There is some debate over Grahame’s sexuality. Grahame was devastated and never wrote anything for the rest of his life. At the age of 20, having just started his studies at Cambridge, he committed suicide by laying on a train track and being decapitated. Toad is thought to be based on Alastair.Īlastair was an eccentric and unruly child.
He wrote other children’s books with good sales after that, but resisted writing a sequel. In 1908 Grahame published the stories as The Wind in the Willows to immediate commercial success. He later expanded on these stories in letters to Alastair, who lived in the country with his mother, after Grahame permanently moved to London. Grahame told young Alastair stories about woodland animals and their adventures in an idyllic woodland as bedtime stories.
They had one son, Alastair (who they nicknamed “Mouse”), who was born blind in one eye and with a pronounced squint in the other and several physical and mental infirmities. He married despite his friends’ reservations and it was a very unhappy match. Grahame didn’t marry until he was 41, to a woman who would probably be diagnosed today as being bipolar. It was a dull and stuffy environment but Grahame worked diligently at it and rose to become the Secretary of the Bank of England by the time he took early retirement. He wanted to go to Oxford University but the family had no money for it and he was instead apprenticed to the Bank of England at the age of 19. He spent most of his time playing and wandering in the nearby woods daydreaming, which became a lifelong solace to him. Grahame was raised mostly by his grandmother under what could be called benign neglect. His father died in poverty in a rooming house in Le Havre when Grahame was 28.
His father, who had been a lawyer, soon fled to France and Grahame never saw him again. Grahame’s mother died when he was four years old and his father, an alcoholic, sent Grahame and his siblings to be raised by relatives. Kenneth Grahame, the author of the classic children’s book The Wind in the Willows, was born on March 8, 1859, in Edinburough, Scotland.ĭespite his great success in his career as an officer of the Bank of England and his literary prominence Grahame had a sad life and a very difficult childhood.
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