Up Tails All: Leisure, Pleasure and Paranoia in Kenneth Grahame’s

Abstract

Kenneth Grahame’s children’s classic is not hard to ‘place’, as F. R. Leavis used to say. Indeed, I recall a ‘dating’ seminar (as we quaintly used to call them) at Downing in which we presented him with the florid nature-poem in chapter 3, ‘The Wild Wood’ (the passage beginning ‘Such a rich chapter it had been’) assuming that he would not be able to recognise it; which he didn’t; but he did tell us confidently that it was very ‘ninetiesish, though later than the ‘nineties, yes surely Edwardian. And The Wind in the Willows surely is Edwardian, in style, themes, ideology. The Edwardian period in English literary culture is short but distinctive,¹ and Kenneth Grahame, Secretary to the Bank of England and erstwhile contributor to the Yellow Book, had a special role in articulating its consciousness and prolonging its after-echoes in the popular imagination by means of one of the most frequently reprinted books in the English language.²