Kenneth Grahame - The Modern Library Collection Childrens Classics 5-Book Bundle: The Wind in the Willows, Alices Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, Peter Pan, The Three Musketeers

The Wind in the Willows, Alices Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass, Peter Pan, and The Three Musketeers are works of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously.

A Modern Library eBook Edition

The Wind in the Willows Introduction copyright 2005 by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
Biographical note and reading group guide copyright 2005 by Random House, Inc.

Alices Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass Introduction copyright 2002 by A. S. Byatt
Notes, biographical note, and reading group guide copyright 2002 by Random House Inc.
Grateful acknowledgement is made to Carcanet Press Limited for permission to reprint eight lines from Alice from Complete Poems by Robert Graves.
Reprinted by permission of Carcanet Press Limited.

Peter Pan Introduction copyright 2004 by Anne McCaffrey.
Biographical note and reading group guide copyright 2004 by Random House Inc.

The Three Musketeers copyright 1950, 1978 by Random House, Inc.
Biographical note copyright 1996 by Random House, Inc.
Introduction copyright 2001 by Alan Furst

All Rights Reserved.

Published in the United States by The Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

Modern Library and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

The novels contained in this omnibus were each published separately by The Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 2005, 2002, 2004, and 1996.

Cover painting: Mari Katogi

eBook ISBN 978-0-8129-8447-7

www.modernlibrary.com

v3.1

2005 Modern Library Paperback Edition

Introduction copyright 2005 by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
Biographical note and reading group guide copyright 2005
by Random House, Inc.

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Modern Library,
an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

M ODERN L IBRARY and the T ORCHBEARER Design are
registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Grahame, Kenneth
The wind in the willows / Kenneth Grahame; introduction by Jeffrey
Moussaieff Masson; illustrations by Paul Bransom. Modern Library pbk. ed.
p. cm.(The Modern Library classics)
eISBN: 978-0-307-82040-2
1. AnimalsFiction. 2. EnglandFiction. 3. FriendshipFiction.
4. River lifeFiction. 5. Country lifeFiction. I. Title. II. Series.

PR4726.W515 2005

821.8dc22 2004055991

Modern Library website address:
www.modernlibrary.com

Frontispiece: The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.

v3.1

The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.

It was the Water Rat.

Come on! he said. We shall just have to walk it.

In panic, he began to run.

Through the Wild Wood and the snow.

Toad was a helpless prisoner in the remotest dungeon.

He lay prostrate in his misery on the floor.

Its a hard life, by all accounts, murmured the Rat.

Dwelling chiefly on his own cleverness, and presence of mind in emergencies.

The Badger said, Now then, follow me!

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

Before The Wind in the Willows, there were animal fables, such as Aesops, which Kenneth Grahame much loved and wrote an introduction to. There were also animal stories, including Beatrix potters Peter Rabbitin fact, Grahame had given his son pet rabbits named Peter and Benjie in that books honor. But there had never been an animal novel.

The Wind in the Willows is the first animal novel ever written. The point of view is pure anthropomorphism, blatantly, obviously, and charmingly so: When they got home, the Rat made a bright fire in the parlour, and planted the Mole in an arm-chair in front of it, having fetched down a dressing-gown and slippers for him, and told him river stories till supper-time. What child would ever exclaim, Preposterous! as the London critics did?

Imagine accusing a child of anthropomorphism because she is telling herself a story about animals who talk. Perhaps there really was a time when parents and educators would reprimand a child with: Animals dont talk. Nor do they think. Nor do they feel. So stop all this foolishness! Back in 1908 when The Wind in the Willows was first published, a witless reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement complained that as a contribution to natural history the work is negligible (as if that were Kenneth Grahames purpose) and that a water rat would never use a boat to navigate a stream.

Children, of course, never made such a criticism, either in the past or now. This is not, I think, because children are more sophisticated literary critics than the reviewer in the Times; it is rather that children use their imaginations to form intense and somewhat mysterious bonds with animals that most adults consider beneath their dignity to ponderrats, badgers, toads, and othersand are not generally thought of as cuddly pets.

Would the Wind in the Willows have attained the immortal status it now enjoys if the book had been identical in every way except one: instead of animals its characters were people? The answer is obvious. The animals are somehow integral to the enduring charm of the book. How can we explain this? I think part of the answer lies in the value of anthropomorphism. Far from being a problem to be solved or, even worse, a sin to be avoided, anthropomorphism is and always has been embraced by children the world over. In every tradition I know, animals are present in childrens stories with attributes that the authors, and the children, know perfectly well those animals do not possess.

In other words, children recognize the value of extending ones imagination right into the life of a creature of another species. Children know that we can enter the inner world of another animal, or indeed even another person, only if we are willing to suspend disbelief, to employ our empathy, our sympathy, and above all, our imagination. This is valuable for reading literature, for writing it, and even for conducting scientific research, as we have belatedly begun to recognize. Call that anthropomorphism if you will; it is a position animal scientists are only recently coming to hold.

A more modern critic might attack Grahame for the sin of sentimentalism, since what Grahame achieves is to capture some of the feelings children have when around real animals, and then project them successfully into this fantasy of perfect peace, harmony, comfort, and safety. His world is infused with not just animal