Annotated Peter Pan

There was another light in the room now, a thousand times brighter 2 than the night-lights, and in the time we have taken to say this, it has been in all the drawers in the nursery, looking for Peter’s shadow, rummaged the wardrobe and turned every pocket inside out. It was not really a light; it made this light by flashing about so quickly, but when it came to rest for a second you saw it was a fairy,³ no longer than your hand, but still growing. It was a girl called Tinker Bell⁴ exquisitely gowned in a skeleton leaf, cut low and square, through which her figure could be seen to the best advantage. She was slightly inclined to embonpoint.⁵

A moment after the fairy’s entrance the window was blown open by the breathing of the little stars, and Peter dropped in. He had carried Tinker Bell part of the way, and his hand was still messy with the fairy dust.

“Tinker Bell,” he called softly, after making sure that the children were asleep, “Tink, where are you?” She was in a jug for the moment, and liking it extremely; she had never been in a jug before.

“Oh, do come out of that jug, and tell me, do you know where they put my shadow?”

The loveliest tinkle as of golden bells answered him. It is the fairy language. You ordinary children can never hear it, but if you were to hear it you would know that you had heard it once before.

Tink said that the shadow was in the big box. She meant the chest of drawers, and Peter jumped at the drawers, scattering their contents to the floor with both hands, as kings toss ha’pence⁶ to the crowd. In a moment he had recovered his shadow, and in his delight he forgot that he had shut Tinker Bell up in the drawer.⁷

If he thought at all, but I don’t believe he ever thought, it was that he and his shadow, when brought near each other, would join like drops of water; and when they did not he was appalled. He tried to stick it on with soap from the bathroom, but that also failed. A shudder passed through Peter, and he sat on the floor and cried.

His sobs woke Wendy, and she sat up in bed. She was not alarmed to see a stranger crying on the nursery floor; she was only pleasantly interested.

Peter could be exceedingly polite also, having learned the grand manner at fairy ceremonies, and he rose and bowed to her beautifully. She was much pleased, and bowed beautifully to him from the bed.

“Wendy Moira Angela Darling,”⁸ she replied with some satisfaction. “What is your name?”

She was already sure that he must be Peter, but it did seem a comparatively short name.

“Yes,” he said rather sharply. He felt for the first time that it was a shortish name.

“Second to the right,”⁹ said Peter, “and then straight on till morning.”

Peter had a sinking. For the first time he felt that perhaps it was a funny address.

“I mean,” Wendy said nicely, remembering that she was hostess, “is that what they put on the letters?”

“Don’t have a mother,” he said. Not only had he no mother, but he had not the slightest desire to have one. He thought them very overrated persons. Wendy, however, felt at once that she was in the presence of a tragedy.

“O Peter, no wonder you were crying,” she said, and got out of bed and ran to him.

“I wasn’t crying about mothers,” he said rather indignantly. “I was crying because I can’t get my shadow to stick on. Besides, I wasn’t crying.”

Then Wendy saw the shadow on the floor, looking so draggled,¹⁰ and she was frightfully sorry for Peter. “How awful!” she said, but she could not help smiling when she saw that he had been trying to stick it on with soap. How exactly like a boy!

Fortunately she knew at once what to do. “It must be sewn on,” she said, just a little patronizingly.

But she was exulting in his ignorance. “I shall sew it on for you, my little man,” she said, though he was tall as herself, and she got out her housewife,¹¹ and sewed the shadow on to Peter’s foot.

“Oh, I shan’t cry,” said Peter, who was already of the opinion that he had never cried in his life. And he clenched his teeth and did not cry; and soon his shadow was behaving properly, though still a little creased.

“Perhaps I should have ironed it,” Wendy said thoughtfully; but Peter, boylike, was indifferent to appearances, and he was now jumping about in the wildest glee. Alas, he had already forgotten that he owed his bliss to Wendy. He thought he had attached the shadow himself. “How clever I am!” he crowed rapturously,¹² “oh, the cleverness of me!”

It is humiliating to have to confess that this conceit of Peter was one of his most fascinating qualities. To put it with brutal frankness, there never was a cockier boy.

But for the moment Wendy was shocked. “You conceit,” she exclaimed, with frightful sarcasm; “of course I did nothing!”

“A little!” she replied with hauteur;¹³ “if I am no use I can at least withdraw”; and she sprang in the most dignified way into bed and covered her face with the blankets.

