Far from fading with time, Kenneth Grahame's classic tale of fantasy has attracted a growing audience in each generation. Rat, Mole, Badger, and the preposterous Mr. Toad (with his 'Poop-poop-poop' road-hogging new motor-car), have brought delight to many through the years with their odd adventures on and by the river, and at the imposing residence of Toad Hall.
Grahame's book was later dramatised by A.A.Milne, and became a perennial Christmas favourite,as Toad of Toad Hall. It continues to enchant and,above all perhaps, inspire great affection.
To the moderately well-read person Kenneth Grahame is known as the author of two books written in the 1890s: The Golden Age and Dream Days. In his spare time he was Secretary of the Bank of England. Reading these delicately lovely visions of childhood, you might have wondered that he could be mixed up with anything so unlovely as a bank;and it may be presumed that at the bank an equal surprise was felt that such a responsible official could be mixed up with beauty.
In 1908 he wrote The Wind in the Willows. The first two books had been about children such as only the grown-up eould understand; this one was about animals such as could be loved equally by young and old. It was natural that those critics who had saluted the earlier books as masterpieces should be upset by the author"s temerity in writing a different sort of book; natural that they should resent their inability to place the new book as more or less of a "children"s book" than those which had actually had children in them. For this reason (or some other) The Wind in the Willows was not immediately the success which it should have been. Two people, however, became almost offensively its champions......
Introduction
ONE The River Bank
TWO The Open Road
THREE The Wild Wood
FOUR Mr Badger
FIVE Duke Domum six Mr Toad
SEVEN The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
EIGHT Toad"s Adventures
NINE wayfarers All
TEN The Further Adventures of Toad
ELEVEN "Like Summer Tempests Came his Tears"
TWELVE The Return of Ulysses
