SOURCE: Watkins, Tony. “‘Making a Break for the Real England’: The River Bankers Revisited.” Children's Literature Association Quarterly 9, no. 1 (spring 1984): 34-5.

[In the following essay, Watkins views the enduring popularity of The Wind in the Willows as a result of nostalgia for a long-ago England.]

On January 1st, 1983, The Wind in the Willows came out of copyright. A month or two later, the English Tourist Board ran a series of double-spread magazine advertisements featuring The Wind in the Willows prints by Nicholas Price. The advertisements, which depicted Toad, Mole or Rat riding in a vintage car or consulting a map on their way to a castle, bore the slogan: “The Real England: Make a Break for it.” The ads invited us to explore a “real England” of ancient monuments and of small villages virtually untouched by social and economic change: an England that is timeless, mysterious and yet, simultaneously, small, rural, comfortable and domestic; made up of communities with pastoral and comic-pastoral names like: “Sheepwash,” “Badger's Mount,” “Butterwick” and “Buttocks Booth.” They promise, “Hidden just beyond the noise of the motorway you'll find secret places that have barely changed for hundreds of years:” the real England, the nation's real home.

This series of advertisements sent me back to re-read The Wind in the Willows and to think about the relationship between such established works of children's literature and history: both the history from which the text emerged and the history into which it is received by us as readers. What accounts for the extraordinary popularity of this novel, seventy-five years after its publication?

As commentators have pointed out, The Wind in the Willows consists of three narratives welded (some would say “pasted”) together: the adventures of Toad, derived from bedtime stories and letters from Grahame to his son Alistair, the tale of the friendship of Rat and Mole, and the two lyrical celebrations of nature mysticism, “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” and “Wayfarers All.” What holds these disparate narratives together? Part of the answer is supplied by two articles, one by Geraldine Poss and the other by Lois Kuznets, that appeared in issues of the Association's annual, Children's Literature. Geraldine Poss's exploration of recurrent pastoral images in the novel and the parallels between Toad's adventures and The Odyssey leads her to describe The Wind in the Willows as “the sweet epic in Arcadia.” Lois Kuznets' article is even more important: she uncovers the significant structural pattern of oppositions in the novel that cluster around “wanderlust” at one pole and “homesickness” at the other. Using Gaston Bachelard's concept of “topophilia,” Lois Kuznets argues that a sense of felicitous space appears in Grahame's

leisurely, almost languid descriptions of the general landscape of The Wind in the Willows and in the attention he pays to particular habitats of his main characters. A search for felicitous space … permeates the structure of The Wind in the Willows.

There is no doubt about the crucial importance in the novel of the tension between a longing for travel and “nostalgia” (homesickness). The latter is the predominant feeling, experienced as loss combined with either an intense longing for home as a place to be regained (Mole End and, to some extent, Toad Hall), or a strong feeling of home as a place to celebrate for its welcome and reassuring continuity (in particular, Badger's kitchen). As Lois Kuznets suggests, such images and feelings certainly relate to both Grahame's own psychology and the appeal the book has had for children and adults. But images of home and the “topophilic” landscape can be related not only at the individual level to the author's or reader's biography, but also at the social and cultural level to the nonconscious structures of the period within which the text was produced or within which it is received. As the geographers D. W. Meinig argues, a landscape can acquire a symbolic status as “an image derived from our national experience, which has been simplified, beautified and widely advertised so as to become a commonly understood symbol.” Further, such landscapes can be “most influential at the national level” as symbols of idealized communities.

The shape of what Raymond Williams calls the “structure of feeling” within which The Wind in the Willows was written is a complex ones. According to Jan Marsh, the collapse of agriculture in the 1870s and the visible decline of the countryside “prompted a sudden rush of nostalgia for rural life. … Pastoral attitudes were reasserted with intensity” among, in particular, “the professional and the rentier classes.” They were the only ones who, “cushioned financially by the proceeds of the hated industrial system,” could afford either to move to the country or holiday there in weekend cottages or gypsy-style caravans. Grahame himself, as a late entrant to such classes, tended to overrate their ideals. The attraction of such a life was partly religious, partly political. Pantheistic Nature worship offered a substitute for a Christianity undermined by Darwinism (articulated in The Wind in the Willows most clearly in the chapter, “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.”). According to Peter Green, riots in the cities produced among the middle-classes, “terror of revolution and mob violence, the supposed dangers latent in an anarchic, industrialized, no longer rural-subservient proletariat.” In The Wind in the Willows, such a threat comes from the stoats, weasels and ferrets of the Wild Wood; but they are driven back by what Jules Zanger calls representatives of the ordered world of nineteenth century England:

thinly disguised types: Water Rat as private gentleman with a touch of Oxbridge still lingering about him, Badger as bluff country squire, Toad of Toad Hall as landed aristocrat, Mole as emerging Mr. Polly”

