which Grahame felt was so important and which reaches its apotheosis in the chapter
‘The piper at the gates of dawn’. Between these two strands is Grahame’s own mixture
of anthropomorphism in which he transforms three animals, Mole, Ratty and Badger
into characteristics of the ideal Edwardian gentleman. Humphrey Carpenter has said of
Grahame:
In many ways he was writing specifically about the bachelor Arcadia,
unencumbered by women. Mole’s first meeting with the Water Rat, their picnic
together with its catalogue of good food, and their homeward row during which
Mole makes a fool of himself by grabbing the oars and upsetting the boat, is a
perfect expression of the delights of the all-male life as enjoyed by Grahame in the
company of such friends as Furnivall, Quiller-Couch, and his Fowey boating
acquaintance Edward Atkinson—a life without many responsibilities, but certainly
not without etiquette. The shy, slightly effeminate, and privately rebellious Mole,
bursting out from his private confines, is both coming to terms with his own nature
as he ‘entered into the joy of running water’ (a phrase strikingly reminiscent of The
Water-Babies) and is being initiated into the outdoor, gently muscular world that
Kingsley, Furnivall, and the other Christian Socialists knew so well, a world which
offered them a form of Escape which was quite adequate for high days and holidays.
Carpenter 1985:156This is very much an all-male world: the few women who appear, either as animals or as
humans, are subsidiary to the males, as Margaret Meek has pointed out:
The world of the River Bank is a men’s club, with Fortnum and Mason picnics for
luncheon, and suppers in warm kitchens underground without the problems of
shopping or washing up. When the Otter child goes missing, his father ‘lonely and
heartsore’ watches by the ford where he taught the little one to swim. Mrs Otter
appears only as the ‘they’ of ‘the Otters’, who insisted Rat should stay to supper,
and ‘keep it up late with his old comrade’. To believe in the artistic success of The
Wind in the Willows one has to enter this enchanted circle of friends.
Meek 1991:24Alison Prince has said ‘the theme of homecoming occurs as repeatedly in Grahame’s
work as his other favourite topic—that of escape. At first sight, they appear to be
opposites, but in fact the escape is often away from something alien and unhomely to
the welcome cosiness of a private nest’ (Prince 1994:70). These two elements are both
strongly in The Wind in the Willows in the shape of the adventurous Ratty and the timid
Mole, with that perfect Edwardian gentleman, Badger, as the still centre of the book. The
characters have long been a part of popular lore, both through cartoon versions of the
story (often confined to the Toad episodes) as well as sequels such as William Horwood’s
The Willows in Winter (1993) and Jan Needle’s fascinating reworking of the plot, Wild
Wood (1981).
While Grahame was indulging in a peculiarly English type of whimsy, Jack London
was producing a very different kind of animal story. These are authentically raw and
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