To induce her to look up he pretended to be going away, and when this failed he sat on the end of the bed and tapped her gently with his foot. “Wendy,” he said, “don’t withdraw. I can’t help crowing, Wendy, when I’m pleased with myself.” Still she would not look up, though she was listening eagerly. “Wendy,” he continued, in a voice that no woman has ever yet been able to resist, “Wendy, one girl is more use than twenty boys.”

Now Wendy was every inch a woman, though there were not very many inches, and she peeped out of the bedclothes.

“I think it’s perfectly sweet of you,” she declared, “and I’ll get up again”; and she sat with him on the side of the bed. She also said she would give him a kiss if he liked, but Peter did not know what she meant, and he held out his hand expectantly.

“I shall know when you give it to me,” he replied stiffly; and not to hurt his feelings she gave him a thimble.¹⁴

“Now,” said he, “shall I give you a kiss?” and she replied with a slight primness, “If you please.” She made herself rather cheap by inclining her face toward him, but he merely dropped an acorn button into her hand; so she slowly returned her face to where it had been before, and said nicely that she would wear his kiss on the chain round her neck. It was lucky that she did put it on that chain, for it was afterwards to save her life.

When people in our set are introduced, it is customary for them to ask each other’s age, and so Wendy, who always liked to do the correct thing, asked Peter how old he was. It was not really a happy question to ask him; it was like an examination paper that asks grammar, when what you want to be asked is Kings of England.

“I don’t know,” he replied uneasily, “but I am quite young.” He really knew nothing about it; he had merely suspicions, but he said at a venture, “Wendy, I ran away the day I was born.”

Wendy was quite surprised, but interested; and she indi cated in the charming drawing-room manner, by a touch on her night-gown, that he could sit nearer her.

“It was because I heard father and mother,” he explained in a low voice, “talking about what I was to be when I became a man.” He was extraordinarily agitated now. “I don’t want ever to be a man,” he said with passion. “I want always to be a little boy and to have fun. So I ran away to Kensington Gardens and lived a long long time among the fairies.”

She gave him a look of the most intense admiration, and he thought it was because he had run away, but it was really because he knew fairies. Wendy had lived such a home life that to know fairies struck her as quite delightful. She poured out questions about them, to his surprise, for they were rather a nuisance to him, getting in his way and so on, and indeed he sometimes had to give them a hiding. Still, he liked them on the whole, and he told her about the beginning of fairies.

“You see, Wendy, when the first baby laughed for the first time, its laugh broke into a thousand pieces,¹⁵ and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies.”

“And so,” he went on good-naturedly, “there ought to be one fairy for every boy and girl.”

“No. You see children know such a lot now, they soon don’t believe in fairies,¹⁶ and every time a child says, ‘I don’t believe in fairies,’ there is a fairy somewhere that falls down dead.”

Really, he thought they had now talked enough about fairies, and it struck him that Tinker Bell was keeping very quiet. “I can’t think where she has gone to,” he said, rising, and he called Tink by name. Wendy’s heart went flutter with a sudden thrill.

“Peter,” she cried, clutching him, “you don’t mean to tell me that there is a fairy in this room!”¹⁷

“She was here just now,” he said a little impatiently. “You don’t hear her, do you?” and they both listened.

The sound came from the chest of drawers, and Peter made a merry face. No one could ever look quite so merry as Peter, and the loveliest of gurgles was his laugh. He had his first laugh still.

“Wendy,” he whispered gleefully, “I do believe I shut her up in the drawer!”

He let poor Tink out of the drawer, and she flew about the nursery screaming with fury. “You shouldn’t say such things,” Peter retorted. “Of course I’m very sorry, but how could I know you were in the drawer?”

Wendy was not listening to him. “O Peter,” she cried, “if she would only stand still and let me see her!”

“They hardly ever stand still,” he said, but for one moment Wendy saw the romantic figure come to rest on the cuckoo clock. “O the lovely!” she cried, though Tink’s face was still distorted with passion.

“Tink,” said Peter amiably, “this lady says she wishes you were her fairy.”

He had to translate. “She is not very polite. She says you are a great ugly girl, and that she is my fairy.”

He tried to argue with Tink. “You know you can’t be my fairy, Tink, because I am a gentleman and you are a lady.”

