by J. M. Barrie
18. “the lost boys.” Peter Pan is, in some ways, a compensatory dream child for all the boys who have fallen out of perambulators. He was once a dead baby, but he is also a fantasy child, as J. M. Barrie acknowledged, in an autograph addition for the second draft of the ending of the 1908 play: “I think now—that Peter is only a sort of dead baby—he is the baby of all the people who never had one.” Mrs. Darling also discerns Peter in the features of women who have never had children. In The Little White Bird, Peter finds two babies who have fallen unnoticed from their perambulators: one is named Phoebe, the other Walter, and both are about a year old. The term “lost” is used frequently as a euphemism for “dead,” as in “he lost his father” or “she lost a child.”
19. not to see her but to listen to stories. Peter is drawn to the Darling nursery window because of the stories told in it, not because of a desire to take Wendy to Neverland. In Neverland, there are plenty of adventures, but no memory and therefore also no stories. Ironically, Peter becomes the main character in one of the most famous cultural stories for children, yet he is forever banished from the nursery, where that story is read and told.
20. “It is to listen to the stories.” Barrie may have been inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s “Thumbelina,” which ends by describing how a swallow flies from the “warm lands” back to Denmark to build a nest above the window of “the man who can tell you fairy tales.” Andersen is one of the authors whose name appeared on the curtain designed for the 1908 revival of Peter Pan. The curtain displays a sampler supposedly stitched by Wendy, including the names of—besides Andersen—Charles Lamb, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Lewis Carroll. Although Barrie does not have much to say about Andersen, he most likely knew his work through his friend Andrew Lang, who produced popular anthologies of fairy tales from all over the world. Barrie must have recognized in Andersen a kindred spirit, for the Danish writer of working-class origins was also a prolific playwright, devoted to the theater, and had the same reputation for streaks of “whimsy” in his work.
21. “Cinderella.” Barrie’s play A Kiss for Cinderella opened in London in March 1916 and at Christmas in New York in the same year. Barrie had been “slinging off heaven knows how many short plays, once I think six in a week,” and the Cinderella play was one of the few works in that period that was not designated for the war effort. In 1926 Herbert Brenon directed a silent film version of A Kiss for Cinderella, with Betty Bronson, who had played Peter Pan in the Paramount film. Barrie’s Cinderella is a saintly young woman whose good deeds fail to rescue her from a death that resembles the martyrdom of Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Match Girl.
22. “they lived happily ever after.” Stanley Green and Betty Comden, hired to write the screenplay for the 1954 musical Peter Pan, added some dialogue about Hamlet. After telling the boys that Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty both live happily ever after, Tootles asks about the end of Hamlet. Wendy replies: “Hamlet! Well, the Prince Hamlet died, and the king died, and the Queen died, and Ophelia died, and Polonius died, and Laertes died, and. . . .” “And?” the boys ask. “Well the rest of them lived happily ever after!” Wendy declares.
23. it was she who first tempted him. In the play Peter Pan, Wendy is seen as something of an intruder in the boys’ world. The stage directions emphasize that she may have “bored her way in at last whether we wanted her or not.” And Barrie adds that Peter simply had to give in to Wendy’s insistence on going to Neverland: “It may be that even Peter did not really bring her to the Never Land of his free will, but merely to do so because she would not stay away” (84). The allusion to the biblical story of Adam and Eve shines through, with Wendy as temptress and Peter as a “greedy” Adam.
24. there was a greedy look in his eyes now which ought to have alarmed her. Peter seems to recognize the bonding power of stories and their capacity to serve as a lure for the lost boys. Like James Barrie himself, the narrator is a storyteller who uses tales to hold the attention of children, and he has deep insight into Peter’s motives for bringing Wendy to Neverland.
25. “Oh, how lovely to fly.” The desire to fly can be traced back to the Greek myth about Daedalus and Icarus. Daedalus, a renowned architect and craftsman, attempted to escape imprisonment on Crete by fashioning wings for himself and his son, Icarus. As noted in the introduction, he warned Icarus against flying too close to the sun, but the boy, overcome by giddy curiosity, soared so high that his wings, made of wax, melted, and he plunged into the sea. In children’s literature, characters are frequently airborne, and flight comes to represent liberation from adult authority and the possibility of adventure. “Where needs are unmet, desires take wing,” Jerry Griswold tells us, in a moving meditation on flight in stories as varied as George MacDonald’s The Light Princess (1864), Pamela Travers’s Mary Poppins (1934), and Virginia Hamilton’s The People Could Fly (1985).
Just two years before Peter Pan was performed, in 1902, the children in Edith Nesbit’s Five Children and It famously wish for wings and fly up to a church tower. “Of course you all know what flying feels like,” Nesbit wrote, “because everyone has dreamed about flying, and it seems so beautifully easy—only, you can never remember how you did it; and as a rule you have to do it without wings, in your dreams, which is more clever and uncommon, but not so easy to remember the rule for” (Nesbit 99). Nesbit also emphasizes how flying is “more wonderful and more like real magic than any wish the children had had yet.”
