Scottish by birth, he spent most of his childhood with his grandmother in England, following the death of his mother and his father's inability to look after the children.

Before writing The Wind in the Willows, he published three other books: Pagan Papers (1893), The Golden Age (1895), and Dream Days (1898).

[2]: 13–14 After their mother's death, the four children were sent to live with their maternal grandmother at The Mount, a large house in extensive grounds in Cookham Dean in Berkshire, while their grieving father remained in Scotland and took to drink.

[2]: 15-18  Also living at The Mount was Grahame's uncle David Ingles, who was the curate at the local church and took the children boating on the River Thames at nearby Bisham.

[1] Holidays were spent at Cranbourne or with his naval commander uncle, Jack Ingles, and his children in Portsmouth and London.

While working in the Westminster office, he lodged with another uncle, Robert Grahame, in Fulham, joined the London Scottish Volunteers and, having met Frederick James Furnivall in a Soho restaurant, became a member of the New Shakspere Society.

[2]: 49-73 On 1 January 1879, aged nineteen, Grahame entered the Bank of England in Threadneedle Street in the City of London as a "gentleman clerk".

[2]: 92  Summer holidays with his sister, Helen, were spent in Cornwall and Italy, both places which would remain favourite destinations throughout his life.

He had been jotting down his thoughts in prose and poetry in a bank ledger, but it was not until 1887 that he started to submit stories and essays to periodicals.

He was then invited to become a regular contributor to the National Observer by its editor, the poet William Ernest Henley, who tried to persuade him to give up his position with the Bank and become a full-time writer.

In 1893 he encouraged Grahame to send a collection of his short stories and essays to John Lane at The Bodley Head publishers.

Having lost both her parents, she was living in Onslow Square with her stepfather John Fletcher Moulton who was a Liberal Party Member of Parliament.

[1][4]: 62  The couple set up home in Durham Villas (now Phillimore Place) in Kensington, where their only child, Alastair (nicknamed Mouse) was born prematurely in 1900 with a congenital cataract that left him blind in one eye.

[1] In 1903, Grahame had a narrow escape when a man entered the Bank of England and took three shots at him with a revolver, missing each time.

[3] In 1906, he had taken out a lease on a house called Mayfield (later Herries Preparatory School) in Cookham Dean, close to where he grew up.

When they returned to England, they settled at Church Cottage in the village of Pangbourne, where Grahame died of a cerebral haemorrhage on 6 July 1932.