To this Tink replied in these words, “You silly ass,” and disappeared into the bathroom. “She is quite a common fairy,” Peter explained apologetically, “she is called Tinker Bell because she mends the pots and kettles.”

They were together in the armchair by this time, and Wendy plied him with more questions.

“They are the children who fall out of their perambulators when the nurse is looking the other way. If they are not claimed in seven days they are sent far away to the Neverland to defray expenses. I’m captain.”

“Yes,” said cunning Peter, “but we are rather lonely. You see we have no female companionship.”

This flattered Wendy immensely. “I think,” she said, “it is perfectly lovely the way you talk about girls; John there just despises us.”

For reply Peter rose and kicked John out of bed, blankets and all; one kick. This seemed to Wendy rather forward for a first meeting, and she told him with spirit that he was not captain in her house. However, John continued to sleep so placidly on the floor that she allowed him to remain there. “And I know you meant to be kind,” she said, relenting, “so you may give me a kiss.”

For the moment she had forgotten his ignorance about kisses. “I thought you would want it back,” he said a little bitterly, and offered to return her the thimble.

“Oh dear,” said the nice Wendy, “I don’t mean a kiss, I mean a thimble.”

Peter thimbled her, and almost immediately she screeched. “What is it, Wendy?”

Again Tink replied, “You silly ass.” Peter could not understand why, but Wendy understood; and she was just slightly disappointed when he admitted that he came to the nursery window not to see her but to listen to stories.¹⁹

“You see, I don’t know any stories. None of the lost boys knows any stories.”

“Do you know,” Peter asked, “why swallows build in the eaves of houses? It is to listen to the stories.²⁰ O Wendy, your mother was telling you such a lovely story.”

“Peter,” said Wendy excitedly, “that was Cinderella,²¹ and he found her, and they lived happily ever after.”²²

Peter was so glad that he rose from the floor, where they had been sitting, and hurried to the window. “Where are you going?” she cried with misgiving.

Those were her precise words, so there can be no denying that it was she who first tempted him.²³

He came back, and there was a greedy look in his eyes now which ought to have alarmed her,²⁴ but did not.

“Oh, the stories I could tell to the boys!” she cried, and then Peter gripped her and began to draw her toward the window.

Of course she was very pleased to be asked, but she said, “Oh dear, I can’t. Think of mummy! Besides, I can’t fly.”

“Wendy, Wendy, when you are sleeping in your silly bed you might be flying about with me saying funny things to the stars.”

He had become frightfully cunning. “Wendy,” he said, “how we should all respect you.”

She was wriggling her body in distress. It was quite as if she were trying to remain on the nursery floor.

“And you could darn our clothes, and make pockets for us. None of us has any pockets.”

How could she resist. “Of course it’s awfully fascinating!” she cried. “Peter, would you teach John and Michael to fly too?”

“If you like,” he said indifferently; and she ran to John and Michael and shook them. “Wake up,” she cried, “Peter Pan has come and he is to teach us to fly.”

John rubbed his eyes. “Then I shall get up,” he said. Of course he was on the floor already. “Hallo,” he said, “I am up!”

Michael was up by this time also, looking as sharp as a knife with six blades and a saw, but Peter suddenly signed silence. Their faces assumed the awful craftiness of children listening for sounds from the grown-up world. All was as still as salt. Then everything was right. No, stop! Everything was wrong. Nana, who had been barking distressfully all the evening, was quiet now. It was her silence they had heard.

“Out with the light! Hide! Quick!” cried John, taking command for the only time throughout the whole adventure. And thus when Liza entered, holding Nana, the nursery seemed quite its old self, very dark; and you would have sworn you heard its three wicked inmates breathing angelically²⁶ as they slept. They were really doing it artfully from behind the window curtains.

Liza was in a bad temper, for she was mixing the Christmas puddings in the kitchen, and had been drawn away from them, with a raisin still on her cheek, by Nana’s absurd suspicions. She thought the best way of getting a little quiet was to take Nana to the nursery for a moment, but in custody of course.

“There, you suspicious brute,” she said, not sorry that Nana was in disgrace, “they are perfectly safe, aren’t they? Every one of the little angels sound asleep in bed. Listen to their gentle breathing.”

Here Michael, encouraged by his success, breathed so loudly that they were nearly detected. Nana knew that kind of breathing, and she tried to drag herself out of Liza’s clutches.

