Maude Adams as Babbie in The Little Minister
Mary came out of retirement briefly to play Babbie in a copyright performance of the play.* The American writer Richard Harding Davis happened to be present, and was asked to play Babbie's father. He gave an account of the somewhat bizarre performance in a letter home:
‘Mrs Barrie played the gypsy and danced most of the time, which she said was her conception of the part as it was in the book. Her husband explained that this was a play and not a book, but she did not care and danced on and off. She played my daughter [Babbie], and I had a great scene in which I cursed her, which got rounds of applause. Lady Lewis's daughters in beautiful Paquin dresses played Scotch lassies, and giggled in all the sad parts. … At one time there were five men on the stage all talking Scotch dialects and imitating Irving at the same time. It was a truly remarkable performance.’13
One of Barrie's favourite photographs of himself
By December 1897, Barrie's name as a playwright was established on both sides of the Atlantic. Despite his avowed dislike of social events, he was in a celebratory mood, and accepted an invitation to Sir George and Lady Lewis's New Year's Eve dinner party—an annual event, considered to be one of the highlights of the season. Sir George was the most distinguished society lawyer of his day (his clientele included the Prince of Wales), and it was his two daughters who had taken part in the copyright performance of The Little Minister. The dinner party was for seventy-two persons, consisting mainly of fashionable actors and actresses, artists, musicians, writers, lawyers and politicians.
The event turned out to be less tedious than Barrie had expected, for he found himself seated next to ‘the most beautiful creature he had ever seen’14—Mrs Arthur Llewelyn Davies, the wife of a young barrister. She had a tip-tilted nose, wide-spaced grey eyes, black hair and a crooked smile. She seemed to say very little, and was more interested in secreting the after-dinner sweets into her silk reticule than in the conversation around her. Barrie became intrigued, and asked her who the sweets were for. ‘For Peter’, she replied, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. On further inquiry he learned that she had formerly been Miss Sylvia Jocelyn du Maurier, sister of the actor Gerald du Maurier and daughter of George du Maurier—author of Peter Ibbetson and Trilby. A conversation developed, Barrie telling her that he had named his dog Porthos after the St Bernard, Porthos, in her father's novel Peter Ibbetson; she in turn told him that she had named her youngest son Peter, the beneficiary of the sweets, after Peter Ibbetson himself. It emerged that she had two other sons, George and Jack, the eldest being named after her father.
Gradually the penny dropped. She was talking to the man with the cough who could wiggle his ears, while he had come face to face with the mother of the boy in the bright red tam-o'-shanter.
Sylvia Llewelyn Davies (JMB)
* The ‘flitting through’ refers to Margaret Henley's brief appearance in Sentimental Tommy as Reddy, a child-friend of Tommy's, who dies at the age of six.
* Photographs known to have been taken by Barrie are indicated thus.
* A copyright performance was a preliminary performance of a new play, prior to its theatrical opening, designed to protect the author's dramatic rights. The performance was usually acted by the cast in front of a ‘witness’ audience of friends.
4
The Davies Family
‘There never was a simpler happier family until the coming of Peter Pan,’ wrote Barrie in Peter and Wendy. Doubtless he was well aware that, in describing the Darling family thus, he was alluding, with shades of perverse humour, to his own intrusion into the lives of the Llewelyn Davies family, on whom the Darlings were to be based.
