by J. M. Barrie
THE END
1. When Wendy Grew Up. The chapter that follows captures the essence of an epilogue that Barrie added to the production of the play. That scene, called An Afterthought, had a run of exactly one night, February 22, 1908, at the Duke of York’s Theatre. It began with the appearance of a Baby Mermaid, who announced: “We are now going to do a new act for the first and only time on stage about what happened to Peter when Wendy grew up . . . and it will never be done again.” Peter Pan returns to the nursery and is bewildered to discover that Wendy has grown up and has a daughter of her own. Peter quickly recovers from his confusion and spirits little Jane off to Neverland. Barrie stepped forward at the end of the performance (the only time he made an appearance onstage), and the scene met with a fifteen-minute round of applause.
2. a cypher in his own house. Cypher is the British term for zero. Once again, Mr. Darling sees himself as suffering from neglect and failing to receive attention and respect from his wife and children.
3. “little sillies who are not sure what they are.” Gender confusion manifests itself in covert ways throughout the text, and here it is articulated in clear terms for the universe of fairies.
4. to let Wendy go to him for a week every year to do his spring cleaning. As noted, Wendy can be seen as a Persephone figure who is lured away from her mother by a male mythical being associated with death. In a neat reversal of the myth, Wendy remains with her mother and returns only briefly to Neverland for spring cleaning. (In the myth, Persephone goes back home in the springtime.) Unlike Persephone, Wendy never becomes Peter’s wife but becomes a mother herself, blending in with Mrs. Darling and becoming part of a series of mothers and daughters.
5. Jenkins minor. In English public schools, the younger or lower in standing of two boys with the same surname is called minor.
6. “I forget them after I kill them,” he replied carelessly. Peter’s amnesia is highlighted here in dramatic fashion. This scene underscores Peter’s narcissism (“he had so much to say about himself”), his capriciousness (“new adventures had crowded the old ones from his mind”), and his heartlessness (“Who is Tinker Bell?”).
7. the careless boy. The phrase captures Peter as a boy who is both uncaring and without cares. Here Barrie points readers to the consequences of failing to grow up.
8. he became a lord. Barrie satirizes the protocols of British aristocracy: when a woman marries a lord, she becomes a lady, but marrying a lady does not result in elevation to the status of lord. In 1913 Barrie became a baronet and henceforth became known as Sir James Barrie, a title that was often shortened to “The Bart” or changed to “the little Baronet.” Michael and Nico affectionately referred to him as Sir Jazz Band Barrie or Sir Jazz. Barrie had turned down a knighthood in 1909, but he could not resist assuming this hereditary title.
9. forbid the banns. The banns of marriage are the public announcement in a Christian parish church declaring that a marriage will take place between two people.
10. in a golden splash. “A million golden arrows” point the way to Neverland, and gold becomes for Barrie the color of beauty and mystery.
11. an odd inquiring look. Like Lewis Carroll’s Alice, Jane is curious in the double sense of the word, both “odd” (a curiosity) and “inquiring” (curious). It was Lewis Carroll’s genius to recognize that children’s natural curiosity was something to be promoted and fostered rather than discouraged, as it had been in earlier books for children.
12. at the three per cents. Once again, fathers are associated with numbers, accounting, and monetary matters.
13. Mrs. Darling was now dead and forgotten. It is not merely in Neverland that memory ceases to do its work. Even in London, at No. 14, memories of forebears fade more quickly than expected. And the narrator makes a point of emphasizing the speed with which humans heal when faced with loss: “dead” and “forgotten.” Compare those two terms with the use of “passed away” (in the next paragraph) for Nana.
14. “What do we see now?” The precocious Jane, described as an “artful child,” recognizes that the “awful darkness” enables her and her mother to develop a form of insight described by Jonathan Swift in his Thoughts on Various Subjects (1711): “Vision is the art of seeing things invisible.” Nighttime and darkness come to be associated with the power of imagination and storytelling, for reality gives way to a sacred and spectacular inner world, to what is described below as “the great adventure of the night.”
15. “‘Boy, why are you crying?’ ” The end of Peter and Wendy takes us back to the very beginning—with an exact repetition of Wendy’s query—suggesting that No. 14 may be ruled by the same cyclical time that prevails in Neverland rather than by linear time. These are the same words Jane will use when she is awakened by Peter’s sobs.
16. with a daughter called Margaret. The last girl in the series is named after Barrie’s mother, Margaret Ogilvy. In the biography of his mother, Barrie closes with a moving description of his mother’s death and imagines the vision of her that will greet him when he dies: “And if I also live to a time when age must dim my mind and the past comes sweeping back like the shades of night over the bare road of the present it will not, I believe, be my youth I shall see here, not a boy clinging to his mother’s skirts and crying, ‘Wait till I’m a man, and you’ll lie on feathers,’ but a little girl in a magenta frock and a white pinafore, who comes toward me through the long parks, singing to herself, and carrying her father’s dinner in a flagon” (207).