But Liza was dense. “No more of it, Nana,” she said sternly, pulling her out of the room. “I warn you if you bark again I shall go straight for master and missus and bring them home from the party, and then, oh, won’t master whip you, just.”

She tied the unhappy dog up again, but do you think Nana ceased to bark? Bring master and missus home from the party! Why, that was just what she wanted. Do you think she cared whether she was whipped so long as her charges were safe? Unfortunately Liza returned to her puddings, and Nana, seeing that no help would come from her, strained and strained at the chain until at last she broke it. In another moment she had burst into the dining-room of 27 and flung up her paws to heaven, her most expressive way of making a communication. Mr. and Mrs. Darling knew at once that something terrible was happening in their nursery, and without a good-bye to their hostess they rushed into the street.

But it was now ten minutes since three scoundrels had been breathing behind the curtains; and Peter Pan can do a great deal in ten minutes.

“It’s all right,” John announced, emerging from his hiding-place. “I say, Peter, can you really fly?”

Instead of troubling to answer him Peter flew round the room, taking the mantelpiece on the way.

“Yes, I’m sweet, oh, I am sweet!” said Peter, forgetting his manners again.

It looked delightfully easy, and they tried it first from the floor and then from the beds, but they always went down instead of up.

“I say, how do you do it?” asked John, rubbing his knee. He was quite a practical boy.

“You just think lovely wonderful thoughts,”²⁸ Peter explained, “and they lift you up in the air.”

“You’re so nippy at it,” John said; “couldn’t you do it very slowly once?”

Peter did it both slowly and quickly. “I’ve got it now, Wendy!” cried John, but soon he found he had not. Not one of them could fly an inch, though even Michael was in words of two syllables, and Peter did not know A from Z.

Of course Peter had been trifling with them, for no one can fly unless the fairy dust has been blown on him. Fortunately, as we have mentioned, one of his hands was messy with it, and he blew some on each of them, with the most superb results.

They were all on their beds, and gallant Michael let go first. He did not quite mean to let go, but he did it, and immediately he was borne across the room.

Peter and the children fly away. (Peter Pan and Wendy by J. M. Barrie, Retold for the Nursery by May Byron. Illustrated by Kathleen Atkins)

They were not nearly so elegant as Peter, they could not help kicking a little, but their heads were bobbing against the ceiling, and there is almost nothing so delicious as that. Peter gave Wendy a hand at first, but had to desist, Tink was so indignant.

Michael was ready: he wanted to see how long it took him to do a billion miles. But Wendy hesitated.

It was just at this moment that Mr. and Mrs. Darling hurried with Nana out of 27. They ran into the middle of the street to look up at the nursery window; and, yes, it was still shut, but the room was ablaze with light, and most heart-gripping sight of all, they could see in shadow on the curtain three little figures in night attire circling round and round, not on the floor but in the air.

In a tremble they opened the street door. Mr. Darling would have rushed upstairs, but Mrs. Darling signed to him to go softly. She even tried to make her heart go softly.

Will they reach the nursery in time?³¹ If so, how delightful for them, and we shall all breathe a sigh of relief, but there will be no story. On the other hand, if they are not in time, I solemnly promise that it will all come right in the end.

They would have reached the nursery in time had it not been that the little stars were watching them. Once again the stars blew the window open, and that smallest star of all called out:

Then Peter knew that there was not a moment to lose. “Come,” he cried imperiously, and soared out at once into the night, followed by John and Michael and Wendy.

Mr. and Mrs. Darling and Nana rushed into the nursery too late. The birds were flown.³³

1. Come Away, Come Away! The title echoes W. B. Yeats’s 1889 poem “The Stolen Child”: “Come away, O human child! / To the waters and the wild / With a faery, hand in hand.” Like the Darling children, the child of Yeats’s poem is escorted by a fairy to an island far away from the ordinary world, “more full of weeping than you can understand.”

2. a thousand times brighter. Powerful light effects are found in Neverland, and Tinker Bell is one of the creatures who provide unearthly illumination, somewhat dimmer than the “million golden arrows” that point the way to Neverland. Colorful radiance is the hallmark of many fantasy worlds in children’s literature—Oz and Narnia are prime examples.