The Reverend John Llewelyn Davies outside Kirkby Lonsdale Vicarage
Sylvia's husband Arthur, later caricatured as Mr Darling, was the second son of the Reverend John Llewelyn Davies, himself a brilliant scholar and theologian, President of the Union at Cambridge University, Honorary Chaplain to the Queen, a Radical of the Broad Church party, and a lifelong supporter of workers' rights, trade-unionism, and women's suffrage. His reputation was such that he was widely expected to be offered a bishopric, and might well have reached the highest pinnacle of the ecclesiastical hierarchy had he not chosen to deliver in Queen Victoria's presence a blistering attack on Imperialism from the pulpit at Windsor. The Queen was outraged, and her Prime Minister, Gladstone, took some relish in seeing the Reverend John transferred to the remoter regions of Westmorland. Nevertheless, as Rector of Kirkby Lonsdale he continued to air his radical views, both from the pulpit and in print. In his spare time he mountaineered the local heights (in 1858 he had been the first man to scale the Dom, the highest mountain in Switzerland), frequently broke the ice on his daily swim, made an authoritative translation of Plato's Republic, and fathered six boys and a girl. His sister, Emily, in addition to founding Girton College, Cambridge, had been one of the original petitioners for women's suffrage, and in 1883 his daughter Margaret, Arthur's elder sister, became a founder member of the Women's Co-operative Guild, editing their magazine and organizing campaigns from an office in the vicarage. There was soon so much activity there that the gardener's wheelbarrow had to be enlisted to carry all the reports, petitions and circulars to the post; indeed, had it not been for the tempering influence of Arthur's mother, Mary, the country vicarage might well have been mistaken by their staid Victorian neighbours for a den of subversive revolutionaries. Mary Crompton had married the Reverend John Llewelyn Davies in 1859, and, while not exactly an atheist, she is said to have not attended a single sermon delivered by her husband in their thirty-six years of married life. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, they remained devoted to one another. What the Reverend John provided for his family in intellectual stimulation, Mary balanced with a presiding sense of grace and humour. Her seven children adored her, and on the last day of their holidays would follow her from room to room as she did their packing, unable to bear being out of her sight for an instant.
Mary Crompton in her early thirties, from the painting by Sir William Blake Richmond
It was in this formidable but invigorating atmosphere that Arthur grew up. He and his five brothers were encouraged to emulate their father's scholastic achievements, and all but one obtained scholarships in public school and university. By 1891 Arthur had been called to the Bar, and was able to account for himself in the following terms to the Council of Legal Education:
Arthur Llewelyn Davies in 1890
My Lords and Gentlemen,
I beg to offer myself as a Candidate for an Assistant Readership in English Law.
I was born in February, 1863, and was educated at Marlborough (where I obtained Foundation, Junior, and Senior Scholarships and a School Exhibition) and Trinity College, Cambridge (of which I was Minor and Foundation Scholar) and was placed in the First Class of the Classical Tripos in June, 1884.
Since that time I have obtained the Lebas Essay Prize (Cambridge University) in 1884, an Inns of Court Studentship in 1886, the First Whewell International Law Scholarship (Cambridge University) in 1887, and an Inner Temple Pupil Scholarship in Common Law in 1889.
For a year (1886–7) I was an Assistant Master at Eton College, and I have had a good deal of other experience of various kinds of teaching.
ARTHUR LLEWELYN DAVIES
George and Emma du Maurier with their daughter May, photographed by Julia Cameron
Arthur first met Sylvia du Maurier at a dinner party in 1889. According to the artist H. J. Ford, an eyewitness, the young lawyer found himself sitting next to a woman of extraordinary grace, beauty and charm, who ‘displayed liberally the most beautiful neck, shoulders and bosom to the admiring world, … and I dimly perceived that his fate was sealed. A few weeks later, the engagement of Arthur Ll. D. was announced to Sylvia du M.’1 The engagement came as something of a surprise to their friends, for although Arthur and Sylvia made a spectacularly handsome couple, their families had virtually nothing in common. In
