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