Many stories for children also show characters riding through the air on sleds (Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen”), winged horses (Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time), and lions (C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia).
26. you heard its three wicked inmates breathing angelically. The children are described by Liza as “little angels,” and we receive a first hint in this passage about how children can be both angelic and wicked, or “innocent” and “heartless,” as we learn at the tale’s end. The children’s facial expressions also assume an “awful craftiness” even as they are presented as cheerfully innocent. As one critic starkly puts it, in a study of British childhood: “The Victorian child is a symbol of innocence, the Edwardian child of hedonism” (Wullschläger 109). If Lewis Carroll’s Alice is sweet, well mannered, and innocent, J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan is, by contrast, self-centered, impertinent, and pleasure-seeking. In a sense, the idealized child of the Victorian era made it possible for adults to discover the demon in children, for the increasing investment in toys, clothes, education, and care could easily backfire when children did not live up perfectly to the expectation of innocent beauty.
27. We now return to the nursery. The narrator, like Peter, is betwixt and between, speaking sometimes with the voice of an adult (as when he refers to the children as “three scoundrels”) yet also enamored of the pleasures of learning how to fly. The narrator never lets us forget his presence.
28. “You just think lovely wonderful thoughts.” In his dedication to the printed play, Barrie felt obliged to add a parental warning: “after the first production I had to add something to the play at the request of parents . . . about no one being able to fly until the fairy dust had been blown on him; so many children having gone home and tried it from their beds and needed surgical attention.” C. S. Lewis similarly added several warnings about entering wardrobes as well as about the hazards of closing the door behind you, all in response to parental concerns about how the Pevensie children reach Narnia in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Cynthia Asquith writes in her memoir of Barrie that she did not dare tell her employer that “one child had been killed because, after seeing Peter Pan, he ‘thought beautiful thoughts,’ and confident that these thoughts would enable him to fly, jumped out of the nursery window!” (Asquith, Portrait, 20). There is no historical evidence or documentation that this incident ever occurred.
29. “I flewed!” Michael’s coinage combines the correct past tense with an additional “ed” in an effort to mimic adult speech. The term
“flewed” reminds us that he is still very much a child and that he has the capacity to “believe” in flight. Yet it also points forward to his desire to become one of the grown-ups.
30. “And there are pirates.” Tales about pirates on the high seas became popular after the publication of Daniel Defoe’s Captain Singleton (1720), and the genre flourished in Anglo-American culture. “Pirates” was a common epithet that included both British sea-robbers and men who set sail from North Africa and became part of their own governments’ revenue machinery. From the seventeenth century on, stories about Europeans captured on the high seas and enslaved by “Barbary pirates” flourished; among them can be counted Rossini’s L’italiana in Algeri (1813). Tom Sawyer captures the romance of piracy when he observes that pirates “have just a bully time . . . and kill everybody in the ships—make ’em walk a plank” (93). Barrie’s pirates are fanciful in their dress, manner, and speech, and they are based on parodic figures (Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance was on the London stage in 1880) as much as on fictional and historical models. They have a sense of adventure, and, in the preface to Peter Pan, Hook is linked with Captain James Cook, who was killed in 1778 by Hawaiian natives. Hook is clearly also inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson’s Long John Silver, the peg-legged pirate who captures young Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island (1883).
Daphne du Maurier, in a memoir about her father, Gerald du Maurier, writes about Hook: “He was a tragic and rather ghastly creation who knew no peace, and whose soul was in torment; a dark shadow; a sinister dram; a bogey of fear who lives in the grey recesses of every small boy’s mind. All boys had their Hooks, as Barrie knew; he was the phantom who came by night and stole his way into their murky dreams. . . . And because he had imagination and a spark of genius, Gerald made him alive” (Dunbar 141).
31. Will they reach the nursery in time? At times the narrator seems to be telling the story to a group of listeners. With this question, he creates the sense that he is narrating the events as they unfold and that he has no foreknowledge of how things will turn out. And yet he can still reassure readers that everything will, as in the fairy tale “Cinderella,” cited earlier, “come right in the end.”
32. “Cave, Peter!” “Cave” is from the Latin term cavere. The star is telling Peter to watch out and beware of danger.
33. The birds were flown. The children are characterized as having reverted to their earlier form as birds. In Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, Barrie writes: “All children could have such recollections if they would press their hands hard to their temples for, having been birds before they were human, they are naturally a little wild during the first few weeks, and very itchy at the shoulders, where their wings used to be” (Hollindale 13). Peter has become a Pied Piper figure, seducing the children, in this case, with the promise of flight and leading them out of their homes into an enchanted retreat.
CHAPTER 4
The Flight
Second to the right, and straight on till morning.”1
That, Peter had told Wendy, was the way to the Neverland; but even birds, carrying maps and consulting them at windy corners, could not have sighted it with these instructions. Peter, you see, just said anything that came into his head.
At first his companions trusted him implicitly, and so great were the delights of flying that they wasted time circling round church spires or any other tall objects on the way that took their fancy.
John and Michael raced, Michael getting a start.
They recalled with contempt that not so long ago they had thought themselves fine fellows for being able to fly round a room.