contrast to the Spartan austerity of the Llewelyn Davies family, the du Mauriers epitomized the gaiety and Bohemian frivolity of the 'nineties. At about the same time as Arthur's father was being ordained, Sylvia's father was leading the dissipated life of an impoverished art student in Paris. Despite his stylish surname, George du Maurier's only connection with the aristocracy lay in the Duke of York's bed, which his grandmother, Mary Anne Clarke, had graced on and off from 1801 to 1804 as mistress to the Prince Regent's brother. After failing to enter the Sorbonne, George du Maurier left Paris for London, where in 1851 he married Emma Wightwick, the daughter of a Bond Street linen draper. His ambition to become an artist found a measure of fulfilment when he joined the staff of Punch in 1864, and over the next thirty years the name of du Maurier became a by-word for social lampoonery. He took particular pleasure in satirizing fashionable upper-class and middle-class life, and his cartoons, for which his five children were put to constant use as models, were responsible for creating a certain Philistine scorn towards artiness and that brand of earnest intellectualism reflected in the Llewelyn Davieses. Sylvia's brother-in-law, Charles Hoyer Millar, observed the great interest shown by ‘the whole du Maurier family in the appearance of their friends and new people they met. … People in general were divided into good-looking, amusing, and bores. … One must never be au sérieux about anything. … The family in general had a rooted dislike to serious topics of any kind, at all events in the presence of each other.’2
George du Maurier frequently used his children (and their remarks) as inspiration for his contributions to Punch
Given their priorities, it was hardly surprising that the du Mauriers viewed Sylvia's engagement to Arthur with mixed feelings. The young man was unquestionably handsome, a point in his favour noted by George du Maurier in a letter to a friend: ‘I will add—from my own aesthetic point of view—qu'il est joli garçon … j'ai toujours l'œil sur ma postérité!’3 However, Emma du Maurier regarded her future son-in-law as too dry and serious a proposition for her gay and ebullient daughter; moreover he was evidently short of money, though his prospects as a barrister appeared promising. Sylvia's seventeen-year-old brother Gerald, a schoolboy at Harrow, was rather more generous in his enthusiasm:
The Grove
Harrow-on-the-Hill
March 30th, 1890
My Darling Sylvia,
I am so sorry I haven't written to congratulate you, but I was ‘struck all of a 'eap!’ But I do congratulate you, fearfully, though I have never seen the charmer, I am sorry to say. …
I hope I get home in time to wish you goodbye to the heather of bonny Westmoreland. I am glad he is a ‘barrister’ because then he won't ‘bar-sister’. O Lord!
I remain, your loving brother,
Gerald du Maurier.
The composer Sir Hubert Parry was an old friend of the Llewelyn Davies family, and his twelve-year-old daughter Dolly was staying at the vicarage a few days before Sylvia's arrival. She later wrote:
‘When Arthur was engaged to Sylvia, I realised what it meant to Mrs Davies. I remember her telling us about it, and taking out of a cupboard in the drawing-room 2 photographs, saying “That is my sweet Sylvia.” I was so fascinated by those photographs that I was always thinking whether I couldn't go to the cupboard and have another look.
‘How romantic it is to think of Sylvia coming to Kirkby, to the outwardly severe-looking Georgian Rectory adjoining the graveyard on one side, and looking over the lovely Fells, where Mr Davies walked nearly every day. I like to think of Sylvia feeling the warmth within, and the love and sympathy she found in Arthur's mother. And Arthur's brothers, austere outwardly, felt, I feel sure, very soon the charm of this lovely sweet feminine creature. All the same, I feel it must have been a strange contrast to her easy-going, happy, more or less Bohemian home.’4
Sylvia wrote to Arthur's mother on her return to London:
15, Bayswater Terrace
April 15th [1890].
Dearest Mrs Davies,
I feel I must just write a few lines to you, to thank you with all my heart for being so very kind and sweet to me. The journey to Kirkby was rather painful, but the sweetness at the end of it, and the dear ones waiting to meet me, was worth going through much, much more for. The recollection of my first visit to Kirkby will be very dear to me, and I shall never be able to thank you enough. I am very, very fond of you. I was, I think, the moment I saw you. …
Always affectionately yours,
Sylvia du Maurier.
Mary Llewelyn Davies replied the following day:
K.L., 16th April, '90
My dearest Sylvia,
Thank you very much for your dear note and for all your loving words. It is delightful to think that your visit to us has established an intimacy and affection which will, I hope, go on always increasing.
