Peter Pan (5 page)

Avery, Gillian. “The Cult of Peter Pan.”
Word & Image
2:2 (1986): 173–85.

Baum, Rob K. “Travesty, Peterhood, and the Flight of a Lost Girl.”
New England Theatre Journal
9 (1998): 71–97.

Bell, Elizabeth. “Do You Believe in Fairies? Peter Pan, Walt Disney and Me.”
Women’s Studies in Communication
19.2 (Summer 1996): 103–26.

Birkin, Andrew.
J. M. Barrie and the Lost Boys.
London: Constable, 1979.

—–. “Introduction” in J. M. Barrie,
Peter Pan or The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up.
Illustrated by Paula Rego. London: The Folio Society, 1992.

Blackburn, William. “Peter Pan and the Contemporary Adolescent Novel” in:
The Child and the Story: An Explorative of Narrative Forms
, ed. Priscilla Ord. Boston: Children’s Literature Association, 1983, pp. 47–53.

Carpenter, Humphrey.
Secret Gardens: A Study of the Golden Age of Children’s Literature.
London: Allen and Unwin, 1985.

Crafton, Donald. “The Last Night in the Nursery: Walt Disney’s Peter Pan.”
The Velvet Light Trap
24 (Fall 1989): 33–52.

Darton, F. J. Harvey.
J. M. Barrie.
London: Nisbet, 1929.

Dunbar, Janet.
J. M. Barrie: The Man Behind the Image.
London: Collins, 1970.

Egan, Michael. “The Neverland of Id: Barrie, Peter Pan and Freud.”
Children’s Literature
10 (1982): 37–55.

Geduld, Harry M.
Sir James Barrie.
New York: Twayne, 1971.

Green, Roger Lancelyn.
Fifty Years of ‘Peter Pan.
’ London: Peter Davies, 1954.

—–.
J. M. Barrie.
London: Bodley Head, 1960.

Griffith, John. “Making Wishes Innocent: Peter Pan.”
The Lion and the Unicorn
3:1 (1979): 28–37.

Hollindale, Peter. “Introduction” in
Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens and Peter and Wendy.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991, pp. vii–xxviii.

Jack, Ronald D. S. “The Manuscript of Peter Pan.”
Children’s Literature
18 (1990): 101–113.

—–.
The Road to the Never Land: An Assessment of J. M. Barrie’s Dramatic Art.
Aberdeen: University of Aberdeen Press, 1991.

Kissel, Susan, “‘But when she appeared at last, I shot her’: The Drama of Gender in
Peter Pan
,”
Children’s Literature in Education
19:1 (Spring 1988): 32–41.

Lewis, Naomi. “J. M. Barrie,” in:
Twentieth Century Children’s Writers
, ed. Daniel Kirkpatrick. New York: Macmillan, 1978.

Mackail, Denis.
The Story of J. M. B.
London: Peter Davies, 1941.

McQuade, Brett. “Peter Pan: Disney’s Adaptation of J. M. Barrie’s Original Work.”
Mythlore
1:75 (Winter 1995): 5–9.

Ormond, Leonée.
J. M. Barrie.
Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1987.

Pace, Patricia. “Robert Bly Does Peter Pan: The Inner Child as Father to the Man in Steven Spielberg’s
Hook.
”
The Lion and the Unicorn
20:1 (1996): 113–20.

Rose, Jacqueline.
The Case of Peter Pan
,
or The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction.
London: Macmillan, 1984; 2nd Ed. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993.

Routh, Chris. “Peter Pan: Flawed or Fledgling ‘Hero’?” in
A Necessary Fantasy? The Heroic Figure in Children’s Popular Culture.
New York: Routledge, 2000, pp. 291–307.

Russell, Patricia Read. “Parallel Romantic Fantasies: Barrie’s
Peter Pan
and Spielberg’s
E. T.—The Extraterrestrial.
”
Children’s Literature Association Quarterly
4 (Winter 1983): 28–30.