3. you saw it was a fairy. Barrie wrote of Tinker Bell’s origins as a creature made up during the days spent with the Llewelyn Davies boys at Black Lake: “It was one evening when we climbed the wood carrying [Michael] to show him what the trail was like by twilight. As our lanterns twinkled among the leaves, he saw a twinkle stand still for a moment and he waved his foot gaily to it, thus creating Tink.”

Fairyland is usually represented in folklore as a parallel universe, one that can be entered by stepping into a fairy ring or interrupting a fairy dance. By invoking fairies and introducing Tinker Bell as an inhabitant of Neverland, Barrie alludes to two different traditional stories, one about fairies as dethroned gods who spend their time fighting and feasting on a “blessed isle” (rather like the lost boys), the other about mortals who are taken away to fairyland to care for lost children (rather like Wendy). In Celtic mythology, the “blessed isle”—also known as the “Isles of the Blest,” “The Fortunate Isle,” “The Isle of Content,” and the “Land of the Young” (the site of perpetual youth and springtime)—is also the Land of the Dead. There, eternal youth lives in a perpetual springtime. Access was often through burial mounds guarded by faery folk. Peter Pan does not grow up and remains young forever in part perhaps because he belongs to the dead.

Barrie was living in an era with a euphoric faith in fairies and elfin folk—as well as in demons who spirit children away from the human world into utopian realms where pain and suffering are banished and beauty reigns supreme. He was no doubt familiar with Goethe’s poem “Erl-King,” Browning’s “Pied Piper of Hamelin: A Child’s Story,” and George MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind, all of which express profound anxieties about fairies and demons with power over children.

Victorian culture was open to the sorcery of elfin people, and fairies appeared often in the art, literature, and plays of the time. A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest were staged frequently and inspired the nineteenth-century rage for fairy paintings and even the fashion for fairy wallpapers designed for bedrooms and nurseries. The cult of fairy lore served both as a form of protest against the rise of industrialism and worship of material wealth and as a nostalgic gesture toward the enchantments of rural life and childhood. It had a complicated, mysterious, and sensually stirring dimension but could also slide easily into the artless and banal.

4. a girl called Tinker Bell. Tinker Bell was originally a fairy-tinker, a creature who mended pots and pans. In Scottish parlance, the word tinker was used to describe Gypsies who engaged in service trades such as knife sharpening and mending household items. Like the fairies in Peter Pan, they were perceived in Edwardian times as a flighty, nomadic folk, characterized by lawlessness and childlike behavior. The Oxford English Dictionary connects “tinker” with Gypsies in Scottish and Irish usages of the term. In the original manuscript to the play, Tinker Bell was called Tippy or Tippytoe.

5. embonpoint. From the French, en bon point, meaning “in good condition,” and used in English to describe someone who is plump, chubby, or buxom.

6. ha’pence. A ha’pence is a small coin, or halfpenny. If Mrs. Darling tidies up the metaphorical chests of drawers that are the children’s minds, Peter Pan flings the contents of the real chest of drawers in the nursery to the ground, creating disorderly clutter.

7. he forgot that he had shut Tinker Bell up in the drawer. Peter’s forgetfulness is part of his identity as the puer aeternus, the boy who will never grow up. He is always forgetting things, and, once Wendy returns to No. 14 in London, he begins to lose his memory of the lost boys, Hook, Tinker Bell, and, presumably, Wendy as well.

8. “Wendy Moira Angela Darling.” The name Moira has two competing histories, one connecting it with the Greek word for fate or destiny, the other linking it to the British Isles, where it is a variant of Mary and literally means “bitter.”

9. “Second to the right.” When Robert Louis Stevenson invited Barrie to visit him on Upolu, one of the Samoan islands, he provided the following instructions: “You take the boat to San Francisco, and then my place is second to the left.” Stevenson had written repeatedly to Barrie, encouraging him to make the journey: “We would have some grand cracks! Come, it will broaden your mind and be the making of me” (Chaney 123). Stevenson’s poor health (he suffered from tuberculosis) had led to his self-imposed exile on the remote South Sea Island, and he died there in 1894. Vailima, Stevenson’s estate, was, for Barrie, “the one spot on earth I had any craving to visit” (Margaret Ogilvy, 148), but Stevenson’s death put an end to his “scheme for travel.” Barrie worked hard to secure Stevenson’s posthumous literary reputation and sought to erect a monument to his memory, despite some fierce local opposition to honoring the author of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Master of Ballantrae, in addition to Treasure Island. In Margaret Ogilvy, Barrie described how Stevenson was “the spirit of boyhood tugging at the skirts of this old world of ours and compelling it to come back and play” (146).

