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

by J. M. Barrie

  I suppose you know a play called Peter Pan? I saw it last year & fell so much in love with it that I am going up to see its revival again in a few days. I found it enchanting, adorable, and entirely beautiful. In reality, no doubt, it is very ridiculous. I am very aged & this mania for children’s plays is a token of advanced senility. . . .

  I have gone about as one in a dream, quoting to myself all the gorgeous fragments of Peter Pan I can remember. As I stroll through Cambridge, Trinity Street fades and I find myself walking by the shore of the Mermaid Lagoon, King’s Chapel often shrinks before my eyes, and rises, and is suddenly the House in the Tree-tops.

  “Letter to Mr. Barrie,” review of Peter Pan in The King, January 14, 1904.

  My advice to everyone who has children is to take them to the Duke of York’s Theatre without delay. Those who have no children should immediately borrow some for the afternoon. They will find that they get a rare pleasure out of watching their little companions enjoy your quaint inventions, and there will be something wrong with them if they do not enjoy the piece on their own account as well.

  Oscar Parker. “The London Stage.” The English Illustrated Magazine 40 (1906): 40.

  Peter Pan is, as I write, rapidly mounting up the score in its third “century.” I was curious to see whether first impressions of this very original and daring experiment would persist upon a second hearing, a year later than the first, and accordingly I have just spent three hours with Peter and Wendy and the lost boys of “Never-never-never-land.” That curiosity was all the stronger because recently I read an American critic’s opinion of the play on its production this winter in New York, and the American critic’s remarks were acid. He found the play “mystifyingly unsatisfactory”—“the sort of fairy story that renders a key unnecessary”—“far-fetched and complicated,” and, to his mind, Peter Pan did nothing “that awoke that juvenile appreciation latent in most grown-ups.” I am sorry for that critic; sorry that life has deposited so many stony strata of hard facts in his mind that the volatile essence of his childhood imagination has no chance to struggle through into memory. . . . Why should adult audiences fill the theatre here and in New York—for it is equally a success in both cities—day after day, but that Mr. Barrie plays upon an almost universal chord of sympathy with this attempt to recall—not the actual visions of childhood, but the whole mental life of the child, when reality and dreams merge into one another.

  Louise Boynton. The Century Magazine, December 1906.

  New York needed Peter Pan. The play came at one of those discouraged moments when the public mind was occupied to an almost morbid degree with huge and vexing problems and with things that were going wrong. Legalized evil-doing was rampant in business and politics, the exposure of fraud was the principal business of those who were not committing it. Cynicism was the dominant note in literature and dramatic art, a cheerful, clever twentieth-century cynicism, but a bitter and depressing influence for all that. At such a moment came Peter Pan, created in the mind of a man of insight and gentleness, embodied by a woman beautiful in life and thought, with the soul of an artist, and the heart of a child. . . .

  Playing Peter Pan is not acting a role. It is embodying a living thought. It is expressing the life-force in the simplest, most beautiful way by teaching us to look at life from the child’s point of view. . . . Realities that seemed formidable are found not to be real at all, and all sorts of lovely illusions are dreams that may come true.

  Virginia Woolf. A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals 1897–1909 of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Mitchell A. Leaska. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990. Pp. 227–28.

  We went with Gerald to Peter Pan, Barries [sic] play—imaginative & witty like all of his, but just too sentimental.—However it was a great treat.

  Max Beerbohm. “Peter Pan Revisited.” In Last Theatres: 1904–1910. New York: Taplinger, 1970. P. 336.

  Of course these books are not read, or are read without pleasure, by children: it is the adults who devour them, while the children satisfy their own romantic cravings with tit-bits of information purveyed by the popular press, opening wide their eyes and thrilling at the thought that if all the pins that are daily dropped in the streets within the four-mile radius were joined together lengthwise they would reach from London to Milan.

  Anonymous. “Life and Letters.” Poet Lore 17 (Spring 1906): 121.

