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

by J. M. Barrie

  Though The Boy Castaways has sixteen chapter-headings, there is no other letterpress; an absence which possible purchasers might complain of, though there are surely worse ways of writing a book than this. These headings anticipate much of the play of Peter Pan, but there were many incidents of our Kensington Gardens days that never got into the book, such as our Antarctic exploits when we reached the Pole in advance of our friend Captain Scott and cut our initials on it for him to find, a strange foreshadowing of what was really to happen. In The Boy Castaways Captain Hook has arrived but is called Captain Swarthy, and he seems from the pictures to have been a black man. This character, as you do not need to be told, is held by those in the know to be autobiographical. You had many tussles with him (though you never, I think, got his right arm) before you reached the terrible chapter (which might be taken from the play) entitled “We Board the Pirate Ship at Dawn—A Rakish Craft—No. 1 Hew-them-Down and No. 2 of the Red Hatchet—A Holocaust of Pirates—Rescue of Peter.” (Hullo, Peter rescued instead of rescuing others? I know what that means and so do you, but we are not going to give away all our secrets.) The scene of the Holocaust is the Black Lake (afterwards, when we let women in, the Mermaids’ Lagoon). The pirate captain’s end was not in the mouth of a crocodile though we had crocodiles on the spot (“while No. 2 was removing the crocodiles from the stream No. 1 shot a few parrots, Psittacidae, for our evening meal”). I think our captain had divers deaths owing to unseemly competition among you, each wanting to slay him single-handed. On a special occasion, such as when No. 3 pulled out the tooth himself, you gave the deed to him, but took it from him while he rested. The only pictorial representation in the book of Swarthy’s fate is in two parts. In one, called briefly “We string him up,” Nos. 1 and 2, stern as Athos, are hauling him up a tree by a rope, his face snarling as if it were a grinning mask (which indeed it was), and his garments very like some of my own stuffed with bracken. The other, the same scene next day, is called “The Vultures had Picked him Clean,” and tells its own tale.

  The dog in The Boy Castaways seems never to have been called Nana but was evidently in training for that post. He originally belonged to Swarthy (or to Captain Marryat?), and the first picture of him, lean, skulking, and hunched (how did I get that effect?), “patrolling the island” in that monster’s interests, gives little indication of the domestic paragon he was to become. We lured him away to the better life, and there is, later, a touching picture, a clear forecast of the Darling nursery, entitled “We trained the dog to watch over us while we slept.” In this he also is sleeping, in a position that is a careful copy of his charges; indeed any trouble we had with him was because, once he knew he was in a story, he thought his safest course was to imitate you in everything you did. How anxious he was to show that he understood the game, and more generous than you, he never pretended that he was the one who killed Captain Swarthy. I must not imply that he was entirely without initiative, for it was his own idea to bark warningly a minute or two before twelve o’clock as a signal to No. 3 that his keeper was probably on her way for him (Disappearance of No. 3); and he became so used to living in the world of Pretend that when we reached the hut of a morning he was often there waiting for us, looking, it is true, rather idiotic, but with a new bark he had invented which puzzled us until we decided that he was demanding the password. He was always willing to do any extra jobs, such as becoming the tiger in mask, and when after a fierce engagement you carried home that mask in triumph, he joined in the procession proudly and never let on that the trophy had ever been part of him. Long afterwards he saw the play from a box in the theatre, and as familiar scenes were unrolled before his eyes I have never seen a dog so bothered. At one matinee we even let him for a moment take the place of the actor who played Nana, and I don’t know that any members of the audience ever noticed the change, though he introduced some “business” that was new to them but old to you and me. Heigh-ho, I suspect that in this reminiscence I am mixing him up with his successor, for such a one there had to be, the loyal Newfoundland who, perhaps in the following year, applied, so to say, for the part by bringing hedgehogs to the hut in his mouth as offerings for our evening repasts. The head and coat of him were copied for the Nana of the play.

  They do seem to be emerging out of our island, don’t they, the little people of the play, all except that sly one, the chief figure, who draws farther and farther into the wood as we advance upon him? He so dislikes being tracked, as if there were something odd about him, that when he dies he means to get up and blow away the particle that will be his ashes.

  Wendy has not yet appeared, but she has been trying to come ever since that loyal nurse cast the humorous shadow of woman upon the scene and made us feel that it might be fun to let in a disturbing element. Perhaps she would have bored her way in at last whether we wanted her or not. It may be that even Peter did not really bring her to the Never Land of his free will, but merely pretended to do so because she would not stay away. Even Tinker Bell had reached our island before we left it. It was one evening when we climbed the wood carrying No. 4 to show him what the trail was like by twilight. As our lanterns twinkled among the leaves No. 4 saw a twinkle stand still for a moment and he waved his foot gaily to it, thus creating Tink. It must not be thought, however, that there were any other sentimental passages between No. 4 and Tink; indeed, as he got to know her better he suspected her of frequenting the hut to see what we had been having for supper, and to partake of the same, and he pursued her with malignancy.

