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12 Jul 09

A Second Wind for Kenneth Grahame’s ‘Wind in the Willows’

The years between 1900 and the outbreak of World War I, it has often been remarked, were a golden age in Britain for the writing of children’s books. New York Times, 9 July 2009.

www.nytimes.com/...10willows.html - Preview

BoB childrens_books

The years between 1900 and the outbreak of World War I, it has often been remarked, were a golden age in Britain for the writing of children’s books.
Part of their appeal is that they’re nostalgic, as we are, for childhood itself, or for a simpler past that seems to embody childhood virtue.
6 more annotations...
- “The Wind in the Willows”
- it has been reissued in two large-format annotated editions
- This scene is so charged that Ms. Gauger detects an element of homoeroticism.
- Toad — blusterer, aesthete, jailed prisoner — was inspired in part by Oscar Wilde.
- “The Wind in the Willows” began as a bedtime story and evolved over a series of letters (reproduced in the Gauger edition) that Grahame wrote to his son, Alastair, during the long months when he was farmed out to a nanny.
- For all its apparent celebration of neatness and domestic orderliness “The Wind in the Willows” is really a book about letting go.

15 Jun 09

Rosemary Hill rereads The Wind in the Willows

If Kenneth Grahame's riverbank idyll inspires nostalgia, it's because The Wind in the Willows is itself saturated in longing. The tale of Ratty and Toad was, Rosemary Hill argues, a product of its own uneasy times. The Guardian, 13 June 2009.

www.guardian.co.uk/...wind-in-the-willows-review - Preview

BoB childrens_books

If the Edwardian age is not remembered as a decade of social discontent and growing international tension when the cracks in the British empire began to show, but as an idyllic last summer bathed in golden sunshine, the reason is largely to be found in children's literature.
If The Wind in the Willows inspires nostalgia now, that is because it is itself saturated in longing for other times and other places.

17 May 09

The giant of modern literature? It has to be The Gruffalo

Writers such as Edward Lear, Charles Kingsley (The Water-Babies) and the sadly neglected George Macdonald (At the Back of the North Wind) inspired a new audience, reached through the new mid-Victorian mass circulation magazines. Their anarchic fantasies were an escape from repressive Victorian rectitude and the horrors of industrialisation. Robert McCrum in The Observer, 17 May 2009.

www.guardian.co.uk/...the-gruffalo-childrens-books - Preview

BoB childrens_books Edward Lear nonsense

What is it about the British literary scene that inspires such a marvellous variety of children's writing?
Writers such as Edward Lear, Charles Kingsley (The Water-Babies) and the sadly neglected George Macdonald (At the Back of the North Wind) inspired a new audience, reached through the new mid-Victorian mass circulation magazines. Their anarchic fantasies were an escape from repressive Victorian rectitude and the horrors of industrialisation.
1 more annotations...
- This cult had its dark side. The atmosphere in which Edwardian children's writing flourished was, at best, dysfunctional. E Nesbit (The Railway Children) endured a menage a trois with a philandering Fabian husband and was inspired to write some of her best work simply to pay household bills. Kenneth Grahame, secretary to the Bank of England, wrote The Wind in the Willows for his only son "Mouse", who later committed suicide. The children for whom JM Barrie conceived Peter Pan, the "boy who never grew up", became themselves "lost boys" whose lives were blighted by "Neverland". The romance of youth would be shot to pieces in the fields of France and the survivors of the Great War turned to psychoanalysis.