Upon his death in 1932, he was buried in Oxford next to his first reader, Mouse. In his will, he gifted the original manuscript of Willows to the Bodleian Library, along with the copyrights and all his royalties. He became increasingly reclusive, eventually abandoning writing altogether. Kenneth Grahame, by all accounts, never recovered from the loss of his only child. An inquest determined his death a likely suicide but out of respect for his father, it was recorded as an accident. The next morning, railway workers found his decapitated body on tracks near the university. In the spring of 1920, while a student at Oxford, he downed a glass of port before taking a late night stroll. Unlike Toad’s recuperative ending, however, Alastair’s story did not end happily. His concerned friends must intervene to restrain his whims, teaching him “to be a sensible toad”.

But when the daredevil, Toad, takes up motoring, he becomes entranced by wild fantasies of the road. In peaceful retreat from “The Wide World”, Rat, Mole, Badger, and Toad spend their days chatting, philosophising, pottering, and ruminating on the latest fashions and fads. In the story, a quartet of anthropomorphised male animals wander freely in a pastoral land of leisure and pleasure - closely resembling the waterside haven of Cookham Dean where Grahame himself grew up. The Wind in the Willows evolved from Alastair’s bedtime tales into a series of letters Grahame later sent his son while on holiday in Littlehampton. His rapture in the fantastic was later confirmed by his nurse, who recalled hearing Kenneth “up in the night-nursery, telling Master Mouse some ditty or other about a toad”. Small, squinty, and beset by health problems, he was bullied at school. Like several classics penned during the golden age of children’s literature, The Wind in the Willows was written with a particular child in mind.Īlastair Grahame was four years old when his father Kenneth - then a secretary at the Bank of England - began inventing bedtime stories about the reckless ruffian, Mr Toad, and his long-suffering friends: Badger, Rat, and Mole.Īlastair, born premature and partially blind, was nicknamed “Mouse”.

The wind in the willows story