The Golden Age

An unnamed narrator remembers his childhood in the English countryside, where he and his brothers and sisters, orphans brought up by aunts and uncles, the grown-ups they call 'the Olympians', live in a world of their own. In short, funny, wistful chapters they play at knights and pirates, plan adventures, fall in love, and see through the dull, incomprehensible adults who rule them.

Kenneth Grahame published the book in 1895, thirteen years before The Wind in the Willows, and it was admired by readers from Swinburne to Theodore Roosevelt. Many of its chapters first appeared in magazines, among them the National Observer edited by W. E. Henley, and its sequel is Dream Days.