The Annotated Peter Pan (The Centennial Edition) (The Annotated Books)

536 Pages·2014·46.1 MB·English

by  J. M. Barrie

To the Five:
For Lauren and Daniel,
as always,
and for the boys in the next generation,
Ben, Sam, and Grant
Contents
A Message for Those Who Have Grown Up
A Note from the Author about Peter Pan and J. M. Barrie
Introduction to J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan
J. M. Barrie in Neverland: A Biographical Essay
PETER AND WENDY by J. M. Barrie
CHAPTER 1: Peter Breaks Through
CHAPTER 2: The Shadow
CHAPTER 3: Come Away, Come Away!
CHAPTER 4: The Flight
CHAPTER 5: The Island Come True
CHAPTER 6: The Little House
CHAPTER 7: The Home under the Ground
CHAPTER 8: The Mermaids’ Lagoon
CHAPTER 9: The Never Bird
CHAPTER 10: The Happy Home
CHAPTER 11: Wendy’s Story
CHAPTER 12: The Children Are Carried Off
CHAPTER 13: Do You Believe in Fairies?
CHAPTER 14: The Pirate Ship
CHAPTER 15: “Hook or Me This Time”
CHAPTER 16: The Return Home
CHAPTER 17: When Wendy Grew Up

J. M. Barrie’s The Boy Castaways of Black Lake Island
“To the Five, a Dedication”: J. M. Barrie’s Introduction to the Play Peter Pan
Arthur Rackham and Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens: A Biography of the Artist
An Introduction to Arthur Rackham’s Illustrations for Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens
Arthur Rackham’s Illustrations for Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens
J. M. Barrie’s Scenario for a Proposed Film of Peter Pan
Peter Pan On-Screen: A Cinematic Survey
Peter Pan: Adaptations, Prequels, Sequels, and Spin-Offs
A Montage of Friends, Fans, and Foes: J. M. Barrie and Peter Pan in the World
J. M. Barrie’s Legacy: Peter Pan and Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children by Christine De Poortere
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
A Message for Those Who Have Grown Up
A
ll children, except one, grow up,” J. M. Barrie tells us, in the famous first
sentence of his novel Peter and Wendy, published seven years after Peter Pan’s
theatrical debut in London. That one rebellious child exists in many different
versions today. There is Walt Disney’s redheaded Peter Pan, animated in both
senses of the term. There are the many nimble women of Broadway—Mary
Martin, Sandy Duncan, and Cathy Rigby—who have soared across the stage as
Peter Pan. There is the enchanting Peter Pan who magically appears at the home
of the Llewelyn Davies boys, when their mother is ill, in Marc Forster’s Finding
Neverland. We encounter the boy who would not grow up on stage and screen,
and also in fiction, with countless prequels, sequels, adaptations, and revisions.
Peter Pan may refuse to grow up, but he also will not die.
When I rediscovered Peter Pan as an adult, I quickly learned that he existed
in multiple textual forms even before he detached himself, to lead a life of his
own, from the Scottish writer who dreamt him up. He was first brought to life in
Barrie’s 1902 novel The Little White Bird, a whimsical and elusive work (Barrie
hated both those adjectives, in part because they captured his style so perfectly)
about a bachelor who develops an attachment to a six-year-old boy named
David. Embedded in that novel is the story of a seven-day-old Peter Pan and his
adventures in Kensington Gardens (“All perambulators lead to the Kensington
Gardens”). The chapters about Peter Pan were published separately in 1906, with
only a few minor changes, under the title Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. The
volume was illustrated by the artist Arthur Rackham, perhaps the most
acclaimed children’s book illustrator of his day, best known today for images he
created for fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm and by Hans Christian Andersen
and for works ranging from Aesop’s Fables to Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in
the Willows.
Today, we know Peter Pan best in his role as lead of the 1904 play Peter
Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up. The play did not appear in print until
1928, but in 1911 Barrie published the novel Peter and Wendy, which became
known as Peter Pan. To recapitulate, we have:
Program for the London production of Peter Pan. (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale
University)
The Little White Bird, 1902
Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up (stage premiere) 1904
Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, illustrated by Arthur Rackham, 1906
Peter and Wendy, 1911 (later renamed Peter Pan) Peter Pan, or, The Boy
Who Would Not Grow Up, published in 1928
The play, which existed only in performance for many years, underwent
multiple revisions. Barrie attended rehearsals and was constantly cutting,
revising, and adding new material, collaborating with the actors and actresses to
improve dialogue and staging. Many of the early scripts are preserved in the J.
M. Barrie archive at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in New
Haven, Connecticut, where the bulk of Barrie’s papers are stored. To give one
example: on onion-skin sheets in a small folder marked 1904/05, the third act of
what was then a three-act play showed Wendy agreeing to become Peter’s
mother and to live with him in Kensington Gardens. The two discover a baby
under some rubbish in the park, and a delighted Wendy, who realizes that Peter
will need someone to take care of him once she grows up, takes the child in. The
curtain falls on Peter, Wendy, and child as they wave from their perch in
Kensington Gardens. Who knew that there were also performances in which
anywhere from a dozen to twenty beautiful mothers compete with one another to
adopt one of the lost boys? Or that Hook survived the crocodile attack on the
high seas in an early version of the play but accidentally lowered himself into its
gaping jaw while climbing down a tree in Kensington Gardens?
Postcard of Cecilia Loftus and Hilda Trevelyan in Peter Pan. (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale
University)
The conventional story of a Peter Pan who enters the nursery of the Darling
family, abducts the children by teaching them how to fly, and escorts them with
Tinker Bell to Neverland is far less stable than most of us realize. To be sure, in
all versions the children and the lost boys on the island still come into conflict