17. gay and innocent and heartless. With the addition of the term heartless, Barrie captured a change in the cultural understanding of childhood. The Victorian cult of the innocent child had done a real disservice by idealizing boys and girls, swaddling them in a serenity that denied their bright energy, their instinct for play, and their bolting curiosity. At the turn of the century, Freud was adding weight to childhood by seeing in its traumas the source of adult pathologies. Barrie, by contrast, introduced the idea of lightness and lack of gravity, uncorking the energy of children everywhere. His children can fly, and while they may be characterized by a form of flightiness and the inability to care and commit, they have finally been liberated from the pedestal on which they had been required to sit obediently still.
J. M. Barrie’s The Boy Castaways of Black Lake Island
The Boy Castaways of Black Lake Island offers us the first real glimpse of Peter Pan. With its lost boys and savage pirate captain, its protective dog watching over sleeping children, and its mysterious boy described as “the sly one, the chief figure, who draws farther and farther into the wood as we advance upon him,” it is the Ur–Peter Pan, the book that gave birth to the boy who would not grow up. Barrie writes in the preface to Peter Pan that the “little people” of his play all seem to emerge from the adventures recorded in a volume that he declared to be the “best and the rarest” of his works.
The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in New Haven, Connecticut, now has the sole remaining copy of The Boy Castaways of Black Lake Island. Thanks to the generous cooperation of the curators and staff, all of the photographs and captions are presented here for the first time in print. These pages reveal how Peter Pan was born from the spirit of play, pantomime, and performance and show James Barrie, his dog Porthos, and three of the Llewelyn Davies boys in starring roles. In looking at illustrations that are in many ways a true curiosity, we discover how the adventures of Peter Pan and the Darling children in Neverland were a joint production, a creative collaboration joining an adult’s desire to remain forever young with the child’s wish to explore and experience perils in ways that only grown-ups can.
In the summer of 1901, Arthur and Sylvia Llewelyn Davies rented a cottage in Tilford, just minutes away from Black Lake Cottage, where James Barrie and his wife, Mary, were spending the summer. Barrie had spent most of June and July working on his play Quality Street, and he sent it off to Charles Frohman in New York just when the Davieses were settling into their cottage. Enacting a ship
wreck on the “high seas” of Black Lake Island and recreating the desert island adventures described in R. M. Ballantyne’s Coral Island with the Llewelyn Davies boys proved a therapeutic alternative for Barrie to writing. At the time, Barrie was also occasionally making mental notes for his novel The Little White Bird, containing the first mention of Peter Pan, and for The Admirable Crichton, a play about the democratizing effects of a shipwreck. But he was also immersed in the role of Captain Swarthy, a dark and sinister pirate equal to Captain Hook. George, Jack, and Peter Davies were the principal players, for Michael was still a baby and Nico had not yet been born.
For much of August, Barrie and the boys sailed on the Anna Pink, sharpened spears, built a hut, explored primeval forests, and killed a tiger. Eventually they sailed home for England. At the end of the summer, Barrie produced a book documenting the adventures, attributing its authorship to Peter Llewelyn Davies. He had two copies printed, one for himself and one that he gave to the boys’ father, who promptly lost it on a train. Peter, as noted earlier, saw the loss of the book as his father’s “way of commenting on the whole fantastic affair” and showing his disdain for the man who had become a powerful competitor for the affections of his wife and children. Barrie gave the sole remaining copy to Jack. When Arthur Llewelyn Davies was bedridden after the surgery in which his jaw was removed, he asked for the book, and it was dispatched to him at once.
The Beinecke Library at Yale University now owns this sole surviving copy of the volume. On the flyleaf, Barrie wrote a dedication: “S Ll D & A Ll D from JMB.” Years later he added: “There was one other copy of this book only and it was lost in a railway train in 1901. JMB 1933.”
The full title of the volume reads: The Boy Castaways of Black Lake Island, being a record of the terrible adventures of the brothers Davies in the Summer of 1901, faithfully set forth by Peter Llewelyn Davies. The place of publication is given as London, and “J. M. Barrie in the Gloucester Road” is listed as the publisher. In actuality, Constable in Edinburgh printed the volume. The Boy Castaways appears in its entirety in the pages that follow, with captioned images after a dedication, a preface, and very brief, telegram-style chapters.
Dedication
TO OUR MOTHER
In cordial recognition
of her efforts
to elevate us
above the brutes
PREFACE
I have been requested by my brothers to write a few words of introduction to this little volume, and I comply with pleasure, though well aware that others may be better acquitted for the task.
The strange happenings here set forth with a currente calamo are expansions of a note-book kept by me while we were on the island, but I have thought fit, in exercise of my prerogative as general editor, to omit certain observations with regard to flora, fauna, etc., which, however valuable to myself and to others of scientific bent, would probably have but a limited interest to the lay mind. I have also in this edition excluded a chapter on strata as caviare to the general.
