by J. M. Barrie
“Don’t go Peter,” she entreated, “I know such lots of stories.”
Those were her precise words, so there can be no denying that it was she who first tempted him.23
He came back, and there was a greedy look in his eyes now which ought to have alarmed her,24 but did not.
“Oh, the stories I could tell to the boys!” she cried, and then Peter gripped her and began to draw her toward the window.
“Let me go!” she ordered him.
“Wendy, do come with me and tell the other boys.”
Of course she was very pleased to be asked, but she said, “Oh dear, I can’t. Think of mummy! Besides, I can’t fly.”
“I’ll teach you.”
“Oh, how lovely to fly.”25
“I’ll teach you how to jump on the wind’s back, and then away we go.”
“Oo!” she exclaimed rapturously.
“Wendy, Wendy, when you are sleeping in your silly bed you might be flying about with me saying funny things to the stars.”
“Oo!”
“And, Wendy, there are mermaids.”
“Mermaids! With tails?”
“Such long tails.”
“Oh,” cried Wendy, “to see a mermaid!”
He had become frightfully cunning. “Wendy,” he said, “how we should all respect you.”
She was wriggling her body in distress. It was quite as if she were trying to remain on the nursery floor.
But he had no pity for her.
“Wendy,” he said, the sly one, “you could tuck us in at night.”
“Oo!”
“None of us has ever been tucked in at night.”
“Oo,” and her arms went out to him.
“And you could darn our clothes, and make pockets for us. None of us has any pockets.”
How could she resist. “Of course it’s awfully fascinating!” she cried. “Peter, would you teach John and Michael to fly too?”
“If you like,” he said indifferently; and she ran to John and Michael and shook them. “Wake up,” she cried, “Peter Pan has come and he is to teach us to fly.”
John rubbed his eyes. “Then I shall get up,” he said. Of course he was on the floor already. “Hallo,” he said, “I am up!”
Michael was up by this time also, looking as sharp as a knife with six blades and a saw, but Peter suddenly signed silence. Their faces assumed the awful craftiness of children listening for sounds from the grown-up world. All was as still as salt. Then everything was right. No, stop! Everything was wrong. Nana, who had been barking distressfully all the evening, was quiet now. It was her silence they had heard.
“Out with the light! Hide! Quick!” cried John, taking command for the only time throughout the whole adventure. And thus when Liza entered, holding Nana, the nursery seemed quite its old self, very dark; and you would have sworn you heard its three wicked inmates breathing angelically26 as they slept. They were really doing it artfully from behind the window curtains.
Liza was in a bad temper, for she was mixing the Christmas puddings in the kitchen, and had been drawn away from them, with a raisin still on her cheek, by Nana’s absurd suspicions. She thought the best way of getting a little quiet was to take Nana to the nursery for a moment, but in custody of course.
“There, you suspicious brute,” she said, not sorry that Nana was in disgrace, “they are perfectly safe, aren’t they? Every one of the little angels sound asleep in bed. Listen to their gentle breathing.”
Here Michael, encouraged by his success, breathed so loudly that they were nearly detected. Nana knew that kind of breathing, and she tried to drag herself out of Liza’s clutches.
But Liza was dense. “No more of it, Nana,” she said sternly, pulling her out of the room. “I warn you if you bark again I shall go straight for master and missus and bring them home from the party, and then, oh, won’t master whip you, just.”
She tied the unhappy dog up again, but do you think Nana ceased to bark? Bring master and missus home from the party! Why, that was just what she wanted. Do you think she cared whether she was whipped so long as her charges were safe? Unfortunately Liza returned to her puddings, and Nana, seeing that no help would come from her, strained and strained at the chain until at last she broke it. In another moment she had burst into the dining-room of 27 and flung up her paws to heaven, her most expressive way of making a communication. Mr. and Mrs. Darling knew at once that something terrible was happening in their nursery, and without a good-bye to their hostess they rushed into the street.
But it was now ten minutes since three scoundrels had been breathing behind the curtains; and Peter Pan can do a great deal in ten minutes.
