1

1860–1885

‘On the day I was born we bought six hair-bottomed chairs, and in our little house it was an event’, wrote Barrie in Margaret Ogilvy1 a portrait of his mother and his own boyhood. Certainly his birth caused little stir in a family that already numbered two boys and four girls, but the implied poverty was an affectation adopted by Barrie in later life. His father, David Barrie, was a hand-loom weaver of more than average means, and the dominant priority in the Barrie household was one of fierce educational ambition rather than a struggle for survival. By the time James Barrie was six, that ambition had been partly realized. Alexander Barrie, the eldest son, had graduated from Aberdeen University with first-class honours in Classics, and had opened his own private school in Lanarkshire. The second son, David, was thirteen, and showed every sign of emulating Alexander's achievements; moreover he was tall, athletic, handsome and charming, the Golden Boy of his mother's eye. Margaret Ogilvy (who had retained her maiden name in accordance with an old Scots custom) was the driving force of the family, and all her hopes were focused on the aspiration that David would one day become a Minister. The six-year-old James was, by comparison, something of a disappointment. He showed no particular academic promise, nor did he possess his brother's looks. He was small for his age, rather squat, with a head too large for his body. In short, the runt of the family.

Barrie aged 6

Barrie's birthplace: Lilybank in the Tenements, Kirriemuir. The wash-house in foreground was the theatre of Barrie's first play, written and performed at the age of 7. It was also, according to his Dedication to Peter Pan, ‘the original of the little house the Lost Boys built in the Never Land for Wendy’

Until he was six, James Barrie lived in the shadow of David. But in January 1867, David was killed in a skating accident on the eve of his fourteenth birthday. Barrie was too young to remember the tragedy with any clarity, his chief memory being that of playing with his younger sister Maggie under the table on which stood David's coffin. For his mother, however, it was a catastrophe beyond belief, and one from which she never fully recovered. ‘She was always delicate from that hour, and for many months she was very ill’, wrote Barrie in Margaret Ogilvy. ‘I peeped in many times at the door and then went to the stair and sat on it and sobbed.’ Barrie's elder sister, Jane Ann, was quick to perceive the damaging effect that Margaret Ogilvy's protracted grief was having on her youngest son:

‘This sister told me to go ben to my mother and say to her that she still had another boy. I went ben excitedly, but the room was dark, and when I heard the door shut and no sound come from the bed I was afraid, and I stood still. I suppose I was breathing hard, or perhaps I was crying, for after a time I heard a listless voice that had never been listless before say, “Is that you?” I think the tone hurt me, for I made no answer, and then the voice said more anxiously “Is that you?” again. I thought it was the dead boy she was speaking to, and I said in a little lonely voice, “No, it's no' him, it's just me.” Then I heard a cry, and my mother turned in bed, and though it was dark I knew that she was holding out her arms.

Margaret Ogilvy in 1871

Barrie aged 9

‘After that I sat a great deal in her bed trying to make her forget him. … At first, they say, I was often jealous, stopping her fond memories with the cry, “Do you mind nothing about me?” but that did not last; its place was taken by an intense desire … to become so like him that even my mother should not see the difference, and many and artful were the questions I put to that end. Then I practised in secret, but after a whole week had passed I was still rather like myself. He had such a cheery way of whistling, she had told me, it had always brightened her at her work to hear him whistling, and when he whistled he stood with his legs apart, and his hands in the pockets of his knickerbockers. I decided to trust to this, so one day after I had learned his whistle (every boy of enterprise invents a whistle of his own) from boys who had been his comrades, I secretly put on a suit of his clothes … and thus disguised I slipped, unknown to the others, into my mother's room. Quaking, I doubt not, yet so pleased, I stood still until she saw me, and then—how it must have hurt her! “Listen!” I cried in a glow of triumph, and I stretched my legs wide apart and plunged my hands into the pockets of my knickerbockers, and began to whistle.

‘She lived twenty-nine years after his death … But I had not made her forget the bit of her that was dead; in those nine-and-twenty years he was not removed one day farther from her. Many a time she fell asleep speaking to him, and even while she slept her lips moved and she smiled as if he had come back to her, and when she woke he might vanish so suddenly that she started up bewildered and looked about her, and then said slowly, “My David's dead!” or perhaps he remained long enough to whisper why he must leave her now, and then she lay silent with filmy eyes. When I became a man … he was still a boy of thirteen.’