Not long ago. But how long ago? They were flying over the sea before this thought began to disturb Wendy seriously. John thought it was their second sea and their third night.
Sometimes it was dark and sometimes light, and now they were very cold and again too warm. Did they really feel hungry at times, or were they merely pretending, because Peter had such a jolly new way of feeding them? His way was to pursue birds who had food in their mouths suitable for humans and snatch it from them; then the birds would follow and snatch it back; and they would all go chasing each other gaily for miles, parting at last with mutual expressions of good-will. But Wendy noticed with gentle concern that Peter did not seem to know that this was rather an odd way of getting your bread and butter, nor even that there are other ways.
Certainly they did not pretend to be sleepy, they were sleepy; and that was a danger, for the moment they popped off, down they fell. The awful thing was that Peter thought this funny.
“There he goes again!” he would cry gleefully, as Michael suddenly dropped like a stone.
“Save him, save him!” cried Wendy, looking with horror at the cruel sea far below. Eventually Peter would dive through the air, and catch Michael just before he could strike the sea, and it was lovely the way he did it; but he always waited till the last moment, and you felt it was his cleverness that interested him and not the saving of human life. Also he was fond of variety, and the sport that engrossed him one moment would suddenly cease to engage him, so there was always the possibility that the next time you fell he would let you go.2
He could sleep in the air without falling, by merely lying on his back and floating, but this was, partly at least, because he was so light that if you got behind him and blew he went faster.
“Do be more polite to him,” Wendy whispered to John, when they were playing “Follow my Leader.”3
“Then tell him to stop showing off,” said John.
When playing Follow my Leader, Peter would fly close to the water and touch each shark’s tail in passing, just as in the street you may run your finger along an iron railing. They could not follow him in this with much success, so perhaps it was rather like showing off, especially as he kept looking behind to see how many tails they missed.
“You must be nice to him,” Wendy impressed on her brothers. “What could we do if he were to leave us!”
“We could go back,” Michael said.
“How could we ever find our way back without him?”
“Well, then, we could go on,” said John.
“That is the awful thing, John. We should have to go on, for we don’t know how to stop.”
This was true; Peter had forgotten to show them how to stop.
John said that if the worst came to the worst, all they had to do was to go straight on, for the world was round, and so in time they must come back to their own window.
“And who is to get food for us, John?”
“I nipped a bit out of that eagle’s mouth pretty neatly, Wendy.”
“After the twentieth try,” Wendy reminded him. “And even though we became good at picking up food, see how we bump against clouds and things if he is not near to give us a hand.”
Indeed they were constantly bumping. They could now fly strongly, though they still kicked far too much; but if they saw a cloud in front of them, the more they tried to avoid it, the more certainly did they bump into it. If Nana had been with them, she would have had a bandage round Michael’s forehead by this time.
Peter was not with them for the moment, and they felt rather lonely up there by themselves. He could go so much faster than they that he would suddenly shoot out of sight, to have some adventure in which they had no share. He would come down laughing over something fearfully funny he had been saying to a star, but he had already forgotten what it was, or he would come up with mermaid scales still sticking to him, and yet not be able to say for certain what had been happening. It was really rather irritating to children who had never seen a mermaid.
“And if he forgets them so quickly,” Wendy argued, “how can we expect that he will go on remembering us?”
Indeed, sometimes when he returned he did not remember them,4 at least not well. Wendy was sure of it. She saw recognition come into his eyes as he was about to pass them the time of day and go on; once even she had to tell him her name.
“I’m Wendy,” she said
agitatedly.
He was very sorry. “I say, Wendy,” he whispered to her, “always if you see me forgetting you, just keep on saying ‘I’m Wendy,’ and then I’ll remember.”
Of course this was rather unsatisfactory. However, to make amends he showed them how to lie out flat on a strong wind that was going their way, and this was such a pleasant change that they tried it several times and found that they could sleep thus with security. Indeed they would have slept longer, but Peter tired quickly of sleeping, and soon he would cry in his captain voice, “We get off here.” So with occasional tiffs, but on the whole rollicking, they drew near the Neverland; for after many moons they did reach it, and, what is more, they had been going pretty straight all the time, not perhaps so much owing to the guidance of Peter or Tink as because the island was out looking for them.5 It is only thus that any one may sight those magic shores.
“There it is,” said Peter calmly.
“Where, where?”
“Where all the arrows are pointing.”
Indeed a million golden arrows6 were pointing out the island to the children, all directed by their friend the sun, who wanted them to be sure of their way before leaving them for the night.
Wendy and John and Michael stood on tiptoe in the air to get their first sight of the island. Strange to say, they all recognised it at once, and until fear fell upon them they hailed it, not as something long dreamt of and seen at last, but as a familiar friend to whom they were returning home for the holidays.
“John, there’s the lagoon.”
“Wendy, look at the turtles burying their eggs in the sand.”
“I say, John, I see your flamingo with the broken leg!”
“Look, Michael, there’s your cave!”
“John, what’s that in the brushwood?”
“It’s a wolf with her whelps. Wendy, I do believe that’s your little whelp!”