  The popular hit of the hour is J. W. [sic] Barrie’s Peter Pan, yet those who manage to retain their individual power of judgment against the obsession of the multitude will find the impression made upon them by the play not so altogether satisfactory and inspiring as they had been led to suppose it would be. There is a strange mixture in it of charm and something that is not charm. . . .

  If we imagine the play written by a child there are sophistications in it which could not possibly enter the mind of a child. If we imagine it written by a grown person there are childish naivetés which would be innocent enough if the childlike point of view were steadily maintained, but which, under the circumstances, become innuendoes that do not strike an absolutely pure note. This mixing up of two points of view is more a flaw in artistic construction than a flaw per se in the ethics of the play. . . .

  An irascible idiot for a father and an amiable idiot for a mother, and anything but a refined and peaceful scene in the nursery strikes so unpleasant a note in the start that the charming scene following in which the children learn from Peter Pan how to fly hardly blots out the impression.

  Alexander Woollcott. Shouts and Murmurs: Echoes of a Thousand and One First Nights. New York: Century Co, 1922. Pp. 198–200 and 186–89.

  And the children love it. There will have to be a chapter about the Peter Pan audiences, and you have never really seen the play if you have not attended a matinee. You must see the miniature playgoers straining in their seats, breaking the nurse’s leash and swarming incontinently down the aisles. You must see them in the boxes, looking in the perfection of their faith, as if at any moment they might attempt to fly out across the auditorium. You must hear their often embarrassingly premature rally to the defense of Tinker Bell and hear the shout that occasionally threatens to break up the proceedings, as when a passionately interested Michael on the wrong side of the footlights cries out in friendly warning: “Watch out, Peter, watch out! The old parrot’s poisoned your medicine.”

  The historian must tell of the little folks waiting gravely at the stage-door to ask for thimbles, and maybe he will have access to the countless letters to Peter that have come in, heavy with pennies sent trustfully to buy a pinch of fairy dust, which is so necessary if you have forgotten how to fly.

  But the dearest friends of Peter Pan are among the oldest living inhabitants. Austere jurists, battered rounders, famous editors and famous playwrights, slightly delirious poets and outwardly forbidding corporation presidents, these are in the ranks of the devoted. You simply cannot recognize a Peter Pantheist at sight, but when you find him reappearing at each engagement you can begin to guess his heart is in the right place.

  It would be idle to pretend that everybody likes the play, but its own public is large and so shamelessly addicted to it that a dozen visits to the theater are as nothing. There are some of us who cannot hear the opening strains of the music, who cannot witness the first inordinately solemn appearance of the responsible Liza, without feeling an absurd desire to laugh and weep at the same time, who cannot watch Peter take his silent stand on guard outside the house they built for Wendy without a sense of exaltation that warms the heart and sends us fair uplifted to our homes.

  It was on the night of November 6, 1905, that Peter Pan was played for the first time in New York. It had been produced triumphantly in London the year before, and quite a fever of expectancy awaited its coming to America. The arrest poster with its “Do you believe in fairies?” bedecked the bill-boards of Manhattan, and sleepy little messenger boys curled up in the corner of the Empire lobby waiting all night for the beginning of the box-offi
ce sale. But the news from the road was disheartening. Washington evidently did not believe in fairies, and Buffalo was cold to Peter Pan. On the opening night in New York, a polite and baffled audience laughed and applauded loyally—but at disconcertingly wrong moments.

  The author of “The Legend of Peter Pan”—with whatever of reluctance or malice may color his disposition—must write one inexorable chapter devoted to the collapse of the New York reviewers. Some there were who responded gaily to the appeal of the play, but there were others who did not respond at all. Now listen to this oracle:

  Mr. Barrie, in the excess of his facetiousness, has seen fit once more to mystify his audience, and if Peter Pan fails to be a prolonged success here, the blame must be laid entirely at his door. It is not only a mystery but a great disappointment . . . a conglomeration of balderdash, cheap melodrama and third-rate extravaganza. From the beginning of its second act, it invariably challenges comparison with plays like The Wizard of Oz and Babes in Toyland, and it fails to show either the sense of fun of childhood which made both pieces a delight to children of all ages. . . . For an artist of Maude Adams’s standing, this play seems like a waste of time. And incidentally, if Peter Pan is a play at all, it is a very bad one.

