makes him sound like he's very damaged in some way. But on the surface, you know, as we said, he seems pretty jolly, pretty well adjusted. So he's sent to St. Edward's School. It's a new school then. And although he's very shy, he actually gets on really well. He plays for the rugby first 15 he becomes head boy. So Humphrey Carpenter says the behavior of Mr. Toad rather than Moll, although Toad like me, is certainly not head boy material, I would say. And he's not shy.

[Dominic]

Well, you would be a very implausible head boy. I mean no offense.

[Tabby]

It's 2026, Dominic. Catch up. Anyway, he works very hard and he hopes to go to university, but no, his uncle says it's a waste of time and money and so gets him a job at the bank of England instead, which I think is so sad in a way. So is this a big disappointment to him? It's hard to know. But I think tellingly he basically breaks off relations with most of his family from this point point and he's a very self contained person anyway and that's another thing that I like about him, to be honest.

[Dominic]

But you, you're, you're dissing the bank of England but actually when he joins

[Tabby]

the good job, it's a good job.

[Dominic]

So he's 19 years old, it's 1879. He's a gentleman clerk, they don't do much work. And actually Humphrey Carpenter, in his book on children's literature, he says over the bank of England pandemonium often reigned. While business was supposed to be being conducted, the staff ate and drank heavily on the premises, kept pet animals and. And amused themselves at all hours, oblivious of decorum. And this is very like Nicole Alfie producers, I was going to say.

[Tabby]

Yeah, exactly. It's working on the book.

[Dominic]

Eating and drinking heavily.

[Tabby]

Yeah, we never do these recordings sober. It's incredible.

[Dominic]

So anyway, he rises through the ranks, he's very good at.

[Tabby]

And he becomes more animals than anyone else. More James.

[Dominic]

Exactly, more japes. And he becomes the secretary of the bank of England when he's only 39. 1898.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic]

And actually he is, I mean on the surface he's quite a conventional. He seems a very conventional kind of late Victorian Edwardian, doesn't he?

[Tabby]

Yeah, he does. And then he joins a territorial regiment and he goes to Cornwall and there he's, you know, messing around in boats, he's going on walking holidays, he visits Italy, etc. He's having a lovely time. Very kind of the Riverbank community from Wind in the Willows.

[Dominic]

Totally.

[Tabby]

And actually one of his mates, camaraderie as well.

[Dominic]

Yeah. And one of his mates is a guy called Mr. Furnival, F.J. furnival, who runs a rowing club. So he's often seen as the model for the water rat. And it's this bloke Furnival who says to him, you know, you. You like writing and stuff, don't you? You make up stories. Why don't you send them into the newspapers and magazines? And he does, and they get published. There's a book of essays that he does called the Pagan Papers, which is all sort of. It's very sort of CS Lewis hearty.

[Tabby]

Very fashionable at this time.

[Dominic]

Totally. It's very. Very Edwardian camaraderie. Let's all go for a jolly country walk and then go to a country park and have a foaming pint of ale and be great chaps together in their tweed coats and stuff.

[Tabby]

Think like Bilbo Baggins, Tolkien, Lewis, etc. Don't think extinction, rebellion or Glastonbury. It's the opposite of that kind of.

[Dominic]

It's that kind. It's that. It's the first kind of. Quite conservative, not the second. Very conservative.

[Tabby]

Yeah, exactly.

[Dominic]

Then he does some short stories which are published. They're. They're basic children's stories. They're the Golden Age and Dream days. These are about kids being brought up by their aunts and uncles, as, of course, he was, and they're kind of getting into scrapes and stuff and having fun. And because they're a little bit more anarchic than Victorian children's stories, they strike quite a chord. They are very popular in America. The future President Theodore Roosevelt is a huge fan of them. I know the bloke who invented the teddy bear.

[Tabby]

I know parallels all around. So he doesn't. He never sees himself, though, as a professional writer or. He doesn't at this time see himself as a professional writer, though, does he? Because he's very. And he's very shy. Like, he's just a gentleman amateur. And he's very shy of publicity and is keen to guard his privacy and.

[Dominic]

Well, he's keen to guard his privacy from one class of person above all else. Yeah. And actually, these are some of the most. These are terrible people. And unfortunately, he meets one of them. Them.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic]

And falls into this. And this person is a woman. So he has basically shunned women completely. And not for any. You know, he's not. There's absolutely never the slightest suggestion that he's gay before, if that occurs to any listeners.

[Tabby]

And it's his childishness as well. Isn't it? You know, sex and women don't really fit into this, you know, fantasy world that he, he retreats into.

[Dominic]

He really is an 8 year old boy who just when people say to him, oh, there are going to be some women, he's like, what? On no.

[Tabby]

You know, breaks down to a sweat, starts quaking.

[Dominic]

Exactly. And he's made it almost to 40 unscathed. And then he falls into the clutches of a literary super fan.

[Tabby]

That's a terrible thing.

[Dominic]

It is a terrible thing. Called Elspeth Thompson. And Elspeth Thompson is from a rich family and she's sort of hung around on the fringes of the London literary set. She's generally, she's a sort of professional superfan. So she cultivated friendships with Tennyson and other writers and things, and everybody who writes about her, all the biographers and critics of Kenneth Graham say she's terrible. So Humphrey Carpenter calls her a ferociously flirtatious blue stocking. And actually you might think, well, this is misogyny. But actually Gillian Avery in her introduction to the Penguin Classics, calls her an emotional, garrulous, fey woman with literary pretensions who later developed into a slovenly eccentric. I can see you pointing at yourself there, Tabby.

[Tabby]

It's terrifying.

[Dominic]

Is this all too close to home?

[Tabby]

It's just a window into my life and my future.

[Dominic]

Well, she's very. Well, don't become a slovenly eccentric, whatever you do.

[Tabby]

I don't know, though. I don't know. Who knows?

[Dominic]

You reckon you're on.

[Tabby]

That's happening. Yeah.

[Dominic]

Elspeth is very needy and demanding and he can't get rid of her. And then the weird thing happens. So Kenneth Graham falls ill and when he falls ill, he's helpless. She starts inviting herself around to see him and look after him and then he feels he's trapped and he has to marry her.

[Tabby]

I have to say, I'm always utterly bemused when you hear. Because, you know, you hear of this happening sometimes he, you know, they just kind of fell into a marriage and before he knew it, he was walking down the aisle. Surely at some point you just say, you know, Elspeth.

[Dominic]

No, no, because he's, he's afraid of emotional attachment and he's. So he's. Because of that, he's afraid of any form of emotional conversation. He just can't bring himself to have the conversation, I think, and to say, I don't want to marry you. And because she's come to his house or his flat or something, whatever, when he Was ill. He feels compromised. People think of them as a couple.

[Tabby]

I mean, yeah, by. By the stands of the day, this is exactly. Yeah.

[Dominic]

His sister apparently saw the announcement in the newspaper and was absolutely stunned and said to him, what is this? Who's this? Are you going to go through with you? Seriously, I'm going to go through with this. And Kenneth Graham replied, quote, and I quote in a tone of the deepest gloom. I suppose so. I suppose so. As in, I am going to go through with it. So other people's marriages. Usually when you read about other people's marriages in books and you sort of get an insight into them, they all sound terrible. But this one, I think sounds particularly awful because they basically communicate in baby talk letters. So they write purely in baby talk to each other.

[Tabby]

But how do you write baby talk? You know, give me an example.

[Dominic]

He writes like this, okay. I eat what I chooses and what I don't want, I don't. And I don't care a damn what they does in Berlin. Thank God I'm British. So he writes in a kind of music cork Cockney way and it's spelled phonetically. And she writes as like a baby girl back kind of Lisbon kind of way to him.

[Tabby]

So just goes in the ITV series. That's horrible.

[Dominic]

Yeah, I know.

[Tabby]

Very disturbing.

[Dominic]

Well, anyway, they. They get married in 1899 and it is an absolute disaster. So basically they don't love each other. Well, she loves. She. She craves affection from him, which he's never, ever going to give her. And there is no physical dimension. There is no dimension of, you know, even sentiment, really, at all. They. He just goes off straight away and he goes off boating with his mates and caught in Cornwall and stuff. And he doesn't want anything to do with her, which she finds enraging. Yeah, they clearly have. You know, she complains bitterly to her friends and things. There is no physical dimension to their marriage. Like, she's shocked. They clearly have had one encounter, presumably on their honeymoon, because in 1900 she gives birth to a son. So once and once only, I think they basically consummated the marriage.

