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Toad's Journey to Buggleton or Kenneth Grahame's Trip from Bedside to Book* by Lois Kuzne t s ?This material is based on a chapter from my forthcoming book, Kenneth Grahame, to be published in 1987 by Twayne Publishers, a division of G. K. Hall & Co., Boston. . . . .(Toad) got out of the window early one morning & went off to a town called Buggleton, & went to the Red Lion Hotel. . . .(Grahame, First Whispers. 51) Partly to explain my title, I have begun with a brief passage from the first of fifteen letters written by Kenneth Grahame to his seven-year-old son, Alastair, during the summer of 1907, letters preserved by Miss Stott, Alastair's governess. These letters form part of the myth that Elspeth Grahame, Kenneth Grahame's widow, erects around the genesis of The Wind in the Willows in her volume, First Whispers of "The Wind in the Willows." What she has to say in the 1940' s—about events of nearly a half century before—is now well-known and often repeated. She gives the account of a bedtime story first overheard by a maid and a guest in 1904, which then grew into these letters, and eventually became the novel we know, published in the fall of 1908. Elspeth Grahame's story is not grossly inaccurate, but as Peter Green, Grahame's revisionist biographer, has shown, it takes on mythlike qualities not only because of its worshipful tone, but because Elspeth Grahame seems quite determined to keep Grahame's creative inspiration, as far as possible, within the small family circle, centered on their son and other shared experiences. the subject considered here, however, is not the accuracy of her account, but rather the letters themselves and what they can tell us about one aspect of Grahame's work. We can only surmise how similar the letters may be to the original bedtime stories, but they form an invaluable record of the development of style both within themselves—letter fifteen is quite different from letter one, for instance—and in comparison with the book in its finished form. In these letters, Kenneth Grahame moves toward a density of style already many steps away from an orally composed bedtime story; the book is even more stylistically dense. What happens to Toad's journey to Buggleton is what happens to Grahame's style in going from bedside (or at least first letter) to book—and, not incidentally, from real child audience to a much wider audience. A dense prose style is one which, through various devices (among them complexity of syntax, richness of diction, imagery, parody and allusion), manages to convey more than one level of meaning and imply more than one type of audience; it is also likely to call attention to itself as mediation between story and audience. Like many of the other classic English children's books of the late nineteenth century, The Wind in the Willows may be said to exhibit a density of style quite foreign to most modern writing for children, at least in the United States. In all probability few American children can now understand and enjoy The Wind in the Willows without being introduced to the book by an interested adult whose own enthusiasm (and oral reading ability) will bring out the colloquial nature of the dialogue, play up the farcical humor of such incidents as Mole's upsetting the boat and the spooky scariness of his Wild Woods adventure, employ the appropriate gusto for the lavish descriptions of eating and drinking, and generally carry the child through the other long descriptive passages, which may hold great interest for the adult returning to the book but which are tough going for the young reader. Those episodes which involve Toad are likely to be most intriguing to the young on first reading. This should come as no surprise, since Toad, in particular, was shaped to suit the child audience, and his adventures, at least in outline, come into the book almost unaltered from the original letters to Alastair, forming the basis for chapters six, eight, ten, eleven and twelve of the novel. Still, we can notice how the stylistic changes that Grahame made in enclosing...

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