Peter Pan (Peter and Wendy)

About this book

Peter and Wendy is J. M. Barrie’s novel version of his own stage play, Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up. The play was first performed in London in 1904 and the novel followed in 1911. The Project Gutenberg text carries the title Peter Pan, which is how most readers now know the book. The character of Peter had already appeared in Barrie’s earlier adult novel The Little White Bird, but it is this book that fixed the story of the Darling children, Neverland, the Lost Boys, Tinker Bell and Captain Hook in its familiar form.

The book has lasted partly because its images are so simple and so strange at once: a boy who will not grow up, a crocodile that has swallowed a clock, a fairy who dies if children stop believing. It has also lasted because Barrie’s narrator is far more knowing and melancholy than the adaptations suggest. The story is told for children, but much of its attention is on the adults, on what it costs to leave childhood and what it costs to refuse to.

The story

Wendy, John and Michael Darling live in Bloomsbury with their parents and a Newfoundland dog named Nana who serves as their nurse. One night Peter Pan comes in through the nursery window looking for his lost shadow. He teaches the children to fly and takes them to Neverland, an island of his own imagining where the Lost Boys live underground, pirates sail the lagoon, and Captain Hook nurses a grudge against Peter for the loss of his hand.

Wendy becomes a mother to the Lost Boys, which is what Peter wanted her for. The adventures that follow, with mermaids, the pirate ship and Hook’s plots, are told briskly and with a good deal of comedy. Running under them is the question of whether the Darling children will remember their real home and whether their mother is still keeping the window open for them.

Themes and historical context

Barrie wrote at the end of the Edwardian period, when a large market existed for children’s books and the stage pantomime tradition was strong. Peter Pan drew on both, and its early productions used theatrical flying effects that were a novelty at the time. The novel keeps the play’s set pieces but adds a narrator who comments on the characters, interrupts himself and openly manipulates the reader’s sympathies.

The central theme is the refusal to grow up and what that refusal costs. Peter has no memory and so no loyalty; he forgets his adventures and his friends almost as soon as they end. Wendy, by contrast, is pulled toward adulthood, toward mothering and remembering. Barrie sets these two instincts against each other without fully siding with either. The treatment of Mrs. Darling, who waits at the open window, gives the book an adult sadness that is easy to miss in a stage version.

Modern readers should be aware that the Neverland “redskins,” led by Tiger Lily, are drawn from the stereotypes of adventure fiction of the period. Most current editions and adaptations handle this material with notes or changes; the Gutenberg text is the original.

Who should read it

This is a short novel, roughly 50,000 words, in plain Edwardian English with short chapters that suit reading aloud. Children from about eight can follow it, though some of the narrator’s irony is aimed over their heads. Adults who know only the Disney film or the stage musical will find a darker and funnier book than they expect. It pairs naturally with Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, both from the same few years.

Edition notes

The Project Gutenberg edition was prepared by Duncan Research. It is the text of the 1911 novel, not the play script, which Barrie published separately in 1928.