KENNETH GRAHAME
Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on March 8, 1859,
Kenneth Grahame was five years old when his mother died of scarlet
fever following the birth of her fourth child. Kenneth’s despondent
father put his children in the care of their maternal grandmother
and, except for a brief interlude, did not see or communicate with
them again. A relatively isolated child, Kenneth developed a
passion for the landscape around his grandmother’s home in Cookham
Dene, Berkshire. That lush area along the Thames stayed in his
imagination and was later to play a large part in his writings; in
time he would live there with his wife and son.
Grahame attended boarding school at St. Edward’s
in Oxford, where he excelled at sports and his studies. These
accomplishments were muted by the death of his brother William and
by his family’s refusal to allow him to study at Oxford University.
Instead Grahame was urged to move to London, where in 1879 he took
a position as a gentleman clerk at the Bank of London. Rather than
mourn his lost opportunities, he worked diligently and spent his
considerable free time playing sports and cultivating literary
interests. Friendship with acclaimed academic F. J. Furnivall
widened his circle of friends, and Furnivall advised the young man
as he began writing short essays and poems.
After publishing his first works under a
pseudonym in the National Observer, Grahame combined some of his
light prose pieces and published them under his own name as Pagan
Papers in 1893. Modest success followed, along with more
publications: The Golden Age (1895), The Headswoman (1898), and
Dream Days (1898). Relatively conservative politically, Grahame
nevertheless published in the same journal as Oscar Wilde and
formed friendships with writers of different opinions and
backgrounds. His double life as bank worker and writer continued
through the end of the century. In 1899 Grahame married Elspeth
Thomson; they had a child, a partially blind son named Alastair, a
year later.
Royalties from the sale of his books allowed
Grahame to resign from the bank, and the family settled in Cookham
Dene, where Grahame had spent his childhood. Although he wrote
little in this period, Grahame told his son stories that gave him
the idea for his great novel The Wind in the Willows. The book was
published in 1908, and, after a slow beginning, proved immensely
popular; it has remained so down to the present day. Grahame wrote
little after the book’s release, withdrawing further into solitude
in the countryside. His quiet way of life was shattered in 1920 by
his son’s death. To cope with the loss, Grahame and Elspeth spent
years traveling through Europe before returning to England in 1924.
Kenneth Grahame died in Pangbourne, Berkshire, on July 6, 1932, and
is buried in Holywell Churchyard in Oxford.