J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys

by Andrew Birkin

  ‘Though The Boy Castaways has sixteen chapter-headings, there is no other letterpress; an absence which possible purchasers might complain of, though there are surely worse ways of writing a book than this. These headings anticipate much of the play of Peter Pan. … In The Boy Castaways Captain Hook has arrived but is called Captain Swarthy, and he seems from the pictures to have been a black man. This character, as you do not need to be told, is held by those in the know to be autobiographical. …

  ‘We carried home the head and skin as trophies’ (JMB)

  ‘The dog in The Boy Castaways seems never to have been called Nana but was evidently in training for that post. … There is … a touching picture, a clear forecast of the Darling nursery, entitled “We trained the dog to watch over us while we slept.” … He was always willing to do any extra jobs, such as becoming the tiger in mask, and when after a fierce engagement you carried home that mask in triumph, he joined in the procession proudly and never let on that the trophy had ever been part of him. …

  Two of Porthos's many roles: as the pirate Swarthy's dog patrolling the island’;

  playing a tiger in a papier-mâché nask: ‘George found himself within four paces of a tiger … but missed’ (JMB)

  Last night on the island' (JMB)

  ‘They do seem to be emerging out of our island, don't they, the little people of the play, all except that sly one, the chief figure, who draws farther and farther into the wood as we advance upon him? He so dislikes being tracked, as if there were something odd about him, that when he dies he means to get up and blow away the particle that will be his ashes.

  ‘Wendy has not yet appeared, but she has been trying to come ever since that loyal nurse cast the humorous shadow of woman upon the scene and made us feel that it might be fun to let in a disturbing element. Perhaps she would have bored her way in at last whether we wanted her or not. … Was it the travail of hut-building that subsequently advised Peter to find a “home under the ground”? The bottle and mugs in that lurid picture, “Last night on the Island,” seem to suggest that you had changed from Lost Boys into pirates, which was probably also a tendency of Peter [Pan]'s. … Even Tinker Bell had reached our island before we left it. It was one evening when we climbed the wood carrying Michael to show him what the trail was like by twilight. As our lanterns twinkled among the leaves Michael saw a twinkle stand still for a moment and he waved his foot gaily to it, thus creating Tink. …

  ‘The Boy Castaways is a little battered and bent after the manner of those who shoulder burdens … I have said that it is the rarest of my printed works, as it must be, for the only edition was limited to two copies, of which one (there was always some devilry in any matter connected with Peter [Pan]) instantly lost itself in a railway carriage.’

  The copy that euphemistically ‘lost itself in a railway carriage’ had been a present from Barrie to the boys' father. That Arthur should have been so strangely careless with it was, in Peter's opinion, ‘doubtless his own way of commenting on the whole fantastic affair’.

  The title page of The Boy Castaways

  six full-page illustrations from the surviving copy of The Boy Castaways. Denis Mackail described the photographs in his 1941 biography, The Story of J.M.B.: ‘The little boys look so happy, and intent, and absorbed in the magic which they only partly understood; and, somehow, also, so very, very far away’

  * In 1945, Peter Llewelyn Davies began a compilation of numerous family letters and papers, linked with occasional comments of his own, into six unpublished volumes spanning the years 1874–1915, which he referred to wryly as the Family Mausoleum, or simply the Morgue. The Christian names of members of his family have been substituted throughout for his abbreviations.

  * There are four different versions of the Dedication in existence: a first hand-written draft, a corrected typedraft, a corrected proof, and the final printed version. In all four versions, Barrie uses numbers to identify the boys instead of their names: No. 1 for George through No. 5 for Nico. Their names are reinstated here and subsequently for the convenience of the reader.