11. housewife. The “sewing housewife,” “housewife sewing kit,” or just plain “housewife” was a kit containing needles, thread, scissors, and other items related to mending. It was part of the standard issue for British soldiers until after World War II.

12. he crowed rapturously. Peter’s narcissistic glee is expressed repeatedly through crowing. The term “cocky” used to describe him had its origins in the mid-nineteenth century and was used by Charles Kingsley in The Water-babies (1863): “He looked the cockiest little man of all little men.” Crowing and crying are what Peter uses to express emotional extremes, and they remind us of his origins in a god with a double nature as beast and human. Peter crows to signal his return to Neverland, to mark triumphs over his enemies, and sometimes, as here, just to signal that he is “pleased” with himself.

13. she replied with hauteur. Wendy speaks to Peter in a condescending way, answering his cockiness with her own arrogance, or hauteur, a word derived from the French word haut, meaning tall.

14. she gave him a thimble. Young audiences participated in the early productions, not just by clapping their hands to save Tinker Bell but also by throwing thimbles onstage to Peter. A twelve-year-old girl describes her efforts: “I nearly shouted myself hoarse. I tried to throw a thimble onto the stage. I don’t know whether it arrived, because there were such a lot of other thimbles thrown” (Gubar 200). For the remainder of the story, Peter will mistake thimbles for kisses.

15. “its laugh broke into a thousand pieces.” In Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, the narrator declares that fairies never do “anything useful.” In language reminiscent of Peter’s words, he describes the origins of fairies: “When the first baby laughed for the first time, his laugh broke into a million pieces, and they all went skipping about. That was the beginning of fairies. They look tremendously busy, you know, as if they had not a moment to spare, but if you were to ask them what they are doing, they could not tell you in the least.”

16. “they soon don’t believe in fairies.” On several occasions, Barrie mourned the disappearance of the idyllic pastoral life of his boyhood in Kirriemuir, a place that had been sustained by faith, not only in matters religious but also in fairies and sprites. By 1922, when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was rejoicing over the case of two girls who had reportedly seen and photographed fairies in a glade behind their home in the village of Cottingley, in West Yorkshire, he could be dismissed as a mystic and kook. The physician who had written the Sherlock Holmes stories rhapsodized about the possibility that the world could be reenchanted through “well-authenticated” cases of fairy presences: “The thought of them, even when unseen, will add a charm to every brook and valley and give romantic interest to every country walk. The recognition of their existence will jolt the material twentieth-century mind out of its heavy ruts in the mud, and will make it admit that there is a glamour and a mystery to life” (Conan Doyle 32). Barrie’s secretary, Cynthia Asquith, describes Conan Doyle’s visit to Barrie’s summer residence and how relieved she was that the famous author did not put the question “Do you believe in fairies?” to Barrie (Asquith, Portrait 172). The spiritualist turn in Conan Doyle’s life and his faith in the five Cottingley fairies (the photographs were revealed to be a hoax) were triggered by a deep depression following the deaths of his wife, his son, a brother, and two nephews.

17. “you don’t mean to tell me that there is a fairy in this room!” In traditional lore, fairies are associated with the practice of stealing human children, and Peter and Tinker Bell might be seen as co-conspirators as they enter the Darling home.

18. “the lost boys.” Peter Pan is, in some ways, a compensatory dream child for all the boys who have fallen out of perambulators. He was once a dead baby, but he is also a fantasy child, as J. M. Barrie acknowledged, in an autograph addition for the second draft of the ending of the 1908 play: “I think now—that Peter is only a sort of dead baby—he is the baby of all the people who never had one.” Mrs. Darling also discerns Peter in the features of women who have never had children. In The Little White Bird, Peter finds two babies who have fallen unnoticed from their perambulators: one is named Phoebe, the other Walter, and both are about a year old. The term “lost” is used frequently as a euphemism for “dead,” as in “he lost his father” or “she lost a child.”

19. not to see her but to listen to stories. Peter is drawn to the Darling nursery window because of the stories told in it, not because of a desire to take Wendy to Neverland. In Neverland, there are plenty of adventures, but no memory and therefore also no stories. Ironically, Peter becomes the main character in one of the most famous cultural stories for children, yet he is forever banished from the nursery, where that story is read and told.

