Book Research - The Wind in the Willows

The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame 

This book is based on characters that are humanized animals living in a simplified lifestyle in a countryside setting, the story is based around the characters that are Mole, Rat, Badger, Toad, and their friends. The book is also based on morality, adventure and friendship. 

The book could be influenced by the public discourse that was happening at the time period of it being written, representing the change of technology and living with the challenges and benefits of it. It addresses social change in relation to the technological advances as it appeared in 1908 which is a few years before the first world war. It shows the reaction from the Edwardian public to political status, economic change and technological/military innovation and is influenced by the discourse that follows. 

As it's set in a simplified rural lifestyle which at that time was fading and changing and was a children's book, the author wanted to keep that ideal for the new generation that would be reading it. He wanted to keep the whole 'running free in fields of grass and flowers' and being completely carefree and blissful instead of having reality make the new generation grow up hopeless. It's as if the author was working against the new changes and modernity that was happening around him. The author in his own writings was dismayed with the demolition of rural and pastoral lifestyles and he portrayed this with The Wind in the Willows. 


When the Wind in the Willows was originally published, it only had one illustrations on the front cover done by W Graham Robertson whose work started off as Pre-Raphaelite oils but later he went on to do illustrations, caricatures and impressionist landscapes . His work is difficult to find but I managed to find some of his work in relation to his different practices. 

Wind in the Willows illustration

Pre-Raphaelite Oils

Illustrations

Impressionist Landscapes

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind_in_the_Willows
http://www.bookrags.com/studyguide-wind-in-the-willows/

Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows: A Children's Classic at 100

 edited by Jackie C. Horne, Donna R. White
http://www.kennethgrahamesociety.net/illustrators.htm
http://www.jssgallery.org/Paintings/W_Graham_Robertson.htm