  A safe but sometimes chilly way of recalling the past is to force open a crammed drawer. If you are searching for anything in particular you don’t find it, but something falls out at the back that is often more interesting. It is in this way that I get my desultory reading, which includes the few stray leaves of the original MS of Peter that I have said I do possess, though even they, when returned to the drawer, are gone again, as if that touch of devilry lurked in them still. They show that in early days I hacked at and added to the play. In the drawer I find some scraps of Mr. Crook’s delightful music, and other incomplete matter relating to Peter. Here is the reply of a boy whom I favoured with a seat in my box and injudiciously asked at the end what he had liked best. “What I think I liked best,” he said, “was tearing up the programme and dropping the bits on people’s heads.” Thus am I often laid low. A copy of my favourite programme of the play is still in the drawer. In the first or second year of Peter No. 4 could not attend through illness, so we took the play to his nursery, far away in the country, an array of vehicles almost as glorious as a traveling circus; the leading parts were played by the youngest children in the London company, and No. 4, aged five, looked on solemnly at the performance from his bed and never smiled once. That was my first and only appearance on the real stage, and this copy of the programme shows I was thought so meanly of as an actor that they printed my name in smaller letters than the others.

  I have said little here of Nos. 4 and 5, and it is high time I had finished. They had a long summer day, and I turn round twice and now they are off to school. On Monday, as it seems, I was escorting No. 5 to a children’s party and brushing his hair in the ante-room; and by Thursday he is placing me against the wall of an underground station and saying, “Now I am going to get the tickets; don’t move till I come back for you or you’ll lose yourself.” No. 4 jumps from being astride my shoulders fishing, I knee-deep in the stream, to becoming, while still a schoolboy, the sternest of my literary critics. Anything he shook his head over I abandoned, and conceivably the world has thus been deprived of masterpieces. There was for instance an unfortunate little tragedy which I liked until I foolishly told No. 4 its subject, when he frowned and said he had better have a look at it. He read it, and then, patting me on the back, as only he and No. 1 could touch me, said, “You know you can’t do this sort of thing.” End of a tragedian. Sometimes, however, No. 4 liked my efforts, and I walked in the azure that day when he returned Dear Brutus to me with the com
ment “Not so bad.” In earlier days, when he was ten, I offered him the MS of my book Margaret Ogilvy. “Oh, thanks,” he said almost immediately, and added, “Of course my desk is awfully full.” I reminded him that he could take out some of its more ridiculous contents. He said, “I have read it already in the book.” This I had not known, and I was secretly elated, but I said that people sometimes liked to preserve this kind of thing as a curiosity. He said “Oh” again. I said tartly that he was not compelled to take it if he didn’t want it. He said, “Of course I want it, but my desk—” Then he wriggled out of the room and came back in a few minutes dragging in No. 5 and announcing triumphantly, “No. 5 will have it.”

  The rebuffs I have got from all of you! They were especially crushing in those early days when one by one you came out of your belief in fairies and lowered on me as the deceiver. My grandest triumph, the best thing in the play of Peter Pan (though it is not in it), is that long after No. 4 had ceased to believe, I brought him back to the faith for at least two minutes. We were on our way in a boat to fish the Outer Hebrides (where we caught Mary Rose), and though it was a journey of days he wore his fishing basket on his back all the time, so as to be able to begin at once. His one pain was the absence of Johnny Mackay, for Johnny was the loved gillie of the previous summer who had taught him everything that is worth knowing (which is a matter of flies) but could not be with us this time as he would have had to cross and re-cross Scotland to reach us. As the boat drew near the Kyle of Lochalsh pier I told Nos. 4 and 5 it was such a famous wishing pier that they had now but to wish and they should have. No. 5 believed at once and expressed a wish to meet himself (I afterwards found him on the pier searching faces confidently), but No. 4 thought it more of my untimely nonsense and doggedly declined to humour me. “Whom do you want to see most, No. 4?” “Of course I would like most to see Johnny Mackay.” “Well, then, wish for him.” “Oh, rot.” “It can’t do any harm to wish.” Contemptuously he wished, and as the ropes were thrown on the pier he saw Johnny waiting for him, loaded with angling paraphernalia. I know no one less like a fairy than Johnny Mackay, but for two minutes No. 4 was quivering in another world than ours. When he came to he gave me a smile which meant that we understood each other, and thereafter neglected me for a month, being always with Johnny. As I have said, this episode is not in the play; so though I dedicate Peter Pan to you I keep the smile, with the few other broken fragments of immortality that have come my way.

  Arthur Rackham and Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens: A Biography of the Artist

  Arthur Rackham’s illustrations for Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens can be seen as an interpretation of Barrie’s book as well as a self-contained visual narrative about adventures with fairies in London’s famous park. The illustrations appear in this volume in gallery form with their original captions and with editorial commentary, along with a commentary on their relationship to the text. The text of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens is readily available in print for those who seek to understand fully Peter Pan’s various incarnations.1

  Arthur Rackham did not much care for the Peter Pan who inhabits Neverland. In a letter of 1914, he complained that “Never Never lands are poor prosy substitutes for Kaatskills [Catskills] & Kensingtons, with their stupendous powers of imagination. What power localizing a myth has. The Rhine. The Atlas Mountains. Olympia” (Hamilton 76). Rackham had already captured local color in all its mysterious intimacy and sublime grandeur for works by the Brothers Grimm, Jonathan Swift, and Washington Irving, and he would do the same for Shakespeare, Richard Wagner, Lewis Carroll, and Hans Christian Andersen, among many others. The expressive intensity of his illustrations for Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens localized Barrie’s myth and animated Peter Pan and the fairies in powerful ways.

