"It was the Water Rat!"

One of the great delights of summer is the opportunity to explore the literary world at whim, rather than abiding by the constraints of syllabuses. Despite the business of some of these weeks (and, indeed, the apathy of others), I've been able to take advantage of this opportunity quite a bit recently, reading books I wouldn't ordinarily pick up during the school year. This venture seems to have thrust me into the territory of non-fiction, a country I'm rather too inclined to neglect. At present, I'm perusing Simon Winchester's fascinating book, The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary. While the book as a whole has proven both intrigueing and incredibly informative, the highlight for me has been a minor digression in the book's second chapter, which reveals that the inspiration for the character of the Water Rat in The Wind in the Willows was "the half-mad scholar--gypsy who was secretary of the Philological Society, Frederick Furnivall" (38).


Winchester writes:
"Some thought Furnivall--despite his devotion to mathematics, Middle English, and philology--a total clown, an ass, a scandalous dandy, and a fool (his critics, who were legion, made much of the fact that his father maintained a private lunatic asylum in the house where the young Frederick had grown up). He was a socialist, an agnostic, and a vegetarian, and "to alcohol and tobacco he was a stranger all his life." He was a keen athlete, obsessed by sculling, and was particularly fond of teaching handsome young waitresses (recruited from the ABC teashop in New Oxford Street) the best way to get the most speed out of a slender racing boat he had designed.... But he was a brilliant scholar, and, like James Murray, he had an obsessive thirst for learning; among his friends and admirers he could count Alfred, Lord Tennyson; Charles Kingsley; William Morris; John Ruskin... and the Yorkshire-born composer Frederick Delius. Kenneth Grahame, a fellow sculler who worked at the Bank of England, came duly under Furnivall's spell, wrote The Wind in the Willows and painted Furnivall into the plot as the Water Rat. "We learned em!" says the Toad. "We taught em" corrects Rat. Furnivall may have been a cunning mischief-maker, but he was also often right" (38-9).

Stumbling upon a reference to Grahame is always a bit like suddenly running into an old friend in an unexpected spot. This particular moment reminded me of the delighted exclamation which first introduces the reader to the beloved character as he pops out from the opposite bank of The River to greet the delighted Mole: "It was the Water Rat!"

I have to confess to some trepidation about finding that a character of what might be my most-cherished book was based on an "appalling flirt" (39). On the other hand, much of the fun of history is discovering such vivid characters, and the description lends so much sense to the wonderfully funny tete-a-tete between the Rat and the Badger over whether Toad's grammar is or is not acceptable. Oh, the joys of summer reading...