[Tabby]

Arguably one time too many.

[Dominic]

Well, I think, yeah, because this is. Well, there would be no Wind in the Willows without this, though.

[Tabby]

There would be no wind in the willows. So she gives birth to a baby boy. He's called Alastair, but they call him Mouse and his life. I have to say I was quite harsh about him just now, but it is. It is a tragedy. He's born prematurely, he has eye problems. Which means that he's left almost blind in one eye and then has a squint in the other. He's very sickly and difficult. But I think this is often the case with kind of sickly difficult children and mothers kind of possibly who, you know, it's kind of a miracle that they were born at all. She puts him. Elspeth puts him on a massive pedestal and is always insisting that he's very talented and amazing. So very Petunia Dursley or Cersei Lannister vibes, I would say. Yeah.

[Dominic]

She spoils him massive.

[Tabby]

Well, yeah. And she gives him unrealistic, kind of, you know, an unrealistic perception of himself, which is always going to make you unhappy in life, I think.

[Dominic]

Yeah. They do that thing that some parents do, I think, of sort of simultaneously spoiling and neglecting their child. So in other words, they're quite distant parents, but when they are with him, they tell him he's brilliant and he's wonderful and he. And he ends up being an absolute monster of football.

[Tabby]

He's like Hubert Lane from Just William, except worse. He's cheeky, he's boastful, he's a terrible show off, he's nasty to other children, he bullies small girls, he doesn't make friends or fit in. And Sam Leith calls him a conceited, spiteful and spoiled little brat. And people may have expected him to be the inspiration for, you know, maybe Mole in the Wind in the Willows, but no, he's actually the model for Toad. And it's insane that Kenneth Graham based Toad on his own son.

[Dominic]

I know. That's the mad thing, because Toad is

[Tabby]

the ultimate, like, you know, immortal slur on your child.

[Dominic]

Yeah.

[Tabby]

Brutal.

[Dominic]

You would absolutely expect that, Mole. Because Mole seems to speak for the child.

[Tabby]

Yeah. And he's vulnerable and.

[Dominic]

Exactly. But no. So this is how the Wind in the Willows is born, as basically bedtime stories for this boy, Mouse. And we know this from the mad baby talk letters that Kenneth Graham is still writing to his wife. So even though they basically, I don't know, sleep in separate rooms or stuff, they still write to each other in the baby talk.

[Tabby]

All they have left is the baby talk.

[Dominic]

And this is in 1903. So Mouse is three years old, and Kenneth Graham says to Elspeth, there was a story in which a mole, a beaver, a badger and a water rat. These are all spelled, by the way, kind of phonetically, because it's part of the baby talk in which a mole, a beaver, a badger and a Water Rat was characters, and I got them terribly mixed up as I went along, but Eeyore was straight into them out and remembered which was which. I heard him telling Nurse afterwards. And do you know, the Moles saved up all his money and went and bought a motor car. So clearly at this point, the stories are very garbled versions of what becomes the winter the widows, because the Mole is buying the car there. By the time Mouse is four, the stories that are. That he's being told are about Mr. Toad and his adventures. The joke here is that Toad is Mouse, Toad is you. You know, I'm telling you the stories about yourself. And animal stories are very fashionable at this point. So this is Beatrix Potter time. Beatrix Potter published Peter Rabbit in 1902, so two years before this. And in 1903, I think they launched the first licensed merch in history, which was Peter Rabbit merch.

[Tabby]

Yeah. And then in the spring of 1907, Graham and Elspeth, they go away to Cornwall for a break while Mouse's government governess takes him for a separate holiday in Little Hampton, which is strange, in Sussex. And then while they're away, Kenneth Graham is writing Mouse a series of 15 letters. And in those, he continues the adventures of Toad and refers to him as a low, bad animal.

[Dominic]

Harsh.

[Tabby]

And in these, you know, Toad has faked being kidnapped by brigands and writes a ransom demand, but then really runs away and he steals a car. And he basically has all the adventures that are familiar from the second half of the Wind in the Willows, you know, the police, the court, the jailer's daughter. And so they appear in the book almost unchanged, the tone being a picaresque 18th century romp. And then Mouse's governess keeps these letters and they're reprinted at the end of the Penguin Classics edition there.

[Dominic]

Indeed.

[Tabby]

But they are, at this point, just fun. He never imagines anyone else will ever see them. And then at the end of August 1907, he's visited at home by an American journalist, and she is called Constance Smedley, and she lives nearby. And her editor at Everybody's Magazine in Philadelphia has told her to. To kind of form a relationship with Graham, to worm her way in and get him to write something for the American market because his Gilden Age Kids stories were so popular. And she somehow she manages to wrangle an invitation to the house. And it turns out that Elspeth, you know, who's very, you know, has aspirations of being very literary minded, has read her novel An April Princess. So they Kind of chat about that. And secretly, Constance is a feminist, but she has to keep that quiet because this is not a household in which.

[Dominic]

Yeah, they're a conservative household.

[Tabby]

Yeah, exactly. So she's invited back, and on a later visit, she overhears Kenneth Graham telling a bedtime story to Mouse, and it's the one about the riverbank animals. And she says, well, why don't you turn these bedtime stories into a book? And he says, no. So he hated writing. It was physical torture. Why should he undergo it? But then she finds out, perhaps from Mouse, about the Toad letters, and she says, well, come on, you've already written it. So she works on Maus, which is slightly odd.

[Dominic]

Works, though.

[Tabby]

It does work. And tells him to turn the letters into a book. And he loves the idea. I mean, obviously not minding at all, that it's kind of all about the worst sides of his nature. Yeah. And he persuades Kenneth Graham to change his mind. And so finally he says, yeah, fine, I'll do it.

[Dominic]

But you can see why that would work, right? Because she's basically saying to the little boy, oh, don't you think your daddy should turn these letters into a book? Wouldn't it be wonderful to see it published? What child is ever going to say no to that? Of course they're going to love the idea. And so Kenneth Graham says, fine, I'll do it. And in autumn 1907, he starts to turn the letters to Mouse and the bedtime stories into a book. And so the genius of the winter, the Willows, really, is its blend of different ingredients. So you've got, first of all, the stories of mole and rat messing around in boats on the riverbank. And it's male friendship in this kind of idealized rural England, in this kind of country idle. All of this, like, the stuff that we were talking about, country walks and kind of picnics and great japes and all of that. So, you know, it's a bit. It's very much the. What you mentioned talking. It's very much the World of the Hobbits, isn't it? Yeah.

[Tabby]

Or tea with Mr. Tumnus in the lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

[Dominic]

Yes, it is. It's that cozy. Well, CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien would both undoubtedly read the Window in the Willows.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic]

I mean, so they would have sort of. Even if they're not necessarily modeling what they write on it, they would be. They would have drunk of the same waters, I guess.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic]

And then you have second ingredient. Toad. His brush with the law, his escape his return to claim his house. The Odyssey elements of the book. And then the. The stuff that then Kenneth Graham puts in after that, which is the. We've already mentioned these strange, melancholy, almost mystical kind of chapters. So mole pining for his home, rat pining for the sea, the two animals meeting the God Pan, all of this. So he's combined all these different elements. He gives it to, you know, his agent and Constance Smedley, and absolutely nobody wants to publish this at all. They're like, this is bonkers. What is this?

[Tabby]

Yeah. So basically publishers say animals up in human clothing.

[Dominic]

Right. Publishers say, what the hell? What's all this with the animals? Like, why. Why have you not written stories about kids? So even though the Beatrix Potter craze is going. I mean, the Beatrix Potter stories are very different. They're aimed at obviously a much smaller reader.

[Tabby]

And also the illustrations lead the way. So if you have that as kind of a visual guider, it's a bit different.

[Dominic]

And also they're very obviously whimsical and they're slight and they're. You know, there's no. No, no, no vague realism in Beatrice Butter, which.

[Tabby]

No pagan gods.

