by J. M. Barrie
“What is it?” he cried again.
She had to tell him.
“I am old, Peter. I am ever so much more than twenty. I grew up long ago.”
“You promised not to!”
“I couldn’t help it. I am a married woman, Peter.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Yes, and the little girl in the bed is my baby.”
“No, she’s not.”
But he supposed she was; and he took a step towards the sleeping child with his fist upraised. Of course he did not strike her. He sat down on the floor and sobbed, and Wendy did not know how to comfort him, though she could have done it so easily once. She was only a woman now, and she ran out of the room to try to think.
Peter continued to cry, and soon his sobs woke Jane. She sat up in bed, and was interested at once.
“Boy,” she said, “why are you crying?”
Peter rose and bowed to her, and she bowed to him from the bed.
“Hullo,” he said.
“Hullo,” said Jane.
“My name is Peter Pan,” he told her.
“Yes, I know.”
“I came back for my mother,” he explained, “to take her to the Neverland.”
“Yes, I know,” Jane said, “I have been waiting for you.”
When Wendy returned diffidently she found Peter sitting on the bed-post crowing gloriously, while Jane in her nighty was flying round the room in solemn ecstasy.
“She is my mother,” Peter explained; and Jane descended and stood by his side, with the look on her face that he liked to see on ladies when they gazed at him.
“He does so need a mother,” Jane said.
“Yes, I know,” Wendy admitted, rather forlornly; “no one knows it so well as I.”
“Good-bye,” said Peter to Wendy; and he rose in the air, and the shameless Jane rose with him; it was already her easiest way of moving about.
Wendy rushed to the window.
“No, no!” she cried.
“It is just for spring-cleaning time,” Jane said; “he wants me always to do his spring cleaning.”
“If only I could go with you!” Wendy sighed.
“You see you can’t fly,” said Jane.
Of course in the end Wendy let them fly away together. Our last glimpse of her shows her at the window, watching them receding into the sky until they were as small as stars.
As you look at Wendy you may see her hair becoming white, and her figure little again, for all this happened long ago. Jane is now a common grown-up, with a daughter called Margaret;3 and every spring-cleaning time, except when he forgets, Peter comes for Margaret and takes her to the Neverland, where she tells him stories about himself, to which he listens eagerly. When Margaret grows up she will have a daughter, who is to be Peter’s mother in turn; and so it will go on, so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless.
THE END
ENDNOTES
Chapter I: Peter Breaks Through
1 (p. 7) Napoleon: Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) was a French general who, through his military genius and risk-taking, became emperor of the French twice. Napoleon was a short but powerful man (Barrie, too, was just over five feet tall); he appears in many of Barrie’s writings.
2 (p. 8) I have one pound seventeen here: Mr. Darling performs his (at times inaccurate) calculations in pre-decimal British currency. “One pound seventeen” is one pound, seventeen shillings; “three nine seven” is three pounds, nine shillings, and seven pence.
3 (p. 8) Of course we can, George: Mr. Darling takes his first name from the oldest of the Davies boys, George Llewelyn Davies. The names of all but the youngest (Nico) of the boys appear in the novel: The second child after George was John (or Jack), the third was Peter, and the fourth was named Michael. Sir George Frampton modeled his statue of Peter Pan, which still stands in Kensington Gardens, after a photograph of Michael.
4 (p. 9) This nurse was a prim Newfoundland dog, called Nana: Barrie stressed how important it was that a man rather than a woman perform the part of Nana in the play Peter Pan. The portrait of Nana was drawn from two of Barrie’s beloved dogs—his Saint Bernard, Porthos, and later a large Newfoundland named Luath. Barrie writes in his dedication to the play in 1928, “I must have sat at a table with that great dog waiting for me to stop, not complaining, for he knew it was thus we made our living, but giving me a look when he found he was to be in the play, with his sex changed. In after years when the actor who was Nana had to go to the wars he first taught his wife how to take his place as the dog till he came back, and I am glad that I see nothing funny in this; it seems to me to belong to the play. I offer this obtuseness on my part as my first proof that I am the author” (Peter Pan and Other Plays, p. 78; see “For Further Reading”).
