It was the heyday of divided lives, from the strange case of Jekyll and Hyde (1886) to the double voice of J Alfred Prufrock (1915), shifting from timorous lover to daring prophet. More pertinent to writers is the dual figure in Henry James’s ghost tale, “The Private Life” (1892), where a celebrated author, holding forth in full public view, is found at the same time alone in his room, back-turned, intent on writing. Matthew Dennison shows us a somewhat similar feat: the co-existence of a fancy-free “eternal boy” and a public conformist throughout the double life of Kenneth Grahame.
What is strange in this case is not the mismatch between private and public lives. It is to be expected, as TS Eliot put it: “Our lives are covered by the currents of action.” Indeed, in Grahame’s children’s classic, The Wind in the Willows, Ratty, the Water Rat, shuns the Wide World beyond the Wild Wood. He instructs his friend Mole that anyone with sense would not go there. But Grahame himself did go there, and more: he shaped himself to the Wide World.
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