ENDNOTES
1 (p. 27) the magnificent motor-car: In 1904, when Grahame began telling his son, Alastair, the stories of Toad, the automobile was a recent invention. A Daimler motor syndicate opened in London in 1893, and in 1897 Motor Mills in Coventry began producing cars for sale. Grahame possibly identified the motor-car with social changes he feared: the loss of agrarian life and the rise of a materialistic middle class. Edward VII, Queen Victoria’s eldest son, who reigned from 1901 to 1910, popularized the motor-car when he became the first member of the royal family to ride in one. People with money soon followed suit. Toad’s view of the motor-car—“The poetry of motion! The real way to travel! The only way to travel!” (p. 28)—which Grahame satirizes, was typical of the time.
2 (p. 61) Garibaldi, and the infant Samuel, and Queen Victoria, and other heroes of modern Italy: Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807-1882) liberated and unified modern Italy. Samuel was a preeminent Jewish leader—judge, prophet, soldier, and seer—in the eleventh century B.C.; information about his life is found in the Bible’s first book of Samuel (also known as the first book of Kings). Queen Victoria ruled England from 1837 to 1901. Peter Green notes in his biography of Kenneth Grahame (pp. 163-164; see “For Further Reading”) that these idiosyncratic features of Mole End derive from the “old-fashioned Ligurian home” Grahame stayed in during the spring of 1905 while on holiday at Alassio on the Italian Riviera. The statues also suggest Mole’s dubious artistic taste. Through his friendship with Rat, Mole grows to have a greater appreciation for art and the imagination.
3 (p. 81) “Oddsbodikins!”: In having the sergeant speak this mild oath (“God’s little body!”), Grahame provides a parody of writer William Harrison Ainsworth (1805-1882), whose “Newgate” novels (named for the infamous London prison) sensationalized the lives and exploits of criminals.
4 (p. 84) a sudden clear call from an actual articulate voice: Rat and Mole are progressively drawn to the articulate voice of nature, which culminates in their vision of Pan and the sound of his music. Grahame is indebted to the British romantic poets for this chapter’s imagery and tone. Indeed, the chapter’s structure recalls that of Wordsworth’s sonnet “Composed by the Side of Grasmere Lake” (1806), which begins as evening turns to night, concerns the speaker’s troubled spirit, and ends: “But list! a voice is near; / Great Pan himself low-whispering through the reeds, / ‘Be thankful, thou; for, if unholy deeds / Ravage the world, tranquility is here!’ ”
5 (p. 87) he looked in the very eyes of the Friend and Helper: Grahame describes the nature god, Pan—half-man, half-goat—as a benevolent force, exemplifying the neo-pagan mysticism associated with the nineteenth century. Compared with the depiction of Pan in ancient Greek mythology, his sexuality is moderated here; his paternalism is accentuated; and he bestows on Rat and Mole the gift of forgetfulness, a talent that he did not have in antiquity and that is Grahame’s invention.
6 (p. 91) “And hark to the wind playing in the reeds!”: One of Grahame’s early titles for his book was “The Wind in the Reeds,” which he abandoned because it echoed too closely the volume of poems by W B. Yeats entitled The Wind Among the Reeds (1899). Another title he considered, among others, was “Mr. Mole and His Mates.” The one he chose operates on two levels. “The Wind in the Willows” signifies literally the sound of the wind “whispering” through the “reed-stems” (p. 18), which Mole hears in chapter 1, and connotes a deeper meaning as the whispering becomes the music and message of Pan in chapter 7.
7 (p. 104) Wayfarers All: Like chapter 7, “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn,” this chapter contains numerous echoes of the Romantic poets. John Keats’s “Ode to Autumn” (1819), with its imagery of autumnal change and mutability, informs the opening of Grahame’s chapter, with its “air of change and departure” (p. 104) . The chapter’s structure recalls Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798). As the Wayfarer Rat holds Ratty spellbound with his “shining eyes” (p. 110) and stories of the south, so Coleridge’s Mariner with “glittering” eyes and tales of the sea hypnotizes the Wedding-Guest.
8 (p. 110) “You will have heard of Constantinople, friend?”: The seafaring rat’s historical musings on Constantinople are lifted from William Morris’s Sigurd the Volsung (1876). Morris influenced Grahame to the extent that he dreamed, as did Grahame, of a “rural non-industrial Earthly Paradise: the return of a lost Golden Age” (Green, pp. 259, 262).
9 (p. 111) “we rode into Venice down a path of gold”: Grahame’s romance with the south, particularly Italy, began in 1886, when he traveled to Florence and Rome. In 1890 he visited Venice and in 1895 Alassio on the Italian Riviera, to which he returned several times. He gives the seafaring rat some of his own experiences and impressions of Italy.
10 (p. 127) Near him stood a dingy gipsy caravan: Toad’s encounter with the gipsy is a parody of Lavengro: The Scholar, the Gypsy, the Priest (1851), a novel by George Borrow (Green, p. 259), about the son of a soldier traveling through the British Isles, having adventures and befriending, among others, gipsies, and encountering murderers and thieves.
11 (p. 136) “Like Summer Tempests Came His Tears”: The title for this chapter is a variation on lines from Alfred Tennyson’s 1847 narrative poem “The Princess: A Medley”: “Rose a nurse of ninety years,/ Set his child upon her knee—/Like summer tempest came her tears—/‘Sweet my child, I live for thee!’ ” (part 6, lines 13-16). Tennyson’s mock-heroic poem concerns a princess who founds a university for women and, in order to preserve it from the encroachment of men, imposes a death penalty on male intruders. When a prince enters in disguise, the princess is forced to admit her failure. She marries the prince only after it is clear he shares her views, and together they strive to free women from oppressive societal strictures. Tennyson was a peripheral member of Frederick James Furnivall’s Early English Text Society and his New Shakespeare Society, to which Grahame belonged. Grahame’s readers would have recognized the echo of Tennyson in this title, which points to Toad’s despair at losing Toad Hall to the stoats and weasels and to the resolution of his friends to help him reform and reclaim his home.
12 (p. 140) “And they’re telling the tradespeople and everybody that they’ve come to stay for good”: Toad’s adventures and exploits as he describes them in this chapter, as well as his return home to find Toad Hall usurped by the stoats and weasels, are mock heroic in tone; they recall Odysseus and his return from the Trojan War to Ithaca, where suitors of his wife have moved into his house. See Lois R. Kuznet’s Kenneth Grahame for an in-depth analysis of the mythical element in Grahame’s book.
13 (p. 152) The Return of Ulysses: Toad is humorously compared to Ulysses (Odysseus) in his return to Toad Hall. Grahame underscored the mock-heroic element in this title and in the way Rat, Badger, Mole, and Toad arm themselves (p. 152) and then enter the banqueting hall: “The four Heroes strode wrathfully into the room!” (p. 154). Grahame uses the language of heroism in his description of the fight that ensues.