[Dominic]

No pagan gods. So everybody's magazine, when Constance Smelly says, well, this is the result of my labors, they're like, what? We don't want this. Kenneth Graham's agent tries various magazines. They all say no. Lots of publishers say no. Eventually Methue and say, fine, but this is so mad. We won't give you an advance. They give him a deal which basically has a sliding scale of royalties, a very sharply sliding scale of royalties in instead of an advance that works out brilliantly for him because he and his. In the Bodleian Library, which is his heir, ultimately they end up making tons of money from this. From this deal anyway. No one can see that coming at the time. Then there's the issue, isn't there, with the title. So the title so often that with so many of the books we've done in this podcast, the original title was Mad. Chosen by the author. Yeah, yeah.

[Tabby]

The Lapping of the Stream. I mean, so the true is no good.

[Dominic]

What else could.

[Tabby]

I like the other alternative, which was the Children of Pan.

[Dominic]

I quite like that the Children of Pan there. But it's not what the book is. Well, I mean, nor is the Wind in the Willows, I suppose.

[Tabby]

No, that's one tiny part of it. And then the other title that they kick around is River Folk.

[Dominic]

Yeah. Which I guess I don't love that. Yeah. But a bit Bland.

[Tabby]

Finally, though, they settle on the Wind in the Reeds, which is a reference to the pan chapter. You can see there how the pan thing is such a big part of this. But Graham. Yeah, and then this is what's used in adverts and stuff like that. But then Methuen decide it's too similar to the W.B. yeats poem the Wind among the Reeds, so they amend to the alliterative the Wind in the Willows. Which does sound good.

[Dominic]

Well, we're used to it though, now, aren't we?

[Tabby]

Yeah, I suppose. I suppose.

[Dominic]

I think we're just so used to it being called the Wind in the Willows that it never occurs to us to question.

[Tabby]

It's very silvery, though. I like it.

[Dominic]

Well, I think the alliterative side of it is really important. It just trips. It does trip off the tongue. Anyway, so it comes out 1908 and guess what? It's a damp squib. Like people are just completely baffled by it. And sometimes whenever you go online and you see. You know when people do like the top 10 worst reviews, most misguided reviews in literary history, the Wind in the Willows is often one of them. Because there was this hilarious review in the Times Literary Supplement which said, as a contribution to natural history, the world work is negligible. I mean, how you could read this thinking it was meant to be a natural history book.

[Tabby]

This is insane. Yeah.

[Dominic]

And the guy who wrote the review said, this book is mad. A water. A water rat doesn't use a boat to cross the stream. Why would a water rat need a boat? Makes no sense. Quote, no doubt moles like their abodes to be clean, but whitewashing? Are we very stupid or is this joke really inferior? So this is the most literal minded reviewer in the world. His complaint is moles don't paint their burrows.

[Tabby]

The imagination of a milk jug and the wit of a. Yeah, exactly.

[Dominic]

Driving a car. That's not possible.

[Tabby]

I know.

[Dominic]

And actually the review goes on to say it's a book with hardly a smile in it.

[Tabby]

Ironically.

[Dominic]

Yeah. Through which we wander in a haze of perplexity, uninterested by the story itself and at a loss to understand this dispute deeper purpose. And then the writer does say something which I think is not unreasonable. The puzzle is, for whom is the book intended? Grown up readers will find it monotonous and elusive. Children will hope in vain for more fun. Now, maybe we can talk about this a tiny bit more after the break. But the reviewer is not wrong there. This is a very strange book. Because it is way above most children's reading level.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic]

But obviously it's a story about animals dressing up in human clothes.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic]

And so not a book for adults, as in, if you're 30, you're not going to read this book. I don't know.

[Tabby]

I enjoyed it, but yeah, of course

[Dominic]

we're reading it in the knowledge that it's a classic. The first readers would be like, who is this for? I'm completely baffled by this.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic]

But anyway, the mad thing is it starts to become a success through word of mouth, doesn't it? So people clearly like it does speak to somebody.

[Tabby]

Publishers dream.

[Dominic]

Yeah.

[Tabby]

It's just a success in America because our old friend President Theodore Roosevelt massively champions it. He tells Kenneth Graham, I have read it and reread it and have come to accept the characters as old friends. And I am almost more fond of it than your previous books. And I get what he means there. I like what he says about them being old friends, because that's how it does come to feel. And it's reprinted every year for the next two decades, sometimes twice a year. And then in 1929, there's a real turning point because it's adapted for the stage by A.A. milne in Toad of Toad Hall. And this is the guy that wrote Winnie the Pooh. So it must have been an inspiration slightly on the Winnie the Pooh stories, which obviously similar thing, slightly anthropomorphized animals.

[Dominic]

And what they do in Turtle Toe Tall is they take out all the

[Tabby]

stuff, the ethereal stuff. Yeah.

[Dominic]

They really slim it down. So it focuses on the adventure story, as it were, and on the banter and the japes and all of that kind of thing, and they take them on mystical stuff and they just ditch

[Tabby]

that completely so it's more accessible. And then it becomes a Christmas pantomime standard. And then there's a Disney version in 1949 that is the backstory for the book. But we haven't actually delved into the book itself, which we will do after the break. And we'll also be digging into how the story reflects Kenneth Graham's childhood unhappiness, his miserable marriage and the. You know, is it. We'll be exploring, is it an allegory for Edwardian class politics or something darker? And then the ultimate question at the heart of this episode, are you, Dominic, Mole, Rat, Badger or Toad? And what am I? And actually, the other big question, why does Toad have hair? That's what really perplexes me. Anyway, all this after the break. Welcome back to the book club. And before the break, we promised that we'd be delving into the Wind in the Willows itself. So Kenneth Graham, writing to thank President Theodore Roosevelt for his kind words about the Wind in the Willows in 1909, said, it was a book with no problems, no sex, no second meaning. It is only an expression of the very simplest joys of life. And they are, I think, very kind of English joys. There's a great deal of kind of sardine action. But it's all very simple, basically, is what he's saying. There's no deeper meaning. And he is definitely right about kind of the lack of sex in it and, you know, the absence of women or complications or anything, anything like that. But the question is, is he right? You know, is he being honest? Is there really nothing going on beneath the surface?

[Dominic]

I don't think he is right, Tabby. Otherwise, it would be a very short podcast, or at least short by our standards.

[Tabby]

That would be great, to be honest. Let's just wrap it.

[Dominic]

Never gonna happen. Never gonna happen. Come on. So, first of all, the world of the book. So the world of the book is a very Edwardian escapist fantasy. So this is an age, you know, they think the 1890s, 1900s, 1910s. It's an age when writers and artists are in constant revolt against what they see as kind of industrial, urban modernity. So for more than a generation, kind of going back to the pre Raphaelites and John Ruskin and stuff, people have idealized the kind of pastoral English landscape, the natural world, all of this. It's an escape from the horrors of the city and from factories, and there's sort of. There's been a huge cult in England of nature writing.

[Tabby]

And this is a.

[Dominic]

This is a perfect example of that. I. I would say. So the first chapter, you know, when Mole comes out of his hole, you know, I was really struck when I was reading it to. To Arthur, to my son, years ago. It's beautiful writing, actually. You know, he comes out and he says it all seemed to be 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, progressive and occupied. And there's this sort of sense of. That this is. The riverbank is paradise. It's untouched by the Industrial Revolution or any of these kinds of things. It's just this kind of arcadia that people have been dreaming of for the last few decades in England. And that those first readers in 1908, they would have recognized this and they would have said, gosh, this is, you know, it's a bit like even as late as, you know, we did 1984 and we did that thing about Winston Smith and Julia escaping to the countryside, and there's kind of dappled glades and all of that kind of thing. I mean, that's a sort of late example of that, I think this. This same tendency to basically have a really romantic fantasy of this sort of early 20th century countryside. It's often produced by people like Kenneth Graham who live in the suburbs, who live in the city. They see the countryside as a place you escape to, a sort of refuge from the modern world, I suppose.

[Tabby]

Yeah, definitely.

[Dominic]

So you've got that and then you have the talking animals as characters.

[Tabby]

That's probably, you know, for the. For the late Victorian Edwardian audiences reading this book, that's probably slightly less standard. Even if we're used to it now,

[Dominic]

would you say it is less standard? I know you don't like it. You don't like talking animals, do you? Which I find mad.