I have missed you so since you went away! It quite surprised me how you have got into my heart in so short a time! … After all I believe I shall not come to London just yet. … I am not sure that my chief disappointment (if there is any) is not seeing your dear face again. I want so to know you more, and to be with you ever so much! But there are some reasons why I am glad to stay on at home, in spite of my four days of solitude while his Reverence is having a fine gay time in town!…
Now goodbye, darling. Write as often as you feel inclined. Kindest regards to yr. father and mother.
Your loving
Mary Ll.D.
Arthur and his mother in about 1891
Sylvia's strong bond of friendship and affection with Arthur's mother was to prove a very real comfort in the drawn-out period of engagement that followed, for it had been decided, probably at Emma du Maurier's insistence, that the couple should wait two full years before marriage in order to watch Arthur's progress at the Bar. It was through the help of George (later Sir George) Lewis that he obtained many of his early briefs; the eminent society solicitor was quick to perceive Arthur's ability at expressing himself with forceful clarity, together with his infinite capacity for hard work, and he confidently predicted that his protégé would one day rise to the top of his profession. But the legal ladder was a slow and weary climb, and Arthur knew that it would be many years before his labours began to reward him financially.
In October 1891, Sylvia and Arthur went to stay with the Parrys at their home at Rustington-on-Sea. Their 14-year-old daughter Dolly had begun to keep a long and detailed diary, in which she recorded her surprisingly perceptive observations:
‘We have never seen such a pair of undemonstrative lovers as Sylvia and Arthur. They hardly ever speak to each other even when in a room by themselves. Sylvia is a delightful thing. I can't imagine her with Margaret [Llewelyn Davies] at all, with her love of pretty dresses and the stage; she is always dancing about the room. … Without being strictly speaking pretty, she has got one of the most delightful, brilliantly sparkling faces I have ever seen. Her nose turns round the corner—also turns right up. Her mouth is quite crooked … Her eyes are very pretty—hazel and very mischievous. She has pretty black fluffy hair: but her expression is what gives her that wonderful charm, and her low voice.’5
Sylvia, Arthur and George in 1893
In the following March, Arthur received a small windfall in the form of a legacy of £3,000 from his mother's brother, Charles Crompton. Sylvia had also begun to earn money by working with Mrs Nettleship, the celebrated theatrical dressmaker, making clothes for Ellen Terry. Their combined income came to little more than £400 a year, but Sylvia's father was able to add a small contribution from the modest profits derived from his first novel, Peter Ibbetson.
On August 15th, 1892, after two years of patient waiting, Arthur Llewelyn Davies was at last able to marry Sylvia du Maurier. They spent their honeymoon at Porthgwarra, in Cornwall, then returned to London and set up house at 18 Craven Terrace, Paddington, where their first son was born on July 20th of the following year. He was christened with one name only, George, after Sylvia's father. The event coinci
ded with the publication of George du Maurier's second novel, Trilby, which all but eclipsed the family's pride over the birth of his grandson. As with Peter Ibbetson, the novel was drawn for the most part from du Maurier's recollections of his early life in Paris as an impoverished artist, but whereas Peter Ibbetson had caused only a modest stir, Trilby quickly became one of the biggest literary bonanzas of the century, heaping its bewildered author with such riches and fame that it positively distressed him. He found it all rather vulgar, and no amount of commercial success could compensate him for his rapidly failing eyesight.
In the summer of 1894, at about the same time as the newly-wed Barries were setting off for their honeymoon in Switzerland, Arthur and Sylvia again went to stay at Rustington. Sylvia was eight months pregnant with her second child, and this year they rented a Mill House near the Parrys' home. Dolly Parry wrote in her diary:
Sylvia and Arthur
George
‘Arthur and Sylvia came down to the Mill House for the summer which much delighted my heart: she is as sweet and dear as ever. They are very flourishing and content on £400 a year—but it is a miracle. … I would rather marry her than anyone I know, she is so wonderfully fascinating and good. … Mother's birthday, which we spent quietly with Sylvia to tea. Discussed cancer, and whether marriage was happy, and whether one would rather be born or not.’
J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys Page 8