  7

  1901–1904

  ‘That strange and terrible summer’ ended with the onset of September, and the Davieses set sail for London, Home and Wilkinson's—George to Wilkinson's for his second term, and the family to their new home at 23 Kensington Park Gardens, across the street from the smaller No. 31. Barrie stayed on at Black Lake for a few more weeks, working in the after-glow of his adventures with the boys, which he now turned to profitable account as further material for The Little White Bird and the castaway scenes in The Admirable Crichton. ‘We were the sole survivors of the ill-fated brig Anna Pink’ claimed George and Jack in the third photograph of The Boy Castaways; ‘I was the sole survivor of the ill-fated Anna Pink,’ contradicted Captain W— in Chapter 23 of The Little White Bird, while Ernest stretched the exploitation still further in the original draft of The Admirable Crichton by proclaiming: ‘Wrecked, wrecked, wrecked! … We are the sole survivors of Lord Loam's steam yacht Anna Pink.’

  On the other side of the Atlantic, Charles Frohman was launching Maude Adams in her second Barrie role as Phoebe Throssel, the heroine of Quality Street. Barrie wrote to Frohman on October 29th, 1901, ‘to thank you most heartily for all the thought and care you have given to “Quality Street”. I see it has been immense—and Miss Adams for the wonderful things she seems to be doing with Phoebe. She is a marvel.’ The pleasure Barrie derived from his American success was somewhat marred by the death of his sister, Isabella—only two years older than himself. Sadder still was the demise of Porthos. After a summer of supreme exertions, the great hound gradually subsided into a state of lethargy. Mary Barrie later wrote, ‘When it became impossible to have him any longer about the house, he was sent to that humane institution, the Dogs' Home at Battersea, and in the lethal chamber he was put peacefully to sleep. Buried with him were … those first seven years of my married life.’1

  Porthos at Black Lake: ‘The dog of a pirate had seen us’ (JMB)

  At Christmas time, Barrie took the Davies boys to see a new production at the Vaudeville, Bluebell in Fairyland, which described itself as ‘A Musical Dream Play’ as distinct from a pantomime. The play starred Ellaline Terriss and her husband, Seymour Hicks, who had played opposite Mary Ansell in Barrie's first West End success, Walker, London. To the astonishment of most managers, Bluebell in Fairyland ran for nearly 300 performances, attracting a fanatical audience of children who saw the play again and again. The Davies boys were early enthusiasts, but the strongest impact was on Barrie. According to Denis Mackail, he ‘talked about it, thought about it, and acted bits of it in more than one nursery. … He was the crossing-sweeper—Hicks's part—he was Bluebell, the little flower-girl, and then, with special and overwhelming effect, he was the terrifying Sleepy King.’ He immediately started making notes for his own fairy play, though it would be many months before he found a peg on which to hang his ideas:

  Ellaline Terriss in Bluebell in Fairyland

  — Fairy Play Hero might be a poor boy of today with ordinary clothes, unhappy, &c, in Act 1.–Taken to Fairydom still in everyday clothes which are strange contrast to clothes worn by the people in fairydom—(à la Hans Xian Anderson)

  — Fairy Play Characters might be carried thro' the air on sheets borne by birds.

  — Fairy Play Alphabet biscuits, &c. George's anger—‘You ate them instead of leaving me the G's.’

  — Fairy Play What children like best is imitation of real boys & girls (not so much comic incidents).

  After four years of gestation, The Little White Bird was finally completed in the summer of 1902. The Peter Pan saga had begun life as a single chapter within the main narrative, but it now ran to over a hundred pages, forming an elaborate book-within-a-book. The overall work, however, was still directed at adults, and Captain W—'s relationship with the boy David remained the dominant theme. Barrie later claimed that both story and title had been Sylvia's idea: he tr
ied to persuade her to write it, she declined, so he wrote it himself. At the end of the novel, the Captain presents David's mother with the completed manuscript, telling her it is all about her ‘little white bird’—the unborn child she has been expecting. When he asks for her opinion, she replies: ‘How wrong you are in thinking this book is about me and mine, it is really all about Timothy.’

  With the finished manuscript at last in the hands of his publishers, Barrie was able to forge his links with Kensington Gardens still closer by moving from 133 Gloucester Road to a small Regency house in the Bayswater Road, Leinster Corner, overlooking the northern stretches of the Gardens. The move also brought him considerably closer to the Davies family, and within a few yards of George's private school in Orme Square. Mary Barrie set to work with another team of builders and decorators, redesigning the new house, while her husband took up residence in an old stable at the end of the garden, which had already been converted into his study. No sooner had he settled himself back at his desk than news came from Scotland that his father had died at the age of eighty-seven after being struck down by a horse and cart. The Barries travelled up to Kirriemuir to watch him laid to rest beside Margaret Ogilvy, then invited the other members of his father's household—Barrie's elder sister Sara and his uncle, Doctor Ogilvy—down to Black Lake after the funeral.

