Car ownership before 1914 was overwhelmingly the preserve of the wealthy, like the car-loving nouveau riche Mr Toad in the children’s story The Wind in the Willows (1908) by Kenneth Grahame (1859–1932). The motor car enabled them once more to revert from the public nature of railway travel to the privacy of an individual mode of transportation, exhibiting their prosperity and modernity to an astonished world.