5 (p. 10) On john’s footer days she never once forgot his sweater: Nana always remembers to bring along John’s sweater on the days when he plays football (that is, soccer).
6 (p. 11) It would be an easy map if that were all... but there is also... the round pond: Barrie describes the Round Pond, which is still located in London’s Kensington Gardens, in The Little White Bird (1902), the novel where Peter Pan first appears by name: “It is round because it is in the very middle of the Gardens, and when you are come to it you never want to go any farther” (p. 149).
7 (p. 13) Wendy said with a tolerant smile: That is, with a forgiving, broad-minded smile. This passage recalls Barrie’s memoir of his mother, Margaret Ogilvy (1896), in which he marvels at the effect his grandmother’s death had on his mother, who was eight years old at the time: “From that time she scrubbed and mended and baked and sewed ... and gossiped like a matron with the other women, and humoured the men with a tolerant smile” (p. 29).
8 (p. 14) they were skeleton leaves, but ... they did not come from any tree that grew in England: That is, they are leaves from which the pulpy parts have been removed, so that only the fibrous stem structures remain. The fact that Peter Pan is dressed in skeleton leaves makes additional sense given that he is a ghost child—a boy who does not belong in the waking human world.
9 (p. 14) he had rent the film that obscures the Neverland: That is, he had violently torn the thin curtain that conceals the Neverland. In the first draft of the play, the island was called the Never, Never, Never Land; when the play was performed, the name changed to the Never, Never Land; in the published play it is the Never Land, and it appears as the Neverland in the novel.
Chapter II. The Shadow
1 (p. 23) She went from bed to bed singing enchantments over them: Here Barrie may have had in mind Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Nights Dream (a text he refers to throughout his 1917 play Dear Brutus). In act 2, scene 2, Titania, the queen of the Fairies, asks her fairies to “Sing me now to sleep,” and they proceed to sing spells of protection over her (which don’t, as it happens, work).
Chapter III: Come Away, Come Away!
1 (p. 25) “Wendy Moira Angela Darling”: The name Wendy existed before Peter Pan, but it was Barrie who made it famous. He took the name from a child who shared his mother’s first name. Margaret Henley, the daughter of poet W. E. Henley, died when she was five and a half years old. Before she died, she became close to Barrie, calling him her “friendy,” which she mispronounced as “wendy.” Barrie’s 1903 play Little Mary is the story of a girl named Moira who mothers orphan children. A daughter, Angela, was born to Gerald du Maurier (the Davies boys’ uncle, who first played Hook and Mr. Darling) and his wife during the period when the play was in rehearsal. In celebration, Barrie made Angela Wendy’s third name. (In the mid-1920s, when Angela was older, she played Wendy on the stage for two seasons and once crashed while flying.)
2 (p. 29) “because she mends the pots and kettles”: Tinker Bell seems to possess a hint of Cinderella. Note that Peter has returned to the Darling house to learn the end of Cinderella’s story. Yet Tinker Bell’s story is nothing like that of the character from the fairy tale. Barrie plays with a similar tension between fairy tales and the
ir distortions in his play A Kiss for Cinderella, which first opened at the Wyndham’s Theatre in 1916.
3 (p. 33) All was as still as salt: Barrie also uses this phrase in his 1891 novel The Little Minister. It exists as a rare idiom that perhaps originates with Lot’s wife in the Bible (Genesis 19:26); she is transformed into a pillar of salt when she turns back to look at the burning Sodom.
4 (p. 37) The birds were flown: In The Little White Bird, Barrie explains that all babies are birds before they become human. As baby Peter never completely stops being a bird, he is known in the book as a “Betwixt-and-Between.”
Chapter IV: The Flight
1 (p. 45) “Hook ... jas Hook”: Captain Hook developed from Captain Swarthy, a figure in the fantasy games played by Barrie and the Llewelyn Davies boys at Black Lake Island in Surrey during the summer of 1901. Swarthy was first immortalized in Barrie’s privately printed book The Boy Castaways of Black Lake Island (1901), of which only two copies were produced, one lost by Arthur Llewelyn Davies, the boys’ father.