[Tabby]

I can see the cosiness of it. I just can't get invested. Although this time I did anyway.

[Dominic]

I mean, we mentioned Beatrix Potter, so people have started to get used to it. With Beatrix Potter from 1902, we know that Kenneth Graham read Beatrix Potter's stories to mouse, but the appeal of the animals, I think, to him is that he can. I mean, he's very blunt about it with it. When he's writing about this book, he says, I use the animals because I wanted the book to. Well, first of all, no parents. There's no mother figure, there is no teacher, there is no authority figure. There's nothing about school or about work or anything like that. You can completely get away from that. And it can be a childlike fantasy. But Kenneth Graham explicitly said it by simply using the animal. I wanted to get away at once from weary sex problems and other problems and just do jolly things without being suspected of preaching or teaching. Now, this is twice now that he has mentioned about the sex, getting away from sex. You can see that he has no shame about saying to people, I think sex is a terrible thing and we should avoid it at all costs.

[Tabby]

And also, this is a man who is just desperate to kind of spend his time, you know, at the pub with the lads. I don't know, these days, watching the football or whatever it may be. He wants to be in that kind of carefree ecosystem. He doesn't want the pressures of, you know, family, woman, marriage, all those things. He's completely that childlike thing again.

[Dominic]

I think he's completely the person in your kind of friendship group who, when everybody starts coupling up with. They start when girls are introduced or women.

[Tabby]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dominic]

He's really depressed because he thinks, gosh, the band is being broken up. These terrible people, these women have invaded it and messed up for everybody.

[Tabby]

There's no one to fight a Budapest with anymore.

[Dominic]

Right. Exactly. Exactly. That's very much his thing. Basically, he wants to be on the river, rowing with his mates.

[Tabby]

I mean, obviously, the first reviewers found all this very weird, and I think that's something we kind of now overlook because the world building, how mad and kind of inconsistent it is. And they pulled this out. And obviously the Wind in the Willows is such a accepted part of kind of literary culture that no one thinks of it, but. So the animals are at once animals and people. They change size accordingly. So when Toad drives, he has no trouble kind of reaching the pedals or anything?

[Dominic]

No, he's human size, clearly.

[Tabby]

Yeah. When he impersonates a washerwoman, no one looks him and says, you're green and you're a toad. They take it totally for granted.

[Dominic]

Yes.

[Tabby]

He's basically a human being. And I think he's actually the most human of all the animals in many ways, because he lives in a massive hall above the ground, whereas at least Mole and Ratty or whatever live in. Yeah. Lives in the borough, whereas he lives in kind of a towered mansion. That, you know, what's the relationship here between the humans and the animals? You know, when they bring up Toad in court, are they like, this is an animal? Or are they like, he's a citizen like any of the. Any other.

[Dominic]

Badger says at one point, you'll give me some very bad name among the humans.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic]

And we want to kind of stay out of the way of the humans. We keep ourselves to ourselves, but they're kind of living alongside the humans. And what's also really weird is there are some animals who are very clearly animals. So. Like this horse who pulls the caravan.

[Tabby]

Yeah. What's the social hierarchy there? You know, is he a serf? Is he an equal? Stuff like this. The other thing is we find hedgehogs having porridge and fried ham for breakfast. Hedgehogs eating pigs.

[Dominic]

They have. I know. Fred Shogs eating pigs.

[Tabby]

Are we dealing with cannibals here? Has all morality. Totally.

[Dominic]

You know, being thrown out the window in his burrow. Badger has eggs. He has hams.

[Tabby]

Hams again. Badger living underground, eating pig. So sinister.

[Dominic]

Rat in his picnic.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic]

He has, you know, when he does the huge list of everything he has that includes cold chicken, cold tongue, cold ham, cold beef. So the rat is eating beef.

[Tabby]

Yeah. Are they eating their friends? You know, what's going on here? Some of them have disturbing.

[Dominic]

It is disturbing also.

[Tabby]

Some of them, some of them wear clothes and some don't. So is this like a particularly open minded society? Do they wear.

[Dominic]

Toad wears his tweed.

[Tabby]

Toad wears his tweed.

[Dominic]

The horse isn't wearing clothes.

[Tabby]

Yeah, well, the horse has tack. So what's up with that? Is that like, you know, is he a repressed creature? The otter is always naked. Bit odd. Some of them hibernate as well.

[Dominic]

Yes.

[Tabby]

So that's an animalistic feature that's come through very confusing. But most chillingly of all, towards the end of the book, Toad is described as combing his hair.

[Dominic]

He parts his hair, doesn't he? So Toad. There are a couple of mentions in the book of Toad's hair.

[Tabby]

Like is it a toupee, is it a wig?

[Dominic]

The illustrator doesn't lean into that, I think wisely.

[Tabby]

No, no, that's actually so true.

[Dominic]

And even the ITV series, what you mock as the fluffy puppet series, they don't have. They don't give either. But the thing is, you see a child when they read that, they just take it all for granted. They don't. It doesn't occur to them for a minute this wouldn't work or it wouldn't. It's a bit like, you know, bilbo Baggins has coffee. Where's the coffee from?

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic]

No one says, come on. I mean, maybe an adult does in a very pedantic way, but nobody, I don't think people. This is why the wrong people were reviewing the Wind of the Willows. Because they were taking it. Yeah. They thought it was a work of natural history.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic]

Obviously isn't. Now the other things that are a bit inconsistent and that a modern publisher would surely hate. Kenneth Graham can't make up his mind who the hero is. So when the book starts, you know, we see it through moles eyes. Mold is us, really. Mold is the child particularly, you know, he's vulnerable and he's nervous and all of that. We'll come on to the characters a little bit later. But halfway through the book, it's as though Kenneth Graham has lost interest and he's decided that Toad is actually the hero. I know because we follow Toad completely. And rats. I know you like rat. But Rat is off stage for huge chunks of the book, I guess.

[Tabby]

Yeah, but they're all off stage for sections of the book.

[Dominic]

Sections, except for in the second half where Toad really dominates.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic]

And then the other thing is that Kenneth Graham clearly hasn't really worked out who the book is for because he wrote a blurb for the publisher and he said it is perhaps chiefly for youth. And that's so vague and evasive, like perhaps chiefly. Come on, make your mind up.

[Tabby]

Because I guess when you're telling these stories to a child, you know, when he was reading them to Mouse, the. The kind of sophistication of the language wouldn't necessarily be there, so it just would straightforwardly be for children. For a child. But then you write it down and it's. He adds those two slightly strange ethereal chapters and the writing is so sophisticated

[Dominic]

so far, he loses track, I guess. Well, yeah, I mean, this is the second paragraph. I looked at the first page. This is the second paragraph of the whole book. The sunshine struck hot on his fur, soft breezes caressed his heated brow. And after the seclusion of the cellarage he had lived in so long, the carol of happy birds fell on his dulled hearing almost like a shout jumping off his four legs all at once in the joy of living, in the delight of spring. Without his cleaning, he pursued his way across the meadow till he reached the hedge on the further side. I mean, it is lovely writing.

[Tabby]

It's lovely writing.

[Dominic]

It's really nice writing. It's. It's obviously mad to think that a six or seven year old or eight year old, which at the ages where you would read a book, talking animals, that they would be capable of reading that.

[Tabby]

Yeah. Compare this to the writing in the Chronicles of Narnia, for instance, or Harry Potter. She was so panned, like. Well, we actually compared this to Harry Potter, didn't we?

[Dominic]

Yeah, it's, it's, it's way more complex. It's so much more sophisticated. I suppose the counter argument would be. I did read this when I was a small child and what I must have done, even though I don't really remember doing it, is what all children do, which is just to skip the bits that you don't, the words that you don't get, or do your eyes just slightly glaze over those bits and you move on quite quickly. I think children, Children read in ways that we don't, that we lose touch with when we're adults. They actually. So much of what they read is new to them. You know, there are so many words they don't know. They don't find it weird that the word caressed or cellarage or seclusion are there in a book about talking animals. Because they're like, yeah, of course there's going to be words we don't know.

