[In the following excerpt, Wall discusses Grahame as a children's author and The Wind in the Willows as a children's book.]

The contribution of Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932) to the evolution of a modern voice in the narration of fiction for children is not easy to assess, in spite of the fact that The Wind in the Willows (1908) is generally regarded as one of the two most celebrated English children's classics, the other being Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Lois R. Kuznets selected only Grahame, Dodgson and Macdonald for her examples of children's classics in ‘Tolkien and the Rhetoric of Childhood’; The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature speaks of The Wind in the Willows as being ‘one of the central classics of children's literature’. Unlike Dodgson, however, Grahame did not sustain address to children. Although Grahame's status as a writer for children is high, in reality he wrote little expressly for children. … The Golden Age and Dream Days, it is true, have often appealed to imaginative children who have the capacity to read the events and the dialogue and to ignore the adult narrator's attitude to his child characters and his narratees. Grahame, writing these pieces over a period of time for publication first in periodicals, seems gradually to have become aware that he had an aptitude for writing for children which he was unable to use as long as he was restricted by the narrative persona he had adopted. In ‘The Reluctant Dragon’, the penultimate story in Dream Days, he broke away from the pattern into which his success had locked him. After half-a-dozen introductory pages he provided a new narrator, the circus-man, who could, within the existing framework, tell a story simply and unselfconsciously. Gone is the knowing narrator, with his arch and sophisticated language; in his place is an oral story-teller whose attention is on his story, not his manner of telling. Gone is the implied adult reader; in his place are two child narratees, Charlotte and the unnamed narrator as a child, whose adult presence can now be forgotten.

In ‘The Reluctant Dragon’ Grahame produced his one undisputed children's story. The great difference in tone which it displays suggests that Grahame had become aware that he could no longer continue with the kind of story which had made his name. He had been making many of the points made by Jefferies in Bevis—the children's despising of the adult world, the contempt, mixed with slight compassion, for girls, the ability of children to do without adults in their secret lives—but throughout the series, whether because of the strength of deep-seated emotions, or because the theme once set and accepted he was unable to escape it, he had been locked into a pattern in which all happiness was tempered by bitterness, resentment and self-pity. That he wanted to escape is suggested by ‘The Reluctant Dragon’. All its characters—even the dragon—are kindly and beneficent. The tone is so markedly different, and the story so out of place in Dream Days, that it is reasonable to suggest that Grahame knew that he had exhausted the earlier vein. He had exorcised that particular demon and had to turn elsewhere if he was to continue to write. It is not surprising to find that The Wind in the Willows is a completely new departure with a new narrative voice. The new voice, however, was not the unvarying voice of the oral story-teller of ‘The Reluctant Dragon’, nor is the implied reader a child, like Charlotte. Whatever Grahame meant to do, he has in The Wind in the Willows produced a complex intermixture of narrative relationships.

The genesis of the story is well known. According to his wife's account, Grahame told bed-time stories of a Toad, a Badger, a Mole and a Water-rat to his small son Alastair, and began to write down episodes of these stories when the little boy was unwilling to go for a seaside holiday because it would mean that he would miss the adventures of Toad. First Whisper of ‘The Wind in the Willows’ prints the fifteen letters which Grahame sent his son between 10 May and the end of September 1907. The letters begin with Toad's stealing the motor-car and end with the banquet with which the novel also concludes. At first they are mere sketches of events, but towards the end, although the final version is more polished and more detailed, the story is presented at some length and much as we have it today. Alastair, as narratee, is always a felt presence in these letters, and in the novel, too, in these incidents. This is not always the case with the other, later, parts of The Wind in the Willows, which Grahame prepared for publication in response to a request from the American magazine, Everybody's.

The Wind in the Willows certainly opens in a way that suggests a child narratee—and thousands of parents have read these words to their young children.

The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home. First with brooms, then with dusters; then on ladders and steps and chairs, with a brush and a pail of whitewash; till he had dust in his throat and eyes, and splashes of whitewash all over his black fur, and an aching back and weary arms.

(p. 1)

The mole is small and alone, hardworking and weary. He is to be regarded with friendly amusement. His expletives are childlike and amusing in their mildness: ‘Bother!’, ‘O blow!’, ‘Hang spring cleaning!’ The description of his tunnelling upwards has a repetitive chant-like rhythm not unlike, though far less memorable than, the chants to be found in Just So Stories.

So he scraped and scratched and scrabbled and scrooged, and then he scrooged again and scrabbled and scratched and scraped, working busily with his little paws and muttering to himself, ‘Up we go! Up we go!’ till at last, pop! his snout came out into the sunlight, and he found himself rolling in the warm grass of a great meadow.

(p. 1)

But though a child reader is certainly implied in these passages, even on the same page a less accommodating narrative voice is giving warning that this is to be a book in which the narrator's focus will not remain fixed on a child and a child's story:

Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing.

