Sir James Matthew Barrie, 1st Baronet, OM (9 May 1860 – 19 June 1937), more commonly known as J. M. Barrie, was a Scottish author and dramatist. He is best remembered for creating Peter Pan, the boy who refused to grow up, whom he based on his friends, the Llewelyn Davies boys. He is also credited with popularising the name Wendy, which was very uncommon before he gave it to the heroine of Peter Pan.
Easton Press J. M. Barrie books
Peter Pan - Collector's Edition - 1987
Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens: From the Little White Bird - Collector's Edition - 1992
Peter Pan and Wendy - Library of Famous Editions - 2002
Peter Pan - part of 4 Volume Classics of Enchantment set
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J. M. Barrie biography
Barrie was born to a family of Scottish weavers in Kirriemuir, Angus, the ninth child of ten. When he was six, his brother David, his mother's favourite, died in a skating accident on the eve of his 14th birthday. His mother never recovered from the loss, and ignored the young Barrie. One time he entered her room, and heard her say "Is that you?" "I thought it was the dead boy she was speaking to," wrote Barrie in his biographical account of his mother, Margaret Ogilvy (1896), "and I said in a little lonely voice, 'No, it's no' him, it's just me.'" Barrie's mother found comfort in the fact that her dead son would remain a boy forever, never to grow up and leave her. This had a profound impact on Barrie: he never grew much beyond five foot, and some authors have speculated that Peter Pan was inspired by the traumatic events of his own childhood. At the age of 13, Barrie was sent away to boarding school at Dumfries Academy. Here he and his friends spent time in the garden of Moat Brae house, playing pirates "in a sort of Odyssey that was long afterwards to become the play of Peter Pan".
Barrie was educated at the Glasgow Academy, Forfar Academy and Dumfries Academy, and the University of Edinburgh.
The Llewelyn-Davies family
The Llewelyn-Davies family consisted of the parents Arthur (1863-1907) and Sylvia, née Du Maurier (1866-1910) (daughter of George Du Maurier) and their five sons George Llewelyn-Davies (1893-1915), Jack Llewelyn-Davies (1894-1959), Peter Llewelyn-Davies (1897-1960), Michael Llewelyn-Davies (1900-1921), and Nicholas Llewelyn-Davies or Nico (1903-1980).
Barrie became acquainted with the family in 1897 or 1898 after meeting George and Jack with their nurse in London's Kensington Gardens, where he often came while walking his dog, Porthos, and lived nearby. He did not meet Sylvia until later, at a chance encounter at a dinner party.
He became a surrogate father, and when the boys became orphans, he became their guardian. Some sources say that the mother's will specified the nurse's sister, and that he forged or unintentionally mistranscribed the will. However it was clear that he was the only one with the time and resources to bring them up together, the alternative being splitting the boys up amongst relatives, a scenario Sylvia objected to.
Barrie suffered bereavements with the boys, losing the two to whom he was closest. George was killed in action in World War One and Michael, with whom Barrie corresponded daily, drowned in a possible suicide pact, one month short of his 21st birthday, while swimming at a known danger-spot with a friend at Oxford. Some years after Barrie's death, Peter Davies, later a publisher, wrote his 'Morgue', which contains much family information and comments on Barrie. He later committed suicide by jumping in front of an Underground train.
The statue of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, erected in secret overnight for May Morning in 1912, was supposed to be modelled upon a photograph of Michael, but the sculptor decided to use a different child as model, leaving Barrie very disappointed with the result. "It doesn't show the devil in Peter," he said.
Death
Barrie died of pneumonia on June 19, 1937 and is buried at Kirriemuir Cemetery next to his parents and one sister and brother. He left the bulk of his estate (excluding the Peter Pan works, which he had previously given to Great Ormond Street Hospital) to his secretary Cynthia Asquith. His birthplace at 4 Brechin Road is maintained as a museum by the National Trust for Scotland.
Writer
Barrie became a journalist in Nottingham, then London, and turned to writing novels and subsequently plays. He set his first novels in his birthplace of Kirriemuir, which he referred to as "Thrums". Barrie often wrote dialogue in Scots. His Thrums novels were hugely successful: Auld Licht Idylls (1888), A Window in Thrums (1889), and The Little Minister (1891). His two "Tommy" novels, Sentimental Tommy (1896) and Tommy and Grizel (1902), dealt with themes much more explicitly related to those that would appear in Peter Pan. The first appearance of Peter came in The Little White Bird (1901).
