The real Kenneth Grahame

Galvin, Elisabeth2021

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Summary

He wrote one of the most quintessentially English books, yet Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932) was a Scot. He was 4 years old when his mother died and his father became an alcoholic, so Kenneth grew up with his grandmother who lived on the banks of the River Thames. Forced to abandon his dreams of studying at Oxford, he was accepted as a clerk at the Bank of England where he became one of the youngest men to be made company secretary. He narrowly escaped death in 1903 when he was mistaken for the Bank's governor and shot at several times. He wrote secretly in his spare time for magazines and became a contemporary of contributors including Rudyard Kipling, George Bernard Shaw and W.B. Yeats. Ironically, his most famous novel today was the least successful during his lifetime: 'The Wind in the Willows' (1908) originated as letters to his disabled son, who was later found dead on a train line after a suspected suicide.