by J. M. Barrie
Hoping to capitalize further on Rackham’s success, the Leicester Galleries arranged a meeting between the artist and J. M. Barrie. The success of Peter Pan onstage augured well for a productive collaboration. Rackham signed a contract for the gift book Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906) at a time when Peter and Wendy (the novel based on the play) had not yet been conceived as a project. The fifty full-page color illustrations took Rackham nearly a year to complete, and in that time he visited Kensington Gardens frequently, where he could be seen observing and sketching. Barrie spoke concisely but accurately about his reaction to the Leicester exhibition of Rackham’s work on the Peter Pan story: “It entranced me.” Critics agreed for the most part, and the Pall Mall Gazette declared, “Rackham seems to have dropped out of some cloud in Mr. Barrie’s fairyland, sent by a special providence to make pictures in tune with his whimsical genius” (Hudson 66). An enlarged version was published in 1912 and included a new color frontispiece with seven additional full-page black-and-white illustrations. The Peter Pan Portfolio appeared in that year as well.
Beyond its surface charm, Rackham’s Peter Pan work displays a mastery of the revolutionary three-color process, color printing that was especially suited to Rackham’s soft tones, and which he labored over in an attempt to achieve the right blend of colors and shades. The illustrations also reveal Rackham doing what he did best, taking a real setting—the Kensington Gardens—and infusing it with lively elements of the unreal, combining the local with the fanciful and whimsical.
Rackham’s triumphs removed his financial concerns, allowing him and his wife to move into a large high-gabled red-and-brown home complete with his own studio. Success did not diminish Rackham’s drive. After completing Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens he undertook perhaps the most daunting challenge of his career: illustrating a new edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. John Tenniel, whose masterful drawings had appeared in the first edition of the book in 1865, was still alive at the time. His images were so closely identified with Lewis Carroll’s book that many critics frowned on the notion of any competing images. Rackham’s sentimental attachment to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland—he had read the work with his father as a child—led him to overcome any artistic inhibitions, and he completed the first half of the project. His was the most successful of the seven editions of Carroll’s work to appear after the expiration of copyright in 1907, but the Times compared Rackham’s work unfavorably with Tenniel’s, dismissing the new illustrations as “forced and derivative.” Discouraged, Rackham abandoned the project and decided against illustrating Through the Looking-Glass.
No critics grumbled over Rackham’s illustrations for A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1908). The artist’s ability to blend dream and reality with mischievous suggestiveness made him an ideal illustrator for Shakespeare’s work. His unique talent shone through in illustrations like “Ere the leviathan can swim a league,” for which Rackham took a passing figure of speech and conceived of a hideous sea monster cresting the waves. William De Morgan, one of the founders of the Arts and Crafts movement, called this book “the most splendid illustrated work of the century, so far.” Fairies were at the height of their popularity in 1909, and Rackham used his fame to speak out in favor of education focused on stimulating children’s imaginations through stories and illustrations. He corresponded with children throughout his career, and the birth of his daughter, Barbara, in 1908, added to the pleasure he derived from creating books for the young.
Rackham’s appeal crossed generational lines as well as cultural boundaries, and his versatility as an artist becomes evident in his illustrations for Wagner’s The Rhinegold and The Valkyrie (1910) and Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods (1911). The landscapes he produced to illustrate Norse myths had a powerful impact on the young C. S. Lewis, who described the cold splendor and serenity of Rackham’s landscapes in Siegfried: “Pure Northernness engulfed me: a vision of huge, clear spaces hanging above the Atlantic in the endless twilight of a Northern summer, remoteness, severity.” Rackham’s images translated sound into vision: “His pictures, which seemed to me then to be the very music made visible, plunged me a few fathoms deeper into my delight” (Hamilton 10).
With characteristic nimbleness, Rackham shifted easily from the raw, sublime beauty of Northern landscapes to images for Aesop’s Fables (1912) and Mother Goose (1913). He included caricatures of himself in the Aesop volume and used his own home in Chalcot Gardens as the model for the House that Jack Built in Mother Goose.
