“To that extent [The Wind in the Willows] is a specimen of the most scandalous escapism: it paints a happiness under incompatible conditions—the sort of freedom we can have only in childhood and the sort we can have only in maturity—and conceals the contradiction by the further pretense that the characters are not human beings at all. The one absurdity helps to hide the other. It might be expected that such a book would unfit us for the harshness of reality and send us back to our daily lives unsettled and discontented. I do not find that it does so. The happiness which it presents to us is in fact full of the simplest and most attainable things—food, sleep, exercise, friendship, and the face of nature, even (in a sense) religion. That ‘simple but sustaining meal’ of ‘bacon and broad beans and a macaroni pudding’ which Rat gave to his friends has, I doubt not, helped down many a real nursery dinner. And in the same way the whole story, paradoxically enough, strengthens our relish for real life. This excursion into the preposterous sends us back with renewed pleasure to the actual.” C.S. Lewis, “On Stories”
Lewis, himself a master of tales, captures something of the essence of what makes The Wind in the Willows such a loved text since its first publication in 1908 . An illustrator’s dream, it has been visualised by many over the years. Scholar Annie Gauger spent over 10 years researching the text and illustrations, including Oxford’s Bodleian library collection, to compile this wonderful annotated edition.
Curiously the question of anthropomorphising the main four characters, or of leaving them to their ‘natural’ animal attire, has had various treatments over the years. Kenneth Graham seems to have pictured them in their natural state, though the more recent the illustrations the more complex the ‘humanisation’ seems to be. Gauger’s edition is a must read for all who love the classic tale and it’s characters, delving into the text in such detail with personal, historical, and illustrative anecdotes. Having spent many a day rambling around Oxford’s canal and river banks it is delightful to think that Graham too was thinking of these places when writing the letters to his son ‘the Mouse’. Letters, which were to form the text of this great children’s classic with which I never tire. The illustrations below are by self taught American illustrator Paul Bransom; the first to fully illustrate the text. They were reproduced using chromolithography in the 1913 edition, published by Scribners.
One of the most quoted books of all time it is full of delicious character moments such as these:
“All was a-shake and a-shiver—glints and gleams and sparkles, rustle and swirl, chatter and bubble. The Mole was bewitched, entranced, fascinated. By the side of the river he trotted as one trots, when very small, by the side of a man who holds one spell-bound by exciting stories; and when tired at last, he sat on the bank, while the river still chattered on to him, a babbling procession of the best stories in the world, sent from the heart of the earth to be told at last to the insatiable sea.”
…“There is nothing — absolutely nothing — half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats. In or out of ‘em, it doesn’t matter. Nothing seems really to matter, that’s the charm of it. Whether you get away, or whether you don’t; whether you arrive at your destination or whether you reach somewhere else, or whether you never get anywhere at all, you’re always busy, and you never do anything in particular; and when you’ve done it there’s always something else to do, and you can do it if you like, but you’d much better not.”
…`Glorious, stirring sight!’ murmured Toad, never offering to move. `The poetry of motion! The real way to travel! The only way to travel! Here to-day–in next week to-morrow! Villages skipped, towns and cities jumped–always somebody else’s horizon! O bliss! O poop-poop! O my! O my!’
…’What are you always nagging at Toad for?’ inquired the Badger, rather peevishly. ‘What’s the matter with his English? It’s the same what I use myself, and if it’s good enough for me, it ought to be good enough for you!’
‘I’m very sorry,’ said the Rat humbly. ‘Only I think it ought to be “teach ‘em,” not “learn ‘em.”‘
‘But we don’t want to teach ‘em,’ replied the Badger. ‘We want tolearn ’em— learn ‘em, learn ‘em! And what’s more, we’re going to doit, too!’
