by J. M. Barrie
Pan’s pipe playing links him with the mythical Pan, but this passage in particular casts his pipe playing as a form of creativity, a form of artistry so real that it pulsates with procreative energy. The passage anticipates Peter’s declaration to Hook in their final battle: “I’m youth, I’m joy . . . I’m a little bird that has broken out of the egg.” Peter is distinctly linked to the ecstasies of procreation and creativity, yet he is also destined never to mature and become an adult.
Although he lingers happily with the birds, Peter longs to return to the gardens, “to play as other children play, and of course there is no such lovely place to play in as the Gardens.” He has his chance at freedom when Solomon gives him a banknote from Shelley, turned by the poet into a paper boat and sent drifting up the Serpentine to Bird’s Island. Peter uses the note to bribe the thrushes, who construct a nest to carry him across the Serpentine and back to the gardens. Thus finally Peter returns to the gardens, borne across with “exultation in his little breast that drove out fear.” When he arrives, it is past Lock-out Time, and mortals are gone, but the fairies are there and they have come out to play.
“DO YOU BELIEVE IN FAIRIES?”
Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens introduces us to the romance of the fairy world in ways that no other work by Barrie does. The fairies’ chief traits—bouncing energy, radiant beauty, and moral carelessness—tell us exactly why the creatures were so appealing to a man who devoted his afternoon walks in the park to small boys. Fairies are wee folk—miniaturized humanlike figures—who behave like children. A volatile, unpredictable lot, they can turn, in a heartbeat, from friend to foe, and vice versa. When Peter Pan arrives in their domain, they plan to “slay” him until the fairy women discover that he is a mere child, a baby using his nightgown as a sail. As nocturnal creatures, the fairies hold late-night balls to which humans are not welcome. Like Tinker Bell, they are vain and mischievous and so small that they have room “for one feeling only at a time.” In the daytime they generally remain underground, in hiding, but “if you look, and they fear there is no time to hide, they stand quite still pretending to be flowers.”
Both Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens and Peter and Wendy recount the origins of fairies. As Peter himself explains: “When the first baby laughed for the first time, its laugh broke into a thousand pieces, and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies.” Favoring youth, they always appoint the youngest among them as schoolmistress so that nothing will ever be taught: “they all go out for a walk and never come back.” The head of the family is also always the youngest. The behavioral kinship with babies becomes evident in the narrator’s explanation for the tantrums of “your baby sister”: “Her fits of passion, which are awful to behold, and are usually called teething, are no such thing; they are her natural exasperation, because we don’t understand her, though she is talking an intelligible language. She is talking fairy.”
Barrie remains faithful to traditional British depictions of fairies as “a middle order between men and angels” or as “spiritual animals” (Briggs 11). But his fairies also differ from the folkloric norm in their desire for autonomy and their general lack of concern for human affairs. Still, they adhere to the hierarchies of the human world and mimic in many ways the culture and customs of those above ground. Maimie, the girl who stays past Lock-out Time in Kensington Gardens, discovers in the fairy world both dazzling beauty (the canopy made by the glowworms for the fairy ring) and aggressive cruelty (“Slay her!” the fairies shout when they discover her in their midst).
YOU CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN
“Of course, he had no mother—at least, what use was she to him?” The narrator of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens reveals himself to be a prevaricator, at times as flighty and unreliable as the fairies. Peter Pan has a mother, and the sad fact of the matter is that Peter is no longer of use to her. As a newcomer to Kensington Gardens, he traded his music with the fairies for two “little” wishes. Holding one wish in reserve, he asks for the power to fly. Enraptured by his newfound abilities, he goes back home to seek out his mother and finds her fast asleep. From the window he admires her and is of “two minds” about whether to stay or go back. Sensing his presence, his mother awakens and whis pers his name “as if it were the most lovely word in the language.” At the foot of her bed, Peter plays a lullaby on his pipes, having “made it up to himself out of the way she said ‘Peter.’ ” He leaves with the plan to return after saying his good-byes to Solomon. But months go by before he makes use of his second wish, and he returns to find the window “closed and barred,” with his mother “sleeping peacefully with her arm around another little boy.” The narrator explains: “There is no second chance, not for most of us. When we reach the window it is Lock-out Time. The iron bars are up for life.”
For Peter, as for Barrie and the rest of us, leaving home means entering a phase in which it is impossible to return to the untroubled dyad of mother and child. This time, the iron bars are not around Kensington Gardens but around home, an idyllic haven where the child remains safe, enclosed in a domestic space. But the bars at the window suggest that home can also be a prison, a place of limited mobility and magic, too confined and narrow to contain the expansive desires of children as they grow up. The tragedy of growing up is tempered by the rainbow promise of what Kenneth Grahame called the Wide World and the Wild Wood, places that, unlike Kensington Gardens, have no limits and no Lock-out Time.
MAIMIE: THE GIRL BEFORE WENDY
Maimie Mannering is the girl who would not leave at Lock-out Time. Hiding from her nurse, who is unaware that she has not left Kensington Gardens with her brother, the four-year-old Maimie, desperate for the chance to witness a fairy ball, takes advantage of confusion about Lock-out Time and conceals herself in St. Govor’s Well. The trees warn her about fairies: “They will mischief you—stab you to death, or compel you to nurse their children, or turn you into something tedious, like an evergreen oak.” Following the ribbons stretched out about the gardens, the paths of the fairies, Maimie encounters Brownie, who is on her way to Queen Mab’s ball, where the Duke of Christmas Daisies is hoping to find a wife. Brownie wins the duke’s heart and asks the fairies to spare the life of Maimie, who is in mortal danger for eavesdropping on the fairies.
Once the fairies become aware of Maimie’s help in engineering the union of Brownie and the duke, they resolve to thank her, building a beautiful house, “exactly the size of Maimie,” around her to keep her warm. When Maimie awakens, she hits her head on the roof, opening it “like the lid of a box” in a scene that recalls Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. When she steps outside to admire the beautiful little house, it shrinks and disappears. But she is not alone. “Don’t cry, pretty human, don’t cry,” a voice calls out. Peter Pan, a “beautiful little naked boy,” stands before her, looking at her “wistfully.”
It is in Kensington Gardens that Peter is first offered a kiss and given a thimble, in the belief that thimbles are kisses. “Poor little boy! he quite believed her, and to this day he wears it on his finger, though there can be scarcely any one who needs thimbles so little.” And it is also in Kensington Gardens that Maimie and Peter exchange thimbles, or real kisses, and that Peter proposes to Maimie. A “delightful” idea comes into his head and he asks Maimie: “Will you marry me?”
Maimie very nearly goes away with Peter, balking only when he suggests that her mother might not always leave the window open for her. “The door will always, always be open, and mother will always be waiting at it for me,” she insists. When the gates to the gardens open in the morning, Maimie promises to return, but fearing that she might linger too long with “her dear Betwixt-and-Between,” she dutifully obeys her ayah. Peter’s brush with love—the exchange of kisses and the proposal—may seem startling to readers of Peter and Wendy. Peter is “touched” by Maimie in ways that he is never really moved by Wendy. But in both encounters, Peter remains “the tragic boy,” flirting with romance yet also destined
to remain forever barred from human pleasures and ecstasies: “For long he hoped that some night she would come back to him; often he thought he saw her waiting for him by the shore of the Serpentine as his bark drew to land, but Maimie never went back.”
Maimie returns at Easter with her mother to bring Peter a gift, the made-up goat that she uses to frighten her brother at night. Standing within a fairy ring, mother and daughter devise an incantation for the fairies, and they turn the goat into a real creature. Peter Pan is now more closely aligned with the god Pan than ever, but he remains more emphatically than ever an eternal youth, joyous and tragic at once.
PETER PAN: GUARDIAN OF THE DEAD
Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens closes with another variation on the theme of Lock-out Time, of unavoidable and abrupt endings. We learn that Peter is unable to rescue some of the children who wander into the gardens at night—precursors of the lost boys, we might say. He buries the children with his paddle-spade, erecting tombstones marked with their initials. The narrator describes two little “tombstones” erected for a boy and a girl, both about a year old, who fell “unnoticed” from their perambulators. Those stones do in fact exist in Kensington Gardens, but as parish boundary markers. The narrator tells us: “David sometimes places white flowers on these two innocent graves,” and adds: “But how strange for parents, when they hurry into the Gardens at the opening of the gates looking for their lost one, to find the sweetest little tombstone instead. I do hope that Peter is not too ready with his spade. It is all rather sad.”
The somber undercurrent in Peter and Wendy surfaces more explicitly in Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. Peter’s connection with river crossings, shadows, tombstones, and burials creates a narrative with a tragic turn. The joyful boy in the gardens may ride his goat and frolic with the fairies, but at Lock-out Time he is also obliged to serve as gravedigger, burying the children who perish of “cold and dark” in Kensington Gardens. The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up could just as aptly be described as the Boy Who Could Not Grow Up.
Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens has not aged particularly well, and modern readers find it something of a challenge to warm up to its eccentric style and fanciful content. The lack of clarity about the narrator’s relationship to David leaves many readers mystified, disoriented, and uncomfortable. Arthur Rackham kept the book from falling into oblivion, creating a set of images that switches Barrie’s prose on to maximum wattage.
This edition reproduces Rackham’s illustrations rather than Barrie’s text, and Barrie himself might not have objected. After all, he considered The Boy Castaways of Black Lake Island, a book designed for the Llewellyn Davies family, to be “so much the best and rarest of this author’s works,” and it consisted of nothing but captioned photographs (Hollindale 2008, 75). Readers will no doubt find Rackham’s work as important to an understanding of Peter Pan as did Rackham’s nephew Walter Starkie, who wrote:
Peter Pan became the consecration of my childhood, for I had watched my Uncle’s sensitive and agile paint-brushes people those trees with dwarfs and gnomes. . . . Although we children went again and again to the theatre to see the play, it was through the Rackham illustrations to Kensington Gardens and the Serpentine that Peter Pan still lived in our memories (Hudson 68).
May Peter Pan live on in our memories, not vaguely as some stock hero or cartoon character but as a fully realized, tragic, wonderful little boy who flew away from home when he was seven days old and never found his way back.
Arthur Rackham’s Illustrations for
Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens
Figure 1: Peter Pan’s Map of Kensington Gardens
Real bodies of water (the Round Pond and the Serpentine River) and paths (The Broad Walk) are marked out for the reader along with fanciful names such as Cecco Hewlett’s Tree and the Fairies’ Winter Palace. This is, after all, Peter Pan’s map.
Figure 2: “The Kensington Gardens are in London, where the King lives.”
Sprites and fairies lurk in the roots of trees and peer out from hiding places as a formally attired figure strolls through the Gardens. Even trees and vines are animated by the visitor, who seems oblivious to the fairy world hidden below, around, and above him (a world with its own kings and queens). The identity of the figure is not clear: he could be the King, but he might also be Pilkington, the schoolmaster mentioned in The Little White Bird who leads his boys through the Gardens, “glamoured to [his] crafty hook.” He sends the fairies into hiding by day.
Figure 3: “The lady with the balloons, who sits just outside.”
The former street vendor at the gate to Kensington Gardens is lifted into the air by her balloons. “David was very sorry for the old one, but as she did let go, he wished he had been there to see.” Nothing is ever taken seriously in Kensington Gardens, which remains a safe space for whimsy precisely because the laws of gravity are defied. There is a tragicomic element to David’s reaction, for it reminds us of the ease with which children can let go of benevolent adults in their lives.
Figure 4: “In the Broad Walk you meet all the people who are worth knowing.”
The people “worth knowing,” as Barrie put it tongue in cheek, are all well-dressed children, young and old. They are shown walking dogs, carrying balloons, skipping rope, climbing fences and taking sailboats to the Long Pond. Rackham gives us a tame Edwardian version of Pieter Brueghel’s celebrated painting Children’s Games (1560).
Figure 5: “The Hump, which is the part of the Broad Walk where all the big races are run.”
The Hump is the place in Kensington Gardens where “you stop when you have run about half-way down it, and then you are lost.” Here we have the first hint at the recurrent theme of lost children in Barrie’s stories.
Figure 6: “There is almost nothing that has such a keen sense of fun as a fallen leaf.”
Falling leaves and fairies perform a graceful minuet in an image that evokes the pleasures of flying, floating, and being wafted through the air. The clothing of the fairies closely resembles the leaves in the air, reminding us of how Peter is dressed in skeleton leaves when we first encounter him.
Figure 7: “The Serpentine begins near here. It is a lovely lake, and there is a drowned forest at the bottom of it. If you peer over the edge you can see the trees all growing upside down, and they say that at night there are also drowned stars in it.”
Barrie told Rackham that he liked this illustration best of all. Stars illuminate the skies and are reflected in the lake’s surface, while fairies dance in the foreground, illuminated by the reflected glory of the stars. Signs of human life appear in the bridge, the fence, and the points of artificial light.
Figure 8: “The fairies of the Serpentine.”
The “drowned” stars of the Serpentine form a backdrop for fairy revelry. Not reflected in the waters, the fairies clearly occupy imaginative space and cannot be mirrored or immersed in the waters of time. Like Peter Pan, they are immortals with the power of flight. Butterflies and dragonflies reveal themselves as kindred spirits.
Figure 9: “The island on which all the birds are born that become baby boys and girls.”
It is daytime in Kensington Gardens, and the park seems disenchanted and deprived of fairies. Children gather in small groups at the shoreline, mingling with birds attracted to them by the promise of food. Winged creatures fly above Bird’s Island, which, cordoned off and mysterious, appears as a world unto itself. This scene could also be the final tableau of Hans Christian Andersen’s “Ugly Duckling,” which Rackham illustrated in 1932.
Figure 10: “Old Mr. Salford was a crab-apple of an old gentleman who wandered all day in the Gardens.”
Mr. Salford has his name from his birthplace, Salford, a town he is eager to discuss with anyone he happens to meet in Kensington Gardens. The Albert Memorial is shown in the background, a monument to the Prince Consort (who died of typhoid in 1861) that includes a statue of Albert, a frieze of Parnassus (with 169 painters, composers, poets, architects, an
d sculptors depicted), and allegorical sculptures of four continents and four industrial activities. Goblins, birds, and fairies play around Mr. Salford’s head, occupying a space between the monument to the Prince Consort and the dignified old gentleman.
Figure 11: “Away he flew, right over the houses to the Gardens.”
Barrie was captivated by Rackham’s image of Peter Pan flying away from home when he is seven days old. The serene infant floats across the space between the clouds above and the smokestacks below. Kensington Gardens was especially appealing as a destination, for it formed a utopian contrast to the smoky grime of London
Figure 12: “The fairies have their tiffs with the birds.”
The fairies “usually give a civil answer to a civil question,” but they flee from Peter, who labors under the delusion that he is a boy rather than a bird. Here, two fairies appear in proud profile near four birds perched on a branch. Peter belongs, yet also still does not quite belong, to the world of birds and fairies.
Figure 13: “When he heard Peter’s voice he popped in alarm behind a tulip.”