SOURCE: "Kenneth Grahame and the Literature of Childhood," in English Literature in Transition: 1880-1920, Vol. 20, No. 1, 1977, pp. 3-12.

[In the following essay, Ray compares Grahame's The den Age to works about childhood by William Wordsworth and Charles Dickens.]

Although Kenneth Grahame's current reputation rests entirely on his classic children's book, The Wind in the Willows, it was the appearance of The Golden Age, a sequence of stories about childhood, some thirteen years earlier in 1985 that made Grahame an immediate literary celebrity. Swinburne called this work "well-nigh too praiseworthy for praise," a judgment ratified by the British public in its enthusiastic response. Today The Golden Age and its sequel in 1898, Dream Days have passed out of print—and out of favor with readers and critics alike. But, in spite of such undeserved oblivion, The Golden Age remains a serious contribution to the body of post-enlightenment literature treating childhood as an intelligible aspect of the human experience and so retains a claim on our critical attention.

Writing in the last decade of the nineteenth century, Grahame is the natural heir of the two dominant literary figures of his age, Wordsworth and Dickens, both deeply concerned with representations of childhood in their work. The link between Grahame and Wordsworth has been briefly marked by Peter Green who, in his critical biography of Grahame, finds that The Golden Age sounds "the authentic Wordsworthian note." Roger Lancelyn Green points to a minor Dickensian piece, "Holiday Romance," as a major influence on Grahame: "'Holiday Romance' seems to be the earliest literary example of that eternal theme of childhood, 'let's pretend,' which was to become the inspiration of such books as The Golden Age and The Treasure Seekers." But neither critic has gone beyond such superficial observations to treat the presence in Grahame's stories of specific Wordsworthian motifs and of Dickensian attitudes to childhood. In effect, Grahame draws from and fuses his predecessors while systematically undercutting their most serious themes. A participant in the Neo-Pagan movement of the nineties, Grahame saw in nature not so much a source of emotional enrichment and self-awareness as an escape from the artificial structures and standards of English society. He echoes Wordsworth in depicting the child's easy exchange with nature, but he turns evasive, sentimentalizing or ironizing the consequences of this exchange. In a similar way, Grahame follows Dickens in recreating the quality of a child's vision and the texture of his world, while discarding the moral energy of his model in favor of a contemplative and remote authorial stance. The stories of The Golden Age combine the thematic concerns of Wordsworth's poetry and Dickens' novels while muting their powerful statements of imagination and humanity to a gentle recollection of what it once meant to be a child.

The child in Wordsworth is almost invariably a solitary, responsive to nature and more at ease in the natural world than in the world of society. The cottage girl of "We Are Seven," the child of "Anecdote for Fathers," and particularly the young Wordsworth recalled in The Prelude express in varied ways the harmonious relationships of the child with nature and the strain of his subjection to the demands of "civilized" adults. This attitude appears in an altered form in Grahame's stories of five orphaned children living in a household of unnumbered and frequently unnamed aunts and uncles, a household loosely based on Cookham Dene, in Berkshire, where the four motherless Grahame children were sent to be raised by their maternal grandmother while their father grieved alone at home in Scotland. To the narrator of The Golden Age recalling his childhood, these adults were the Olympians, remote beings who "having absolute license to indulge in the pleasures of life, … could get no good of it"; they are alien in their tastes, arbitrary in their judgments, comprehensible only "as in the parallel case of Caliban upon Setebos." Nature provides one method of escape from the world presided over by these Olympians, and it is here that Grahame follows Wordsworth into the English countryside.

Grahame presents us with his version of Wordsworth's moment of communion with nature in "A Holiday," first of the seventeen sketches which compose The Golden Age. The narrator recalls a solitary ramble when "the passion and the call of the divine morning were high in my blood" and he ran "colt-like … in the face of Nature laughing responsive." I quote at length the following passage because it illustrates so clearly Grahame's transformation of the majesty of The Prelude into the intimacy of the prose sketch:

The air was wine; the moist earth-smell, wine; the lark's song, the wafts from the cow-shed at top of the field, the pant and smoke of a distant train,—all were wine,—or song, was it? or odour, this unity they all blended into? I had no words then to describe it, that earth-effluence of which I was so conscious; nor, indeed, have I found words since. I ran sideways, shouting; I dug glad heels into the squelching soil; I splashed diamond showers from puddles with a stick; I hurled clods skywards at random, and presently I somehow found myself singing. The words were mere nonsense,—irresponsible babble; the tune was an improvisation, a weary, unrhythmic thing of rise and fall: and yet it seemed to me a genuine utterance, and just at that moment the one thing fitting and right and perfect.