Rackham enlisted in the war effort in 1914, working with the Hampstead Volunteers and digging trenches in Essex. He continued to work on his annual gift books, publishing, in the war years, A Christmas Carol (1915), Grimms’ Little Brother and Little Sister (1917), and English Fairy Tales Retold (1918). After the war, additional fairy-tale volumes appeared, most notably Cinderella (1919) and Sleeping Beauty (1920), both of which afforded him the opportunity of developing his talent for silhouettes.
The year 1920 brought unprecedented prosperity to Rackham, with his income exceeding £7,000 (he was now closing in on J. M. Barrie’s earnings), a sum amplified by his now extensive list of publications and his new American exhibitions. He purchased a country home at Houghton and a new London studio. The country home had its inconveniences—no running water, no electric lights, rats—but Rackham had already developed a distaste for modern technology, declaring that the fall of man had begun with the invention of the wheel and disapproving wholeheartedly of photography and cinema. “I would rather,” he told one friend, “have a page of handwriting I couldn’t read than a typewritten manuscript” (Hamilton 83).
Rackham’s output remained high through the 1920s, and he illustrated a number of American classics: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s A Wonder Book (1922), Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1928), and Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination (1935). Fresh from a trip to the United States in 1927, where he received a warm reception and flattering attention from American publishers, he decided to try his hand at commercial art, producing advertisements for Colgate and various other companies. In 1927 Queen Mary purchased The Holy Grail, one of his illustrations for Mallory’s The Romance of King Arthur (1917). The lean war years had given way to a postwar resurgence that was to mark the last real peak in Rackham’s career.
Still, the market for fine books began to decline, and Rackham counted himself fortunate to receive a commission for an edition of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales. With his daughter, he traveled to Denmark, visiting farms and museums and absorbing local color. Hugh Walpole chose Rackham’s Andersen volume as the best picture book of the year, noting that Rackham had “acquired a new tenderness and grace. His fantasy is stronger than ever” (Hudson 134). The Arthur Rackham Fairy Book was published in 1933, and in it, as in the illustrations for Andersen’s fairy tales, the artist used a generally brighter palette.
In the summer of 1936 American publisher George Macy commissioned Rackham to illustrate James Stephen’s novel The Crock of Gold, a strange blend of philosophy, folklore, and melodrama that contains encounters with Pan and the fairy world. In conversation, Macy casually suggested The Wind in the Willows as a possible next project. “Immediately a wave of emotion crossed his face,” Macy recalls, “he gulped, started to say something, turned his back on me and went to the door for a few minutes” (Hudson 144). Rackham had long hoped to illustrate Grahame’s work, a childhood favorite of his, and he set aside The Crock of Gold in order to spend the next two years on Kenneth Grahame’s masterpiece.
Arthur Rackham rose to his drawing board for what would be the last time and created illustrations of heartbreaking beauty. Bedridden with cancer in 1938, he struggled to complete the illustrations and finished the last one shortly before his death, on September 6, 1939, just days after the outbreak of World War II. This last effort, like so much of his previous work, proved a beautiful localization of his personal response to a work of great imaginative power. Of all hi
s books it best characterizes the potency of his art as described by the Dublin Independent: “Some of Mr. Rackham’s pictures are pure poems—they set you dreaming” (Hamilton 128).
1. I am grateful to Adam Horn, a Harvard student in my freshman seminar on J. M. Barrie, who contributed to the essays on Rackham and assembled information about the artist and his career. As collaborator and coauthor, he helped capture the spirit of Rackham and his art.
