Is "The Wind in the Willows" a children's book?
In 1908, when "The Wind in the Willows" first appeared, the Times Literary Supplement said that "children will hope, in vain[,] for more fun." There's something to that, as the literary critic Michael Dirda notes in the latest New York Review of Books, in the course of reviewing two new annotated versions of the classic. (Katherine A. Powers reviewed the same books for the Globe in May.) The language is dense and, except for Toad's reckless driving and, subsequently, his escape from prison, the tale a bit short on action. As the biographer of Kenneth Grahame, Peter Green, put it, the book is suffused with "timeless, drowsy beatitude."
Still, Dirda may go a step too far when he draws a parallel with another major author of the period:
While "The Wind in the Willows" certainly has the appearance of a children's book, this masterpiece nevertheless tends to be most deeply affecting to those past forty. It's a bedtime story for readers of Henry James, and throughout its pages one periodically hears the faint, wistful cry that haunts Strether in 'The Ambassadors' (1903): "Live all you can; it's a mistake not to."
"Wind" is a rich book, grounded (as C.S. Lewis observed) in a sophisticated understanding of English social life. But "A The Portrait of a Toad" it is not.
Incidentally, Peter Green, the Grahame biographer whom Dirda cites, is none other than Peter Green the noted classicist. Who knew Green was also, at least early in his career, a "Wind in the Willows" aficionado?
