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Life & Times

About the Author

‘Those who bring sunshine to the lives of others cannot keep it from themselves’ – an apt sentiment indeed for the author of a tale that has enchanted readers for well over a century. J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan has appeared in stage productions, novels, films and cartoons, inspiring hope and bravado in children and adults alike. But sunshine was often in short supply in the author’s own life – certainly prior to the invention of his most famous character.

Family and Failure

J. M. Barrie was often consumed with a sense that he did not quite live up to expectation. He was a small child, the ninth of ten born to a weaver in Kirriemuir, Scotland, and always felt overshadowed in his mother’s affections by his older brother David. When Barrie was six David died in a skating accident, a tragedy that affected their mother so profoundly that the young boy took to assuming David’s mannerisms and clothes in an attempt to ease her disappointment.

Barrie found solace in stories and books and dreamt of following in the footsteps of Jules Verne and James Fenimore Cooper, but his family had other ambitions for him, and persuaded him to go to university. He was an unenthusiastic student at Edinburgh University and channelled his energies into writing theatre reviews instead, an experience that ultimately led him to defy his family’s wishes and immerse himself in the theatrical and literary world of faraway London.

A series of flops and moderate successes marked Barrie’s early years as a writer – he first wrote stories about Scotland and then turned to comedic plays – and it was during the staging of his third play that he met the young actress Mary Ansell, whom he married against even his own better judgement in 1894. He had always loved children but they had none of their own, and the marriage ended in 1909 following her affair with a fellow playwright. Barrie remained single until his death almost thirty years later.

The Creation of Peter Pan

But out of this series of unshakeable disappointments Barrie drew inspiration for what was to become his greatest work and one of the most popular stories in the world. Since his brother’s death in 1867, he had remained intrigued and consoled by the notion that David would forever be thirteen – he would never grow old, or feel the weight of expectation and responsibility – and gradually these thoughts gelled around the idea of a ‘boy who wouldn’t grow up’.

Around this same time, the early years of his unhappy marriage, Barrie had taken to walking alone in Kensington Gardens, where in 1897 he encountered three young brothers out playing with their nanny. George, John and baby Peter Llewelyn Davies were easily amused by the mercurial writer and a friendship with the family – which soon had two new children, Michael and Nico – developed. Their mother, Sylvia, a member of the du Maurier literary dynasty and the aunt of Daphne du Maurier, became a particular friend to Barrie; to the boys he was ‘Uncle Jim’. The children provided the final inspiration for his new character. He later told them, ‘By rubbing the five of you violently together, as savages with two sticks to produce a flame, I made the spark of you that is Peter Pan.’

The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up

Peter Pan made his debut in Barrie’s 1902 novel The Little White Bird, in which he was a baby who could fly. (Barrie had often joked to the Llewelyn Davies boys that their brother Peter could fly.) In 1904 an older Pan was the star of Barrie’s play Peter Pan, an ambitious and visually stunning production that debuted to rave reviews. The Guardian went so far as to say ‘no such play was ever seen before on any stage. It is absolutely original – the product of a unique imagination.’

Peter Pan was such a hit that the Duke of York’s Theatre in London staged it annually for the next ten years, although Barrie was compelled to make some adjustments in the name of health and safety: ‘After the first production,’ he wrote in a later foreword, ‘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.’

In 1911 Barrie produced ‘the book of the play’, Peter and Wendy (known more commonly as Peter Pan), which brought the Neverland adventures of Wendy Darling and her brothers to an even wider audience.

An Awfully Big Adventure

Thanks to Peter Pan, and the children who inspired him, J. M. Barrie at last found his place in the world. He became someone who brought hope in times of darkness rather than someone who struggled to come up to scratch. When the Llewelyn Davies’ father, Arthur, died in 1907, Barrie supported the family financially; when their mother, Sylvia, died just three years later he became the boys’ guardian.

It is not just the author but the character himself who has proved a source of great inspiration – a hero to those who refuse to grow old and sensible. One great fan was the British explorer Captain Robert Scott, who was introduced to Barrie in 1906 and was taken by him to a rehearsal of Peter Pan; he later named his only child, Barrie’s godson, Peter. Captain Scott was particularly struck by the notions of bravery and great spirit espoused by Peter Pan and his friends – Wendy’s ‘last words’ to the Lost Boys during a moment of peril at the hands of Captain Hook (‘I feel that I have a message for you from your real mothers, and it is this: “We hope our sons will die like English gentlemen.”’), as well as Peter’s bold claim that ‘To die will be an awfully big adventure.’ In the weather-battered tent in which Scott and his companions died in 1912 after their catastrophic, heroic expedition to the South Pole, he left a letter for his great friend J. M. Barrie, which the author carried with him to his death: ‘I never met a man in my life whom I admired and loved more than you,’ wrote Scott. ‘I never could show you how much your friendship meant to me – for you had much to give and I nothing.’

Great Ormond Street Hospital

Before his death in 1937, J. M. Barrie ensured Peter would for ever come to the rescue of children in need by bequeathing the copyright in Peter Pan to London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children. It was an extraordinarily generous gift from a man who loved and was loved by children but never had any of his own. He claimed that Peter had once been a patient at ‘The Hospital for Sick Children’ (as it was then known), ‘and it was he who put me up to the little thing I did for the hospital’. When the term of copyright expired in 1987, the UK government authorised a special exception for Peter Pan, granting the hospital royalties from all UK stage productions and publications, including this one, in perpetuity.