Once Upon a Time in Great Britain: A Travel Guide to the Sights and Settings of Your Favorite Children's Stories

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MUCH-LOVED CLASSIC STORIES

PETER PAN

by J. M. Barrie

Mrs. Darling first heard of Peter Pan when she was tidying up her children’s minds. It is the nightly custom of every good mother after her children are asleep to rummage in their minds and put things straight for next morning.… Occasionally in her travels through her children’s minds Mrs. Darling found things she could not understand, and of these quite the most perplexing was the word Peter. She knew of no Peter, and yet he was here and there in John and Michael’s minds, while Wendy’s began to be scrawled all over with him. The name stood out in bolder letters than any of the other words, and as Mrs. Darling gazed she felt that it had an oddly cocky appearance.…

—Peter Pan, 1928

A sprinkling of fairy dust and off they fly over the rooftops of London to Neverland. Wendy, Michael, and John Darling slip away with Peter Pan and Tinker Bell to an enchanted place where children never grow up. They play with mermaids, make friends with Indians, and live in a cozy underground home that can only be reached by a secret passage through a tree trunk. The menacing Captain Hook and his band of pirates lurk about and provide excellent enemies to overcome.

Alas, there is no way to visit Neverland, but it is possible to enjoy the place that inspired J. M. Barrie as he was writing the original play, Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens. Barrie himself paid to have a statue of Peter Pan placed in Hyde Park, and it makes a wonderful excuse to wander around one of the world’s great urban parks. A new playground dedicated to the late Princess Diana features fanciful play areas inspired by Peter Pan.

Barrie’s birthplace, the charming village of Kirriemuir, is nestled into the hillside in a picturesque area north of Edinburgh, right down the road from one of Scotland’s most famous castles. The modest house in which Barrie was born has been restored to its original state and houses a display about Barrie’s life and the early stage productions of Peter Pan.

A Brief Biography of J. M. Barrie

Nothing that happens after we are twelve matters very much.

—J. M. Barrie

James M. Barrie was born in Kirriemuir, Fife, Scotland,¹ in 1860, the ninth of ten children. His father was a handloom weaver, his mother the daughter of a stonemason. When James was six, his thirteen-year-old brother, David, died in a skating accident. David had been his mother’s great favorite, and she never fully recovered from her grief. Barrie later wrote that he never was able to make his mother forget that pain for when I became a man, he was still a boy of 13. From Peter Pan to the title of Barrie’s final play, The Boy David, the boy who never grew up surfaces repeatedly in Barrie’s work.

The large family lived in a tiny row house that also housed his father’s loom and yarn shop. Barrie’s earliest success as a writer came from stories about his childhood in the town of Thrums, a thinly disguised Kirriemuir. (Thrums are short strands of thread that are left over in the weaving process.)

From the age of eight, Barrie was sent away to school, first to Glasgow and then to Dumfriesshire in southern Scotland. He lived with his older brother Alexander, who taught at both schools. Barrie attended the University of Edinburgh from 1878 to 1882, but he had a lonely time of it. At barely five feet tall, he found himself feeling isolated from the social life of his peers. Later in life, after his literary success, Barrie returned to the University of Edinburgh in 1909 to receive an honorary doctorate and in 1930 to be given the honorary position of chancellor of the university.

Upon finishing his university degree, Barrie spent a short stint as a journalist in Nottingham and then moved on to London to pursue work as a novelist and playwright. He had his first play produced in 1891, and several successful plays followed, including Mary Rose and The Admirable Crichton. At one point three plays by Barrie were running in London at the same time.

Barrie married an actress, Mary Ansell, in 1894 in Kirriemuir. Their marriage was not a happy one. It ended in divorce in 1909 after Barrie became aware that Mary was having an affair. They had no children.