If Margaret Ogilvy drew a measure of comfort from the notion that David, in dying a boy, would remain a boy for ever, Barrie drew inspiration. It would be another thirty-three years before that inspiration emerged in the shape of Peter Pan, but here was the germ, rooted in his mind and soul from the age of six.

When not acting out the role of his dead brother, Barrie would invent other parts for himself. Some were performed in amateur theatricals in his mother's wash-house; others in real life:

‘When I was a very small boy, another as small was woeful because he could not join in our rough play lest he damaged the “mourning blacks” in which he was attired. So I nobly exchanged clothing with him for an hour, and in mine he disported forgetfully while I sat on a stone in his and lamented with tears, though I knew not for whom.’2 It was this same vicarious curiosity, this ‘devouring desire to try on other folk's feelings as if they were so many suits of clothes’,3 that led the young James Barrie to question his mother about her own girlhood. ‘Those innumerable talks with her made her youth as vivid to me as my own, and so much more quaint, for, to a child, the oddest of things, and the most richly coloured picture-book, is that his mother was once a child also.’ Margaret Ogilvy had a captive audience of one as she unfolded the picture-book of her own childhood: ‘She was eight when her mother's death made her mistress of the house and mother to her little brother, and from that time she scrubbed and mended and baked and sewed, … then [rushed] out in a fit of childishness to play dumps or palaulays with others of her age.’

A hand-loom weaver. The bunches of thread above the loom were known as ‘thrums’, which Barrie later adopted as his pseudonym for Kirriemuir

The story of Margaret Ogilvy's childhood expanded into other stories, told to her as a small girl: tales of the weaving community before the Industrial Revolution, of a Scotland long vanished and coloured by her memory. Many of these stories concerned the Auld Lichts, or Old Lights, a religious sect to which Margaret Ogilvy had belonged before her marriage. These tales, or Idylls, never failed to fire Barrie's imagination, and were, at a later date, to provide him with much of the source material for his articles and ‘Thrums’ novels. But it was the image of the substitute mother that was to take the deepest root: the memory of his own mother as a little girl, refashioned and remoulded into numerous heroines, epitomized as Wendy mothering the Lost Boys and Peter Pan in the Neverland. In Margaret Ogilvy, Barrie admitted with pride that ‘I soon grow tired of writing tales unless I can see a little girl, of whom my mother has told me, wandering confidently through the pages. Such a grip has her memory of her girlhood had upon me since I was a boy of six.’

Barrie's father, David Barrie, in about 1871

Barrie's sense of rejection and inferiority, suffered while in the shadow of David, was largely dispelled by his younger sister Maggie. She worshipped him, and her unswerving loyalty and devotion helped to restore in him a measure of self-confidence. Barrie's father, on the other hand, appears to have had little influence on his son's character and development. He is scarcely mentioned in any of Barrie's autobiographical writings, beyond a cursory reference to him in Margaret Ogilvy as ‘a man I am very proud to be able to call my father’, and it was left to his mother to fire the boy with an enthusiasm for literature:

‘We read many books together when I was a boy, “Robinson Crusoe” being the first (and the second), and the “Arabian Nights” should have been the next, for we got it out of the library (a penny for three days), but on discovering that they were nights when we had paid for knights we sent that volume packing, and I have curled my lips at it ever since. … Besides reading every book we could hire or borrow I also bought one now and again, and while buying (it was the occupation of weeks) I read, standing at the counter, most of the other books in the shop, which is perhaps the most exquisite way of reading.’

Barrie also subscribed to various ‘Penny Dreadfuls’—the forerunners of adventure comics—which were, like the later Neverland, ‘not large and sprawly … with tedious distances between one adventure and another, but nicely crammed’.4 In addition to the staple diet of blood and thunder, pirates and desert islands, the penny comics contained serial characters, including a young girl who sold water-cress and bore a striking resemblance to ‘that little girl, of whom my mother has told me’—the young Margaret Ogilvy:

‘This romantic little creature took such hold of my imagination that I cannot eat water-cress even now without emotion. I lay in bed wondering what she would be up to in the next number; I have lost trout because when they nibbled my mind was wandering with her; my early life was embittered by her not arriving regularly on the first of the month. I know not whether it was owing to her loitering on the way one month to an extent flesh and blood could not bear, or because we had exhausted the penny library, but on a day I conceived a glorious idea, or it was put into my head by my mother, then desirous of making progress with her new clouty hearthrug. The notion was nothing short of this, why should I not write the tales myself? I did write them—in the garret—but they by no means helped her to get on with her work, for when I finished a chapter I bounded downstairs to read it to her, and so short were the chapters, so ready was the pen, that I was back with the new manuscript before another clout had been added to the rug. … They were all tales of adventure (happiest is he who writes of adventure), no characters were allowed within if I knew their like in the flesh, the scene lay in unknown parts, desert islands, enchanted gardens, with knights (none of your nights) on black chargers, and round the first corner a lady selling water-cress. … From the day on which I first tasted blood in the garret my mind was made up; there could be no hum-dreadful-drum profession for me; literature was my game.’

Barrie aged 14 at Dumfries Academy

At the age of thirteen, Barrie ‘put the literary calling to bed for a time, having gone to a school where cricket and football were more esteemed’. His childhood was over. In Margaret Ogilvy he wrote:

‘The horror of my boyhood was that I knew a time would come when I also must give up the games, and how it was to be done I saw not (this agony still returns to me in dreams, when I catch myself playing marbles, and look on with cold displeasure); I felt that I must continue playing in secret.’

For a man seemingly convinced that the end of boyhood is the end of life worth living—‘nothing that happens after we are twelve matters very much’—it comes as something of a surprise to find that he recalled his five years spent at Dumfries Academy as being the happiest of his life. But Barrie had Found a Way; moreover, there was no need for him to play in secret, for on the very first day at school he met another boy who shared his own appetite for high adventure. The boy's name, according to the school register, was Stuart Gordon:

‘But that wasn't the name he was known by at school. He came up and asked me my name. I told him. It didn't seem to please him. He said, “I'll call you Sixteen String Jack.” I asked his name, and he said it was Dare Devil Dick.’5

Dare Devil Dick was one of the characters in the ‘Penny Dreadful’ comics so familiar to Barrie, a boy who had run away to sea and become a pirate. Gordon invited him to join his own pirate crew, and Barrie readily accepted:

‘…when the shades of night began to fall, certain young mathematicians shed their triangles, crept up walls and down trees, and became pirates in a sort of Odyssey that was long afterwards to become the play of Peter Pan. For our escapades in a certain Dumfries garden, which is enchanted land to me, were certainly the genesis of that nefarious work. We lived in the tree-tops, on coconuts attached thereto, and that were in a bad condition; we were buccaneers and I kept the log-book of our depredations, an eerie journal, without a triangle in it to mar the beauty of its page. That log-book I trust is no longer extant, though I should like one last look at it, to see if Captain Hook is in it.’⁶

A ‘certain Dumfries garden’: Moat Brae, by the river Nith

Although Barrie was soon to develop an almost legendary shyness and reserve, there were few signs of this during his years at Dumfries. He quickly became immersed in school life, playing football for the Dumfries Academy XI, taking part in monthly recitations, the Debating Society, fishing expeditions and frequent visits to the local theatre:

‘The theatre in Dumfries … was the first I ever entered; so it is the one I liked best. I entered many times in my school days, and always tried to get the end seat in the front row of the pit, which was also the front row of the house, as there were no stalls. I sat there to get rid of stage illusion and watch what the performers were doing in the wings. … Such doings led inevitably to the forming of a dramatic club at school for which I wrote my first play, “Bandelero the Bandit”. No page of it remains, but though it played for less than half an hour it contained all the most striking scenes that boy had lapped up from his corner seat, and had one character (played by same boy) who was a combination of his favourite characters in fiction.’7

An early piece of Barrie journalism, contributed to the Dumfries Academy's school magazine, ‘The Clown’, edited by Wellwood Anderson

In later life, Barrie often lamented that he had never written anything shocking, daring or harmful. His first dramatic effort, ‘Bandelero the Bandit’, was considered all of these by a clergyman who denounced it in the columns of a local newspaper as being a grossly immoral play. Barrie was, not unnaturally, delighted by the clergyman's attack, and he and his accomplice, Wellwood Anderson, wrote off to Sir Henry Irving and other theatrical personalities of the day, enlisting their support in the cause of the Dramatic Club. The splendour of the clergyman's vitriol, which ran to several columns, was only slightly marred by the newspaper's dramatic critic, who reviewed the play in more sober terms:

‘Two awful villains, Gamp and Benshaw, were characters in Barrie's play “Bandelero the Bandit”. They were no worse, and no better, than the average stage villain of the “penny plain and tuppence coloured” variety and were probably based on Deadwood Dick, Spring-Heeled Jack, a Fenimore Cooper pirate, or the cruel robbers of the Babes in the Wood. Presumably this was the “grossly immoral play” referred to by the accusing person.’⁸

Nevertheless Barrie had scored a hit, and the ensuing controversy, which was taken up by several London newspapers, turned him into a celebrity at school. At any rate among the boys. Girls, however, were another matter. Dumfries Academy was co-educational, and in his earlier days there Barrie had received a prize of special distinction: ‘It was awarded by the girls of the school by plebiscite, to the boy who had the sweetest smile in the school. The tragic thing was that my smile disappeared that day and has never been seen since.’⁹ But as he grew older, the girls turned their attentions and affections elsewhere. Barrie recorded his sense of failure in one of his early notebooks:¹⁰

— The boys write on walls, &c, name of boy & girl, coupling them together. As never did it to me I wrote my own with girl's name.

— Ashamed at being small enough to travel half ticket by rail.

At seventeen, Barrie was barely five foot—and had stopped growing. He had not yet begun to shave. He was still a boy. For the moment this did not greatly matter: there were plenty of other boys, even if they were a few years younger than himself. One in particular left a lasting impression: James McMillan, a ‘thin, frightened-looking boy, poorly clad and frail’,11 who was, like David, to attain the unattainable by dying young. A quarter of a century later, Barrie recalled McMillan in a speech given to the students at his old school:

‘He was the greatest boy that ever sat on the forms of the old Dumfries Academy. I don't mean merely as a scholar, though in scholarship he was of another world from the rest of us; so he shone, pale star that he was, when he went to Glasgow University and afterwards to Oxford, until—someone turned out that light. He was too poor, was that brave little adventurer. I think that explains it all. The other boys felt that there was something winged about him, just as I did. He couldn't play games, and yet we all accepted him as our wonder one. … What was it about James McMillan that has stayed with me for so many years, and can still touch me to the quick? I felt, when we were boys, that he was—a Presence, and I feel it still.’¹²

Barrie courted McMillan's friendship, and the two boys became comrades. Together they would go for long walks in the neighbouring countryside, seeking out their hero, Thomas Carlyle, or set out on expeditions where ‘we became backwoodsmen, and left our mark on what we agreed were primeval forests’.¹³ But their favourite haunt was a ruined keep up in the hills:

‘It [was] a spot heavy with romance, as indeed is all that favoured land. There we talked poetry, and fame, and the clash of arms and poor dead things said to escape back into the world for that horrid hour when day and night, their gaolers, are in the grip. … One day we wrote something about ourselves in cryptogram and hid it in a crevice in the ruin, agreeing to have another look for it when we were men. So when I was a man I dug for it and found it, having then quite forgotten what it said. But before putting it back I spelt it out. It gave our names and ages, and said that McMillan and I had begun to write a story of school life, “by Didymus”. … School life is not what a boy usually takes as the subject of his first book, and I think there was something rather pathetic in the choice. It was as if we knew already that the next best thing to being boys is to write about them. Some day, perhaps, that book will be finished, but I must practise for a long time on men first. Men are so much easier to write about than boys.’¹⁴

The ruined keep in the hills above Dumfries

Barrie's entry in a Querist's Album, given to him by Margaret Ogilvy for his 17th birthday. In The Greenwood Hat (1930) he recalled, ‘In my schooldays I wrote the most beautiful copperplate. … It went, I think, not gradually with over-writing, but suddenly, like my smile.’

