The Wind in the Willows

Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932) was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. When he was not yet five, his mother died of scarlet fever, after which he was sent to his maternal grandmother's house at Cookham Dean near the Thames. His father virtually abandoned his children to relatives, and Grahame was sent to boarding school in Oxford at the age of nine. Disappointed in his dream of going on to university, he was instead given a job as a clerk in the Bank of England, where ultimately he became Secretary. He achieved fame as a writer with his recollections of childhood, The Golden Age and Dream Days, published in 1895 and 1898. The Wind in the Willows, turned down by several publishers as a poor sequel to the earlier books, began…