Barrie’s success afforded him a pleasant life in London living near Kensington Gardens, where he walked each day with his Saint Bernard dog, Porthos. On one of these walks he made friends with three young brothers, George, Jack, and Peter, the children of Sir Arthur and Sylvia Llewelyn Davies. Barrie often walked with the boys in the park or visited them at their home. Eventually Barrie became almost a member of their family, spending summer vacations with them, taking them to plays, and seeing them on almost a daily basis. The stories and games they made up together on these occasions grew into a series of stories about a boy named Peter Pan. Porthos found a place in the stories as the children’s nanny. These stories evolved into a play, Peter Pan or the Boy Who Would Not Grow Up, which was first produced in 1904. It was an instant success. Peter Pan eventually found his way into several books, including Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906), Peter and Wendy (1911), and Peter Pan or the Boy Who Would Not Grow Up (1928).

In 1912, Barrie commissioned a Peter Pan statue to be placed in Kensington Gardens, London, where it still stands today.

When Arthur and Sylvia Davies died of cancer within three years of each other, Barrie adopted their five sons (two of whom, Nico and Michael, had been born since Barrie first befriended the boys), thereby gaining a family. A great deal of tragedy touched their lives. One of the boys, George, was killed in 1915, a casualty of World War I. Michael, Barrie’s favorite, drowned in the Thames near Oxford a few weeks before his twenty-first birthday. He drowned in still water with a close friend in what may have been a double suicide. Barrie wrote: All the world is different to me now. Michael was pretty much my world. And in 1960, long after Barrie’s death, Peter Llewellyn Davies killed himself by jumping in front of one of London’s subway trains. A headline read: The Boy Who Never Grew Up Is Dead.

Barrie continued to write successful plays on into the 1920s. At the age of seventy-seven, he wrote his last play, The Boy David. He was too ill to attend any of the performances of the work, which turned out to be his least successful play.

Barrie died in June 1937. He is buried in the cemetery overlooking the town of Kirriemuir, his birthplace. Shortly before his death, he signed over all the royalties for Peter Pan to the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in London. A special Act of Parliament continued this arrangement after the copyright expired in 1988. The hospital received over half a million dollars alone from the Steven Spielberg movie Hook.

1. NOTE: Items in boldface are described in detail in the following pages.

A Brief Biography of Arthur Rackham

Born in London in 1867, Arthur Rackham studied art in evening courses at Lambeth School of Art for seven years, from age seventeen to twenty-four, while working in an insurance office. In 1892, he found work as a staff artist for a newspaper, and he began to illustrate books. His reputation for imaginative and fantastical artwork began to build with the publication of his illustrations for Grimm’s Fairy Tales in 1900. His illustrations accompanied James Barrie’s Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906) and a 1907 version of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. He continued to illustrate classic works and children’s books throughout the rest of his career until his death in 1939. His final work, illustrations for The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame, was published posthumously. Rackham’s first-edition books and original artwork continue to be popular with collectors internationally.

Places Connected with the Story of Peter Pan

HYDE PARK/KENSINGTON GARDENS, LONDON

Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens form one continuous expanse of parkland in the heart of London to the northwest of the Buckingham Palace area. The western half of the park, between Kensington Palace and a lake called the Serpentine, is known as Kensington Gardens. Kensington Palace was the birthplace and childhood home of Queen Victoria and the residence of Princess Diana before her death.

Barrie spent his many years in London living close by Kensington Gardens at various addresses (see below). Strolls through the park were part of his daily routine, and as mentioned earlier, he began several significant friendships with children there. In 1906, James Barrie published a book titled Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. It was a reworking of an earlier book, The Little White Bird, and included an early version of the Peter Pan story. In that version Peter is a baby who flies away from his mother when he is just seven days old and goes to live in

Kensington Gardens. He lives on an island in the Serpentine and sails across the water each evening in a boat made from a thrush’s nest to play in the park once the gates are closed. Arthur Rackham did the gorgeous illustrations. The first chapter of the book is a charming tour of the gardens, which gives a flavor of how it might have been to stroll around them as a child with James Barrie.

… I shall pass on hurriedly to the Round Pond, which is the wheel that keeps all the Gardens going. It is round because it is in the very middle of the Gardens, and when you are come to it you never want to go any farther. You can’t be good all the time at the Round Pond, however much you try. You can be good in the Broad Walk all the time, but not at the Round Pond, and the reason is that you forget, and, when you remember, you are so wet that you may as well be wetter.