Chapter V: The Island Come True
1 (p. 50) Slightly: The origin of this character’s strange name is explained in the play when he clarifies that his mother had written “Slightly Soiled” on the pinafore he was wearing when he was lost. Therefore, he has always assumed that Slightly is his name.
2 (p. 52) In dress he somewhat aped the attire associated with the name of Charles II: That is, Captain Hook somewhat imitated the “Restoration” or “Cavalier” style of dress associated with the “Merry Monarch,” King Charles II (ruled 1660-1685). Charles dressed and lived flamboyantly—in direct opposition to his predecessor, Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell, whose Puritan dictatorship introduced severe laws prohibiting amusements. Influenced by the style of Charles II, the late seventeenth century was a period of elaborate, foppish men’s clothing.
3 (p. 52) the ill-fated Stuarts: The Stuart family ruled England and Scotland from 1603 through the reign of Queen Anne, who died in 1714 (except for the period of the republican Commonwealth in the 1650s). In 1649 the English Parliament tried for treason and executed one Stuart monarch, Charles I. In 1689 his grandson, James II, was dethroned and exiled for his pro-Catholic sympathies. In the eighteenth century, James II’s son and grandson both unsuccessfully asserted their claims to the throne.
4 (p. 56) “Odds bobs, hammer and tongs”: Barrie takes Hook’s favorite curse from the sea ballad in Frederick Marryat’s Snarleyyow; or, The Dog Fiend (1837).
Chapter VII: The Home under the Ground
1 (p. 70) The couch ... was a genuine Queen Mab, with club legs; ... the wash stand was Pie-crust... but of course she lit the residence herself: Some details here have meaning—“Queen Mab” is the queen of the fairies; “Pie-crust” means having the appearance of the crimped, raised crust of a pie—but otherwise Barrie indulges in a flight of linguistic whimsy designed to mock the pretensions of the antiques market.
Chapter VIII: The Mermaids’ Lagoon
1 (p. 82) In that supreme moment Hook did not blanch, even at the gills: That is, Hook did not turn white, even around his chin and neck. The word “gills” also recalls the respiratory organs of most aquatic animals that breathe water to obtain oxygen, anticipating Peter’s later identification of Hook with a codfish.
ChapterX: The Happy Home
1 (p. 91) They called Peter the Great White Father: Barrie’s original title for the play Peter Pan when he first showed it to Charles Frohman in April 1904 was The Great White Father. Frohman liked everything about it except the title. By the time it was performed, the play had been retitled Peter Pan; or, The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up.
Chapter XI: Wendy’s Story
1 (p. 101) in half mourning: At the time Peter Pan was written, “half mourning” was the third and final stage of mourning, lasting about three to six months, when people stopped wearing only black and gradually began to wear other dark or subdued colors such as gray or lavender.
Chapter XVII: When Wendy Grew Up
1 (p. 149) “You don’t feel... that you would like to say anything to my parents about a very sweet subject?”: Wendy wants to know if Peter would like to ask her parents whether he can someday marry her.
2 (p. 153) Slightly married a lady of title, and so he became a lord: This is ironic, as a woman could increase her social status by marrying a man with a title, but in fact a man had no such luck when he married a woman with a title.
3 (p. 158) Jane is now a common grown-up, with a daughter called Margaret: Barrie may take the name “Margaret” from that of his mother, Margaret Ogilvy.
INSPIRED BY PETER PAN
Film
J. M. Barrie wrote a script for a silent film version of Peter Pan. Though his scenario was never used, a silent Peter Pan appeared in 1924. Directed by Herbert Brenon, the 105-minute movie stars Betty Bronson as Peter. This version, though praised by critics, was a disappointment to Barrie. Little more than a play on celluloid, it failed to utilize the unique possibilities offered by the medium. Nevertheless, in 2002 the Library of Congress deemed it “culturally significant” and placed it in the National Film Registry for preservation. The text of Barrie’s unused scenario can be found in Roger Green’s Fifty Years of Peter Pan (1954), which traces the early history of the author’s work.