  . . . But the severest rebuke that was administered to the playwright appeared in “a morning newspaper” and contained these bitter reflections:

  Peter Pan is a riddle to which there is no answer; it baffled a large and typical Maude Adams house last night. . . . His [Barrie’s] ideas of childlike simplicity are ludicrous. They seem to be the fancies of a disordered stomach. . . . It was a pity to see Miss Adams, with her delightful gifts, wasting herself on such drivel.

  Well, the third-rate extravaganza celebrated its tenth anniversary with no signs of mortality; the fancies of a disordered stomach have rejoiced more than a thousand audiences in America. The Smee, the Jukes, and the Captain Hook among the unbelievers have been pushed into the sea, and on its tenth anniversary was it fancy that the sound the wind brought from the Empire was the crowing of Peter triumphant?

  Nina Boucicault. In Bruce K. Hanson, The Peter Pan Chronicles: The Nearly One-Hundred-Year History of the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up. New York: Birch Lane Press, 1993. P. 31.

  To me Peter Pan has always been much more than a fairy play for children. The fairy trappings are only a setting for the development of a serious idea. From beginning to end the story is a rather wistful commentary on human nature, taking as its theme the supreme selfishness of man and the supreme unselfishness of woman.

  Peter Pan’s Post Bag: Letters to Pauline Chase. London: William Heinemann, 1908. Pp. 13, 22–23, and 32–33.

  My dear Peter Pan

  I loved you so much that Mother said I was crying in bed for you. I wish you could come here and I would show you my puppies and things. Will you come and see us if you ever come to Bexhill. We live four miles from there in the country. We all want to see you again. Will you teach me and Baby to fly. I am sending you my sixpence. The smallest little girl in the photo is me—

  With love and a hug from

  Marjorie

  My dear Peter Pan,

  I hope you are very well.

  I was at the theatre yesterday (the 8th). I think it must be very nice to fly, can you come to Grove Park, to teach me how to fly if you have not time will you ask Wendy to come.

  I think it must be very tireing work for you all to have to be there afternoon and night.

  I have a brother and a sister our sister goes to boarding school but she comes home every week.

  Please will you write to me if you have time.

  With very much love from

  Charles William Eric.

  P.S.—I am 8 years old.

  My dear Peter & Wendy,

  I did like the play SO much on Wednesday Do you remember me? I was sitting in the stage-box & I was waving to you & Wendy in the last scene in the tree-tops.

  Captain Hook I HATE because he tried to kill you, he did look SO horrid when a green light was put on his face when you were asleep. He put his horrid hand right over poor wendy’s mouth so that she could not speak. . . .

  I wish you would teach ME to fly.

  Give Wendy my love when she comes for spring-cleaning. . . .

  Yours trully,

  Barbara

  Anonymous. Saturday Review, January 7, 1905.

  Peter Pan; or, adds Mr. Barrie, The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up. And he himself is that boy. That child, rather; for he halted earlier than most of the men who never come to maturity—halted before the age when soldiers and steam-engines begin to dominate the soul. To remain, like Mr. Kipling, a boy, is not at all uncommon. But I know not anyone who remains, like Mr. Barrie, a child. It is this unparalleled achievement that informs so much of Mr. Barrie’s later work, making it unique. This, too, surely it is that makes Mr. Barrie the most fashionable playwright of his time.

  Hesketh Pearson. Bernard Shaw: His Life and Personality. London: Methuen, 1961. P. 282.

  Agreeing with Max Beerbohm’s view that Peter Pan was an artificial freak which missed its mark completely, and was foisted on children by the grown-ups, [George Bernard] Shaw confessed, “I wrote Androcles and the Lion partly to show Barrie how a play for children should be handled.” Doubtless the children would have thoroughly enjoyed it, but unfortunately the grown-ups . . . considered the play blasphemous, and instead of foisting it on their offspring forbade them to see it.

  Anonymous. New York Times, December 3, 1911.