  Leinster Corner

  The gesture brought an oppressive layer of Scottish gloom to the holiday cottage. His relatives felt ill-at-ease amid the comparative luxury, while Barrie found their tepid company a far cry from the savage days of the previous Boy Castaways summer. He affected warm devotion towards his family when they were north of the border, but here at Black Lake they seemed singularly out of context, and when they announced their intention of returning to Kirriemuir, little pressure was put on them to stay. They were replaced by the Davies family, and the gloom immediately lifted. Barrie emerged from his shell, and the woods were alive once more to the war-cries of pirates and Indians, the lake again transformed into a South Seas lagoon. But the adventures this year were subject to frequent interruptions. Quality Street had begun rehearsal at the Vaudeville, with Barrie's latest heroine, Ellaline Terriss, in the lead. Her husband, Seymour Hicks, had been given the part of the hero, Valentine Brown, and was also directing the proceedings, which frequently met with the author's displeasure as Hicks had the irritating habit of adding extra lines of his own. Barrie would have preferred to have had Dion Boucicault in charge, but he was busily occupied down the road at the Duke of York's Theatre, preparing The Admirable Crichton for presentation.

  George and Jack at Black Lake: ‘Deeper and deeper into those primeval forests’ (JMB)

  Quality Street opened on September 17th, 1902, and gathered the same adulatory reviews as it had received in New York. Six weeks later, The Admirable Crichton opened at the Duke of York's. Its story of a butler who, when wrecked on a desert island with his aristocratic employers, becomes ruler by ‘natural selection’, was seized upon as having great social significance. ‘If ever a Problem Play was set before an audience The Admirable Crichton was one’, wrote H. M. Walbrook in his study of Barrie's plays. ‘No comedy of our time has set its beholders thinking so hard. In England and America, and even in Paris, it was hailed as one of the most penetrating dramatic social pamphlets of the day.’ One critic went so far as to compare the play with the writings of Rousseau which had prepared the way for the French Revolution, while William Archer, the great social critic of his time, questioned whether Barrie was aware of the immensity of his attack upon the constituted social order of Great Britain. Amid the controversy aroused by The Admirable Crichton, Messrs Hodder and Stoughton published The Little White Bird. It would be hard to conceive of two such seemingly disparate creations from the same author appearing before the public in the same week, yet The Times, in reviewing both works, inadvertently put its finger on the common factor. ‘The Admirable Crichton … is signed “Barrie” over and over again,’ observed A. B. Walkley in his 3,400-word review; ‘hold it up to the light and you see “Barrie” in the watermark. … It deals with Rousseau's perpetual subject, “the return to nature”. But it deals with that subject in a whimsical, pathetic, ironic, serious way which would have driven Rousseau crazy. Nevertheless it is as delightful a play as the English stage has produced in our generation.’ The following day The Times book critic wrote:

  Gerald du Maurier as Ernest in The Admirable Crichton

  ‘The peculiar quality of THE LITTLE WHITE BIRD … is its J.-M.-Barrie-ness. Nobody else could have done it. … The book is all Barrie-ness; whimsical, sentimental, profound, ridiculous Barrie-ness; utterly impossible, yet absolutely real, a fairy tower built on the eternal truth. To say what happens in it is to stultify one's praise for one of the most charming books ever written. … To speak in sober earnest, this is one of the best things that Mr Barrie has written. From beginning to end it is a fantasy, of fairies, birds, old bachelors … pretty young wives and their children—but especially their children. If a book exists which contains more knowledge and more love of children, we do not know it. To the [narrator] the smallest details of his adored David, his braces and his behaviour in the bath, are not too trivial to dwell on. … In fine, here is an exquisite piece of work. To analyse its merits and defects … would be to vivisect a fairy. Mr Barrie has given us the best of himself, and we can think of no higher praise.’