Tarr, Carol Anita. “Shifting Images of Adulthood: From Barrie’s
Peter Pan
to Spielberg’s
Hook
” in
The Antic Art: Enhancing Children’s Literary Experiences through Film and Video.
Fort Atkinson, WI: Highsmith, 1993, pp. 63–72.

Wilson, Ann. “Hauntings: Anxiety, Technology, and Gender in Peter Pan.”
Modern Drama
43.4 (Winter 2000): 595–610.

Wolf, Stacy. “‘Never gonna Be a Man/Catch Me If You Can/I Won’t Grow Up’: A Lesbian Account of Mary Martin as Peter Pan.”
Theatre Journal
49.4 (1997): 493–509.

Wullschläger, Jackie.
Inventing Wonderland: The Lives and Fantasies of Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, J. M. Barrie, Kenneth Grahame, and A. A. Milne.
London: Methuen, 1995.

Yeoman, Ann.
Now or Neverland: Peter Pan and the Myth of the Eternal Youth.
Toronto: Inner City Books, 1998.

Zipes, Jack. “Negating History and Male Fantasies through Psychoanalytic Criticism.”
Children’s Literature
18 (1990): 141–43.

The texts in this volume are based on the following editions:

Barrie, J. M.
Peter and Wendy.
Author’s Edition. New York:

Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1911.

Barrie, J. M.
The Little White Bird.
London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1902. Chapters 13–18.

Francis Donkin Bedford (1864–1954) did the original illustrations for
Peter and Wendy
in 1911. There were many different illustrators for the book afterward. Bedford was trained as an architect and was adroit at drawing large landscapes and detailed illustrations of action scenes. He made a name for himself by illustrating E. V. Lucas’s verses in
The Book of Shops
in 1899, and during his lifetime he produced superb drawings for books by Charles Dickens, George MacDonald, and Ann and Jane Taylor.

Arthur Rackham (1867–1939) was called upon to design the illustrations for
Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens
(1906), which included six chapters from
The Little White Bird.
Influenced by Japanese prints and the pre-Raphaelites, Rackham developed his own unique style of watercolors and dynamic line drawings. He became recognized as a gifted illustrator in 1896 with his drawings for S. J. Adair Fitzgerald’s
Zanikwank and the Bletherwitch.
His next great illustrations were produced for Washington Irving’s
Rip Van Winkle
(1905) and were followed by numerous award-winning pictures for the works of Lewis Carroll, the Brothers Grimm, Christina Rossetti, Charles Dickens, and Aesop. Rackham made a practice of
exhibiting his drawings at the Leceister Galleries, and the managers of the galleries brought Rackham together with Barrie, who conceived the idea of collaborating with the illustrator by separating the chapters from
The Little White Bird
to make an independent book.

 

 

All children, except one, grow up. They soon know that they will grow up, and the way Wendy
¹
knew was this: One day when she was two years old she was playing in a garden, and she plucked another flower and ran with it to her mother. I suppose she must have looked rather delightful, for Mrs. Darling put her hand to her heart and cried, “Oh, why can’t you remain like this for ever!” This was all that passed between them on the subject, but henceforth Wendy knew that she must grow up. You always know after you’re two. Two is the beginning of the end.

Of course they lived at 14, and until Wendy came her mother was the chief one. She was a lovely lady, with a romantic mind and such a sweet mocking mouth. Her romantic mind was like the tiny boxes, one within the other, that come from the puzzling East, however many you discover there is always one more; and her sweet mocking mouth had one kiss
²
on it that Wendy could never get, though there it was, perfectly conspicuous in the right-hand corner.

The way Mr. Darling won her was this: the many gentlemen who had been boys when she was a girl discovered simultaneously that they loved her, and they all ran to her house to propose to her except Mr. Darling, who took a cab and nipped in first, and so he got her. He got all of her, except the innermost box and the kiss. He never knew about the box, and in time he gave up trying for the kiss. Wendy thought Napoleon could have got it, but I can picture him trying, and then going off in a passion, slamming the door.

