An awfully big adventure
Thu 9 Nov 2017James Matthew Barrie was born in 1860, in Kirriemuir in Scotland, one of a large family. It seems that the seeds of his most famous creation, Peter Pan, may go back to his early childhood. After the death of his 13-year-old brother David when Barrie was just six, their mother eventually found comfort in the thought that David – her favourite child – would remain a boy forever, never growing up.
Other aspects of his childhood also made their way into Peter Pan: in later life Barrie remembered playing pirates with friends at school, “in a sort of Odyssey that was long afterwards to become the play of Peter Pan.”
Barrie begun his writing career as a drama critic, writing reviews while still at university, before going on to become first a full-time journalist and then an author. After some success as a novelist, he increasingly turned his attention to play writing. His third play, Walker (1892), led to him meeting his wife, the actress Mary Ansell.
The character of Peter Pan first appeared in a novel, The Little White Bird, which was published in 1902. The version of Peter’s story that most of us are now familiar with, started life as a stage play, first performed in 1904. It was in this play that the character of Wendy first appeared. Barrie is credited with inventing this name, which is said to have come about because of a young girl with a speech impediment, who called Barrie “Friendy’.
Other young friends of Barrie also influenced the story. He first encountered the Llewelyn Davies family in 1897, when he met three young boys – George, Jack and Peter – and their nanny, whilst walking his St Bernard dog in Hyde Park (the dog, named Porthos, seems to have been a model for Nana, the giant dog in Peter Pan). After becoming friends with the boys, Barrie became a regular visitor to the house of their parents, Arthur and Sylvia. The character of Peter – named after their little brother – was invented to entertain George and Jack. He claimed that babies were birds before they were born, and that so many nursery windows had bars to stop them flying away – this gradually grew into the tale of the boy who really did fly away.
He died in 1937 as Sir James Matthew Barrie, 1st Baronet, having been ennobled in 1913. He left the bulk of his estate to his secretary, with the exception of the books featuring Peter Pan – the copywrite for these had already been gifted to Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital, from which it has benefitted ever since.
Peter Pan: Friday 24 November to Sunday 14 January.