Along with the Broadway musical starring Mary Martin (it opened in 1954), Walt Disney’s animated musical Peter Pan (1953) is in part responsible for readers’ continuing interest in the story. The full-length cartoon bears a fairly close resemblance to Barrie’s book, although it dispenses with Peter’s more sinister side. Hans Conried’s voice makes Captain Hook both droll and malevolent, counterbalancing Bobby Driscoll’s prankish, somewhat one-dimensional Peter Pan. This classic film is well-paced and features vivid color, abundant action and humor (including amusing slapstick), and exciting chase scenes, as well as a catchy original soundtrack.
Disney’s version stood so firmly as the definitive Peter Pan that a reincarnation of the story did not reappear for almost forty years, until Steven Spielberg created Hook (1991). Spielberg’s movie brazenly diverges from the famous first line of Barrie’s book by representing Peter as a grown-up. Robin Williams stars as Peter Banning, a workaholic mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer who ignores his children and forgets that, as a child, he was Peter Pan. Captain Hook, played by Dustin Hoffman, kidnaps Banning’s children, forcing the lawyer to travel to a cluttered Neverland that features Julia Roberts as Tinker Bell. In portraying a hero who has lost his magic, however, the film throws away the charm that makes Barrie’s story so special.
Return to Never Land (2002), an animated musical sequel to Disney’s 1953 production, takes place during the blitz of London during World War II. Directed by Robin Budd and Donovan Cook, the film depicts a grown-up Wendy whose daughter, Jane, doesn’t believe her mother’s tales of Lost Boys and flying. Captain Hook rocks Jane’s complacency by kidnapping her, and Peter is forced to plan a rescue. Temple Mathews’s script, written with an eye toward grade-school children, adds several new elements, such as a revised impression of Jane, who hates Never Land and finds Peter Pan foolish. But in spite of the problems that necessarily arise from filming a sequel to a powerful story, Return to Never Land is a witty, refreshing film. It gently satirizes all that dates the 1953 version; for example, in the 2002 movie Jane, who wants nothing to do with mothering Peter and the Lost Boys, becomes the first Lost Girl.
P J. Hogan’s intelligent, live-action Peter Pan (2003) is the adaptation most loyal to Barrie’s book on an emotional level. While earlier film versions of the story tend to be light and campy, Hogan’s Peter Pan captures the dark, poignant aspects of the tale, while providing an engaging, impassioned payoff. Refusing to gloss over the underlying melancholy in the novel or the pre-sexual love triangle among Peter, Wendy, and Captain Hook, the film simultaneously retains all the wonder and magic of the fantastic Neverland. Rachel Hurd-Wood steals the show as Wendy, imbuing the character with enthusiasm and a wisdom beyond her y
ears. The beautiful and wild Jeremy Sumpter is the first boy to play a live-action Peter, and Jason Isaacs takes on dual roles as Captain Hook and Mr. Darling. Tastefully rendered computer-generated special effects give a mythical feeling to Neverland.
The star-studded Finding Neverland (2004), directed by Marc Foster, chronicles the fascinating story of Barrie’s relationship with the Llewelyn Davies family and the premier of the play Peter Pan; or, The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up. Johnny Depp seems tailor-made for his role as the diminutive author, and Kate Winslet is magnificent as the widowed Sylvia Llewelyn Davies. The film takes some liberties with history; in it, Barrie meets Sylvia after her husband has died, when she already had four boys. In truth, her husband didn’t die for ten years after Barrie’s meeting with the family. Only three of her sons (out of five total) were alive when Barrie met them, and because Peter was still an infant at home it was George and Jack that Barrie spent his time with every day in the gardens. Nonetheless, the child actors give some of the most stunning performances in this film; particularly effective is Freddie Highmore’s portrayal of Peter’s fits of anger at Barrie, who he says cannot replace his dead father. Julie Christie portrays Davies’s stern mother, Emma du Maurier, who disapproves of Barrie’s relationship with the family. Dustin Hoffman rounds out the cast as American theater producer Charles Frohman. Based on Allan Knee’s play The Man Who Was Peter Pan (1998), the film boasts beautiful art direction and spectacular outdoor settings, making the production a feast for both the eyes and the emotions.