The Wilderness, My World

The Edwardian author Kenneth Grahame’s adoration of Nature and landscape was a personal creed that made him passionate about conservation, says his biographer Matthew Dennison

With a shudder, readers of The Wind in the Willows will remember ‘the cold still afternoon with a hard steely sky overhead’ when Mole slips silently from Rat’s parlour on his journey to discover Badger ‘in his hole in the middle of the Wild Wood’. For many readers, Mole’s snowy tribulations blot out the inventory of summer wildflowers with which author Kenneth Grahame prefixes Mole’s adventure—what Grahame describes as ‘the pageant of the river bank’: purple loosestrife, willow-herb, purple- and white-flowered comfrey, dog roses and meadowsweet.

Look again at Grahame’s descriptions, in which each of these wildflowers is personified, and what emerges is a writer deeply in thrall to Nature’s beauty.

On publication 110 years ago, The Wind in the Willows—Grahame’s only full-length fiction—was met with lukewarm, even hostile reviews. Memorably, the Times Literary Supplement dismissed it as ‘nonsense of poor quality’ and ‘as a contribution to natural history… negligible’.

Granted, Grahame employed a degree of creative licence. Each of his riverbankers is first and foremost a leisured Edwardian bachelor: Mole, for example, has a black-velvet smoking jacket and, as Beatrix Potter fulminated, toad combs his hair.