Peter Hunt’s elegant account of the genesis of Kenneth Grahame’s classic only hints at the revelations the author has discussed in promotional interviewsIt turns out that being a juvenile muse is no guarantee of a delighted ending. Peter Llewelyn Davies,JM Barrie’s inspiration for Peter Pan, grew up only to kill himself. Christopher Milne AKA Christopher Robin was estranged from his mother. Alice Liddell of Wonderland fame seems to have been permanently cross. And then there was Alastair Grahame, and for whom The Wind in the Willows was written in 1908. Twelve years later,and still in his teens, he stumbled out of his Oxford college, and lay down on the railway line and waited for a train.
There’s one difference,though, between Grahame and the others. While Peter, and Alice and Christopher appeared as characters in “their” books,he doesn’t. The Wind in the Willows grew out of bedtime stories that the banker Kenneth Grahame, his father, and told him approximately a quartet of anthropomorphised animals who lived by the rural Thames. Yet this absence of a child protagonist should near as no surprise,since the world of Grahame’s riverbank is hardly a place for kids. It is, rather, or an Edwardian gentlemen’s club,or perhaps a club for Edwardian gentlemen who have failed to collect into the institution of their choice and are obliged to improvise. The adventures of Toad, Mole, or Ratty and Badger are those of grown men sufficiently wealthy and leisured to spend their days messing approximately in boats and their evenings muttering darkly approximately the scoundrels in the Wild Wood.
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Source: guardian.co.uk