Mole abandons his spring cleaning mid-scrub, shouts "Bother!" and "O blow!", and bolts up into the sunshine, and Grahame's long, rolling sentences carry that same restless energy right through the book. It rewards being read aloud over many nights rather than raced through, which suits a chapter a bedtime nicely.
About this book
First published 1908 · Grew from bedtime stories for the author's son · Adapted for the stage as Toad of Toad Hall · Never out of print
Kenneth Grahame was Secretary of the Bank of England, and in the evenings he told bedtime stories to his young son Alastair. When the boy stayed behind during a family holiday, Grahame kept the stories going in letters, following a boastful Toad and his friends on the river bank. Those letters, about Mole, Rat, Badger and Toad, grew into the book he published in 1908.
It was not an immediate critical success. Reviewers had expected more of his earlier writing about childhood and found the talking animals odd, though readers took to it. The American president Theodore Roosevelt wrote to say he had read it and reread it until the characters felt like old friends. In 1929 A. A. Milne turned the Toad chapters into a stage play, Toad of Toad Hall, which is still performed today. The book has stayed in print ever since.
The copy on this shelf is the full original text.
Chapters
A long one: read it a chapter a night.
Public domain. Source text via Project Gutenberg, PG boilerplate removed. View the source edition