Margaret Ogilvy was inconsolable over the loss and became, in Barrie’s words, “delicate from that hour.” Young James attempted to take the place of his elder brother and spent much time in his mother’s room listening to her reminisce about her childhood. A turning point in Barrie’s life came at the age of seven, when his 14-year-old brother, David, a brilliant boy and his mother’s favorite, died in a skating accident while attending a private school run by Alexander Barrie.
He enjoyed Penny Dreadfuls-penny-a-number magazines featuring sensational fiction in serialized form-although when he later read a condemnation of this class of fiction in the morally conscientious children’s magazine Chatterbox, he buried his supply of them in a field. Barrie’s eldest brother, Alexander, eventually became a bursar at Aberdeen University and one of the first of Her Majesty’s Inspector of Schools, and four of Barrie’s five sisters to survive childhood were schoolteachers before they married.ĭuring his childhood Barrie played with a friend’s toy theater and acted out improvised dramas in the family’s little brick washhouse, a building he later identified as the original of the little house the Lost Boys build for Wendy in Peter Pan. With careful planning the Barries were able to send their children to private schools and to college. Although David Barrie had been poorly educated, he was hardworking, ambitious, and determined that his children should have every opportunity to receive an education.
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She was the strongest influence on her third son, who would later produce a series of popular newspaper articles about her, as well as a titular biography, published in 1896, a year after her death. His father, David, was a handloom weaver his mother, Margaret Ogilvy, the daughter of a stonemason, was known by her maiden name, according to Scottish tradition. The ninth of 10 children in a family that lived in one small cottage, James Matthew Barrie was born on May 9, 1860, in Kirriemuir, Scotland. The inspiration for Peter Pan grew out of several singular experiences in Barrie’s life, as well as from his imagination.
In 1929 the Boston Transcript characterized Peter Pan’s appeal as an adult, as well as a children’s, play: “It is middle age’s own tragicomedy-the faint, far memories of boyhood and girlhood blown back in the bright breeze of Barrie’s imagination.” Barrie’s particular Wonderland, which he called Neverland, with its pirates, Lost Boys, Indians, lagoons, and dueling captains, Hook and Peter Pan, has continued to work its magic on audiences not only because it is a world embodied in productions that are entertaining spectacles but also because this adventurous, storybook milieu is juxtaposed with a sweet idealization of family life and the tenderness and pain of parenthood to speak to a sense of childhood lost. Peter Pan has attained the status of what one critic has called a “legendary creation,” and the play and its central character have survived to confer upon Barrie and his “Boy Who Would Not Grow up” (the play’s subtitle) a reputation similar to that of Lewis Carroll and his Alice. Only Peter Pan, the first important play written for children and in many ways the most sentimental of Barrie’s work, has continued to enchant both children and adults in numerous dramatic and musical stage, film, and television productions.
Barrie’s plays are infrequently revived now. Barrie’s works for the stage were popular in their day, and some were later filmed (with varying degrees of success), but by the 1930s his plays had begun to seem less like the charming pastiches they were and more as quaint relics of middle-class Victorian and Edwardian sentimental sensibilities, lacking the intellectual and sociological heft of works by such contemporaries as George Bernard Shaw. Barrie wrote several plays for adults, the best known of which are The Admirable Crichton (1902), Quality Street (1902), What Every Woman Knows (1908), and Dear Brutus (1917), as well as the theatrical version of his most celebrated novel, The Little Minister (1897). Roger Lancelyn Green, Fifty Years of Peter Pan Like the other great stories of its kind, it was told first to a particular child or a group of children-but like them also it was invented to please the author and drew from the unsuspected depths of his memory and of his own deepest personality. And so it seems worth studying, not only for its remarkable stage history, but also as a piece of great literature: its background as a story as well as its foreground as a play. The secret of Peter Pan seems to be that it is not merely a children’s entertainment but a great play in its own right, a memorable theatrical experience, differing only in the nature of its appeal to the adult playgoer or to the child.
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