‘Second to the right, and straight on till morning!’ These are the directions to the Neverland, home to J. M. Barrie’s most famous character Peter Pan, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up.
For more than a hundred years, Barrie’s fantasy world of fairies and mermaids, crocodiles and pirates, and children who refuse to grow up, has been delighting and, sometimes confusing, children and grown-ups alike.
Peter’s name is made up from Peter Llewelyn Davies, a son of one of Barrie’s friends, and Pan, the mischievous Greek god of the woodlands. The inspiration behind the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up may have come from the Barrie’s memory of his elder brother David, who died in an ice-skating accident the day before he turned 14; staying for always a young boy.
Peter Pan first appeared on the page in the 1902 novel The Little White Bird. Written for adults, it was a fictionalised version of Barrie’s relationship with the Llewelyn Davies children. Peter’s part in the novel turned up again in a volume of stories called Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens in 1906 before being immortalised five years later in the novel Peter and Wendy, an adaptation of the highly successful Peter Pan stage play of 1904, published by Hodder Stoughton in the United Kingdom and Charles Scribner’s Sons in the United States.
The novel was first abridged by May Byron in 1915 and published under the title Peter Pan and Wendy. The script of the play, which Barrie had continued to tinker with since its first performance, was published in 1928. In 1929, Barrie gifted the copyright of the Peter Pan works to Great Ormond Street Hospital, a children’s hospital in London.
But there would be no Peter Pan without Wendy Darling and her brothers, whose adventures in Neverland we eagerly follow. With them we meet the fickle fairy Tinker Bell, the charmingly naughty lost boys, the formidable Indian princess Tiger Lily, and the dastardly pirate Captain Hook.
And so, a hundred years on and we continue to be swept away, even without the help of fairy dust, from the opening line ‘All children, except one, grow up.’
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