Mr. Darling used to boast to Wendy that her mother not only
loved him but respected him. He was one of those deep ones who know about stocks and shares. Of course no one really knows, but he quite seemed to know, and he often said stocks were up and shares were down in a way that would have made any woman respect him.

Mrs. Darling was married in white, and at first she kept the books perfectly, almost gleefully, as if it were a game, not so much as a Brussels sprout was missing; but by and by whole cauliflowers dropped out, and instead of them there were pictures of babies without faces. She drew them when she should have been totting up. They were Mrs. Darling’s guesses.

Wendy came first, then John, then Michael.

For a week or two after Wendy came it was doubtful whether they would be able to keep her, as she was another mouth to feed. Mr. Darling was frightfully proud of her, but he was very honourable, and he sat on the edge of Mrs. Darling’s bed, holding her hand and calculating expenses, while she looked at him imploringly. She wanted to risk it, come what might, but that was not his way; his way was with a pencil and a piece of paper, and if she confused him with suggestions he had to begin at the beginning again.

“Now don’t interrupt,” he would beg of her.

“I have one pound seventeen
³
here, and two six at the office; I can cut off my coffee at the office, say ten shillings, making two nine and six, with your eighteen and three makes three nine seven, with five naught naught in my cheque-book makes eight nine seven—who is that moving?—eight nine seven, dot and carry seven—don’t speak, my own—and the pound you lent to that man who came to the door—quiet, child—dot and carry child—there, you’ve done it!—did I say nine nine seven? yes, I said nine nine seven; the question is, can we try it for a year on nine nine seven?”

“Of course we can, George,” she cried. But she was prejudiced in Wendy’s favour, and he was really the grander character of the two.

“Remember mumps,” he warned her almost threateningly, and off he went again. “Mumps one pound, that is what I have put down, but I daresay it will be more like thirty shillings—don’t speak—measles
one five, German measles half a guinea,
⁴
makes two fifteen six—don’t waggle your finger—whooping-cough, say fifteen shillings”—and so on it went, and it added up differently each time, but at last Wendy just got through, with mumps reduced to twelve six, and the two kinds of measles treated as one.

There was the same excitement over John, and Michael had even a narrower squeak; but both were kept, and soon, you might have seen the three of them going in a row to Miss Fulsom’s Kindergarten school, accompanied by their nurse.

Mrs. Darling loved to have everything just so, and Mr. Darling had a passion for being exactly like his neighbours; so, of course, they had a nurse. As they were poor, owing to the amount of milk the children drank, this nurse was a prim Newfoundland dog,
⁵
called Nana, who had belonged to no one in particular until the Darlings engaged her. She had always thought children important, however, and the Darlings had become acquainted with her in Kensington Gardens,
⁶
where she spent most of her spare time peeping into perambulators, and was much hated by careless nursemaids, whom she followed to their homes and complained of to their mistresses. She proved to be quite a treasure of a nurse. How thorough she was at bath-time, and up at any moment of the night if one of her charges made the slightest cry. Of course her kennel was in the nursery. She had a genius for knowing when a cough is a thing to have no patience with and when it needs stocking round your throat. She believed to her last day in old-fashioned remedies like rhubarb leaf, and made sounds of contempt over all this new-fangled talk about germs, and so on. It was a lesson in propriety to see her escorting the children to school, walking sedately by their side when they were well behaved, and butting them back into line if they strayed. On John’s footer days she never once forgot his sweater, and she usually carried an umbrella in her mouth in case of rain. There is a room in the basement of Miss Fulsom’s school where the nurses wait. They sat on forms, while Nana lay on the floor, but that was the only difference. They affected to ignore her as of an inferior social status to themselves, and she despised their light talk. She resented
visits to the nursery from Mrs. Darling’s friends, but if they did come she first whipped off Michael’s pinafore and put him into the one with blue braiding, and smoothed out Wendy and made a dash at John’s hair.

No nursery could possibly have been conducted more correctly, and Mr. Darling knew it, yet he sometimes wondered uneasily whether the neighbours talked.

He had his position in the city to consider.