We now return to the nursery.27
“It’s all right,” John announced, emerging from his hiding-place. “I say, Peter, can you really fly?”
Instead of troubling to answer him Peter flew round the room, taking the mantelpiece on the way.
“How topping!” said John and Michael.
“How sweet!” cried Wendy.
“Yes, I’m sweet, oh, I am sweet!” said Peter, forgetting his manners again.
It looked delightfully easy, and they tried it first from the floor and then from the beds, but they always went down instead of up.
“I say, how do you do it?” asked John, rubbing his knee. He was quite a practical boy.
“You just think lovely wonderful thoughts,”28 Peter explained, “and they lift you up in the air.”
He showed them again.
“You’re so nippy at it,” John said; “couldn’t you do it very slowly once?”
Peter did it both slowly and quickly. “I’ve got it now, Wendy!” cried John, but soon he found he had not. Not one of them could fly an inch, though even Michael was in words of two syllables, and Peter did not know A from Z.
Of course Peter had been trifling with them, for no one can fly unless the fairy dust has been blown on him. Fortunately, as we have mentioned, one of his hands was messy with it, and he blew some on each of them, with the most superb results.
“Now just wriggle your shoulders this way,” he said, “and let go.”
They were all on their beds, and gallant Michael let go first. He did not quite mean to let go, but he did it, and immediately he was borne across the room.
Peter and the children fly away. (Peter Pan and Wendy by J. M. Barrie, Retold for the Nursery by May Byron. Illustrated by Kathleen Atkins)
“I flewed!”29 he screamed while still in mid-air.
John let go and met Wendy near the bathroom.
“Oh, lovely!”
“Oh, ripping!”
“Look at me!”
“Look at me!”
“Look at me!”
They were not nearly so elegant as Peter, they could not help kicking a little, but their heads were bobbing against the ceiling, and there is almost nothing so delicious as that. Peter gave Wendy a hand at first, but had to desist, Tink was so indignant.
Up and down they went, and round and round. Heavenly was Wendy’s word.
“I say,” cried John, “why shouldn’t we all go out?”
Of course it was to this that Peter had been luring them.
Michael was ready: he wanted to see how long it took him to do a billion miles. But Wendy hesitated.
“Mermaids!” said Peter again.
“Oo!”
“And there are pirates.”30
“Pirates,” cried John, seizing his Sunday hat, “let us go at once.”
It was just at this moment that Mr. and Mrs. Darling hurried with Nana out of 27. They ran into the middle of the street to look up at the nursery window; and, yes, it was still shut, but the room was ablaze with light, and most heart-gripping sight of all, they could see in shadow on the curtain three little figures in night attire circling round and round, not on the floor but in the air.
Not three figures, four!
In a tremble they opened the street door. Mr. Darling would have rushed upstairs, b
ut Mrs. Darling signed to him to go softly. She even tried to make her heart go softly.
Will they reach the nursery in time?31 If so, how delightful for them, and we shall all breathe a sigh of relief, but there will be no story. On the other hand, if they are not in time, I solemnly promise that it will all come right in the end.
They would have reached the nursery in time had it not been that the little stars were watching them. Once again the stars blew the window open, and that smallest star of all called out:
“Cave, Peter!”32
Then Peter knew that there was not a moment to lose. “Come,” he cried imperiously, and soared out at once into the night, followed by John and Michael and Wendy.
Mr. and Mrs. Darling and Nana rushed into the nursery too late. The birds were flown.33
1. Come Away, Come Away! The title echoes W. B. Yeats’s 1889 poem “The Stolen Child”: “Come away, O human child! / To the waters and the wild / With a faery, hand in hand.” Like the Darling children, the child of Yeats’s poem is escorted by a fairy to an island far away from the ordinary world, “more full of weeping than you can understand.”
2. a thousand times brighter. Powerful light effects are found in Neverland, and Tinker Bell is one of the creatures who provide unearthly illumination, somewhat dimmer than the “million golden arrows” that point the way to Neverland. Colorful radiance is the hallmark of many fantasy worlds in children’s literature—Oz and Narnia are prime examples.