This child experiences the summons of nature, the blending of his senses into a single sensation, the failure of language to express his feelings. We may compare his inarticulate song to the boy of Winander blowing "mimic hootings to the silent owls, / That they might answer him" (Prelude). Nature does answer him, "responsive to his call," much as "Nature laughing responsive" encourages Grahame's narrator in his frolic. Both children find instinctive modes of communication with nature, untroubled by the failure of conventional language to meet their needs; and both feel an animal pleasure in their harmony with the rhythms of the natural world.

In contrast to this Wordsworthian experience, however, its framework suggests that Grahame is far more interested than the poet in the public dimensions of the world his rambler inhabits. "A Holiday" begins with a substantial social reality, a glorious morning, by good fortune someone's birthday and consequently a holiday from lessons and routine. There is an interval during which the narrator joins his sister Charlotte in fighting a bear, played heroically by their brother Edward, but finally he is drawn away from his usual pastimes and companions, giving himself up to the wind instead as guide and sole companion. This may remind us fleetingly of a scene in The Prelude, when the young Wordsworth, ice-skating with his companions, offers himself up to the wind and is rewarded by a glimpse into the workings of the universe, "even as if the earth had rolled/With visible motion her diurnal round:" Although Grahame does not allow, as Wordsworth does, that the child may instruct his elders by virtue of such unspoiled relations with nature (the Olympians are apparently beyond recall to the vision of childhood), he does follow the poet in his insistence on the effect of nature's tutelary powers on the child himself. But Grahame offers nothing comparable to Wordsworth's moment of pure vision. The wind in "A Holiday" proves rather to be "a whimsical comrade" with diverse motives, directing the child to one lesson after another but never leading him outside the ordinary limitations of the social and natural worlds.

The demands of the narrative form Grahame has chosen diffuse the intensity of a concentrated poetic image over an extended adventure, and Grahame's tone remains aloof and even ironic as he records the reactions of his child character to nature's instruction. The wind first leads him to a pair of lovers, a spectacle that ordinarily strikes the narrator as absurd. This time, however, the encounter seems to him appropriate and acceptable:

and it was with a certain surprise that I found myself regarding these fatuous ones with kindliness instead of contempt, as I rambled by, unheeded of them. There was indeed some reconciling influence abroad, which could bring the like antics into harmony with bud and growth and the frolic air.

Romance is followed by morality, as the wind takes the narrator past the village church, where the local bad boy is engaged in stealing biscuits. Wordsworth's nature acts to intimidate and reprove the young thief in Prelude, Book I, or so he thinks, but to Grahame's hero nature seems to assert its strict neutrality in all matters of social justice: "Nature, who had accepted me for ally, cared little who had the world's biscuits, and assuredly was not going to let any friend of hers waste his time in playing policeman for Society". And, extending this principle of amorality, Grahame next confronts the narrator with a hawk attacking a chaffinch: "Yet Nature smiled and sang on, pitiless, gay, impartial. To her, who took no sides, there was every bit as much to be said for the hawk as for the chaffinch".

The adventure reaches a climax when the wind deserts its companion at a "grim and lichened" whipping-post, inscribed with the initials of generations of past offenders. This incident may remind us of a comparable, though sterner, passage in The Prelude, and the differences are themselves instructive of the way in which Grahame has altered Wordsworth from the visionary mode to a whimsical narrative of boyish truancy. Wordsworth remembers a day in his childhood when, separated from his companion, he stumbled on

  a bottom, where in former times
A murderer had been hung in iron chains.
The gibbet-mast had mouldered down, the bones
And iron case were gone; but on the turf,
Hard by, soon after that fell deed was wrought,
Some unknown hand had carved the murderer's name.
The monumental letters were inscribed
In times long past; but still, from year to year
By superstition of the neighbourhood,
The grass is cleared away, and to this hour
The characters are fresh and visible.

