It turns out that being a juvenile muse is no guarantee of a happy ending. Peter Llewelyn Davies, JM Barrie’s inspiration for Peter Pan, grew up only to kill himself. Christopher Milne AKA Christopher Robin was estranged from his mother. Alice Liddell of Wonderland fame seems to have been permanently cross. And then there was Alastair Grahame, for whom The Wind in the Willows was written in 1908. Twelve years later, and still in his teens, he stumbled out of his Oxford college, lay down on the railway line and waited for a train.

There’s one difference, though, between Grahame and the others. While Peter, Alice and Christopher appeared as characters in “their” books, he doesn’t. The Wind in the Willows grew out of bedtime stories that the banker Kenneth Grahame, his father, told him about a quartet of anthropomorphised animals who lived by the rural Thames. Yet this absence of a child protagonist should come as no surprise, since the world of Grahame’s riverbank is hardly a place for kids. It is, rather, an Edwardian gentlemen’s club, or perhaps a club for Edwardian gentlemen who have failed to get into the institution of their choice and are obliged to improvise. The adventures of Toad, Mole, Ratty and Badger are those of grown men sufficiently rich and leisured to spend their days messing about in boats and their evenings muttering darkly about the scoundrels in the Wild Wood.

Scholars have long speculated about the identity of those scoundrels. The literal answer is that they’re the weasels and stoats who in chapter 11 swarm out of their dank, rooty realm, break into Toad Hall and trash the place. Reading biographically, it’s impossible to overlook the fact that in 1903 Grahame was ambushed in his office at the Bank of England and shot at by a madman with a gun. The fact that the would-be assassin identified himself as a socialist placed him firmly on the side of chaos, along with the anarchists, suffragettes and the increasingly belligerent Kaiser. For a mid-Victorian like Grahame, it must have felt as if the world was coming undone.

Yet, as Peter Hunt stresses in this elegant account of the genesis of The Wind in the Willows, Grahame’s life had always been more precarious than you might think. Following his mother’s early death in 1864 and with a father lost to drink, five-year-old Kenneth was taken from his native Edinburgh and deposited at his maternal grandmother’s house near Marlow. It was during that stay on the banks of the Thames that the boy gathered the materials with which he would later build his happy place. Still, insists Hunt, it’s crucial that we should see the narrative of The Wind in the Willows for what it is – not so much gently recuperative as anxiously stagnant. For what has actually changed by the end? Toad Hall has been returned to its bombastic owner, the defeated stoats and weasels slink back to the Wild Wood and the four heroes are free to continue planning their picnics. This isn’t growth, merely a return to stasis.

Lacking funds to go to Oxford, Grahame was placed as a “gentleman clerk” at the Bank, where he rose to the top. Oxford, however, remained Grahame’s personal riverbank, which is why when he died in 1932 he left all his copyrights to the Bodleian. His widow, an enthusiastic booster of the book’s origin myths, gave the library many other documents concerned with the making of the masterpiece. It is from these rich holdings that Hunt has extracted some fascinating images to accompany his short text, all beautifully produced by the Bodleian’s publishing arm. Here are original story letters to Alastair, in which the bedtime tales are fleshed out and written down. There’s also the spine of the first edition showing Toad in his dandyish motoring gear, and some wonderful plates to remind us of EH Shepard’s genius for getting Grahame’s oddly proportioned world into a coherent and charming visual form.

There remains, though, one puzzle about Hunt’s book. In interviews he has trenchantly suggested that Grahame was homosexual, that young Alastair had been profoundly emotionally damaged from birth, and that The Wind in the Willows is a coded manifesto for communal gay living. Yet none of these intriguing possibilities is developed here. Instead, we are left with odd little hints – the fact that Grahame’s earliest literary work appeared in the “decadent” Yellow Book, whose first art editor was Aubrey Beardsley, or, again, that Grahame left the bank suddenly in 1908 under a cloud. Hunt has suggested he was sacked because he had been outed, but here his sudden departure remains a mystery. Over a century since its publication, is it possible that the notion that The Wind in the Willows emerged from painful adult ambivalence – rather than the charming ways of toads in trousers – is still considered too touchy for general consumption?• The Making of the Wind in the Willows is published by Bodleian Library Publishing. To order a copy for £12.99 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.