In 1878, at the age of eighteen, Barrie left Dumfries Academy and returned home to Kirriemuir with the intention of becoming a writer. But his parents had other plans. Margaret Ogilvy impressed upon him that David would have gone to University, had he lived. Reluctantly, Barrie complied with his mother's wishes and matriculated at Edinburgh. However, his instincts were right. University was not the place for him, and it was a somewhat desolating experience in a city that held no family and few friends. A fellow student, Robert Galloway, later recalled him as being ‘exceedingly shy and diffident, and I do not remember ever to have seen him either enter or leave a classroom with any companion. … Nor did he, I think, connect himself with any of the debating societies of the College—at least I never saw him at any. Yet I remember him distinctly—a sallow-faced, round-shouldered, slight, somewhat delicate-looking figure, who quietly went in and out amongst us, attracting but little observation, but himself observing all and measuring up men and treasuring up impressions.’15

Barrie was indeed treasuring up impressions—in his notebook:

— Men can't get together without talking filth.

— He is very young looking—trial of his life that he is always thought a boy.

— Far finer and nobler things in the world than loving a girl & getting her.

— Greatest horror—dream I am married—wake up shrieking.

— Grow up & have to give up marbles—awful thought.

— Want to stop everybody in street & ask if they've read ‘The Coral Island’. Feel sorry for if not.

— Want to go into shop & buy brooch for child, but don't dare.

If Dumfries had been the happiest period of his life, Edinburgh was the loneliest. He was a man among men; and yet he was not a man. As he later wrote vicariously in The Wedding Guest, ‘I lived too much in my art, and my solitary thoughts. I shrank from men's free talk of women, and yet when I left them it was to brood of the things they spoke of; theirs was a healthier life than mine.’ His attempts to cultivate the opposite sex met with similar failure. Mocking himself (in the third person, as ‘Anon’), Barrie afterwards wrote:

‘Did Anon ever hear ladies discussing him for the briefest moment in a train or anywhere else? Alas, his trouble was that ladies did not discuss him. … I remember (I should think I do) that it was his habit to get into corners. In time the jades put this down to a shrinking modesty, but that was a mistake; it was all owing to a profound dejection about his want of allure. They were right, those ladies in the train; “quite harmless” summed him up, however he may have writhed (or be writhing still). … If they would dislike him or fear him it would be something, but it is crushing to be just harmless. … In short, Mr Anon, that man of secret sorrows, found it useless to love, because, after a look at the length and breadth of him, none would listen.’¹⁶

None, that is, except children. His brother Alexander had married in 1877, and Barrie now had two young nieces, whom he visited whenever he could. They were not puzzled by him, as many of his contemporaries were puzzled, and while he was in their company, he ceased to be a puzzle to himself. He felt safe with them, alive with them, at one with them.

In 1882, Barrie was able to return home to Kirriemuir with the letters M.A. after his name. But if the intervening years at University had brought about an increasing shyness, they had not dimmed his determination to become a writer:

‘It was not highly thought of by those who wished me well. I remember being asked by two maiden ladies, about the time I left the university, what I was to be, and when I replied brazenly, “An author”, they flung up their hands, and one exclaimed reproachfully, “And you an M.A.!” My mother's views at first were not dissimilar; for long she took mine jestingly as something I would grow out of, and afterwards they hurt her so that I tried to give them up. To be a Minister—that she thought was among the fairest prospects.’

Barrie as an M.A.

It was Barrie's sister, Jane Ann, who was instrumental in securing him his first literary opportunity. She saw an advertisement in The Scotsman for a leader-writer on an English provincial newspaper, the Nottingham Journal, and showed it to him. He duly applied, and was offered the post at the seemingly enormous salary of three pounds a week.

One of Barrie's tasks in preparing for his M.A. at Edinburgh had been to write essays on topics of surpassing boredom and make them both convincing and readable. His duties on the Nottingham Journal required him to perform a similar feat with the humdrum subjects handed him by his Editor. Whether it was ‘English Blank Verse’, ‘Roses’, ‘The Leafy Month’ or ‘My Umbrella’, Barrie's approach was invariably the same: enter the mind of another for the space of a column, adopt the standpoint least expected by the reader, then proceed to inject into the affair as much cynicism and laconic humour as his spirits could muster. These techniques were soon to become his literary hallmarks, though presently they would be tempered, and in the opinions of some marred, by two other idiosyncratic characteristics: sentiment and ‘whimsy’. Their absence from his writing at this stage was no accident: Barrie himself was only too well aware of the sentimental streak in him, and his intellect fought against it.