Barrie also wrote a number of works for the theatre, beginning with Ibsen's Ghost (1891), a parody of Henrik Ibsen's drama Ghosts, which had just been performed for the first time in England under the Independent Theatre Society, led by J. T. Grein. Barrie's play was first performed on May 31 at Toole's Theatre in London. Barrie seemed to appreciate Ibsen's merits; even William Archer, the translator of Ibsen's works into English, enjoyed the humour of the play and recommended it to others. Barrie also authored the flop, Jane Annie (1893), which he begged his friend Arthur Conan Doyle to revise and finish, when he suffered the first of his many nervous breakdowns. Notable successes included Quality Street (1901) and The Admirable Crichton (1902).
Barrie's most famous and enduring work, Peter Pan, had its first stage performance on December 27, 1904. In 1929 he specified that the copyright of the play should go to the nation's leading children's hospital, Great Ormond Street Hospital in London. The current status of the copyright is complex. Later plays included What Every Woman Knows (1908). His final play was The Boy David (1936), which dramatized the Biblical story of King Saul and the young David. Like the role of Peter Pan, that of David was played by a woman, Elisabeth Bergner.
Barrie, along with a number of other playwrights, was involved in the 1909 and 1911 attempts to challenge the censorship of the theatre by the Lord Chamberlain.
Writing acquaintances
Barrie traveled in high literary circles, and had many famous friends. With Arthur Conan Doyle he wrote a failed musical. With Robert Louis Stevenson he conducted a long correspondence, but the two never met in person. George Bernard Shaw was for several years his neighbor, and once participated in a Western that Barrie scripted and filmed. Jerome K. Jerome introduced Barrie to his wife; H. G. Wells was a friend of many years. J.M. Barrie met Thomas Hardy through Hugh Clifford while he was staying in London. Conan Doyle, Jerome, Wells and other luminaries such as G. K. Chesterton and A. A. Milne also occasionally played cricket with a team founded by Barrie for his friends, the "Allahakbarries" (the name was chosen under the mistaken belief that "Allah akbar" means "God save us" in Arabic; in fact it means "God is great").
Barrie also befriended Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott and was one of the seven recipients of letters that Scott wrote in the final hours of his life. He was godfather to Robert's son, Peter. Another close friend of Barrie's, theater producer Charles Frohman, who was responsible for the debut of Peter Pan' in both England and the U.S., died famously, declining a lifeboat seat when the RMS Lusitania was sunk by a German U-boat in the North Atlantic. Frohman reportedly paraphrased Peter Pan's final line from the stage play, "To die will be an awfully big adventure."
On several occasions he met and told stories to the little girl who would become Queen Elizabeth II and her younger sister Princess Margaret.
Works
Barrie's most famous and best loved work is undoubtedly his play Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up, performed innumerable times since 1904, adapted by Barrie into a novel, and adapted into three feature films. The story is the classic tale of the child that does not want to grow up and Barrie clearly felt that it was, in part, the condition of humanity to feel always in exile from the innocence and freedoms of childhood. The societal constraints of middle-class domestic reality are enacted in the Bloomsbury scenes while the Never-Land is a world free of these Victorian social constraints, a world in which sexuality and morality are crucially ambivalent.
From this point of view, the familial nucleus represented by the Darling Children acts as a metaphor for social order and stability while Peter and the Lost Boys exist without parental (and by implication societal) control. The brutish pirate scenes, in which the Darling Boys indulge with relish (although Peter himself also indulges, and is both infantile and devilish) are the embodiment of anarchic disorder and in this way represent the innate, but repressed, desire for social deviance. Similarly, Wendy can be regarded as the epitome of ‘the good wife and mother’, a role which is playfully challenged by the more flirtatious and untamed Tinker Bell in the parallel dimension of Never Land. George Bernard Shaw’s description of the play as ‘ostensibly a holiday entertainment for children but really a play for grown-up people’, suggests his understanding of the deeper social allegories at work in Peter Pan.