3. you saw it was a fairy. Barrie wrote of Tinker Bell’s origins as a creature made up during the days spent with the Llewelyn Davies boys at Black Lake: “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, he saw a twinkle stand still for a moment and he waved his foot gaily to it, thus creating Tink.”
Fairyland is usually represented in folklore as a parallel universe, one that can be entered by stepping into a fairy ring or interrupting a fairy dance. By invoking fairies and introducing Tinker Bell as an inhabitant of Neverland, Barrie alludes to two different traditional stories, one about fairies as dethroned gods who spend their time fighting and feasting on a “blessed isle” (rather like the lost boys), the other about mortals who are taken away to fairyland to care for lost children (rather like Wendy). In Celtic mythology, the “blessed isle”—also known as the “Isles of the Blest,” “The Fortunate Isle,” “The Isle of Content,” and the “Land of the Young” (the site of perpetual youth and springtime)—is also the Land of the Dead. There, eternal youth lives in a perpetual springtime. Access was often through burial mounds guarded by faery folk. Peter Pan does not grow up and remains young forever in part perhaps because he belongs to the dead.
Barrie was living in an era with a euphoric faith in fairies and elfin folk—as well as in demons who spirit children away from the human world into utopian realms where pain and suffering are banished and beauty reigns supreme. He was no doubt familiar with Goethe’s poem “Erl-King,” Browning’s “Pied Piper of Hamelin: A Child’s Story,” and George MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind, all of which express profound anxieties about fairies and demons with power over children.
Victorian culture was open to the sorcery of elfin people, and fairies appeared often in the art, literature, and plays of the time. A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest were staged frequently and inspired the nineteenth-century rage for fairy paintings and even the fashion for fairy wallpapers designed for bedrooms and nurseries. The cult of fairy lore served both as a form of protest against the rise of industrialism and worship of material wealth and as a nostalgic gesture toward the enchantments of rural life and childhood. It had a complicated, mysterious, and sensually stirring dimension but could also slide easily into the artless and banal.
4. a girl called Tinker Bell. Tinker Bell was originally a fairy-tinker, a creature who mended pots and pans. In Scottish parlance, the word tinker was used to describe Gypsies who engaged in service trades such as knife sharpening and mending household items. Like the fairies in Peter Pan, they were perceived in Edwardian times as a flighty, nomadic folk, characterized by lawlessness and childlike behavior. The Oxford English Dictionary connects “tinker” with Gypsies in Scottish and Irish usages of the term. In the original manuscript to the play, Tinker Bell was called Tippy or Tippytoe.
5. embonpoint. From the French, en bon point, meaning “in good condition,” and used in English to describe someone who is plump, chubby, or buxom.
6. ha’pence. A ha’pence is a small coin, or halfpenny. If Mrs. Darling tidies up the metaphorical chests of drawers that are the children’s minds, Peter Pan flings the contents of the real chest of drawers in the nursery to the ground, creating disorderly clutter.
7. he forgot that he had shut Tinker Bell up in the drawer. Peter’s forgetfulness is part of his identity as the puer aeternus, the boy who will never grow up. He is always forgetting things, and, once Wendy returns to No. 14 in London, he begins to lose his memory of the lost boys, Hook, Tinker Bell, and, presumably, Wendy as well.
8. “Wendy Moira Angela Darling.” The name Moira has two competing histories, one connecting it with the Greek word for fate or destiny, the other linking it to the British Isles, where it is a variant of Mary and literally means “bitter.”
