Two books that do not match, bound together
Read it as an adult and the join is obvious. Half the chapters are a farce about a rich TOAD who steals a MOTORCAR, goes to prison, escapes disguised as a washerwoman and retakes TOAD HALL from the WEASEL and STOAT gangs of the WILD WOOD. The other half is slow, seasonal nature writing in which very little happens by design.
The quiet chapters are the ones publishers would cut now. One is about MOLE being overwhelmed by his own abandoned BURROW and RATTY helping him love it again. Another, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, has the two of them encounter a god on a RIVER island at first light and be made to forget it — a passage of religious awe dropped into a book with a comic amphibian in it. Pink Floyd took their first album title from that chapter, which tells you it is not really for children.
The publishers said no
Kenneth Grahame was Secretary of the Bank of England, a serious job he had reached without a university education, and the Toad stories began as bedtime tales and then letters to his son Alastair while the boy was away. He had no intention of publishing them.
When he did submit the manuscript in 1908 it was turned down repeatedly. Reviewers who did see it complained there were no fairies, that the animals behaved inconsistently — sometimes pocket-sized, sometimes driving cars — and that it was not the sequel to his earlier bestsellers anyone wanted. It sold poorly at first. A fan letter from Theodore Roosevelt, who had read it several times, helped; A.A. Milne adapting the Toad chapters for the stage as Toad of Toad Hall in 1929 did more, and that play is why most people know the loud half of the book and not the quiet half.
The motorcar was a real alarm in 1908
TOAD's obsession reads as pure comedy now. It was topical then. Britain's speed limit had been raised to twenty miles per hour in 1903, the same year registration plates and driving licences were introduced, and a small number of very rich men were suddenly travelling through villages at speeds nobody had experienced. Newspapers ran campaigns about it.
So Toad is a specific joke about a specific class of person: wealthy, bored, unaccountable, and fixated on the newest machine. He crashes seven cars in the book and is fined and imprisoned and learns nothing. The gentler ADVENTURE of the gypsy CARAVAN comes first and gets abandoned the instant something faster goes past, which is the whole character in one scene.
The riverbank itself
MESSING about in BOATS is the line everybody quotes, and RATTY says it in the first chapter while ROWING an astonished MOLE up the RIVER to a PICNIC. It has since been printed on a great many mugs.
The RIVERBANK Grahame was describing is usually taken to be the Thames near Cookham Dean in Berkshire, where he spent much of his childhood with his grandmother, and later the stretch around Pangbourne where he retired. The OTTER, the HEDGEHOG, the WILLOWS and the changing seasons are observed rather than invented — he was a keen walker and it shows. If the nature is the part that appeals, our river page has what is actually going on in a waterway like that one.