(p. 1)

It soon becomes clear that both narratee and implied reader in this story may change from paragraph to paragraph. Sometimes the 1890s essayist is still at work:

the river still chattered on to him, a babbling procession of the best stories in the world, sent from the heart of the earth to be told at last to the insatiable sea.

(p. 3)

At other times, in a manner reminiscent of both Dodgson and Beatrix Potter, the narrator appears to be talking to a child about a character already known and loved.

As he gazed, something bright and small seemed to twinkle down in the heart of it, vanished, then twinkled once more like a tiny star. But it could hardly be a star in such an unlikely situation; and it was too glittering and small for a glow-worm. Then, as he looked, it winked at him, and so declared itself to be an eye; and a small face began gradually to grow up round it, like a frame round a picture.

A brown little face, with whiskers.

A grave round face, with the same twinkle in its eye that had first attracted his notice.

Small neat ears and thick silky hair.

It was the Water Rat!

(p. 3)

Just as the characters are part animals, part children, part men, and never settle into any one role, just as the characters are sometimes as tiny as their animal selves would be, and sometimes as large as their male counterparts and sometimes somewhere between, so the narrative voice veers wildly and unselfconsciously: the precious fin de siècle poet—

Comfrey, the purple hand-in-hand with the white, crept forth to take its place in the line; and at last one morning the diffident and delaying dog-rose stepped delicately on the stage, and one knew, as if string-music had announced it in stately chords that strayed into a gavotte, that June at last was here

(p. 30)

gives place to the jaunty parodist,

‘Oddsbodikins!’ said the sergeant of police, taking off his helmet and wiping his forehead. ‘Rouse thee, old loon, and take over from us this vile Toad, a criminal of deepest guilt and matchless artfulness and resource. Watch and ward him with all thy skill; and mark thee well, greybeard, should aught untoward befall, thy old head shall answer for his—and a murrain on both of them!’

(p. 87)

and to the genial writer of comic verse for children.

The World has held great Heroes,
As history-books have showed;
But never a name to go down to fame
Compared with that of Toad!

(p. 144)

That many adults respond strongly to the tug of nostalgia which is the mainspring of Grahame's work, has clouded their ability to see, in historical perspective, what Grahame was doing. He is neither as innovative nor as original as his admirers assert. The Golden Age and Dream Days are not addressed to children, are indeed rather flattering to adults in their ridiculing of children. The Wind in the Willows, whatever its virtues, is a flawed and uneven work, for Grahame, unlike the Kipling of the Puck books, who deliberately worked his material in ‘overlaid tints and textures’, appears to be unaware of his uncertain stance. He does not oscillate between stances for artistic reasons, but because he has never seen the book as a whole. It has plenty of good episodes, addressed to different audiences, but no centre. The Toad stories which began as letters to a real child gave Grahame the opportunity to write about a very masculine world, in which male creatures live comfortable and somewhat irresponsible lives, and are constantly retreating into cosy womb-like holes, in a way that would have been impossible outside the framework of stories for children. In the letters written to Alastair the narrative voice does not vary, but once a wider audience was addressed, the narrator could, under the cloak of writing, as he said, for ‘youth’, indulge in a nostalgia and a sentimentality which might otherwise have alienated adult readers. W. W. Robson points out in The Definition of Literature that the two chapters ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ and ‘Wayfarers All’ have ‘none of the atmosphere of the children's book’ (p. 130). He might more accurately have said ‘are not addressed to children’. Yet it is hard to believe that they would have occurred outside a children's book. It was because Rat and Mole were firmly fixed as characters in a children's story, and therefore in a sense not to be taken too seriously, that they could safely be used in episodes dealing with the author's own imperfectly understood longings.

While modern critics are more likely to praise writers who use dual rather than double address, Grahame's particular variety of double address, in which the narrator shows no consciousness at all of an implied child reader for chapters at a time, surprisingly, is seldom criticised. It suits adult readers, perhaps, better than it does children. Humphrey Carpenter, in Secret Gardens, speaks of The Wind in the Willows as two linked stories, a ‘comic narrative about Toad’ and an ‘Arcadian vision of the River Bank’ (p. 157). Indeed he goes further: ‘The two are really separate books, and The Wind in the Willows could exist quite satisfactorily (for adult readers) without Toad’ (p. 229). It certainly seems odd that a critic and admirer of children's literature, in a book about books for children, should consider expunging from a children's classic, even in a parenthesis, the very character which has most attracted children. The fact that The Wind in the Willows is so celebrated as a children's classic casts a curious light on the part adults have played in the creation of such classics, for in fact much of the book has as its subject nostalgia for childhood, a feeling which children cannot share. It is undoubtedly true that the great children's classics are those that appeal strongly to adults.