20. “It is to listen to the stories.” Barrie may have been inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s “Thumbelina,” which ends by describing how a swallow flies from the “warm lands” back to Denmark to build a nest above the window of “the man who can tell you fairy tales.” Andersen is one of the authors whose name appeared on the curtain designed for the 1908 revival of Peter Pan. The curtain displays a sampler supposedly stitched by Wendy, including the names of—besides Andersen—Charles Lamb, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Lewis Carroll. Although Barrie does not have much to say about Andersen, he most likely knew his work through his friend Andrew Lang, who produced popular anthologies of fairy tales from all over the world. Barrie must have recognized in Andersen a kindred spirit, for the Danish writer of working-class origins was also a prolific playwright, devoted to the theater, and had the same reputation for streaks of “whimsy” in his work.

21. “Cinderella.” Barrie’s play A Kiss for Cinderella opened in London in March 1916 and at Christmas in New York in the same year. Barrie had been “slinging off heaven knows how many short plays, once I think six in a week,” and the Cinderella play was one of the few works in that period that was not designated for the war effort. In 1926 Herbert Brenon directed a silent film version of A Kiss for Cinderella, with Betty Bronson, who had played Peter Pan in the Paramount film. Barrie’s Cinderella is a saintly young woman whose good deeds fail to rescue her from a death that resembles the martyrdom of Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Match Girl.

22. “they lived happily ever after.” Stanley Green and Betty Comden, hired to write the screenplay for the 1954 musical Peter Pan, added some dialogue about Hamlet. After telling the boys that Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty both live happily ever after, Tootles asks about the end of Hamlet. Wendy replies: “Hamlet! Well, the Prince Hamlet died, and the king died, and the Queen died, and Ophelia died, and Polonius died, and Laertes died, and. . . .” “And?” the boys ask. “Well the rest of them lived happily ever after!” Wendy declares.

23. it was she who first tempted him. In the play Peter Pan, Wendy is seen as something of an intruder in the boys’ world. The stage directions emphasize that she may have “bored her way in at last whether we wanted her or not.” And Barrie adds that Peter simply had to give in to Wendy’s insistence on going to Neverland: “It may be that even Peter did not really bring her to the Never Land of his free will, but merely to do so because she would not stay away” (84). The allusion to the biblical story of Adam and Eve shines through, with Wendy as temptress and Peter as a “greedy” Adam.

24. there was a greedy look in his eyes now which ought to have alarmed her. Peter seems to recognize the bonding power of stories and their capacity to serve as a lure for the lost boys. Like James Barrie himself, the narrator is a storyteller who uses tales to hold the attention of children, and he has deep insight into Peter’s motives for bringing Wendy to Neverland.

25. “Oh, how lovely to fly.” The desire to fly can be traced back to the Greek myth about Daedalus and Icarus. Daedalus, a renowned architect and craftsman, attempted to escape imprisonment on Crete by fashioning wings for himself and his son, Icarus. As noted in the introduction, he warned Icarus against flying too close to the sun, but the boy, overcome by giddy curiosity, soared so high that his wings, made of wax, melted, and he plunged into the sea. In children’s literature, characters are frequently airborne, and flight comes to represent liberation from adult authority and the possibility of adventure. “Where needs are unmet, desires take wing,” Jerry Griswold tells us, in a moving meditation on flight in stories as varied as George MacDonald’s The Light Princess (1864), Pamela Travers’s Mary Poppins (1934), and Virginia Hamilton’s The People Could Fly (1985).

Just two years before Peter Pan was performed, in 1902, the children in Edith Nesbit’s Five Children and It famously wish for wings and fly up to a church tower. “Of course you all know what flying feels like,” Nesbit wrote, “because everyone has dreamed about flying, and it seems so beautifully easy—only, you can never remember how you did it; and as a rule you have to do it without wings, in your dreams, which is more clever and uncommon, but not so easy to remember the rule for” (Nesbit 99). Nesbit also emphasizes how flying is “more wonderful and more like real magic than any wish the children had had yet.”

Many stories for children also show characters riding through the air on sleds (Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen”), winged horses (Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time), and lions (C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia).

