Dream Days (1898), by Kenneth Grahame (Children's Classics)

Dream Days is a collection of children's fiction and reminiscences of childhood written by Kenneth Grahame. A sequel to Grahame's 1895 collection The Golden Age (some of its selections feature the same family of five children), Dream Days was first published in 1898 under the imprint John Lane: The Bodley Head. (The first six selections in the book had been previously published in periodicals of the day-in The Yellow Book, the New Review, and in Scribner's Magazine in the United States.)The book is best known for its inclusion of Grahame's classic story The Reluctant Dragon. Like its precursor volume, Dream Days received strong approval from the literary critics of the day. In the decades since, the book has perhaps suffered a reputation as a thinner and weaker sequel to The Golden Age-except for its single hit story. In one modern estimation, both books "paint a convincingly unsentimental picture of childhood, with the adults in these sketches totally out of touch with the real concerns of the young people around them, including their griefs and rages." As with The Golden Age, the first edition of Dream Days was un-illustrated; again like the prior volume, a subsequent edition of Dream Days was published with illustrations by Maxfield Parrish. The publisher's first intention was to print color plates; however, John Lane was not satisfied with the color reproductions of Parrish's pictures. Lane instead chose a new photogravure reproduction process that produced black-and-white results superior to the halftone images in the 1899 edition of The Golden Age. The Parrish-illustrated edition of Dream Days was issued by The Bodley Head in London and New York in 1902; it contained ten full-page illustrations (one for each of the eight selections plus frontispiece and title page), and six tailpieces. The quality of the images in Dream Days inspired Lane to issue a matching edition of The Golden Age, with improved photogravure plates, in 1904. Kenneth Grahame ( 8 March 1859 - 6 July 1932) was a British writer, most famous for The Wind in the Willows (1908), one of the classics of children's literature. He also wrote The Reluctant Dragon; both books were later adapted into Disney films.Kenneth Grahame was born on 8 March (1859) in Edinburgh, Scotland. When he was a little more than a year old, his father, an advocate, received an appointment as sheriff-substitute in Argyllshire at Inveraray on Loch Fyne. Kenneth loved the sea and was happy there, but when he was 5, his mother died from complications of childbirth, and his father, who had a drinking problem, gave over care of Kenneth, his brother Willie, his sister Helen and the new baby Roland to Granny Ingles, the children's grandmother, in Cookham Dean in the village of Cookham in Berkshire. There the children lived in a spacious, if dilapidated, home, "The Mount", on spacious grounds in idyllic surroundings, and were introduced to the riverside and boating by their uncle, David Ingles, curate at Cookham Dean church. This delightful ambiance, particularly Quarry Wood and the River Thames, is believed, by Peter Green, his biographer, to have inspired the setting for The Wind in the Willows. He was an outstanding pupil at St Edward's School in Oxford. During his early years at St. Edwards, a sports regimen had not been established and the boys had freedom to explore the old city with its quaint shops, historic buildings, and cobblestone streets, St Giles' Fair, the idyllic upper reaches of the River Thames, and the nearby countryside.Grahame died in Pangbourne, Berkshire, in 1932. He is buried in Holywell Cemetery, Oxford. Grahame's cousin Anthony Hope, also a successful author, wrote his epitaph, which reads: "To the beautiful memory of Kenneth Grahame, husband of Elspeth and father of Alastair, who passed the river on the 6th of July, 1932, leaving childhood and literature through him the more blest for all time"