An Introduction to Arthur Rackham’s Illustrations for Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens
GENESIS OF PETER PAN IN KENSINGTON GARDENS
It is not like Peter Pan to leave a trail. “He so dislikes being tracked,” J. M. Barrie tells us, in his preface to Peter Pan, “as if there were something odd about him, that when he dies he means to get up and blow away the particles that will be his ashes” (Hollindale 2008, 84). And certainly his childlike elusiveness has always been one of his foremost charms. This is the boy who plays hide-and-seek with the stars, who slips through the arms of smitten mermaids, who can meet you and also forget you exist in a matter of moments. It is no surprise, then, that most readers would never make the effort to identify his origins. Could the boy so famous for flying really have left any footprints at all? Yes and no. Pan’s literary debut in The Little White Bird of 1902 was not nearly as dramatic as his first appearance onstage in 1904. The Little White Bird also had nothing close to the impact of Peter and Wendy, the 1911 novelization of the play, and as a text it is in some ways as shifty as the character it introduces. Still, those who would follow Peter have one source text to which they must turn—for the path to Neverland runs directly through Kensington Gardens.
Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906), the story illustrated by the renowned artist Arthur Rackham, first appeared as a six-chapter section of Barrie’s The Little White Bird (1902). That work recounted the relationship of a bachelor (who is also the narrator) with a young boy named David, tracing the development of a friendship with obvious parallels to Barrie’s own with George Llewelyn Davies, age five when the two first met in 1898 in London’s Kensington Gar dens. Intended for an adult readership, The Little White Bird met with critical acclaim, despite its unconventional style and quirky content. The book critic at the Times called it “one of the best things that Mr. Barrie has written.” And he added: “If a book exists which contains more knowledge and more love of children, we do not know it” (Birkin 95). The book was also dedicated to “their boys (my boys),” a phrase that did not raise the eyebrows of the critic at the Times. It was in Kensington Gardens that Barrie had entertained the young George, the oldest of the five Llewelyn Davies boys, with stories of magic and mischief that had no morals, no lessons, and no messages whatsoever—just sheer fun, despite Barrie’s later declaration that the stories contained “moral reflections.”
As noted earlier in this volume, the genesis of Peter Pan recalls the origins of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, works that were also produced in collaboration with a child, with a certain creative give-and-take as the adult cued the child and vice versa. A protagonist soon emerged, gradually inching his way to the center of the narrative. Barrie, after telling George that all children start out as birds, further assured him that his baby brother, Peter, was still able to fly, in part because his mother, Sylvia, had not weighed him at birth. Peter was able to fly to Kensington Gardens and romp with the fairies at night. But when George became skeptical of Peter’s ability to fly—the infant Peter seemed to spend his nights tucked safely in bed—Barrie began to develop Peter as an independent character, a child who would soon come to dominate their stories and eventually make his way into The Little White Bird. Thus Peter Pan was born.
What started as one chapter soon became six, and a figure who began as a minor character quickly became central. Pan spread his dominion across the middle of the novel, acting as a force almost beyond the author’s control. He had already taken over the stories Barrie told in Kensington Gardens. As Roger Lancelyn Green notes, in his Fifty Years of Peter Pan:
Kensington Gardens were well peopled with fairies by the year 1901, when another character crept into being there. He came so quietly that in after years none of the children could remember how he began: he was just there, and he was so well known that of course you had always known he was there, and you didn’t even think of asking why his name was Peter Pan, because of course that was his name and that was who he was. (17)
Roughly a year after the publication of The Little White Bird, Barrie set to work on a new play, one that sprang to life on the London stage, meeting with a level of success and admiration that even the respected author himself had never before received. The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up had outgrown the scenes of storytelling in Kensington Gardens and had also outgrown the pages of The Little White Bird to become, as Lewis Carroll put it about Alice, “large as life, and twice as natural.”
The public fell in love with Peter Pan. Barrie’s publishers asked him to create a narrative version of the play, and the author initially declined, apparently apprehensive about giving Peter definitive textual treatment just yet. Instead he offered to reissue the Peter Pan chapters of The Little White Bird, personally requesting the renowned artist Arthur Rackham as illustrator for the work. The book would be published in a sumptuous, eye-catching gift edition. London publishing house Hodder & Stoughton saw immediately the appeal of a holiday Peter Pan gift book—especially considering Charles Frohman’s plans to revive Peter Pan annually around Christmastime. And so the idea of the chapters from The Little White Bird as a stand-alone novel was born.
