Audiobook · read by volunteers
Dream Days
Kenneth Grahame (1859–1932)
Read by Catharine Eastman · 9 chapters · 4 h 51
About the book
Dream Days returns to the world of childhood that Kenneth Grahame first opened in The Golden Age, and once again it sees that world from inside. Five orphaned children live under the vague care of grown-ups they call the Olympians, people who seem to move through life without noticing anything that truly matters. Left to themselves, the children invent games, quarrel over kingdoms, tell stories and slip away on small expeditions where an ordinary afternoon can turn into a legend. The book mixes gentle humour with real feeling, and it remembers how large and strange the everyday world looks at that age. Among its nine pieces is the tale of a dragon, which many readers know on its own. Catharine Eastman reads the whole collection, nearly five hours of quiet, affectionate storytelling for anyone who remembers being small.
Introduction
Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932) was a Scottish-born writer who worked for most of his life at the Bank of England and wrote in his spare time. Today he is best known for The Wind in the Willows, but before that he made his reputation with two books about childhood, The Golden Age and its sequel Dream Days, which appeared in 1898.
Both books look at the world through the eyes of a family of children who live in the English countryside under the loose supervision of adults they refer to as the Olympians. Grahame's gift was to write about childhood without sentimentality and without condescension. The adults are puzzling and often foolish, the children are serious about their play, and the humour comes from the gap between the two. Dream Days was first published by John Lane at The Bodley Head, and it contains the story of the reluctant dragon, which later became famous as a separate children's tale.
This recording has nine chapters and runs for about five hours, read by LibriVox volunteer Catharine Eastman. The prose is elegant, a little old-fashioned and full of gentle irony, and it rewards slow listening. It will suit adults who remember what it was like to see a garden as a kingdom, and children who enjoy being treated as intelligent listeners. As a window onto late Victorian ideas of childhood it is also quietly instructive.
Public domain
Kenneth Grahame died in 1932: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text