26. you heard its three wicked inmates breathing angelically. The children are described by Liza as “little angels,” and we receive a first hint in this passage about how children can be both angelic and wicked, or “innocent” and “heartless,” as we learn at the tale’s end. The children’s facial expressions also assume an “awful craftiness” even as they are presented as cheerfully innocent. As one critic starkly puts it, in a study of British childhood: “The Victorian child is a symbol of innocence, the Edwardian child of hedonism” (Wullschläger 109). If Lewis Carroll’s Alice is sweet, well mannered, and innocent, J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan is, by contrast, self-centered, impertinent, and pleasure-seeking. In a sense, the idealized child of the Victorian era made it possible for adults to discover the demon in children, for the increasing investment in toys, clothes, education, and care could easily backfire when children did not live up perfectly to the expectation of innocent beauty.

27. We now return to the nursery. The narrator, like Peter, is betwixt and between, speaking sometimes with the voice of an adult (as when he refers to the children as “three scoundrels”) yet also enamored of the pleasures of learning how to fly. The narrator never lets us forget his presence.

28. “You just think lovely wonderful thoughts.” In his dedication to the printed play, Barrie felt obliged to add a parental warning: “after the first production I had to add something to the play at the request of parents . . . about no one being able to fly until the fairy dust had been blown on him; so many children having gone home and tried it from their beds and needed surgical attention.” C. S. Lewis similarly added several warnings about entering wardrobes as well as about the hazards of closing the door behind you, all in response to parental concerns about how the Pevensie children reach Narnia in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Cynthia Asquith writes in her memoir of Barrie that she did not dare tell her employer that “one child had been killed because, after seeing Peter Pan, he ‘thought beautiful thoughts,’ and confident that these thoughts would enable him to fly, jumped out of the nursery window!” (Asquith, Portrait, 20). There is no historical evidence or documentation that this incident ever occurred.

29. “I flewed!” Michael’s coinage combines the correct past tense with an additional “ed” in an effort to mimic adult speech. The term “flewed” reminds us that he is still very much a child and that he has the capacity to “believe” in flight. Yet it also points forward to his desire to become one of the grown-ups.

30. “And there are pirates.” Tales about pirates on the high seas became popular after the publication of Daniel Defoe’s Captain Singleton (1720), and the genre flourished in Anglo-American culture. “Pirates” was a common epithet that included both British sea-robbers and men who set sail from North Africa and became part of their own governments’ revenue machinery. From the seventeenth century on, stories about Europeans captured on the high seas and enslaved by “Barbary pirates” flourished; among them can be counted Rossini’s L’italiana in Algeri (1813). Tom Sawyer captures the romance of piracy when he observes that pirates “have just a bully time . . . and kill everybody in the ships—make ’em walk a plank” (93). Barrie’s pirates are fanciful in their dress, manner, and speech, and they are based on parodic figures (Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance was on the London stage in 1880) as much as on fictional and historical models. They have a sense of adventure, and, in the preface to Peter Pan, Hook is linked with Captain James Cook, who was killed in 1778 by Hawaiian natives. Hook is clearly also inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson’s Long John Silver, the peg-legged pirate who captures young Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island (1883).

Daphne du Maurier, in a memoir about her father, Gerald du Maurier, writes about Hook: “He was a tragic and rather ghastly creation who knew no peace, and whose soul was in torment; a dark shadow; a sinister dram; a bogey of fear who lives in the grey recesses of every small boy’s mind. All boys had their Hooks, as Barrie knew; he was the phantom who came by night and stole his way into their murky dreams. . . . And because he had imagination and a spark of genius, Gerald made him alive” (Dunbar 141).

31. Will they reach the nursery in time? At times the narrator seems to be telling the story to a group of listeners. With this question, he creates the sense that he is narrating the events as they unfold and that he has no foreknowledge of how things will turn out. And yet he can still reassure readers that everything will, as in the fairy tale “Cinderella,” cited earlier, “come right in the end.”

32. “Cave, Peter!” “Cave” is from the Latin term cavere. The star is telling Peter to watch out and beware of danger.

33. The birds were flown. The children are characterized as having reverted to their earlier form as birds. In Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, Barrie writes: “All children could have such recollections if they would press their hands hard to their temples for, having been birds before they were human, they are naturally a little wild during the first few weeks, and very itchy at the shoulders, where their wings used to be” (Hollindale 13). Peter has become a Pied Piper figure, seducing the children, in this case, with the promise of flight and leading them out of their homes into an enchanted retreat.