The sight of the gibbet and the subsequent sight of the girl bearing a pitcher form a spot of time for Wordsworth, a sharp memory of "visionary dreariness" assuaged only when he revisits the scene years later with his beloved. The gibbet, then, with its monumental letters, comes to represent, in the design of the poem, the restorative powers of feeling where once strong emotion has occurred. If we compare the gibbet to Grahame's whipping-post, there is a striking decline from the visionary quality of Wordsworth's episode to the self-consciously literary and slightly coy finish to Grahame's adaptation:

Had I been an infant Sterne, here was a grand chance for sentimental output! As things were, I could only hurry homewards, my moral tail well between my legs, with an uneasy feeling, as I glanced back over my shoulder, that there was more in this chance than met the eye.

Nature has offered a lesson here too, but its terms are immediate and practical: the truant returns home to find his brothers and sisters suffering the consequences of their holiday behavior. He has already absorbed the meaning of his lesson and applies it to his situation:

The moral of the whipping-post was working itself out; and I was not in the least surprised when, on reaching home, I was seized upon and accused of doing something I had never even thought of. And my frame of mind was such, that I could only wish most heartily that I had done it.

Another way of formulating the difference between Wordsworth and Grahame is to say that where the poet is most vitally concerned with the spiritual or philosophic implications of childhood engagement with nature, the writer of stories is interested in the child's relationship with nature as it illuminates his psychosocial existence as a brother, a nephew, a pupil. So where Wordsworth moves temporally from the distant to the more recent past, Grahame moves spatially from the natural to the social world. His narrator always leaves from and returns to a comfortable if not always congenial social framework; his sorties into nature are refreshing and expressive of his child's being, but they are finally reabsorbed into the childhood community he inhabits.

Wordsworth of The Prelude and Grahame have something more in common, something they share with Charles Dickens: all three authors employ an adult narrator who recollects, from the vantage of maturity, his childhood experiences and emotions. For Wordsworth the act of memory is sacramental, a way of restoring and rededicating his poetic powers, while for Grahame it is closer to nostalgia, the pleasure of recalling a happier, less complicated time of life. For Dickens, as for Wordsworth, memory is sacred and restorative; the motto of his 1848 Christmas book, The Haunted Man, "Lord, keep my memory green," might serve as well as the epigraph for virtually all his novels, though particularly for his novels of remembered childhood, David Copperfield and Great Expectations. But, where Wordsworth examines the way he responded to and was molded by nature in his youth, Dickens and Grahame are concerned to recreate the way their child characters observed and comprehended the social and natural worlds. Wordsworth, we might say, is interested primarily in childhood as it links the adult self to nature, Dickens and Grahame in the nature of the child himself.

The technical method that Dickens developed to transcribe the child's sense of the world is a double perspective that superimposes the voice of an adult narrator onto the perceptions of his child self. The retrospective voice can assume a great variety of tones—it may be sympathetic, ironic, amused, indignant, even uncomprehending—but at all times it provides simultaneously a wedge into the child's consciousness and an assertion of the child's essential separateness from the world familiar to his elders. The early sections of both David Copperfield and Great Expectations are wonderfully successful in evoking the private world of distortions and illuminations that the child inhabits in the midst of ordinary adult life. Here Pip recalls his early interpretation of his catechism:

Neither were my notions of the theological positions to which my Catechism bound me, at all accurate; for I have a lively remembrance that I supposed my declaration that I was to "walk in the same all the days of my life," laid me under an obligation always to go through the village from our house in one particular direction, and never to vary it by turning down by the wheelwright's or up by the mill.

Such a passage renders with great clarity the child's characteristic methods of interpretation; on the one hand, he is painfully literal in his acceptance of language, while on the other hand his imagination is released by the effort of this literalness. Dickens, however, gains something more than faithful renderings of a child's vision from his narrative method: he can, at the same time, offer critical judgment of adult conduct and values through the child's intuitive and naive perspective. David Copperfield's description of Miss Murdstone's arrival is as complete a dissection of that harsh and unyielding woman as any adult could offer with comparable economy:

She brought with her two uncompromising hard black boxes, with her initials on the lids in hard brass nails. When she paid the coachman she took her money out of a hard steel purse, and she kept the purse in a very jail of a bag which hung upon her arm by a heavy chain, and shut up like a bite. I had never, at that time, seen such a metallic lady altogether as Miss Murdstone was.

The details are true to the limits of David's powers of observation, yet the narrator also signals to the reader a more expansive moral statement than the frightened David could then have made.

