The Modern Library Collection Children's Classics 5-Book Bundle

Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932) was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. When he was not yet five, his mother died of scarlet fever, after which he was sent to his maternal grandmother’s house at Cookham Dean near the Thames. His father virtually abandoned his children to relatives, and Grahame was sent to boarding school in Oxford at the age of nine. Disappointed in his dream of going on to university, he was instead given a job as a clerk in the Bank of England, where ultimately he became Secretary. He achieved fame as a writer with his recollections of childhood, The Golden Age and Dream Days, published in 1895 and 1898. The Wind in the Willows, turned down by several publishers as a poor sequel to the earlier books, began as a bedtime story told to his only child, Alistair, whose tragic death at twenty was so great a sorrow that he and his wife lived in seclusion thereafter. In a life of much sadness, it seems that all he found pleasurable in this world he put into one of the best-loved children’s book of all time.

Lewis Carroll is the pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832–1898). He wrote Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland for the amusement of 11-year-old Alice Liddell and her two sisters, who were the daughters of the dean of Christ Church College, Oxford, where Dodgson taught mathematics. The book was published in 1865, and its first companion volume, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, followed in 1871.

J. M. Barrie, also known as Sir James Mathew Barrie, was born on May 9, 1860, at Kirriemuir in Scotland, the ninth of ten children of a weaver. When Barrie was six, his older brother David died in a skating accident. Barrie then became his mother’s chief comforter, while David remained in her memory a boy of 13 who would never grow up. Barrie received his MA degree from the University of Edinburgh in 1882 and began working as a journalist. In 1885 he moved to London, and his writings were collected in Auld Licht Idlls (1888) and A Window in Thurns (1889), which, together with a sentimental novel, The Little Minister (1891), made him a best-selling author. In 1894 he married an actress, Mary Ansell, but the marriage was profoundly unhappy, produced no children, and was dissolved in 1910. However, a favorite Saint Bernard dog of Mary’s later became the famous Nana of Peter Pan. In 1897, with the adaptation of The Little Minister, Barrie became a successful playwright, writing the plays The Admirable Crichton (1902), What Every Woman Knows (1903), and Peter Pan (1904), which was produced in 1904 and revived in London every Christmas season thereafter. While the figure of Peter Pan first appeared in Barrie’s book The Little White Bird (1902), the story and the concept began in the tales he told the sons of Mrs. Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, a woman Barrie loved. Barrie then published the story of Peter Pan in book form as Peter and Wendy (1911). The best of his later works is Dear Brutus (1917), a haunting play that again brought the supernatural and fantasy to the London stage. Barrie died in 1937, bequeathing the copyright of Peter Pan to the Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, a hospital for children.

Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870) lived a life as romantic as that depicted in his famous novels. He was born in Villers-Cotterêts, France. His early education was scanty, but his beautiful handwriting secured him a position in Paris in 1822 with the du’Orléans, where he read voraciously and began to write. His first play, Henri III et sa cour (1829), scored a resounding success for its author and the romantic movement. His lavish spending and flamboyant habits led to the construction of his fabulous Château de Monte-Cristo, and in 1851 he fled to Belgium to escape creditors. Dumas’s overall literary output reached more than 277 volumes, but his brilliant historical novels made him the most universally read of all French novelists. With collaborators, mainly Auguste Maquet, Dumas wrote such works as The Three Musketeers (1843–1844); its sequels, Twenty Years After (1845) and the great mystery The Man in the Iron Mask (1845–1850); and The Count of Monte Cristo (1844). His work ignored historical accuracy, psychology, and analysis, but its thrilling adventure and exuberant inventiveness continued to delight readers, and Dumas remains one of the prodigies of nineteenth-century French literature.