[Tabby]

You take it for granted, don't you? And I suppose you just take the imagery away with you, the animals. Because I think that's the thing, the lasting appeal of this book, it's clearly down not just to the escapist world, but I think specifically the characters. So, as we've said, Toad is a jokey portrayal of Alistair, and most critics agree that the other three. So Moll, Rat and Badger are all different aspects of Kenneth Graham's own self image. They're versions of himself, the versions that he'd like to be, but they're also the different sides of English society and national character. And I think also human nature. Because isn't this a. This is a famous thing, isn't it that. Well, traditionally, it was. Every Englishman is one of those characters that is, you know, that's telling because he's, you know, whatever class he's from, whatever way he leans. But I think it's true of anyone. I think. I think everyone is made up of all these characters.

[Dominic]

You can go through your own friends and people. You know, you could go through the goal hanger office and say, are you a mole, a rat, a toad?

[Tabby]

Full of wild wooders, just endless.

[Dominic]

I mean, there's a lot of toads, let's be honest. So if we start with molecular. So Mole is the character we begin with. I think he's a brilliant way to introduce children to this world because we're emerging from darkness into daylight. He's kind of blinking and trying to make sense of the world. He's shy, he's anxious, as children are. He's modest, he's nervous. In his. In sort of class terms, Mole is very middle class.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic]

He has all the anxieties of the kind of respectable, you know, he wants to be respectable, he wants to do the right thing. And there's a sort of suburban side to him. So later on, when we go back to his burrow, it's described as having these. This decorations of plaster statuary. He's got a statue of Garibaldi, he's got a statue of some biblical characters. He's got a statue of heroes of Italian Unification, bizarrely, I know, so strange of Queen Victoria. And I think the joke here is that these are the kind of things you would have got in Kind of mass produced stores in the 1900s. So there were perhaps a little bit suburban, a little bit gauche starting off. Yeah. A bit naff. So this is a joke, I think, for the parents rather than from the children. And. And Mole. You know, the heart of Mole's character is the tension between wanting to go up and explore the world. So adventure, all of that, and then wanting to go back, you know, his love of home. And there's a chapter called Dolce Domum.

[Tabby]

It's my favorite chapter.

[Dominic]

Is it?

[Tabby]

Yeah. So I was very touched by it.

[Dominic]

He's gone on this walk, hasn't he, or something, with Rat. And he smells his. His house and he starts crying and he wants to go back to it and he sort of sobs and sobs. He says to Rat, I know it's a shabby, dingy little place. It's not like your cosy quarters or Toad's beautiful hall or all this, but it was my own little home and I was fond of it. And I went away and I forgot all about it. But then I smelt it suddenly on the road. And he called out to Rat and Rat didn't hear him, just sat down and cried.

[Tabby]

Because that's, you know, when you were a child. I remember this when. Feeling really, really homesick, like my first ever sleepover or something, and calling out for my mum. And they're just not there.

[Dominic]

Yeah.

[Tabby]

And no one hears you and you just want to be elsewhere. So I think it's really moving.

[Dominic]

It is moving. And then at the end, you know, he sort of. He reaches a kind of state of equilibrium. He says he doesn't want to abandon the new life and its splendid spaces to turn his back on sun and air and all they offered him and all of this. But it was good to think that he had this to come back to this place which was all his own. These things which was so glad to see him again and could always be counted upon for the same simple welcome. I think that's really. I agree with you. I think it's really sweet and it's really. And it does express, you know, in this sort of childlike way, the tension within all of us between wanting to go out and have fun and to see the world and have adventures and then wants to come home and curl up in front of the fire.

[Tabby]

I think also, in a way, Mole is the most believable character because he's very fearful and vulnerable, but also he forces himself to kind of go beyond the boundaries of what he considers to be safe and comfortable. So In a way, he's actually the bravest because he confronts his fears every time. And he does this thing where at the end when they. They have to face these enemies that have taken over one of their houses, he dresses up as a woman. More drag. Dresses up as a woman and infiltrates this house of enemies and tricks them into being frightened and plays mind games with them. So hurrah for Mole.

[Dominic]

Yeah, he's great. Now, what about Rat?

[Tabby]

So then there's Rat. Yeah, he's the one I think. I do like Rat. He's the one I think everyone really wants to be.

[Dominic]

Right.

[Tabby]

So he's socially a cut above Mole. He has much more social ease, he's sociable, he has more friends and he's already pals with the local landowner. So this is Mr. Toad. And Mole is very differential to him. So for instance in the chapter that we just discussed, and he's more of an upper middle class gentleman of leisure, so he's messing around in boats. He has no financial or domestic cares or ties. He has a massive stockpile of weaponry.

[Dominic]

He does. And sandwiches.

[Tabby]

Bloody good shot. He has, you know, he has a vast picnic, lots of different meat and sandwiches. So eating more of his friends, ginger beer, soda water, he's very well off. But he's also a more complicated character because he's shrewd and he's practical. I actually think he's a bit of a fuss pot, endearingly. And he is a dreamer and an idealist. So his buried wanderlust surfaces in this chapter called In Wayfarers all. And we'll get onto more of this later. But in that you kind of see that he's torn between the two sides of his life as they all are torn. And he likes writing bad poetry and he's the first one to hear the music of the God Pan.

[Dominic]

Yes, he is.

[Tabby]

His relationship, spiritual side to him, definitely. And his relationship with Mole is one of the classic early 20th century fictional friendships. So it's very Holmes and Watson again, I guess. One is always taking the lead, one is slightly secondary following in his wake. And Humphrey Carpenter sees this Mole Rat friendship as a celebration of a cheerful bachelor like existence. And. And this is, you know, that shared by Kenneth Graham and his friends where they was messing around in boats and going on jaunts to foe and stuff like that.

[Dominic]

Exactly, exactly. And they're sort of the world of picnics and the world of all this.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic]

And there's a sort of understated. Well, it's very Holmes and Watson. So the moment When Rat first says to Mole, look here, I think you better come and stop with me for a little time and I'll say, teach you to row and all of this. And Mole is so touched he can't answer and he has to, we're told he had to brush away a tear or two with the back of his paw.

[Tabby]

It's ultimate romance.

[Dominic]

Yeah, that's. Well, that's very like when Dr. Watson realizes that Sherlock Holmes actually does like him and cares about him and he can't, he can barely speak, he's kind of choked up with emotion. I think it's a very kind of similar thing. So you've got these two mates and then the against them is set the jeopardy, the threat. And this is made explicit to Mole. Mole says to Rat, what's over there? And Rat says, it's the Wild Wood. You know, we don't go there very much, we river bankers. And the Wild Wood is inhabited by the weasels and the stoats and the ferrets. And lots of the critics have written about the wind of the Willows, think that the Wild Wood basically represents the proletariat, the working classes, social disorder, you know, that when Mole does go there and he does go for a walk and gets lost, it feels a bit like a sort of, you know, a man from the home counties, a well heeled man from the home count is

[Tabby]

going into the East End, wandering into Archway.

[Dominic]

Right.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic]

Well, I've been more thinking that kind of in the 1900s, if they went into the East End and they saw the sort of faces glaring at them from the rookeries and the slums or whatever, you know, that's the sort of Victoria, late Victorian, Edwardian nightmare, you know, that you'll be lost in this underworld. So the world would, could be that, it could be social. Humphrey Carpenter suggests the Wildwood might be the subconscious might be. I mean that's the thing that Kenneth Graham fears most of all is kind of sexuality, you know, maturity, sensuality, this kind of thing.

[Tabby]

His wife's domain.

[Dominic]

Exactly. His wife's domain. Something like that. But I think that scene we would, that, that moment when Mole gets lost in the Wildwood and then he, he finds his way to Badger's house. As a child, I loved that because there's something about being lost and then found that really speaks to you as a child and that sort of, that the, the, the coming into the kind of the warm hearth and having the tea when you've been freezing outside and terrified and sobbing in the snow.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic]

I mean when you're six or something, that happens to you all the time, basically. Your parents have dragged you on a walk or something.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic]

And then finally you get home and you're rewarded with a hot chocolate.

