To generations of readers The Wind in the Willows has been a fanciful and childlike tale of woodland creatures messing about in boats.
Now a scholar of Kenneth Grahame’s work claims the author’s intentions were not only more complex but, for their time, subversive. The book should not only be read as an autobiographical work but an exploration of the author’s homosexuality, claims Peter Hunt, emeritus professor in English and children’s literature at Cardiff University.
Professor Hunt said that there was good circumstantial evidence that Grahame was gay despite having a wife and child.
The professor, whose book The Making of The Wind in the Willows will be published in March, said that once he considered a gay subtext to the tale of all-male characters it was impossible to read the book any other way. “It’s hiding in plain sight,” he said. “You could read it as a gay manifesto.”
Grahame died in 1932, 35 years before homosexual acts were decriminalised. The author had been a secretary at the Bank of England until he left abruptly in 1908. One reason suggested for the departure is a dispute with Walter Cunliffe, director and later governor of the bank, who many believe was a model for Toad. A colleague recorded that Grahame’s exit “had nothing to do with ill health, but to his resentment of the bullying nature of [Cunliffe]”. The professor believes Grahame’s shoddy treatment was because Cunliffe knew and disapproved of his sexuality.
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Grahame’s wife and son lived in Cookham Dean in Berkshire from 1906 but Grahame spent much of his week at his home in London, which he shared with Walford Graham Robertson, a theatre set designer and friend of Oscar Wilde. “It fits in with his biography. It was an unhappy marriage and he went off quite a lot down to Fowey [in Cornwall], boating and fishing.”
Another connection with the gay community was Constance Smedley, a family friend who was instrumental in getting The Wind in the Willows published. A year after publication she married the artist Maxwell Armfield, who was gay, Professor Hunt said. “It just strikes me that if you’ve got a woman who goes to see Kenneth Grahame and his wife and Kenneth is gay and she marries a gay man, then you can see some empathy going on.”
He said that the book was certainly “a story of maleness and male companionship” and there were passages such as a description of the ancient Greek god Pan that were sensuous. Grahame describes the god of the wild as having “splendid curves” and “rippling muscles”.
Homoerotic charge
Chapter 4 Mole and Rat sleep in Badger’s food store. “[Badger] conducted the two animals to a long room that seemed half bedchamber and half loft. The Badger’s winter stores, which indeed were visible everywhere, took up half the room — piles of apples, turnips, and potatoes, baskets full of nuts, and jars of honey; but the two little white beds on the remainder of the floor looked soft and inviting, and the linen on them, though coarse, was clean and smelt beautifully of lavender; and the Mole and the Water Rat, shaking off their garments in some 30 seconds, tumbled in between the sheets in great joy and contentment.”