THE BETWIXT-AND-BETWEEN APPEARS IN KENSINGTON GARDENS
Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens was a difficult, eccentric little book with beautiful illustrations, the most sought-after gift book of Christmas 1906. It opens with a map of Kensington Gardens and is, by contrast to the exotic island setting of the play Peter Pan, intimately tied to the gardens as a real setting grounding the stories. As Roger Lancelyn Green explains, “Kensington Gardens must always remain a special province of fairyland round which still lingers a magic of its own—or rather of Barrie’s own. There certainly he not only created a new mythology, but one more definite and inevitable ‘a local habitation and a name’ than Olympus itself” (Green 16).
The gardens are described as a “tremendous big place” and serve as the site for miniaturized antics, from Mabel Grey’s “incredible adventures, one of the least of which was that she kicked off both her boots,” to Malcolm the Bold’s near-drowning in St. Govor’s Well. The narrative is framed as a walk through the gardens. The narrator-guide offers only the highlights of the gardens’ storied history, for if he were “to point out all the notable places as we pass up the Broad Walk, it would be time to turn back before we reach them.”
Barrie’s entry to Kensington Gardens. (Courtesy of Great Ormond Street Hospital Children’s Charity)
The Bird’s Island is one of the central locations in Kensington Gardens. On it, “all the birds are born that become baby boys and girls,” and the narrator notes that Peter Pan is the only human who can land on the island, “and he is only half human.” Although Peter’s flying and crowing in Peter and Wendy suggest his kinship with birds—and in fact his being borne away by the Never bird’s nest presents a strong visual metaphor to that effect—Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens explicitly draws that connection, telling us that Peter “escaped from being a human” by flying out his window when he was just seven days old, returning to the gardens completely unaware that he is anything other than a bird, perplexed that his attempts to draw in water through his nose and to perch on tree branches are not successful. Mystified and distraught, the little boy is left alone in the Gardens:
Poor little Peter Pan, he sat down and cried, and even then he did not know that, for a bird, he was sitting on his wrong part. It is a blessing that he did not know, for otherwise he would have lost faith in his power to fly, and the moment you doubt
whether you can fly, you cease for ever to be able to do it. The reason birds can fly and we can’t is simply that they have perfect faith, for to have faith is to have wings.
Flying and faith are linked here with Barrie’s trademark tender sentimentality.
THE PIPER AT THE GATES OF KENSINGTON GARDENS
Peter flies to Bird’s Island, which no one can reach except by flying, in order to put his case before old Solomon Caw, a crow who serves as a wizened chieftain among the birds of the island. Solomon tactfully informs the unsuspecting Peter that he is not in fact a bird, stripping Peter of his faith and therefore of his ability to fly. Trapped on the island, Peter learns that he may never again return to Kensington Gardens. In a phrase that captures the tragedy of Peter Pan perhaps more forcefully than anything in Peter and Wendy itself, Solomon declares: “Poor little half-and half!” before dubbing him “Betwixt-and-Between.” This is the great tragedy of Peter Pan. He never really has a home, never really has a mother, and belongs neither to the world of birds nor to the world of humans. The gift of eternal youth turns him into a homeless wanderer.
Peter lives among the birds, learning their ways—including how to have a “glad heart”—from Solomon. In his time on the island he feels compelled to “sing all day long, just as the birds sing for joy, but, being partly human, he needed an instrument, so he made a pipe of reeds.” Barrie’s description of Pan’s pipe playing is one of the most moving passages in the book:
He used to sit by the shore of the island of an evening, practicing the sough of the wind and the ripple of the water, and catching handfuls of the shine of the moon, and he put them all in his pipe and played them so beautifully that even the birds were deceived, and they would say to each other, “Was that a fish leaping in the water or was it Peter playing leaping fish on his pipe?” And sometimes he played the birth of birds, and then the mothers would turn round in their nests to see whether they had laid an egg.