  Irene Vanbrugh and Muriel Beaumont in The Admirable Crichton. Muriel Beaumont married her fellow castaway Gerald du Maurier at the end of the run

  The secrets of Kensington Gardens were now well and truly out of the bag, and although the critic had assumed the book to be a fantasy from beginning to end, others knew better. George suddenly found himself the centre of attention at Wilkinson's—as did Wilkinson, caricatured as the infamous Pilkington—but despite a certain amount of teasing for his belief in fairies, he remained both proud of and loyal to his participation in the story. George was also aware that the book was a colossal best-seller, and that colossal best-sellers earn colossal sums for their authors—and extra pocket-money for their collaborators. Encouraged by George, Barrie began to think again about his fairy play. He noted down an idea that was a minor variation on the ‘Wandering Child’ story in Tommy and Grizel:

  ‘The fairies of the Serpentine’ (Rackham)

  — Play. ‘The Happy Boy’: Boy who can't grow up—runs away from pain & death—is caught wild. (End escapes)

  — The Mother—treated from child's point of view—how mother scolds, wheedles, &c—children must be tickled by recognising truth of scenes.

  — Peter [Davies]: ‘Mother, how did we get to know you?’

  — Peter Pan.

  — Peter in love—yet tragic horror of matrimony.

  — Marriage of children—Peter wd attend in black.

  — Cd ghost mother (L.W.B.) work into this?

  Sylvia's contribution to The Little White Bird had been almost as large as her son's, and Barrie's immediate reward was to take her off to Paris on a celebration trip. Arthur stayed at home, going about his business at the Temple and looking after the boys. He wrote to his father at Kirkby Lonsdale:

  Sylvia at Black Lake (JMB)

  2, Garden Court, Temple, E.C.

  Nov. 28, 1902.

  Dearest Father,

  I don't know what your arrangements are for Christmas, nor if you are likely to have the Vicarage very full. I should like to come, if possible, bringing one boy or perhaps two. It is just possible that Sylvia may be induced to come too, but that is not likely. …

  Sylvia is at present on a trip to Paris with her friends the Barries, by way of celebration of the huge success of Barrie's new plays and new book. The party is completed by another novelist, [A.E.W.] Mason, and they seem to be living in great splendour and enjoying themselves very much. They left on Monday and return tomorrow. Barrie's new book, The Little White Bird, is largely taken up with Kensington Gardens and our and similar children. There is a whole cha
pter devoted to Peter.

  I was at the large Encyclopaedia Britannica dinner last week. … Bell of Marlborough was there, and professed indignation at my reminiscence that the Bishop of London was superannuated in the Lower Fifth.

  My work is moderately prosperous but no more. …

  Your affect, son,

  A.Ll.D.

  A joint letter from Barrie to Peter and Michael

  The reference to ‘a whole chapter devoted to Peter’ would seem to indicate that Arthur had only given the book a cursory glance, since the chapter to which he is referring is not about Peter, but his namesake, Peter Pan. Peter Davies observed in the Morgue:

  ‘“Her friends the Barries” is a suggestive phrase; the Davieses and Barries had known one another now for some five years. Was Arthur a little put out by Sylvia's visit to Paris? … I think it pretty clear that Arthur was a shade vexed and thought it all rather a bore. On the other hand, how Sylvia must have enjoyed it, and why not? Paris meant something to her, and nothing, I think, to Arthur. And Jimmy was, in his own odd way, an excellent Parisian and most delightful of hosts, and it would have been hard to imagine a more satisfactory addition than Alfred Mason, a new and devoted admirer and one of the most romantically minded men of that day who put all beautiful women on a pedestal, and a most attractive, amusing and romantic figure himself. … I have always, by the way, regarded [The Little White Bird] as being much more about George than about me. I can't say I like it, any more than, it would seem, Arthur did.’

  A letter to Barrie from Jack, aged eight, who was staying with his grandmother, Emma du Maurier, at Ramsgate. Gerald du Maurier had married Muriel Beaumont on April 11th. Clare Mackail was the sister of Denis Mackail, Barrie's 1941 biographer