[Tabby]

Yeah. I'd always run away and hope to be found. So it's really. Yeah. And then. And also, when you. When you do make it home or whatever, there's always that, you know, safe parental guardian figure to make you feel like you're in the realm of safety again. And in this, that is Badger, who's the other major character of this story. And Carpenter calls him the still centre around which the book's various storms may rage. And he's scarcely touched by them. He's clearly a cut above them both socially. He's a kind of elderly, aristocratic gentleman from an old family and he knew Toad's father and all the other animals defer to him. And he's venerable and wise and well respected, but he's also gruff, shy, serious. He's a font of wisdom and common sense. And he has, I mean, massive natural authority. I mean, the opening reading that we did, that was him confronting Toad for his bad behavior. And he lives in this huge, rambling ancient house, or warren, and it's the great country house and its estate dominating the villages with literally ancient foundations.

[Dominic]

I mean, we don't need some master. We go into this. But even his kitchen is described explicitly as like an Anglo Saxon hall.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic]

So it seemed a place where heroes could fit the feast after victory, or weary harvesters could line up before that along the table. Blah, blah, blah, blah. There's a sense that Badger represents kind of English history and a kind of. I mean, he's. He's living among. Amid ruins. Right.

[Tabby]

And he's Old England.

[Dominic]

He completely is. And. And he, interestingly, is not in the more weird chapters because he wouldn't fit. He's too commonsensical, he's too gruff, he's too grounded, too sensible. So these two chapters are ones that, as a child, I always used to skip because I just thought they're so.

[Tabby]

Really?

[Dominic]

Yeah, Because I was interested in the Adventures of Toad.

[Tabby]

Yeah, I liked it.

[Dominic]

And. And actually they are cut from the theatrical adaptations. They are typically cut from the t. From the TV thing that you don't like. Madly. Yeah, they're not in that. So the first one is the Piper at the Gates of Dawn. This is Mole and Rats Go looking for this lost otter baby called Portly.

[Tabby]

Yeah. Sweet.

[Dominic]

It's beautiful kind of nature writing again.

[Tabby]

It is such beautiful writing.

[Dominic]

It really Is the moon at last? Over the rim of the waiting earth, the moon lifted with slow majesty till it swung clear of the horizon and rode off free of moorings and blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. They see the landscape lit up in the moonlight, then they hear this strange melody. Rat is described as wrapped, transported, trembling. He's literally entranced by this melody. He said, oh, Mole, the beauty of it. Row on, Mole, row. The music and the call must be for us. They keep rowing. Mole hears the music too. And then at the break of dawn, they see this God, Pan, you know, the sort of Greek or Roman God, and he's cradling the lost otter. And Pan is described in a very.

[Tabby]

Quite homoerotic, isn't he?

[Dominic]

Well, he's very kitsch, I think so. I mean, literally. He's got these kind of rippling muscles, shaggy limbs, and they kneel and they worship him. And I think this is the one bit of the book that's massively dated, because to the Edwardians. The Edwardians love the figure of Pan. They are fascinated by kind of paganism and by nature, gods and things. And, you know, Peter Pan, obviously named after Pan. And they were really into this sort of pagan mysticism as a rejection of the modern. Whereas to us, this just looks a bit bizarre. And I think most critics now, I mean, one calls it a ghastly error in taste, Another calls it an error of judgment on a grand scale.

[Tabby]

So I don't know, I. I actually quite liked it. I always like a little bit of an ethereal element.

[Dominic]

And it reminds me. Do you know what it reminds me of? Tom Bombadil.

[Tabby]

Yes. That's a great comparison, actually. Yeah. And I don't really like Tom Bombadil.

[Dominic]

It's like a mad chapter. You can't understand what it's doing there. And at the center is this sort of nature spirit who doesn't seem to belong in the rest of the world.

[Tabby]

I quite like it. I like that. You know, I think it's quite profound, the spell they come under and this sense of kind of an existential force governing their lives or whatever. I actually do, and I think the writing is so beautiful. But then there's a second odd chapter that doesn't quite fit in with the rest of the book. This is the one we mentioned earlier, Wayfarers all. And it dramatises the theme of escape and homecoming that has undoubtedly obsessed Kenneth Graham all his life. So in this, the rat is restless. He sees that the birds are migrating, that everyone's getting ready for the change of season. He tries to persuade the swallows not to go. And he feels a newborn need for travel and adventure and going beyond the Downs. And it's a massive change of kind of pace for a character that's otherwise very content in himself and his life. And he meets this Sea Rat and is thrilled by these stories that Sea Rat tells him about his journeys around the Mediterranean and his voyages and these glittering adventures. And he goes into this kind of trance and his eyes get glazed and set, and, you know, he's like one of Odysseus's mariners, seduced by the siren song. And he's gone home to pack up his bags and jump on the. The next boat out. Then he bumps into Mole, and Mole basically talks him down. Mole convinces him to stay at home and stay content about where he is, even though he says, you know, the shores, they are calling me. So Mole restrains him. And then. And then Rat, you know, this, you know, socially competent Englishman essentially breaks down in tears and he comforts. Comforts himself by writing poetry and has to console himself with the pleasures of home. So it's the usual tension, I guess it is.

[Dominic]

But on the other hand, I think there's also an element to me reading this, especially once I was aware of, like, Kenneth Graham's backstory. It's as though Rat is being tempted by growing up. You know, CS hated growing up as well, in the Chronicles of Narnia. So. So maybe the travel isn't just like travel around the ports of the Mediterranean. Maybe the travel represents, you know, Rat is being tempted by leaving behind their childhood world.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic]

And going to the big. The big world out there with its women and its relationships and all of this. And basically, Mole says, don't go, Rat. You know, stay here with me and our friends. And. And actually, what Rat literally does is he returns to the world of the imagination, because he's right, as you said, he writes poetry and he returns to molecular. And it's a sort of. I think this is yet another reminder of just how much Kenneth Graham really hated his wife.

[Tabby]

It's all about that dreadful wife.

[Dominic]

It's basic. It's basically what Kenneth Graham wishes he had done. I wish I hadn't been persuaded by this awful woman to marry her and to, you know, go to bed with her and whatever. That was the worst decision I ever made. I should have stayed with my friends messing around in boats.

[Tabby]

Because this is an idealized version of life, isn't it, really, that he's writing in the way.

[Dominic]

Completely with. And with. And tellingly, with no Women in it.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic]

At all. So we already said there are no female animals. So the otter cub who gets lost, it's his father who's looking for him, not his mother. Mother never mentioned at all. So even among the humans, the only women you see are the. There's a jailer's daughter and there's a comic barge woman. And they're just mad.

[Tabby]

They're cartoons really, aren't they? Yeah.

[Dominic]

No hint that you could ever meet a woman animal in this book.

[Tabby]

No, no way. Unless it's a man animal dressed up as a woman, that's the closest you're gonna come.

[Dominic]

Which brings us very neatly to most people's favorite character, doesn't it?

[Tabby]

So definitely the best known. So this is Mr. Toad, and he's tremendous fun. I think the book absolutely comes alive whenever he's. He's in it, whenever he enters the narrative. And even for those who have never read the Wind of the Willows or even barely aware of it, he's definitely familiar the kind of character he is. And his personality is definitely familiar. He's boastful, untrustworthy, greedy, self promoting, but also jolly, enthusiastic, brave and ultimately good hearted. He's such fun. So a few Toad kind of points. He has a very ambiguous class position because he's the lord of the manor. And we know that his father was mates with Badger, who's kind of classic old money, respectable old money, you know, an aristocrat. And that Toad hall has been in their family for at least one generation before. But then he constantly acts in a very nouveau riche manner. So he wears loud suits. He is boastful and showy. He's always talking about how much money he has. He's obsessed with bling and the latest fads and gadgets, particularly cars.

[Dominic]

Yes.

[Tabby]

So I know. The question is, is he perhaps the son of a rich self made businessman or something like that? You know, the not so early a generation of money that he is literally nouveau. But he's still not old money.

[Dominic]

Yes, I agree. I agree completely. I think Toad, it's. There's a sense that he doesn't quite know how to behave and that he's

[Tabby]

behaving badly like that boy that's the clown of the class. Because he's a bit insecure.

[Dominic]

Yes. Oh, completely. That's what Toad is. Is Toad insecure? I don't know. I mean, he wants to sing songs and stuff about how brilliant he is.

[Tabby]

Yes, always.

[Dominic]

Which suggests a kind of insecurity. And yet he doesn't seem troubled by excessive Self doubt does he really doesn't. I mean, I think he's a very, very familiar literary type. Actually, I think he's full staff.

