It’s the birthday of Kenneth Grahame, author of the beloved children’s story, The Wind in the Willows. Grahame’s life was tragic at both ends so the disclaimer from my post on A.A. Milne (January 18) applies.

Grahame was born in 1859 in Edinburgh, Scotland, one of four children, and by the age of five was essentially orphaned. His mother died of scarlet fever several days after giving birth to Grahame’s brother, and his father succumbed to a drinking problem. (I’m declaring this Scarlet Fever Week at the Almanac.) Grahame and his siblings were largely raised by his maternal grandmother, living first in her home in Cookham Dean near the Thames. This setting was ideal for the children (large garden, lovely river), but after a couple years the chimney of the old house collapsed and the family had to move to a smaller cottage some distance away.

Grahame did well at school and wanted to study at Oxford but lacked the money, so he went to work for the Bank of England instead. Fun fact: Grahame took an entrance exam for the bank and received full credit for his English essay, something that has never been done before or since. While moving forward in his career at the bank, he began writing essays and stories about a family of orphaned children, eventually collected in two volumes, The Golden Age (1895) and Dream Days (1898). They were very well received.

In 1899 Grahame married Elspeth Thomson, with whom he exchanged fairly icky letters full of baby talk during their courtship. The marriage was a miserable one; Elspeth appears to have been neurotic, hypochondriacal, and just plain wacky (not in a good way). Their only child, Alastair, was born premature, blind in one eye, and with health issues that persisted. The parents together participated in a delusion that Alastair was a genius. Meanwhile, Grahame had done very well for himself career-wise and was secretary of the Bank of England by 39. But in 1903 a strange incident occurred at the bank: a man later referred to by the papers as a “Socialist Lunatic” pulled a gun on Grahame and fired three shots, all of which missed. He was taken away in a straitjacket and Grahame himself was never quite the same.

By now Grahame had been making up bedtime stories for Alastair about Toad, Ratty, Mole, and Badger. Just a few years after the shooting incident, Grahame moved the family back to the Cookham area and wrote The Wind in the Willows. The book came out in 1908, and while critically panned, it became enormously popular. In 1920, Alastair, having tried and failed to live up to his parents’ unrealistic academic dreams for him and just shy of his 20th birthday, committed suicide by lying across a railroad track. Grahame was devastated and wrote very little after that, dying himself in 1932 from a cerebral hemorrhage.

Wow, that was sad. Sorry about that. Let’s all focus on that great essay score Graham got from the Bank of England and the millions of children who have loved his stories.

Have an increasingly cheerful Thursday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.