SOURCE: Watkins, Tony. “‘Making a Break for the Real England’: The River Bankers Revisited.” Children's Literature Association Quarterly 9, no. 1 (spring 1984): 34-5.

In the following essay, Watkins views the enduring popularity of The Wind in the Willows as a result of nostalgia for a long-ago England.

On January 1st, 1983, The Wind in the Willows came out of copyright. A month or two later, the English Tourist Board ran a series of double-spread magazine advertisements featuring The Wind in the Willows prints by Nicholas Price. The advertisements, which depicted Toad, Mole or Rat riding in a vintage car or consulting a map on their way to a castle, bore the slogan: “The Real England: Make a Break for it.” The ads invited us to explore a “real England” of ancient monuments and of small villages virtually untouched by social and economic change: an England that is timeless, mysterious and yet...