Not all of his articles were on topics beyond his sphere of interest. Cricket was already making an appearance; so too were the theatre and amateur theatricals. A third subject had also found its way into the anonymous columns of the Nottingham Journal: boys. His first article on the breed was a typical piece of cynicism, entitled ‘Pretty Boys’:

‘Pretty boys are pretty in all circumstances, and this one would look as exquisitely delightful on the floor as when genteelly standing, in his nice little velvet suit with his sweet back to the fireplace, but think of the horror and indignation of his proud and loving mother. … When you leave the house, the pretty boy glides like a ray of black sunshine to the door and … holds up his pretty mouth for a pretty kiss. If you wish to continue on visiting terms with his mother you do everything he wishes; if you are determined to remain a man whatever be the consequences, you slap his pretty cheeks very hard while the mother gazes aghast and the father looks another way, admiring your pluck and wishing he had the courage to go and do likewise. It would, on the whole, be a mistake to kill the child outright, because, for one thing, he may grow out of his velvet suit in time and insist on having his hair cut, and, again, the blame does not attach to him nearly so much as to his mother.’17

Strath View, the Barries' home in Kirriemuir from 1872

It would appear that Barrie's provincial readers were not altogether amused by his sense of humour: at any rate his employment on the newspaper was short-lived, and by the end of October 1884 he was back in Kirriemuir—without a job. He had never regarded Nottingham as anything more than a stepping-stone towards Fleet Street journalism, and he now bombarded various London publications with unsolicited articles. One of these, entitled ‘An Auld Licht Community’, was based on some of Margaret Ogilvy's anecdotes about the Kirriemuir of her childhood. The St James's Gazette published it on November 17th, 1884, and Barrie quickly followed it with another article on a different theme, having assumed he had exhausted the subject of the Auld Lichts. It came back by return of post with a reject slip attached; the Gazette's editor, Frederick Greenwood, softened the blow by adding a note of his own: ‘I liked that Scotch thing—any more of those?’¹⁸ Barrie consulted his mother, and soon ‘An Auld Licht Funeral’ was on its way to Greenwood, followed in rapid succession by ‘An Auld Licht Courtship’, ‘An Auld Licht Scandal’ and ‘An Auld Licht Wedding’. Spurred on by Greenwood's enthusiasm, Barrie decided it was time to make his assault on London:

Auld Licht gossips

‘I wrote and asked the editor [Greenwood] if I should come to London, and he said No, so I went, laden with charges from my mother to walk in the middle of the street, … never to venture forth after sunset, and always to lock up everything (I who could never lock up anything, except my heart in company). … London, which she never saw, was to her a monster that licked up country youths as they stepped from the train; there were the garrets in which they sat abject, and the park seats where they passed the night. … I daresay that when night comes, this Hyde Park which is so gay by day, is haunted by the ghosts of many mothers, who run, wild-eyed, from seat to seat, looking for their sons.’

‘Let us survey our hero’: Barrie in 1886, aged 26

Before leaving Kirriemuir, Barrie took the precaution of sending Greenwood another offering, though it was a somewhat risky venture, since the article, ‘The Rooks Begin to Build’, had nothing to do with his mother's Auld Licht stories. Without waiting for a response, he packed his all-purpose university box and caught the night train to London. In The Greenwood Hat, Barrie described himself in hindsight:

‘Let us survey our hero as he sits awake in a corner of his railway compartment. … He is gauche and inarticulate, and as thin as a pencil but not so long (and is going to be thinner). Expression, an uncomfortable blank. … Manners, full of nails like his boots. Ladies have decided that he is of no account, and he already knows this and has private anguish thereanent. Hates sentiment as a slave may hate his master. Only asset, except a pecuniary one, is a certain grimness about not being beaten. … The baggage of our hero … consisted of a powerful square wooden box. … Having reached London for the great adventure, he was hauling this box to the left-luggage shed at St. Pancras when his eyes fell upon what was to him the most warming sight in literature. It was the placard of the “St. James's Gazette” of the previous evening with printed on it in noble letters “The Rooks begin to Build”. In other dazzling words, having been a minute or so in London, he had made two guineas. Forty-five years having elapsed since this event, the romance of my life, I myself can now regard it with comparative calm, but I still hold that it was almost as if Greenwood had met me at the station.’