[Tabby]

Yes.

[Dominic]

From. From the Henry iv, part one and two. So as like Falstaff, Toad is a liar, he's a cheat, he's a braggart, he's a thief. But we forgive him because he's ultimately generous and kind and he's funny. He's really funny and he's great. He's irrepressible and there's a sort of good natured naughtiness to him. There's another character, I mean, a character that, you know, that I love, which is Billy Bunter, who is often called the schoolboy for Falstaff, who was in boarding school stories at the time. Edwardian again, you know, a thief, a liar, greedy, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But he's the hero and people like him.

[Tabby]

It's like horrid Henry. At the end of the book, at the end of those stories, he always has a moment of kind of redemption and atonement, but he does terrible things along the way.

[Dominic]

Yeah. So Toad is also. I mean, he's also obviously an addict, isn't he?

[Tabby]

Yeah. So there's that hilarious bit when his friends. It's like from the opening bit when. When they. They sort of have a come to God moment with him and they lock him in his room and he pulls all the chairs together to make a sort of car and he's going like this. So it's like an addict, like reaching for the bottle or something. He starts shaking and quivering. He has the different stages of addiction and he's.

[Dominic]

And I think if you were being very sort of deep about it. And he is pure id. His pure desire and impulse and self indulgence. So Otter says of him that when he goes boating, he has no stability and. And he has no stability generally. He's addicted to whatever the latest fad is.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic]

Whatever his latest enthusiasm is. So he was addicted to caravanning, then to cars and whatnot. He has no discipline. And I think each of. I mean, we will get on to talk about which characters we most resemble, but there is definitely a bit of. I mean, surely all human beings have a Mr. Toad.

[Tabby]

Oh, yeah. When we get towards the end of our. Of our evenings, when we have scheduling meetings or whatever with Nicole or everyone. I am pure Toad.

[Dominic]

Exactly. What do you think you are at the beginning, Tabby? I mean, come on, you're deluding yourself.

[Tabby]

The venerable Mr. Badger.

[Dominic]

So, yeah, the other thing about Toad, he is I know you like this bit. He is Odysseus, honestly.

[Tabby]

Cunning, quicksilver odysseus and then Mr. Toad. I just. It doesn't sit well with me. I do get it. Of course I get it. I get it. In terms of, you know, the story of the second half is clearly modelled on the Odyssey without, you know, Penelope and Telemachus, the family element, the sex, so to speak, but you know, the different episodes of his journey home. So his escape from prison, overcoming a series of trials and then returning home to find his house occupied by weasels, which is obviously the suitors from the Odyssey.

[Dominic]

Yeah. So. And the other thing about this. So on the one hand it's at the Odyssey, but on the other hand there is a kind of political dimension to it because I think when you think about the occupation of Toad hall, you don't think initially about Penelope's house occupied by the suitors from the Odyssey.

[Tabby]

No.

[Dominic]

What, what it's like, what it's obviously modeled on is something like the French Revolution where all the people have broken into the house, the sans culottes have broken in and they're helping themselves to the aristocrats wine cellar and all that. Which is precisely what the weasels and go. They're having a banquet, aren't they?

[Tabby]

When it's that invasion fantasy, isn't it?

[Dominic]

It is, it's exactly. It's the. It's the sort of. It's the worst thing that could possibly happen to you if you've got money, you know that basically the lower orders will break in and they'll steal your stuff and all of that. I mean, this is the fantasy, the nightmare that haunted the Edwardian imagination in an age of like trade unions and the birth of the Labour Party and anarchism and socialism and all of this. Yeah. For a lot of the people who probably bought the Wind in the Willows, this was their nightmare, that one day the working classes would kind of break in and steal all their stuff. And I think readers in 1908 would have sort of spoken to them maybe in a way it doesn't speak to us. Badger says to Toad, this is all your fault. Because Badger said to Toad, yeah. You were letting the side down with your self indulgent behavior. You know, you're giving animal, us animals a bad name. You're exposing us to danger, you're weakening our defenses, you're making us vulnerable to riot and revolution. And that's. And so because of that, when the animals, when mole and rat and whatnot, they reclaim Toad hall. This is a massive victory for the status quo, for. Yeah, conservatism. So, I mean, I didn't, you know, I didn't spot any of this when I was a child. You know, I loved the bit when they're in the tunnel and they're making their way through the tunnel. Toad is like. What's he doing? Is, like dropping his stuff, falling.

[Tabby]

I found it a bit comical, actually. You know, Badger sending Toad, you know, to the back and then sending him to the front because he can't be trusted. It reminded me more of kind of a crocodile of school children visit. Visiting the British Museum or something.

[Dominic]

That's completely what it is, though. At the same time that Toad is behaving like. They think they're a war band, but Toad is behaving like the naughty child on the school trip.

[Tabby]

But then also rats, mental arsenal of weapons. He's a secret arms dealer.

[Dominic]

I think it's really cleverly done, though, because basically, kids love weapons, but there's that. Basically they do.

[Tabby]

I loved weapons as a child. I had like a bow and arrow. Couldn't get enough of it, of course.

[Dominic]

I mean, we used to have so many swords. It was a beyond belief.

[Tabby]

Yeah. Smuggled into the country from around the world.

[Dominic]

Exactly, yeah. Don't say that. I don't want to have flipping the customs people come around to reclaim all Arthur's stuff. Anyway, when the animals do break in and they're, like, firing their pistols and waving their cuts, I mean, no one gets hurt. It's like the A team. No one gets. There's no blood. There's no. They do bash weasels on the head with cudgels and things, but that's fine. Like, it kind of.

[Tabby]

The melee of. It kind of reminded me of, so this wonderful Paddington books. Whenever Paddington cooks or does something like that, it's always this mad melee of paws and marmalade and flying pants and stuff. It's never really clear what's going on, but it's wonderful.

[Dominic]

It's very like that. Exactly, exactly. So, anyway, so there's that element of it, which is a bit of a daily tale of our fantasy, but then the other. The other thing, I think when you get to the end of the book, it's not just the Wild Wooders, the insurgents who, as it were, who've been defeated, but actually Toad himself is defeated, isn't he? Yeah, because he's basically fallen back into the clutches of the animals who wanted to tame him and make him behave himself. Toad really has tried to escape. Toad has tried to go off drive his car while other people's cars actually behave badly. All of this. But the book ends with him put back in his box. He's had to give up his cars, he's had to give up his thumb. He's not even allowed to give a kind of speech about himself. His own victory speech at his own victory banquet. Rather, Badger has won, like, Badger has tamed him and defeated him. And actually, that's true of all the animals wrapped. Gladstone has won. Exactly. I mean it. Actually. Badger has got a very Gladstone. Rat didn't go abroad. Toad didn't get. Get his car. It's like they'll never grow up, they'll never develop.

[Tabby]

None of them has a girlfriend.

[Dominic]

No. Well, they didn't want girlfriends there today.

[Tabby]

No girlfriends. They didn't want girlfriends.

[Dominic]

Rat would be the first to get a girlfriend.

[Tabby]

He would. He. He would. I actually, I think, yeah.

[Dominic]

You think Rat would be a good boyfriend.

[Tabby]

I don't think Mole. I don't think Mole would stand a chance, I have to say.

[Dominic]

Mole's one of these people who. Someone would say he'd be a nice husband, but not a boyfriend. So before we give our final verdicts in the book, we should just tie up, actually, what happened to Kenneth Graham, because actually, that's not an Adita Mouse, because that really is not a happy story, is it?

[Tabby]

No, it's really not. So Graham had lost his job, his job at the bank of England, just before the book was published, Possibly because he fell out with his boss, possibly because he was so distracted by the writing. And he's well off, but he seems lonely and sad, possibly without purpose. And, you know, now, I guess there's no distraction like this. He has to spend all of his time at home with his wife that he dislikes. So Matthew Dennison says for hours he walked, often he was alone in the silence of his own thoughts. His days were overwhelmingly empty. And what happens to Mouse is a genuinely very, very sad story. So he's sent to rugby. He doesn't fit in. And he leaves after six weeks. Friends suggest that he's homeschooled, but his mother insists that he go to Eton. That also doesn't work out. He doesn't fit in. And so eventually he has a. A breakdown of some kind and he ends up being homeschooled. They get him into Oxford somehow, but he seems to have been very unhappy there too. Perhaps crushed by the parental expectations, you know, of his mother having been told all his life that he was something special. Then you go out into the world and people tell you you're not nasty shock, I guess. He fails exams, he doesn't make any friends. And then his body is found on a railway line one morning in May, in 1920, and he's killed by a train. And it's almost certainly suicide, which is obviously genuinely, really, really sad.

