Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows: A Children's Classic at 100 (review)

I doubt if it's the done thing to quote oneself, especially in a review, but just to clarify where I stand on The Wind in the Willows, here are a few points from the introduction to my new annotated edition in Oxford University Press World's Classics (July 2010):

The Wind in the Willows may be the greatest case of mistaken identity in literature: it is commonly accepted as an animal story for children—despite being neither an animal story, nor for children. … Arnold Bennett, reviewing it in The New Age (24 October 1908) observed, presciently: "the book is fairly certain to be misunderstood of the people … The author may call his chief characters the Rat, the Mole, the Toad,—they are human beings, and they are meant to be nothing but human beings … The book is an urbane exercise in irony at the expense of the English character and of mankind. It is entirely successful … and no more to be comprehended by youth than 'The Golden Age' was to be comprehended by youth." Not surprisingly, The Wind in the Willows does not fit comfortably into the history of children's literature, if at all …

And so it is perhaps surprising that—apart from wondering why Horne and White's generally admirable book is in a children's literature series at all—my attitude only occasionally presents me with a problem, as with Meg Worley's essay on the mutual inhumanity of the animal characters, or when Karen Keeley gets (briefly) entangled in "species as name."

Having spent a year working on the minutiae of the factual background to the book (which, according to my wife, tends to unbalance a chap), coming to criticism is a positive relief. Nevertheless, I have to say that I approached Horne and White with some trepidation: one of the downsides of becoming a fully fledged academic discipline is that children's literature has tended to adopt the habit of machine-made criticism—where papers are written not because the author must write them or die, but because she/he must write them or not get tenure. Consequently, a hardened skeptic might look at essays with "techne" or "carnivalesque" in their titles with suspicion (unfounded, in this case).

But I am pleased to report that the editors' aim of "moving discussion on" is generally achieved. The book certainly starts well, with an exemplary introduction, giving the background (especially good on The Golden Age) and a highly satisfying review of virtually everything that's been written on The Wind in the Willows (worth the cover price alone). The fact that it ends, in conventional but mystifying fashion, by summarizing the articles in the book so efficiently that it is hardly worth reading them will probably be seen as a blemish only by old rationalists like myself. And the slightly desperate attempt to weld the essays into an unnecessarily coherent whole by suggesting that the essay on Chinese translations "fills a gap"—presumably in the library of papers on translations—is only to be sympathized with.

I might, however, make so bold as to draw the editors' attention to a couple of slips (in the loveable way that reviewers have). Describing how The Wind in the Willows came to be published in the United States, the editors repeat a traditional story: "Having finally found a British publisher, Curtis Brown once again sent the manuscript to America. Luckily, Grahame had also sent a copy of the Methuen edition of Wind to an influential American fan—President Theodore Roosevelt. Scribner's initially rejected Wind, but after receiving a letter from Roosevelt … did an about face" (xx). The only problem is that Roosevelt is unlikely to have read a copy of the Methuen edition because the Scribner's edition came out a week before the...