  It is enough that Mr. Barrie has put Peter into a book for fear a play would not hold him long enough. Only curmudgeons can fail to bless Mr. Barrie for doing it.

  Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman. Charles Frohman: Manager and Man. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1916. Pp. 169 and 257.

  When Frohman first read Peter Pan he was so entranced that he could not resist telling all his friends about it. He would stop them in the street and act out the scenes. Yet it required the most stupendous courage and confidence to put on a play that, from the manuscript, sounded like a combination of circus and extravaganza; a play in which children flew in and out of rooms, crocodiles swallowed alarm-clocks, a man exchanged places with his dog in its kennel, and various other seemingly absurd and ridiculous things happened.

  No one will be surprised to know that in connection with Peter Pan is one of the most sweetly gracious acts in Frohman’s life. The original of Peter was sick in bed at his home when the play was produced in London. The little lad was heartsick because he could not see it. When Frohman came to London, Barrie told him about it.

  “If the boy can’t come to the play, we will take the play to the boy,” he said.

  Frohman sent his company out to the boy’s home with as many “props” as could be jammed into the sick-room. While the delighted and excited child sat propped up in bed the wonders of the fairy play were unfolded before him. It is probably the only instance where a play was done before a child in his home.

  Charles Frohman. Harper’s Weekly, April 1906.

  Life in the big cities where huge buildings shut off from the child all contemplation of the open sky, and where dull grey streets have replaced green fields, where the lesson of the day is “getting on in the world” rather than being a child and enjoying the dream-while of pirates, fairies, and Indians—all these are pointed out as tendencies towards early self-consciousness and the stagnation of the imagination. . . . It has fallen to Barrie to evolve what, in all my experience, the American stage has only now accorded—namely an entertainment creative of pure fancy in the city-bred child, and quickening to the imagination of the little people whose natural Fairyland we grown-ups have possessed—an illusion of a night during which the mother or father and child find abundant delights in common and realize new joys in being complete chums.

  Daphne du Maurier. Gerald: A Portrait. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1935. Pp. 104–5.

  When Hook first paced his quarter-deck in t
he year 1904, children were carried screaming from the stalls, and even big boys of twelve were known to reach for their mother’s hand in the friendly shelter of the boxes. How he was hated, with his flourish, his poses, his dreaded diabolical smile! That ashen face, those blood-red lips, the long, dank, greasy curls; the sardonic laugh, the maniacal scream, the appalling courtesy of his gestures; and that above all most terrible of moments when he descended the stairs and with slow, most merciless cunning poured the poison into Peter’s glass. There was no peace in those days until the monster was destroyed, and the fight upon the pirate ship was a fight to the death. Gerald was Hook; he was no dummy dressed from Simmons in a Clarkson wig, ranting and roaring about the stage, a grotesque figure whom the modern child finds a little comic. He was a tragic and rather ghastly creation who knew no peace, and whose soul was in torment; a dark shadow; a sinister dream; a bogey of fear who lives perpetually 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. He was the spirit of Stevenson and of Dumas, and he was the Father-but-for-the-grace-of-God; a lonely spirit that was terror and inspiration in one. And because he had imagination and a spark of genius, Gerald made him alive.

  Pauline Chase. “Behind the Footlights: My Reminiscences of Peter Pan.” The Strand, February 1913. Pp. 73–74.

  And now let me tell you about some of my behind-the-scenes reminiscences of this hardy and ever-youthful annual. First of all, I would point out that all sorts of things happen in Peter Pan which never happen in any other play. Thus every December a terrifying ceremony takes place, and this is the measuring of the children who play in it. They are all measured to see whether they have grown too tall, and they can all squeeze down into about two inches less than they really are; but this does not deceive the management, who have grown frightfully knowing, and sometimes they frown horribly at you and say, sternly, “We shall pass you this year, but take care, madam, take care!” And sometimes you are told, “It won’t do, my lad; you’ve grown out of knowledge. We are sorry for you, but—farewell!” Yes, measuring day is one of the tragedies of Peter Pan.