9. “Second to the right.” When Robert Louis Stevenson invited Barrie to visit him on Upolu, one of the Samoan islands, he provided the following instructions: “You take the boat to San Francisco, and then my place is second to the left.” Stevenson had written repeatedly to Barrie, encouraging him to make the journey: “We would have some grand cracks! Come, it will broaden your mind and be the making of me” (Chaney 123). Stevenson’s poor health (he suffered from tuberculosis) had led to his self-imposed exile on the remote South Sea Island, and he died there in 1894. Vailima, Stevenson’s estate, was, for Barrie, “the one spot on earth I had any craving to visit” (Margaret Ogilvy, 148), but Stevenson’s death put an end to his “scheme for travel.” Barrie worked hard to secure Stevenson’s posthumous literary reputation and sought to erect a monument to his memory, despite some fierce local opposition to honoring the author of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Master of Ballantrae, in addition to Treasure Island. In Margaret Ogilvy, Barrie described how Stevenson was “the spirit of boyhood tugging at the skirts of this old world of ours and compelling it to come back and play” (146).
10. draggled. soiled and wet, as if dragged through the mud.
11. housewife. The “sewing housewife,” “housewife sewing kit,” or just plain “housewife” was a kit containing needles, thread, scissors, and other items related to mending. It was part of the standard issue for British soldiers until after World War II.
12. he crowed rapturously. Peter’s narcissistic glee is expressed repeatedly through crowing. The term “cocky” used to describe him had its origins in the mid-nineteenth century and was used by Charles Kingsley in The Water-babies (1863): “He looked the cockiest little man of all little men.” Crowing and crying are what Peter uses to express emotional extremes, and they remind us of his origins in a god with a double nature as beast and human. Peter crows to signal his return to Neverland, to mark triumphs over his enemies, and sometimes, as here, just to signal that he is “pleased” with himself.
13. she replied with hauteur. Wendy speaks to Peter in a condescending way, answering his cockiness with her own arrogance, or hauteur, a word derived from the French word haut, meaning tall.
14. she gave him a thimble. Young audiences participated in the early productions, not just by clapping their hands to save Tinker Bell but also by throwing thimbles onstage to Peter. A twelve-year-old girl describes her efforts: “I nearly shouted myself hoarse. I tried to throw a thimble onto the stage. I don’t know whether it arrived, because there were such a lot of other thimbles thrown” (Gubar 200). For the remainder of the story, Peter will mistake thimbles for kisses.
15.
“its laugh broke into a thousand pieces.” In Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, the narrator declares that fairies never do “anything useful.” In language reminiscent of Peter’s words, he describes the origins of fairies: “When the first baby laughed for the first time, his laugh broke into a million pieces, and they all went skipping about. That was the beginning of fairies. They look tremendously busy, you know, as if they had not a moment to spare, but if you were to ask them what they are doing, they could not tell you in the least.”
16. “they soon don’t believe in fairies.” On several occasions, Barrie mourned the disappearance of the idyllic pastoral life of his boyhood in Kirriemuir, a place that had been sustained by faith, not only in matters religious but also in fairies and sprites. By 1922, when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was rejoicing over the case of two girls who had reportedly seen and photographed fairies in a glade behind their home in the village of Cottingley, in West Yorkshire, he could be dismissed as a mystic and kook. The physician who had written the Sherlock Holmes stories rhapsodized about the possibility that the world could be reenchanted through “well-authenticated” cases of fairy presences: “The thought of them, even when unseen, will add a charm to every brook and valley and give romantic interest to every country walk. The recognition of their existence will jolt the material twentieth-century mind out of its heavy ruts in the mud, and will make it admit that there is a glamour and a mystery to life” (Conan Doyle 32). Barrie’s secretary, Cynthia Asquith, describes Conan Doyle’s visit to Barrie’s summer residence and how relieved she was that the famous author did not put the question “Do you believe in fairies?” to Barrie (Asquith, Portrait 172). The spiritualist turn in Conan Doyle’s life and his faith in the five Cottingley fairies (the photographs were revealed to be a hoax) were triggered by a deep depression following the deaths of his wife, his son, a brother, and two nephews.
17. “you don’t mean to tell me that there is a fairy in this room!” In traditional lore, fairies are associated with the practice of stealing human children, and Peter and Tinker Bell might be seen as co-conspirators as they enter the Darling home.