Perhaps the best known, though by no means the finest, of Barrie’s fictional output are his early Thrums stories, Auld Licht Idylls (1888), A Window in Thrums (1889) and The Little Minister (1891). Literary criticism of these works has been unfavourable, tending to disparage these early writings as sentimental and nostalgic depictions of a parochial Scotland far from the realities of the industrialised nineteenth century. Criticism has perhaps judged these early works too harshly. For one thing, regionalism was in fashion at the turn of the century, as exemplified in the fiction of Thomas Hardy and George Elliot. Moreover, Barrie’s descriptions of humble life are acutely observed and the painstaking detail he devotes to describing the conditions in which the rural poor lived offsets some of the more idealised and romantic characterisations and plots. The Thrums tales do not ignore the problems of alcoholism and temptations of adultery in lives characterised by boredom, monotony and poverty.
J. M. Barrie books in order
Better Dead (1887)
Auld Licht Idylls (1888)
When a Man's Single (1888)
A Window in Thrums (1889)
The Little Minister (1891)
Richard Savage (play) (1891)
Ibsen's Ghost (Toole Up-to-Date) (play) (1891)
Walker, London (1892)
A Holiday in Bed (1892)
Jane Annie (opera), music by Ernest Ford, libretto by Barrie and Arthur Conan Doyle (1893)
A Powerful Drug and Other Stories (1893)
A Tillyloss Scandal (1893)
Two of Them (1893)
A Lady's Shoe (1893)
Life in a Country Manse (1894)
Scotland's Lament: A Poem on the Death of Robert Louis Stevenson (1895)
Sentimental Tommy, The Story of His Boyhood (1896)
Margaret Ogilvy (1896)
Jess (1898)
Tommy and Grizel (1900)
The Wedding Guest (1900)
The Boy Castaways of Black Lake Island (1901)
Quality Street (play) (1901)
The Admirable Crichton (1902)
The Little White Bird; or, Adventures in Kensington Gardens (1902)
Little Mary (play) (1903)
Peter Pan (play) (1904)
Alice Sit-by-the-Fire (play) (1905)
Pantaloon (1905)
Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906)
What Every Woman Knows (1908)
When Wendy Grew Up - An Afterthought (1908)
Peter and Wendy (novel) (1911)
Half an Hour[83] (play) (1913)
Half Hours[84] (1914) includes:
Pantaloon
The Twelve-Pound Look (1911)[85]
Rosalind
The Will
The Legend of Leonora (1914)
Der Tag[86] (The Tragic Man) (Short play) (1914)
The New Word[87] (play) (1915)
Charles Frohman: A Tribute (1915)
Rosy Rapture[88] (play) (1915)
A Kiss for Cinderella (play) (1916)
Real Thing at Last[89] (play) (1916)
Shakespeare's Legacy[90] (play) (1916)
A Strange Play[91] (play) (1917)
Charwomen and the War or The Old Lady Shows her Medals (play) (1917)
Dear Brutus (1917)
La Politesse (play) (1918)
Echoes of the War (1918) Four plays, includes:
The New Word
The Old Lady Shows Her Medals
A Well-Remembered Voice
Barbara's Wedding
Alice Sit-By-The-Fire (1919)
Mary Rose (play) (1920)
Courage, the Rectorial Address delivered at St. Andrews University (1922)
The Author (1925)
Biographical Introduction to Scott's Last Expedition (preface included in 1925 edition only)
Cricket (1926)
My Lady Nicotine, A Study in Smoke (1926)
Shall We Join the Ladies? (1928) includes:
Shall We Join the Ladies?
Half an Hour
Seven Women
Old Friends
The Greenwood Hat (1930)
Farewell Miss Julie Logan (1932)
The Boy David (1936)
Story treatment for film As You Like It (1936)
M'Connachie and J. M. B. (1938)
Stories by English Authors: London (Selected by Scribners) (as Contributor)
Stories by English Authors: Scotland (Selected by Scribners) (as Contributor)
The Young Visiters or, Mr. Salteena's Plan by Daisy Ashford (preface)
J. M. Barrie Quotes
"To die will be an awfully big adventure."
"All the world is made of faith, and trust, and pixie dust."
"Dreams do come true, if only we wish hard enough. You can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it."
"The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease forever to be able to do it."
"Life is a long lesson in humility."
"The best of happiness is the least of pain."
"Those who bring sunshine into the lives of others cannot keep it from themselves."
"When the first baby laughed for the first time, its laugh broke into a thousand pieces, and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies."
"Do you believe in fairies? Say quick that you believe. If you believe, clap your hands!"
"We are all failures at least, all the best of us are."
Source and additional information: J. M. Barrie