  Peter Pan was invented during walks through Kensington Gardens, coming to life in conversations with children about the various sites there. Arthur Rackham reintroduced the visual element that was there from the start, drawing us into the landscape that inspired tales about what happens after Lock-out Time in the Gardens. He takes us back to a time before Neverland, when the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up had not yet grown up at all and was still a baby.

  Born in London on September 19, 1867, seven years J. M. Barrie’s junior, Rackham was the oldest surviving male in a family with twelve children. All his life he took pride in his working-class origins (though his father was a clerk in the British civil service), claiming that his artistic abilities had their roots in his ethnicity: “Cockneys are very observant of small, new, strange things” (Hamilton 20). From an early age, he demonstrated unusual talent in drawing and was known to smuggle paper and pencil into bed in order to sketch far into the night, sometimes even using a pillowcase when he had no paper. His choice of subjects as a child revealed a taste for the fantastic and imaginative, inspired perhaps by his love of Arthur Boyd Houghton’s illustrations for the Arabian Nights.

  In September 1879 Rackham began his formal education at the City of London School, where, although without special academic distinction, he was beloved by his masters and received the school prize for drawing. Prolonged illness led to a trip to Australia in early 1884, where he found ample opportunity to hone his talent for watercolor with panoramic landscapes. He returned to London in July physically renewed and determined to pursue his passion to the end. Later that year he entered the Lambeth School of Art, but financial considerations began to wear away at his ambition and determination. As he would later write to an aspiring young artist asking for guidance, drawing was a profession “to which no parent would be justified in putting a son without being able to give him a permanent income as well” (Hudson 32). Unlike Barrie, who set aside all practical considerations and traveled to London, nearly penniless, to establish himself as a journalist, Rackham showed real caution and accepted a clerkship in the Westminster Fire Office.

  Rackham regularly submitted drawings to magazines—sending in everything from political cartoons to illustrated sporting events—and he left his clerkship in 1892 to become a staff illustrator with the Westminster Budget, a large-format magazine for which he drew many famous personages of the time. Most of this work is relatively conventional, although the mastery of line is already evident. One piece from 1893, The Influenza Fiend, presages Rackham’s trademark style in its portrayal of a demonic disease transmitter as a wiry, deformed, goblinlike creature. With the publication of illustrations for the Ingoldsby Legends (1898) and Tales from Shakespeare (1899) Rackham reached an artistic crossroads, a phase he would later describe as the “worst time” ever in his life. His mind overflowing with images and alive with creative energy unable to express itself, he had to meet the multiple demands of the journalistic work that was putting food on the table.

  At the turn of the century, Rackham revisited a childhood favorite and created ninety-nine black-and-white drawings and a color frontispiece for Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. Greeted with immediate success, the volume was reprinted several times, and in 1909 Rackham turned forty of the original drawings into full-color illustrations. He always felt deep affection for this first commercially successful project, in part because he had produced illustrations that were less supplement and reinterpretation than creative works of their own—imaginative evocations of “once upon a time.”

  “His face was wizened and wrinkled like a ripe walnut,” an admirer once wrote, “and as he peered short-sightedly at me out of his goggle spectacles I thought he was one of the goblins out of Grimm’s Fairy Tales.” Rackham was a mere thirty-three years old at the time, but he was showing signs of age, with a face deeply lined and with premature hair loss. “When he was armed with palette and paint brushes he became for me a wizard, who with one touch of his magic wand could people my universe with elves and leprechauns,” that same admirer added (Hudson 50).

  That romantic wizardry attracted the attention of the accomplished portrait painter Edyth Starkie, who married Rackham in 1903. In many ways the antithesis of her husband,
Starkie was a spirited Irishwoman, mischievously irreverent with a keen sense of irony. Married life suited the couple, and Rackham prospered both personally and professionally. His work was exhibited widely and prominently at the Royal Academy and at the Institute of Painters of Water-Colours. Rip Van Winkle, published in 1905, established him as the foremost decorative illustrator of his time. The volume, with its fifty-one color plates, allowed him to display the sorcery of his style, with its landscapes of twisted undergrowth and gnarled trees haunted by curious creatures with gaunt limbs and grotesque features.

  Rip Van Winkle inaugurated Rackham’s longtime relationship with the venerable British publishing firm of William Heinemann, and the release of the book in limited (fully subscribed) and trade editions in multiple countries set a precedent that would be followed for years to come. The artwork itself sold well, establishing Rackham’s exhibitions at the Leicester Galleries as an annual event. Thus began Rackham’s twenty-year run at the top of the English illustration industry.