The roles and types described here are, perhaps, too schematic, but the description does illuminate our understanding of one dimension of the social and political concerns of the novel. After all, it is Toad who “lets the side down,” betrays the leisured life of the River-Bankers through his addiction to the new attractions of the motor-car. He squanders the money left him by his father, gives the other animals a bad name, and is responsible for letting the insurgents take over Toad Hall. However, Toad Hall is cleansed through the collective efforts of the River-Bankers; the “self-contained gentleman's residence dating in part from the 14th century,” with “handsome Tudor window” and banqueting hall, “but replete with every modern convenience;” “the handsome, dignified old house of mellowed red brick,” part of the heritage of the River-Bankers, is saved. The aristocratic, heroic values are simultaneously mocked and lauded. But, above all, what is restored at the end of the novel is a vision of the good life: order, tranquility, harmony: the virtues that men like Ruskin believed were being destroyed by industrial progress. But it is utopia of a particular social group: the River-Bankers. A way of life that Peter Green has described as “the rentier's rural dream,” with the countryside not as a place of work but redefined as an Arcadia of rural leisure.

What is important for us is the way that version of utopia has come to occupy a dominant place in the cultural myth of “the English way of life.” It has become part of the “real England,” a national felicitous space, our home, for which many express intense nostalgia. That “real England” co-exists with an actual England that is far from ideal; the real is “hidden away,” “just beyond the noise of the motorways.” Through the agency of romance fantasy, ordinary reality can be transformed.

What was formed in the latter half of the nineteenth century as a result of specific social, economic and industrial changes, was a set of cultural representations (inscribed within actual social activities) which has come to constitute a kind of National Heritage. This Heritage has, through tourism, forged a link with leisure. According to Michael Bommes and Patrick Wright, it depicts utopia as

a dichotomous realm existing alongside the everyday. Like the utopianism from which it draws, National Heritage involves positive energies which certainly can't be written off as ideology. It engages hopes, dissatisfactions, senses of tradition and freedom, but it tends to do so in a way that diverts these potentially disruptive energies into the separate and regulated space of leisure.

National Heritage is predominantly rural, pre-industrial and apparently classless and timeless. It stands above history. Yet it has an ambivalent relationship to Toad's pride and joy—the motor-car. Automobiles are both a threat to the utopia offered and the means by which people may find it. Thus, the images have been sustained over the years by such contradictory groups as the National Trust, the Shell Oil Company and now, the English Tourist Board.

National Heritage seems closely related to what Fredric Jameson calls a “protonarrative,” to which a more recognizeable narrative—The Wind in the Willows—can be articulated. The images can be drawn upon by the English Tourist Board because there is a remarkable compatibility between the nostalgia of Grahame's book and that of the “protonarrative” of National Heritage, the “real England.” Both are simultaneously utopian and ideological.

The continuing popularity of the novel may be due not only to the resonances of homesickness it evokes in individual readers. It can be argued that texts of any kind are never offered to readers in isolation: they are offered through the institutional practices of various kinds within a specific historical context. The texts of children's literature are offered through the practices and discourses of criticism and through the cultural institutions of the family and education. The “meanings” of a work are offered to children and adults within a specific social context. Rereading The Wind in the Willows in the context of nostalgia for the “real England” may help us understand a little more about the space occupied by the category “children's literature” in our culture.

Works Cited

Bachelard, Gaston, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas. New York: Orion, 1964.

Bommes, Michael, and Patrick Wright. “‘Charms of Residence:’ the Public and the Past, in Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Making Histories. London: Hutchinson, 1982.

Green, Peter. “The Rentier's Rural Dream.” Times Literary Supplement, Nov. 26, 1982, 1299-1301.

Jameson, Frederic. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. London: Methuen, 1983.

Kuznets, Lois R. “Toad Hall Revisted,” Children's Literature 7 (1978), 115-128.

Marsh, Jan. Back to the Land: the Pastoral Impulse in England from 1880 to 1914. London: Quartet, 1982.

Meinig, D. W. The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical Essays. New York: Oxford, 1979.

Poss, Geraldine D. “An Epic in Arcadia: the Pastoral World of The Wind in the Willows,” Children's Literature 4 (1975), 80-90.

Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. London: Paladin, 1975.

Zanger, Julius. “Goblins, Morlocks and Weasels: Classic Fantasy and the Industrial Revolution,” Children's Literature in Education 8,4 (1977), 154-162.