The date on which we were wrecked was this year on August 1, 1901, and I have still therefore a vivid recollection of that strange and terrible summer, when we suffered experiences such as have probably never before been experienced by three brothers. At this time the eldest, George, was eight and a month. Jack was approaching his seventh lustrum, and I was a good bit past four. Perhaps a few words about my companions on the island will not be deemed out of place.
George was a fine, fearless youth, and had now been a term at Wilkinson’s. He was modest withal. His chief fault was wanting to do all the shooting, and carrying the arrows inside his shirt with that selfish object. Jack is also brave as a lion, but he also has many faults, and he has a weakness (perhaps pardonable) for a pretty face (bless them!). Of Peter I prefer to say nothing, hoping that the tale, as it is unwound, will show that he was a boy of deeds rather than of words, which was another of Jack’s blemishes. In conclusion, I should say that the work was in the first instance compiled as a record simply, at which we could whet our memories, and that it is now published for Michael’s benefit. If it teaches him by example lessons in fortitude and manly endurance, we shall consider that we were not wrecked in vain.
PETER LLEWELYN DAVIES
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
Early Days—Our Amusing Mother—Her Indiscretions.
CHAPTER II
Schools and Schoolmasters—Mary’s Bullying Ways—George teaches Wilkinson a Stern Lesson—We run away to Sea.
CHAPTER III
A Fearful Hurricane—Wreck of the Anna Pink—The Longboat—We go crazy from Want of Food—Proposal to eat Peter—Land ahoy!
CHAPTER IV
First Night on Black Lake Island—A Horrible Discovery—The Bread-fruit Tree—Monkeys and Cocoanuts—Turning a Turtle.
CHAPTER V
Gallant Behaviour of Jack—We make Bows and Arrows—We set about the Building of a Hut.
CHAPTER VI
Tree-cutting—Madame Bruin and her Cubs—George to the Rescue—Pig-sticking and its Dangers.
CHAPTER VII
We finish the Hut—George and Jack set off on a Voyage of Exploration round the Island—Primeval Forests—Night in the Woods—Startling Discovery that the Island is the Haunt of Captain Swarthy and his Pirate Crew.
CHAPTER VIII
Dead Men’s Point—Corpsy Glen—The Valley of Rolling Stones.
CHAPTER IX
Exploration continued—We find Captain Swarthy’s Dog—Suspended Animation—We are attacked by Wolves—Jack saves George’s Life.
CHAPTER X
The Hut meanwhile—The Pirates set upon Peter—“Shut up”—Peter is sentenced to walk the Plank—Timely Arrival of George and Jack.
CHAPTER XI
We board the Pirate Sloop at Dawn—A Rakish Craft—George Hew-them-down and Jack of the Red Hatchet—A Holocaust of Pirates—Rescue of Peter.
CHAPTER XII
Trial of Captain Swarthy—He begs for mercy—We string him up.
CHAPTER XIII
The Rainy Season—Malarial Fever—A ship in the Offing—Disappointment nobly borne.
CHAPTER XIV
We build a boat—Narrow Escape from a Tiger—Skinning the Tiger.
CHAPTER XV
The Pleasures of Tobacco—Peter’s Dream of Home—Last Night on the Island—We set sail for England, Home, and Wilkinson’s.
CHAPTER XVI
Concluding Remarks—Advice to Parents about the bringing up of their Children.
We set out to be wrecked. (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)
Michael wished us luck by waving his foot. (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)
We were the sole survivors of the ill-fated brig Anna Pink. (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)
It was a coral island glistening in the sun. (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)
We made ourselves a rude shelter for the night. (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)
The first night on the island fell very dark and mysterious. (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)
It was George waiting for the dawn with one hand upon his dagger. (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)
George at once recognised it to be the Mango (Mangifera Indica) by its lancet-shaped leaves and the cucumber-shaped fruit. (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)
It was the pirate Swarthy’s dog patrolling the island. (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)
We prepared for the pirates by making spears and other trusty weapons. (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)
While Jack was removing the crocodiles from the stream, George shot a few parrots (Psittacidae) for our mid-day meal. (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)
We begin the building of the hut. (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)
After three weeks of incessant toil, the hut approached completion. (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)
A la
st pipe before turning in. (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)
We set off in our crazy craft for an exploration of the island. (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)
“It is undoubtedly,” said George, “the cocos nucifera, for observe the slender columns supporting the crown of leaves which fall with a grace that no art can imitate.” (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)
We pulled each other up the Valley of Rolling Stones. (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)
Jack hung suspended between heaven and earth. (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)
Deeper and deeper into those primeval forests. (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)
The dog of a pirate had seen us. (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)
“Surrender, or die!” (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)
We trained the dog to watch over us while we slept. (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)
“Truly,” said George, “though the perils of these happenings are great, yet would I rejoice to endure still greater privations to be thus rewarded by such wondrous studies of nature.” (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)