—James Barrie, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, 1906

In addition to the Llewellyn Davies boys, Barrie had another child friend, a little girl aged four named Margaret. She called Barrie her friendy, but her childish pronunciation turned it into wendy. Barrie used this as the name for his heroine in the stage version of Peter Pan, a name he invented. Sadly, little Margaret died at age six.

In 1912, James Barrie commissioned a statue of Peter Pan by Sir George Frampton. It was based on photos that Barrie had taken of Michael Llewellyn Davies dressed in a Peter Pan costume. Barrie had it erected in secret one night in Kensington Gardens so it would seem to have appeared by magic. It is located at the spot where the baby Peter Pan landed each evening on the shore of the Serpentine (see map, here). The base of the statue is a clamor of fairies and animals. It’s a good spot for feeding the ducks or having a picnic and reading Barrie’s story about Peter Pan’s babyhood.

London is a fascinating city, but its crowds and noise can be overwhelming for travelers of any age. A walk through the park to the areas that inspired James Barrie and his young friends to invent Peter Pan can be a relaxing break for adults and an opportunity for children to run around and be mad-dog, as Barrie terms it. Toy boats, formal or informal, can be sailed on the Round Pond. The newly restored, gold-covered Albert Memorial, Queen Victoria’s tribute to her husband, is a stunning sight at the edge of the park across the road from the Royal Albert Hall. The Household Cavalry ride out from the Hyde Park Barracks every morning at 10:30 A.M. on their way to Whitehall.

The closest tube stop is Lancaster Gate on the north side of the park, but there are several other stops on other tube lines that will get you quite close.

Elsewhere in the United Kingdom

KIRRIEMUIR, FIFE, SCOTLAND

James Barrie was born in the village of Kirriemuir. It’s worth a visit in its own right as a lovely Scottish village with its red-stone houses and winding lanes; but it also offers Barrie’s birthplace/museum, grave, and the unusual gift Barrie bestowed upon the town. Kirriemuir is also just five miles down the road from Glamis Castle, the setting for Macbeth and the childhood home of the Queen Mother. It is pictured on some Scottish banknotes (pound notes issued by Scottish banks as opposed to English ones).

Barrie lived the first twelve years of his life in a tiny four-room house at 9 Brechin Road, also known as Lilybank, in Kirriemuir. Today the home is refurnished as it would have been when Barrie was a child. An adjoining house has been set up as an exhibit on Barrie’s life, complete with the original Peter Pan costume from the 1904 play. One unexpected but compelling momento on display is a letter from Barrie’s friend, the explorer Capt. Robert Scott. As he and his expedition party lay dying in the heart of Antarctica, Scott asked Barrie to take care of his widow and child. (Barrie made good on his friend’s request.) The washhouse in back, which was used by all the tenants on the street in Barrie’s day, served as a stage for plays Barrie created as a child. It is said to be the inspiration for the house the lost boys built for Wendy in Neverland.

In 1929, Barrie gave an unusual gift to the town of Kirriemuir: a camera obscura. This device displays a panoramic view of an external scene inside a darkened room, using only mirrors and lenses. Barrie’s camera obscura provides a perfect 360-degree view of the Vale of Strathmore. The scene is reflected onto a saucer-shaped viewing table through a mirror and lens located on the roof. Housed in a cricket club at the very top of the hill behind Kirriemuir, the camera obscura is still in operation today and open to the public. On a clear day, mountains as far as fifty miles away can be seen.

Barrie is buried in the cemetery on the hill above his birthplace, and his grave site affords a lovely view of the valley. He was offered a spot in Westminster Abbey in London, but he chose to come back to Kirriemuir to be buried with his parents and siblings.

Barrie’s birthplace is run by the National Trust and is open to the public. There is a small gift shop and a quaint tearoom. It is open Easter weekend and from May through the beginning of October, Monday to Saturday, 11:00 A.M.–5:30 P.M.; and Sundays, 1:30–5:30 P.M. There is a modest admission fee. For more information, call (01575)