Grahame adapts Dickens' method in chronicling the adventures of Edward, Selina, Charlotte, Harold, and the narrator in the voice of an adult appreciative of his childhood yet candid enough to wonder, as he analyzes the enormous gulf between children and Olympians, "Can it be I too have become an Olympian?" Like the adult Pip or David, this narrator remembers not simply what happened in the past, but how it all looked and felt; he evokes the texture of a child's daily life, surrounded by yet detached from adults, and the element of "let's pretend" cited by Roger Lancelyn Green is only part of a more complex treatment of childhood than "Holiday Romance" attempts.

Grahame follows Dickens in presenting childhood as a province remote from the world of adult business and routine. The children of The Golden Age, like virtually all of Dickens' children, are without what Grahame calls "a proper equipment of parents," but their orphanhood is not the cruel isolation of a Dickens child, in part simply because there are five of them. They act as "members of a corporation, for each of whom the mental or physical ailment of one of his fellows might have farreaching effects," squelching independent action in the service of their "Republic." And of course the Republic is united in its opposition to the Olympians, evading their demands, mocking their customs, denouncing their injustice. But if these themes sound strikingly Dickensian, it is important to note that they appear in Grahame's stories emptied of the moral attention which Dickens' novels command. Just as he dilutes the force of Wordsworthian nature by opposing it to the claims of a conventional upper-middle-class household, so Grahame defuses Dickens' anguished concern for the alienated child by making him a member of an harmonious children's society. Grahame's adults are not affectionate and nourishing, like the Dickens adults—Joe Gargery or Peggotty—who understand children, but neither are they brutal or destructive, like Dickens' sinister child-haters and exploiters. They are merely adults guilty of no more than thoughtlessness and an occasional lack of charity, a "strange anaemic order of beings," as the narrator tells us, "further removed from us, in fact, than the kindly beasts who shared our natural existence in the sun." Dickens makes use of the distance between child and adult to make strong moral judgments of individuals and of society, but Grahame is content to depict the separation of worlds without formulating any moral statements of consequence. His satire of the Olympians is mild where Dickens' is scathing, his refrain not Dickens' cry for the sustenance of childhood memories but the ceaseless lament that children must become adults at all.

With these qualifications on Grahame's use of his predecessors, we may examine one of the most successful of the Golden Age sketches, "The Finding of the Princess," as a fusion of Wordsworthian motifs with Dickensian attitudes. Once again, as in "A Holiday," it is a glorious morning, and the narrator has just been elevated to that harbinger of manhood, a toothbrush. As if counseled by "The Tables Turned," he decides to forego his customary geography lesson in favor of an unlicensed and solitary ramble on the grounds that "the practical thing was worth any quantity of bookish theoretic." Leaving familiar surroundings for an unfamiliar copse, he experiences nature in a manner that heralds a significant adventure:

If the lane had been deserted, this was loneliness become personal. Here mystery lurked and peeped; here brambles caught and held with a purpose of their own, and saplings whipped the face with human spite. The copse, too, proved vaster in extent, more direfully drawn out, than one would ever have guessed from its frontage on the lane: and I was really glad when at last the wood opened and sloped down to a streamlet brawling forth into the sunlight.

In many ways Grahame's story may be read as an adaptation of Wordsworth's "Nutting," with its parallel journey through "tangled thickets" to a hidden bower, a banquet, and a rest amid "fairy water-breaks." But where Wordsworth's young adventurer falls victim to the temptation of the scene and violates its peace with a brutality that teaches him a lesson, Grahame's narrator leaves the natural world altogether and enters the carefully landscaped garden of a country estate. And here Wordsworth gives way to Dickens, as Grahame shifts his interest onto the hero's response to the elegant scene. With a child's insouciance, he immediately recognizes it as the Garden of Sleep and wastes no time in setting out "in search of the necessary Princess." He meets the challenge of the unfamiliar by means of an imagination stocked with the lore of fairy tales, and it is his interpretative faculty which now assumes prominence. Encountering a young couple in the garden, he ingenuously imposes his fantasy onto the scene. The young lady is of course the princess, "'But she's wide-awake, so I suppose somebody has kissed her!" This remark draws a blush from the lady and laughter from her companion—the observer is both naive and acute. This section of the story depends on similar jokes; the silent footman who serves a splendid lunch is "another gentleman in beautiful clothes a lord, presumably," and the child advises the couple, according to his fairy tale expertise, that they really should marry. When the narrator wakes from a sleep in the garden, however, the natural world reasserts its primacy over the social:

When I woke, the sun had gone in, a chill wind set all the leaves a-whispering, and the peacock on the lawn was harshly calling up the rain. A wild unreasoning panic possessed me, and I sped out of the garden like a guilty thing, wriggled through the rabbit-run, and threaded my doubtful way homewards, hounded by nameless terrors.

