Dennison’s account of all this is sympathetic but honest, psychologically acute and insightful. It is, withal, a sad story but one that Dennison tells extremely well to his and Grahame’s credit.
Carefully meditated but curiously upsetting ... The story of Elspeth and Kenneth’s marriage is depressing; but Dennison’s account of their child’s life is heartbreaking ... Dennison, in this finely written book with its sometimes bejewelled vocabulary has dug deep into some of the complex truths that underpin The Wind in the Willows and give it its layers of resonance ... at its core, what it celebrates, despite adventures and crises, is a quintessentially English dolce far niente, a refusal of the real, a quiescence that is almost mystical. As such, it embodies the odd, half-life so elegantly described by Dennison in this biography, perhaps the most haunting of whose revelations is that the figure of Toad was inspired by little Alistair, the lost child of lost parents.
Dennison’s bold criticism stands out in a biography that is scrupulously just to its subject. His frequent reminders of the blows Grahame suffered will speak to rational minds. The reminders are necessary because the blows, as they happen, are oddly unmoving. We have to understand the reasons why this child developed so extreme a version of an escapist self. Only gradually does Dennison allow the facts to add up to something twisted, even dangerous to any human being who ventured too close ... Drawing on telling quotes from Grahame’s works, Dennison’s book more than meets the challenge of a walled-off man. The result is a sensitively probing and nuanced portrait that makes sense of the darker character furled in the dreamer.
Dennison makes extensive and excellent use of [Grahame's] stories in recreating Grahame’s childhood ... This sorry tale has been told before, and while Dennison does not add a great deal to earlier books by Peter Green (1959) and Alison Prince (1994), he is particularly good on the way Grahame ‘insisted on his own physical and emotional connectedness to the landscape’ and freely admitted that he preferred places to people. It would have been nice to have had The Wind in the Willows placed in the context of other children’s literature of the period, and be given some sense of how Grahame’s exploration and celebration of the countryside chimed with prevailing Edwardian notions of England and Englishness; but by keeping tightly focused on Grahame, Dennison has produced a book that is brief, brisk and very readable.
Sadly, Dennison does little to enliven his portrait of Grahame. While respectful and not entirely unsympathetic, the author’s treatment feels like a commissioned exercise. His prose style is overly fusty, and Grahame’s portrait lacks the psychological probing one expects with contemporary scholarship. For instance, Dennison neglects to explore his subject’s sexual identity. Though a biographer is unlikely to prove that Grahame was a homosexual, this aspect of his personality has been strongly considered by other recent scholars ... A stale exploration of a nearly forgotten writer, offering little to enhance Grahame’s relevancy for modern readers.
