Rat, Toad and Mole Get Footnotes

Had you asked, when I was 7 or 8 I could have led you right to the spot where Rat and Mole lived along the River Bank. Kenneth Grahame didn't supply exact coordinates for the hole in "The Wind in the Willows," but I knew it was by a stream in a meadow near my house. The same goes for Toad Hall, which was just down the road.

As an adult, I've come to accept that Grahame did not, in fact, have my corner of the Northeastern United States in the 1980s in mind when he wrote his allages classic in England in 1908. I've also learned that I'm not remotely alone in feeling that the book was written solely for me. By some strange magic, an untold but sizable percentage of Grahame's readers find in his stories an uncanny reflection of their experiences, especially of being young.

This kind of magic is fragile: as the old line about dissecting jokes says, if you try to explain this book's charm, you might end up with little more than a dead toad (and mole … and rat … and badger …). So the news that two annotated versions of Grahame's book would appear within a few weeks of one another raises some difficult questions. For instance: "What kind of sadistic pedant killjoy would want to annotate 'The Wind in the Willows'? And how can there be two such fiends?"

Seth Lerer and Annie Gauger, the editors of the new annotated editions, don't entirely allay this skepticism. Each of their volumes (published by Harvard University Press and W.W. Norton, respectively) is laden with buzz-killing trivia. When Toad disguises himself as a washerwoman and sweet-talks a train conductor into helping him evade the police, Gauger notes: "The trading of laundry service for a free ride would have been against regulations for anyone working for the London and North-Western Railway Company." Lerer, for his part, shows a mania for citing the OED. Yet both offer insights that burnish the book. Sometimes because of their efforts and sometimes in spite of them, Grahame's weird masterpiece seems as charming as ever—but also sadder, more enduring and more necessary.

It's Lerer, for instance, who highlights a quality of the book that might elude even devoted readers: what he calls its "bookishness." Grahame's story marinates in a world of texts—of language written, read and occasionally sung. Rat "murmurs poetry-things to himself" when drifting down the river to a picnic and, when lost in the snow with Mole, is consoled when he reads the sign MR. BADGER. THE river itself is a kind of living anthology, as Grahame puts it in the first chapter—"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."

In a more meaningful way, the bookishness reflects the story's origins. Rat and Badger and the rest began their careers in bedtime stories that Grahame told Alastair, his only child. Nicknamed Mouse, the sickly boy had a difficult childhood, one marred by emotional problems and severe eye trouble. His ideas and questions had so much influence on his father that Gauger calls Alastair the book's "first editor and co-author." It can't be an accident that the novel's protagonist is a mole, an animal that can barely see in real life, but who in the story sees just fine.

If Grahame dreamed up Toad's carstealing high jinks partly as a way of cheering up his son, he also did so partly to cheer up himself. The other point reiterated in the new editions—more fully in Gauger's version than in Lerer's—is just how sad a life Kenneth Grahame lived. Born in 1859 in Scotland, he lost his mother at age 5 and saw his alcoholic father walk away soon after that. The happiest days of his youth were spent with his grandmother and siblings at the Mount, a bucolic estate that sounds a lot like the River Bank. The closed-off nature of that idyll—he lived there for just two years, before being relocated again—may explain why, for all the book's careful depiction of late-Victorian manners colliding with Edwardian bustle, its spirit is overwhelmingly Romantic. The influence of Wordsworth, poet laureate of youth-in-nature, pervades the writing, which often has a rapturous beauty. Here is Grahame describing the animals as they look back on summer: