by J. M. Barrie
Anne McCaffrey. Introduction. Peter Pan. New York: Modern Library, 2004. Pp. xiii–xv.
It was more than seventy years ago that my mother read Peter Pan aloud to my two brothers and me. I still remember two things from that first reading: the directions to the Neverland, which never allowed me to get there (“Second to the right, and then straight on till morning” was a curious way to give directions, I thought at the time), and the magical possibility of reviving a fairy (Live, Tinker Bell!). . . . the directions to the Neverland have stayed with me all my life. . . even before I became a practicing science fiction writer, I had doubts about the usefulness of such ambivalent directions. However, on close examination, if one were facing north in London, right would be east. And straight on till morning . . . depending on when you took off—and I presume that the Darling children were put to bed about seven—you’d run into morning over India or the Micronesian sea, which has ever so many lovely untouched islands where pirates might still anchor, and coves and lagoons and the tropical vegetation that F. D. Bedford captured so enchantingly in his illustrations. So, whimsical as it may seem, “straight on till morning” is valid. Barrie never suggests that the Neverland is not on earth somewhere. Using fairy dust as an early antigravity spray and conjuring happy thoughts do speed one up on good days.
Rodrigo Fresán. Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens: A Novel. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. P. 192.
The need to get away from the house. Maybe forever. I remember feeling that and thinking that maybe I’d climb a tree in the forest of Sad Songs and never come down. I walk with my hands in my pockets, and I come to the summerhouse, where the Victorians sometimes rehearse, and I go in, and—mystery of mysteries—on the floor there’s a book, and the book is called Peter Pan.
I open it.
I enter it.
I read:
All children, except one, grow up.
And all books, except one, grow up. Peter Pan—unlike all the other books we read in childhood and reread as adults; like the author of Peter Pan, like the reader of Peter Pan—doesn’t grow up, will never grow up. Peter Pan is like Peter Pan.
I enter Peter Pan, never to emerge from it again.
The character is the writer.
The writer of children’s literature.
Adam Gopnik. Through the Children’s Gate. New York: Random House, 2007. Pp. 97–98.
On an airplane over middle America, I sit down to read Peter Pan, which we saw once but I have never really read. Maybe, I think, I can find some secret flight formula buried in the Original Text. I read with pleasure, if not with illumination. Peter Pan, I see, is about escape, outward motion, the flight beyond Neverland. For J. M. Barrie, the townhouse, very much like those we envy on Halloween, represented the thing to fly away from, the little prison of bourgeois bedtimes. It wasn’t that Barrie didn’t like the houses he knew; he tried to build one like the one in his book for the real boys who inspired the story. It was that he took the fifth-floor window for granted, as part of the bourgeois entitlement. . . .
But to us, the house in Peter Pan looks like an unobtainable idyll of domestic pleasure, a place to fly to, just as Cherry Tree Lane is the place you want your children to be, not the one you need the magic nanny to lead them out of. The Edwardian-Georgian London, which sits just before and just after the great warning disaster of liberalism, the Great War, nonetheless casts its spell as a place for children’s books to come out of.
There is an untieable knot at the heart of child raising: We want both a safe house with a garden and a nursery, and the world beyond, stars and redskins and even a plank to (harmlessly) walk. . . .
“Steven Spielberg on Peter Pan.” Andrew M. Gordon. Empire of Dreams: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Films of Steven Spielberg. Lanham, UK: Roman & Littlefield, 2008. Pp. 189, 191–92.
I have always felt like Peter Pan. I still feel like Peter Pan. It has been very hard for me to grow up. . . . I’m a victim of the Peter Pan Syndrome.
My first memory of anybody flying is in Peter Pan. . . . I am absolutely fascinated and terrified by flying. It is a big deal in my movies. All my movies have airplanes in them. . . . To me, flying is synonymous with freedom and unlimited imagination, but, interestingly enough, I’m afraid to fly.
Patti Smith. Just Kids. New York: HarperCollins, 2010. P. 10.
“Patricia,” my mother scolded, “put a shirt on!”
“It’s too hot,” I moaned. “No one else has one on.”
“Hot or not, it’s time you started wearing a shirt. You’re about to become a young lady.” I protested vehemently and announced that I was never going to become anything but myself, that I was of the clan of Peter Pan, and we did not grow up.
David Sedaris. When You Are Engulfed in Flames. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 2008. P. 237.
After Paris came London, and a bedroom on the sixth floor with windows looking onto neat rows of Edwardian chimney tops. A friend characterized it as a “Peter Pan view,” and now I can’t see it any other way. I lie awake thinking of someone with a hook for a hand, and then, inevitably, of youth, and whether I have wasted it.
Brom. The Child Thief: A Novel. New York: HarperCollins, 2009. Pp. 477–78.
Like so many before me, I am fascinated by the tale of Peter Pan, the romantic idea of an endless childhood amongst the magical playground of Neverland. But, like so many, my mind’s image of Peter Pan had always been that of an endearing, puckish prankster, the undue influence of too many Disney films and peanut-butter commercials.
That is, until I read the original Peter Pan, not the watered-down version you’ll find in children’s bookshops these days, but James Barrie’s original—and politically uncorrected—version, and then I began to see the dark undertones and to appreciate just what a wonderfully blood-thirsty, dangerous, and at times cruel character Peter Pan truly is.
Foremost, the idea of an immortal boy hanging about nursery win dows and seducing children away from their families for the sake of his ego and to fight his enemies is at the very least disturbing.
A. S. Byatt. The Children’s Book. New York: Random House, 2009. P. 669.
The penultimate scene was the testing of the Beautiful Mothers, by Wendy. The Nursery filled with a bevy of fashionably dressed women, who were allowed to claim the Lost Boys if they responded sensitively to a flushed face, or a hurt wrist, or kissed the long-lost child gently, and not too loudly. Wendy dismissed several of these fine ladies, in a queenly manner. . . . Steyning spoke to Olive behind his hand. “This will have to go.” Olive smiled discreetly and nodded. Steyning said “It’s part pantomime, part play. It’s the play that is original, not the pantomime.” “Hush,” said the fashionable lady in front of him, intent on the marshalling of the Beautiful Mothers.
After the wild applause, and the buzz of discussion, Olive said to Tom: “Did you enjoy that?”
“No,” said Tom, who was in a kind of agony.
“Why not?”
Tom muttered something in which the only audible word was “cardboard.” Then he said “He doesn’t know anything about boys, or making things up.”
August Steyning said “You are saying it’s a play for grown-ups who don’t want to grow up?”
“Am I?” said Tom. He said “It’s make-believe make-believe make-believe. Anyone can see all those boys are girls.”
His body squirmed inside his respectable suit. Tom said “It’s not like Alice in Wonderland. That’s a real other place. This is just wires and strings and disguises.”
“You have a Puritan soul,” said Steyning. “I think you will find, that whilst everything you say is true, this piece will have a long life and people will suspend their disbelief, very happily.”
George Bernard Shaw. In Hesketh Pearson, George Bernard Shaw: His Life and Personality. London: Methuen, 1961. P. 307.
I was always on affectionate terms with Barrie, like everyone else who knew him; but though I lived for many years opposite him in the Adelphi and
should, one would suppose, have met him nearly every day, we met not oftener than three times in five years in the street. It was impossible to make him happy on a visit unless he could smoke like a chimney (mere cigarettes left him quite unsatisfied); and as this made our flat uninhabitable for weeks all the visiting was on our side, and was very infrequent.
I fancy Barrie was rather conscious of the fact that writers have no history and consequently no biography, not being men of action.
His wife’s elopement, and the deaths of some of his adopted children in the war, were the only events in his life I knew of. Though he seemed the most taciturn of men he could talk like Niagara when he let himself go, as he did once with Granville Barker and myself on a day which we spent walking in Wiltshire when he told us about his boyhood. He said that he had bacon twice a year, and beyond this treat had to content himself with porridge. He left me under the impression that his father was a minister; but this was probably a flight of my own imagination. I believe he was a weaver.
He had a frightfully gloomy mind, which he unfortunately could not afford to express in his plays. Only in child’s play could he make other people happy.
You will have a bit of a job to make a full-sized biography for him; but I daresay you will manage it if anybody can. I really knew very little about him; and yet I suspect that I knew all that there was to be known about him from the official point of view. Anyhow I liked him.
J. M. Barrie’s Legacy: Peter Pan and Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children
by Christine De Poortere
The Hospital for Sick Children at Great Ormond Street opened its doors on St. Valentine’s Day in 1852 with just ten beds. It was the first children’s hospital in Great Britain and quickly acquired the patronage of Queen Victoria, along with widespread public interest. Dr. Charles West founded the hospital at a time when mortality rates for children were shockingly high and when many hospitals refused to admit children because they were believed to carry infection. He was a driven, pioneering figure and worked hard to transform his vision of a children’s hospital in London into reality.
When the hospital opened its doors, the first patient admitted was Eliza Armstrong, three and a half years old. She was suffering from consumption, a then common and often fatal disease. Like all hospital patients at this time, Eliza came from a family too poor to pay for medical treatment. The hospital itself was funded by charitable donations, and financing its operations was a constant challenge from the outset. It was at this point that Charles Dickens stepped in to promote the hospital. Just six weeks after it opened, he published “Drooping Buds” in his popular periodical, Household Words. The essay was not just an impassioned plea for the hospital but also a declaration of its absolute necessity for children. He made a compelling case for addressing the high mortality rates for children in London. Just a few weeks after the appearance of Dickens’s article, and quite possibly as a direct consequence of it, Queen Victoria made a donation to the hospital and became its official patron. With royal endorsement, the Hospital for Sick Children could now be confident of being able to move forward with its motto, “The Child First and Always.”
The nursery scene is staged for patients and staff in 1929, the year Barrie donated the rights to Peter Pan. (Courtesy Great Ormond Street Hospital Children’s Charity)
Margaret Lockwood plays Peter Pan at the hospital in 1950. (Courtesy Great Ormond Street Hospital Children’s Charity)
Peggy Cummins plays Peter Pan at the hospital in 1955. (Courtesy Great Ormond Street Hospital Children’s Charity)
Great Ormond Street Hospital’s association with major literary figures began with Charles Dickens and has continued ever since. After all, the hospital is situated in Bloomsbury, for many years the hub of London’s literary world. Figures such as Oscar Wilde, A. A. Milne, Lewis Carroll, J. B. Priestley, and Monica Dickens, to name but a few, have all supported the hospital in one way or another.
Many have given but few so generously as J. M. Barrie. And the question naturally arises, Why did J. M. Barrie give Peter Pan to the hospital? Until Great Ormond Street Hospital became part of the National Health Service (NHS) in 1948, it had always had to rely on private donations and assistance from the public. J. M. Barrie was known to be a generous man and was familiar with the hospital, having lived just around the corner from it during his first years in London. His name first appeared in the hospital’s records when he attended a fund-raising party on New Year’s Eve in 1901, and his first recorded donation was in 1908. A Peter Pan Playground was opened in Catford, South East London, in 1922, and Barrie asked that the proceeds go directly to the hospital. Since his personal secretary, Lady Cynthia Asquith, was the daughter of the Earl of Wemyss, who was then chairman of the management board of the hospital, Barrie would have been well acquainted with the hospital’s work.
In February 1929, the hospital wanted to buy the site vacated by the Foundling Hospital in neighboring Coram’s Field, and the governors invited Barrie to help with the fund-raising campaign. He declined but replied, “At some future time I might find a way of helping. . . . I have been through the hospital several times and wish complete success to the project.” Two months later, he stunned the board—and the world—when he announced his plan to give the hospital the copyright to Peter Pan. In the words of hospital secretary James McKay, this was truly a “munificent gift,” and the hospital’s president, the Prince of Wales (later to become HM King Edward VIII), wrote to thank him personally.
The following December, at Barrie’s suggestion, the nursery scene from Peter Pan was performed in one of the wards by a cast that included Sir Gerald du Maurier and Jean Forbes-Robertson. It was watched by a delighted crowd of patients, nurses, doctors, and Barrie himself, hiding in the background. It became traditional for the cast of the London production of Peter Pan to perform at the hospital and visit the wards. The performances still take place today, and the actors always find it moving to understand directly just what Barrie’s legacy means for children.
The Peter Pan statue by Diarmuid Byron-O’Connor at the entrance of Great Ormond Street Hospital. (Courtesy Great Ormond Street Hospital Children’s Charity)
In 1930, the hospital founded the Peter Pan League, a club for children to whom the author A. A. Milne and E. H. Shepard, the illustrator of Winnie-the-Pooh, appealed “to help the Hospital to help other children when they are ill and want comforting.” That same year Barrie chaired a fund-raising dinner for the hospital reconstruction and in his speech stated that “at one time Peter Pan was an invalid in the Hospital for Sick Children, and it was he who put me up to the little thing I did for the hospital.” At his death in 1937, the gift was confirmed in his will. A Peter Pan Ward, a Tinker Bell play area, a statue at the entrance of the hospital, and a memorial tablet to Sir James Barrie in the hospital chapel record the institution’s gratitude. Barrie’s name—and that of the Boy Who Would Not Grow Up—will always hold a special place in the hearts of patients and their families, as well as everyone who works at the hospital.
Over the years, the hospital had become so closely associated with the street that in the 1990s it was officially renamed Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children. Today, it is one of the world’s leading children’s hospitals, with the broadest range of dedicated children’s healthcare specialists under one roof in Great Britain, providing free medical care for all National Health Service patients. The hospital’s pioneering research and treatment give hope to children who are suffering from the rarest, most complex, and often life-threatening conditions, from across the country and abroad. While the NHS meets the day-to-day costs of running the hospital, the fund-raising income provided by Great Ormond Street Hospital Children’s Charity allows the hospital to remain at the forefront of child healthcare. J. M. Barrie’s inspired legacy contributes toward the hospital’s redevelopment, research, and new equipment and has been helping children to grow up for over eighty years.
Detail of the Peter Pan statue at the h
ospital, showing Tinker Bell. (Courtesy Great Ormond Street Hospital Children’s Charity)
CHRISTINE DE POORTERE
PETER PAN DIRECTOR
Great Ormond Street Hospital Children’s Charity
Bibliography
WORKS BY J. M. BARRIE
A. Collected Editions
Kirriemuir Edition of the Works of J. M. Barrie. 10 vols. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1913.
The Definitive Edition of the Plays of J. M. Barrie. Ed. A. E. Wilson. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1942.
B. Individual Works
Better Dead. London: Swann, Sonnenschein, Lowrey, 1888.
Auld Licht Idylls. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1888.
When a Man’s Single. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1888.
An Edinburgh Eleven. London: Office of the “British Weekly,” 1889.
A Window in Thrums. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1889.
My Lady Nicotine. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1890.
Richard Savage. London: privately printed, 1891.
The Little Minister. London: Cassell, 1891.
Margaret Ogilvy, by Her Son, J. M. Barrie. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1896.
Sentimental Tommy. London: Cassell, 1896.
Tommy and Grizel. London: Cassell, 1900.
The Wedding Guest. Hodder & Stoughton, 1900.
The Boy Castaways of Black Lake Island. London: J. M. Barrie in the Gloucester Road, 1901.
The Little White Bird; or, Adventures in Kensington Gardens. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1902.
Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1906.
Walker, London. New York & London: S. French, 1907.
Peter and Wendy. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1911.
Quality Street. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1913.