The panic and guilt result from no breach against nature, and his infractions of household rules are too common to disturb him in this powerful way. The moment recalls the sudden interruption of communion in "Knotting," but is also Keatsian with its suggestion of panic at the loss of an imagined world and guilt at truancy from the world of men. Again, however, Grahame steps back from the implications of this episode. He sends the child home, clutching the half-crowns given him by the gentleman, recalling the lady's farewell kiss, to a token punishment. The story ends with his dream that night, a lyrical summation of the day's adventures:

Then, nature asserting herself, I passed into the comforting kingdom of sleep, where, a golden carp of fattest build, I oared it in translucent waters with a new half-crown snug under right fin and left; and thrust up a nose through water-lily leaves to be kissed by a rose-flushed Princess.

The solitary excursion, the discovery of a hidden bower, the awakening into a terror are all Wordsworthian motifs suggesting some form of instruction or initiation. Yet the opening of the story dwells on such nursery talismans as toothbrushes and slates; the middle on the child's confounding of fantasy with society; the end on the child's imaginative response, in sleep, to his escapade—all suggestive of post-Romantic, novelistic concern with the conduct and the psyche of the child. The final dream, in fact, turns the story away from nature and toward the child's private vision, in this case shaped equally by fantasy and reality; even the word nature is used in the last sentence to refer to human nature, the physical demands of the young body. And the elegance of Grahame's style even further distances the adventure, cools down the frightened energy of the child's panic to physical exhaustion and soothing sleep. The adventure is enclosed by the aesthetic form of the adult voice which, unlike Wordsworthian and Dickensian voices, acts to reaffirm the distance between the child's vision and the adult's.

The remaining stories of The Golden Age show similar concern for the imaginative life of the five children. As an insulated community, they establish their own rules, customs, and conventions of behavior based in part on a sharp understanding of Olympian habits and in part on a child's delight in games of pretense. Individualism is discouraged, though it occasionally breaks through in the narrator's excursions or in Harold's solitary games of Clubman or muffinman. But the real threat to the children's society is time. We see Selina excluded from a forbidden game because she has "just reached that disagreeable age when one begins to develop a conscience"; she later shows an alarming preference for conversation with other girls of her age. The most violent disruption comes in the final story, "Lusisti Satis," when Edward departs for school:

Fortunately I was not old enough to realise, further, that here on this little platform the old order lay at its last gasp, and that Edward might come back to us, but it would not be the Edward of yore, nor could things ever be the same again.

The theme, once again, is Wordsworthian in its mourning for the old childhood order; Dickens sees no comparable loss in growing up if the adult can retain the child's clarity of vision and kindliness of heart. But the expression of Grahame's regret is social, not personal. The intrusion of a world larger and more threatening than that of the Olympians is felt in Edward's pride over the badges of his new estate: the trunks bearing his name, the spending money in his pocket, his first bowler hat. And the narrator's lament that he will not return to their children's society unchanged is only a particularized and limited instance of Wordsworth's universal lament in the Intimations Ode.

The Golden Age is in many ways a classic among works about childhood, surely deserving of more attention than it has received in this century. But it is also indisputably a minor classic, because Grahame modulates aspects of his theme from the major key of Wordsworth and Dickens to his own artful yet minor key. His writing lacks the depth and range of his models; childhood for Grahame is a time of great joy and imagination, but he offers no sense of its continuity with maturity, neither Wordsworth's sense of diminishing power nor Dickens' of expanding moral perception. As an appreciation of childhood, remarkable in recreating its moods and colors, The Golden Age excels, but as a literary statement of the relationship of childhood to the rest of experience it falls short. The narrator of Grahame's work stands apart from his remembered youth, the ironic, urbane, and lyrical tones of his voice suggesting always detachment, never the rapprochement between past and present that for Wordsworth and Dickens meant the survival of the highest human powers.