[Dominic]

And his parents react to that. And they're classic Kenneth Graham way, don't they? They run away, they. They sort of seek escape. They go to Italy and then they have this sort of very, very Matthew Dennis, I think, calls it a recessional, basically a kind of dying fool. They just don't do anything. Kenneth Graham spends all this time going for walks on his own. And Elspeth, she's now. What did the Gillian Avery call her? Kind of eccentric, shabby, slovenly figure.

[Tabby]

Eccentric, shabby and slovenly, yeah.

[Dominic]

And he dies. Kenneth Graham died of a stroke in 1932 and he lost. Left all his royalties to the Bodleian Library in Oxford because obviously he didn't have an heir because Maus taking his own life. So there's the kind of sadness, actually,

[Tabby]

that I think that is so, so dreadfully sad.

[Dominic]

And you don't. I don't know. Is there a melancholy in the wind and the willows? I mean, actually, I think.

[Tabby]

I think there is. I think there is real melancholy. I don't think it's, you know, the melancholy of a. Obviously at this stage of a man mourning his son or mourning his life or anything like that, but I think you get this sense. Or maybe it's because I'm reading it from the perspective of, you know, the present, but I get the sense throughout that. So a little bit like in Narnia, how the children are always going to have to go back. I get the sense that this is the. It's a dwindling age. This is. This is a world that can't endure for long. And that. It's like. It's.

[Dominic]

The motor cars will come and rip it all up.

[Tabby]

Yeah, it's at the height of every season. Every season is perfect. And, yeah, the engines are coming, the motor cars are coming. And, you know, is it. Are the. Are the humans coming? Is the law coming, whatever it may be? And I think. I think there is a melancholy in that. And whenever they have these surreal, strange chapters, I think those are sad, too. When they're longing for something greater.

[Dominic]

There is a longing. Definitely. There's a definitely. There's definitely. There is a longing. Anyway, our verdict's in the book. And you know what? We haven't Agreed. What we're going to rank it in. So have you got something in mind? Oh, and poop. Poops. Brilliant. God almighty. Okay, we're going to rank it and poop. Boops. Out of 10.

[Tabby]

I.

[Dominic]

So first of all, like, this is clearly a book that has lasted and books last for a reason. It shouldn't work. You know, the world building is mad, the tone is very inconsistent, but it's incredibly charming. I think it's really funny. I think there is something in all the characters for us to, to love. And I think actually Kenneth Graham in the characters express something. You know, it's something quite profound about the human condition and about the. About human nature. I think it is beautifully written at times far in advance of most children's book. I mean almost any other children's book actually. I loved it when I was a child. I loved rereading it and I would give it a 10 out of 10.

[Tabby]

Wow. Oh, that's touching. I, I agree that I think it, I genuinely think it, it does express something profound about the different facets of human nature. I think that as Roosevelt said, they do kind of become your friends, these characters. And even though not a great deal happens, you know, the stakes aren't that high. You're in this childhood fantasy. I was so invested in everything that went on and I found bits of it very moving. For instance, when Otter is looking for his baby son and he's sitting on the bank waiting for him to come home and, and moles, homesickness and toad's occasional contrition. All this rat's wanderlust. The writing is just beautiful. I mean, far and away above any children's book I've ever read. It's still not one of my favorite books, so I'd give it an 8 out of 10.

[Dominic]

8 out of 10. Tabby.

[Tabby]

That's pretty high.

[Dominic]

I think that's harsh.

[Tabby]

It's even higher than a court of thorns and roses. Yeah, I think animal action in that as well.

[Dominic]

Have I ranked this literally twice as high as east of Eden? Right. This is madness. Which characters are we? That's the question.

[Tabby]

Okay, so I'm going to do yours first. Are you so naturally.

[Dominic]

Yeah, go on.

[Tabby]

No. So I know what's coming. You have all of them in you. You're a cross dressing toad. No, of course. We all do. Because, you know, you especially because you have the kind of wanderlust and the sociability of ratty Toad's love of fine clothes. You live in a manor house.

[Dominic]

Like just be clear to the Listeners, I do not live in a manor house.

[Tabby]

He has a bombastic side. So do you. But you also, you're a history badger. And you, you know, you know a lot, so there's something of badger in you. I think you're Lassemol, possibly Les Mole. Yeah, I think so.

[Dominic]

Interesting.

[Tabby]

But I think, I think if you had to be one, da da da, I think you'd be. I think you'd be ratty, actually.

[Dominic]

Oh, Tabby, that's, that's what I want

[Tabby]

you to stockpile armaments to sell on the black market. No, I, I genuinely think so. I think because you're very sociable, you're, you're organized, you're confident and you're, you're pretty, you know, pretty decent, really. And you also have a passion for boating, so thanks. Wow.

[Dominic]

I mean, this is great for my ego, by the way. We should do this more often. So. Actually the funny thing is I thought I'd like to be rat, but I am. I know that. I Mr. Toad, so that's really interesting.

[Tabby]

Oh, my God, that is so self knowing. The rest is therapy.

[Dominic]

I've got a massive Mr. Toad side to me, I think. So I have you down as I think you very much present, as it were, to use the jargon, as rat.

[Tabby]

Nice. Sweet.

[Dominic]

I think, very much. I think, I think you definitely think of yourself as rats.

[Tabby]

I so do.

[Dominic]

And you, you really, you know, the fun loving, sociable. Yeah. Always sort of boasting about how you've been out on the town and how many parties you've been totally popular. However, anybody who works with you soon discovers that actually this is only skin deep, as it were, or like fur deep. Because what you've not been boasting about when you've been claiming, oh, I've been out parties and I've got a massive hangover and blah, blah, blah, blah, is that actually secretly you've probably come back home from the party and have been like working really late or something and like reading mad stuff about Eleanor of Aquitaine or whatever.

[Tabby]

I believe you're exposing me like this.

[Dominic]

Right, so it's a classic. It's like actually a very modern thing. It's like the difference between someone's Instagram manicured image and the reality. I think there is definitely a rat element to you, but I think you have a very, very pronounced inner mold.

[Tabby]

I don't know. I actually think that could be fair. And, you know, yeah, mole's a great guy.

[Dominic]

All right, so I'll just give you a sense of what's Coming up. So next week is Giuseppe Tomasi deland produces the Leopard, a very different book. A brilliant book, I have to say. Arguably the greatest historic, some people say the greatest historical novel ever written. Certainly one of the most reflective. Then we have your choice, Tabby. Madeline Miller's Cersei. Yeah, you love this book.

[Tabby]

So back to the Odyssey, because we're doing this sort of as the of part. Sort of like an Odyssey special for the. For the movie, when that comes out.

[Dominic]

Then we have John Buchan, the 39 Steps. We have Elena Ferrante, my brilliant friend, by popular demand.

[Tabby]

Yeah. And our producer, Nicole is one of

[Dominic]

her favorites, one of her favorite books. Then we have Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, again by popular demand. Lots of people have been saying, please do some Hemingway. Including you, Tabby, actually.

[Tabby]

Yeah.

[Dominic]

So we're doing For Whom the Bell Tolls.

[Tabby]

So lots to look forward to.

[Dominic]

Loads to look forward to. All right, great to see you, Molly.

[Tabby]

Thanks, Toad.

[Dominic]

Bye, everybody.

[Tabby]

Bye. Stitch Fix. Stop shopping. Get styled. A plus on the outfit. Ms. Turner, you are about to slay parent teacher conferences.

[Dominic]

Oh, these just the most perfect fitting jeans my stylist sent me. Oh, hello, you who didn't set one foot in a mall and still looks amazing.

[Tabby]

Just share your size, style and budget. And your stylist sends personalized looks right to your door. Stitch Fix, get started today@stitch fix.com to my stylist, this look is dedicated to you. Thank you. Thank you.