J.m. Barrie
Barrie)
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Sir James Matthew Barrie, 1st Baronet OM (9 May 1860 – 19 June 1937), more commonly known as J. 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. He was made a baronet in 1913; his baronetcy was not inherited. He was made a member of the Order of Merit in 1922.
Childhood and adolescence
Barrie was born in Kirriemuir, Angus, to a conservative Scottish Calvinist family.
His mother Margaret Ogilvy Barrie had assumed her deceased mother's household responsibilities at the age of 8. Barrie was the ninth child of ten (two of whom died before he was born), all of whom were schooled in at least the three Rs, in preparation for possible professional careers.
He was a small child (he only grew to 5 feet 3 inches as an adult), and drew attention to himself with storytelling.
When he was 6 years old, his next-older brother David Barrie, his mother's favourite, died two days before his 14th birthday in an ice-skating accident. This left his mother devastated, and Barrie tried to fill David's place in his mother's attentions, even wearing his clothes.
One time Barrie 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. It has been speculated that this trauma induced psychogenic dwarfism, and was responsible for his short stature and apparently asexual adulthood. Eventually Barrie and his mother entertained each other with stories of her brief childhood and books such as Robinson Crusoe and Pilgrim's Progress.
At the age of 8, Barrie was sent to the Glasgow Academy, in the care of his eldest siblings Alexander and Mary Ann, who taught at the school. When he was 10 he returned home and continued his education at the Forfar Academy.
At 13, he left home for Dumfries Academy, again under the watch of Alexander and Mary Ann. The editor 'liked that Scotch thing', so Barrie wrote a series of them, which served as the basis for his first novels: Auld Licht Idylls (1888), A Window in Thrums (1890), and The Little Minister (1891).
Literary criticism of these early works has been unfavourable, tending to disparage them as sentimental and nostalgic depictions of a parochial Scotland far from the realities of the industrialised nineteenth century, but they were popular enough to establish Barrie as a very successful writer. His two 'Tommy' novels, Sentimental Tommy (1896) and Tommy and Grizel (1902), were about a boy and young man who clings to childish fantasy, with an unhappy ending.
Meanwhile, Barrie's attention turned increasingly to works for the theatre, beginning with a biography about Richard Savage (performed only once, and critically panned).
Barrie also authored Jane Annie, a failed comic opera for Richard D'Oyly Carte (1893), which he begged his friend Arthur Conan Doyle to revise and finish for him. In 1901 and 1902 he had back-to-back successes: Quality Street, about a responsible 'old maid' who poses as her own flirtatious niece to win the attention of a former suitor returned from the war; and The Admirable Crichton, a critically-acclaimed social commentary with elaborate staging, about an aristocratic household shipwrecked on a desert island, in which the butler naturally rises to leadership over his lord and ladies for the duration of their time away from civilisation.
The first appearance of Peter Pan came in The Little White Bird, which was serialised in the United States, then published in a single volume in the UK in 1901.
Barrie's most famous and enduring work, Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up, had its first stage performance on 27 December 1904. In 1929 Barrie specified that the copyright of the Peter Pan works should go to the nation's leading children's hospital, Great Ormond Street Hospital in London.
The current status of the copyright is somewhat complex.
Barrie had a long string of successes on the stage after Peter Pan, many of which discuss social concerns. The Twelve Pound Look shows a wife divorcing a peer and gaining an independent income.
Other plays, such as Mary Rose and a subplot in Dear Brutus revisit the image of the ageless child. His final play was The Boy David (1936), which dramatised 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, for whom Barrie wrote the play.
Barrie used his considerable income to help finance the production of commercially unsuccessful stage productions. He had a long correspondence with fellow Scot Robert Louis Stevenson, who lived in Samoa at the time, but the two never met in person.
George Bernard Shaw was for several years his neighbour, and once participated in a Western that Barrie scripted and filmed. He paid for the Pavilion at Stanway Cricket ground.
Barrie founded an amateur cricket team for his friends.
He was godfather to Scott's son Peter, and was one of the seven people to whom Scott wrote letters in the final hours of his life following his successful – but doomed – expedition to the South Pole.
Barrie's close friend Charles Frohman, who was responsible for producing the debut of Peter Pan in both England and the U.S. The two became friends, and she joined his family in caring for him when he fell very ill in 1893 and 1894. They married in Kirriemuir on 9 July 1894, shortly after Barrie recovered, and Mary retired from the stage; but the relationship was reportedly sexless and the couple had no children.
Beginning in mid 1908, Mary had an affair with Gilbert Cannan (an associate of Barrie's in his anti-censorship activities), including a visit together to Black Lake Cottage, known only to the house staff. It consisted of the parents Arthur (1863–1907) and Sylvia (1866–1910) (daughter of George du Maurier), ; and their five sons: George (1893–1915), John (Jack) (1894-1959), Peter (1897–1960), Michael (1900–1921), and Nicholas (Nico) (1903–1980).
Barrie became acquainted with the family in 1897, meeting George and Jack (and baby Peter) with their nurse (nanny) Mary Hodgson in London's Kensington Gardens.
He did not meet Sylvia until a chance encounter at a dinner party in December. (His income from Peter Pan and other works was easily adequate to provide for their living expenses and education.) Following Sylvia's death in 1910, Barrie claimed that they had been engaged to be married. Her will indicated nothing to that effect, but specified her wish for 'J.M.B.' to be trustee and guardian to the boys, along with her mother Emma, her brother Guy Du Maurier, and Arthur's brother Compton.
Although Barrie and Hodgson did not get along well, they served as surrogate parents until the boys were all in school and Jack was married.
Barrie also had friendships with other children, both before he met the Davies boys and after they were grown, and there has since been speculation that Barrie was a paedophile or that he engaged in child sexual abuse. 'He was an innocent — which is why he could write Peter Pan.' His relationships with the surviving Davies boys continued well beyond their childhood and adolescence.
The statue of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, erected in secret overnight for May Morning in 1912, was supposed to be modelled upon old photographs of Michael dressed as the character.
The set of 2 DVDs is available in both the UK and USA. Barrie and the Lost Boys, a factual book covering in greater detail the material portrayed in the docudrama.
A semi-fictional movie about his relationship with the family, Finding Neverland, was released in November 2004, starring Johnny Depp as Barrie and Kate Winslet as Sylvia Llewelyn Davies.
Sylvia is already a widow when she meets Barrie), and omits Nico altogether.
Sir James Barrie has a school named after him in Wandsworth, South West London.
Works
The Admirable Crichton
Alice Sit-By-The-Fire
Auld Licht Idylls
Better Dead
Dear Brutus
Echoes of the War
The Little Minister
The Little White Bird; or, Adventures in Kensington Gardens
Margaret Ogilvy
My Lady Nicotine, A Study in Smoke
Peter Pan (play)
Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens
Peter and Wendy
Sentimental Tommy, The Story of His Boyhood
Stories by English Authors: London (Selected by Scribners) (as Contributor)
Stories by English Authors: Scotland (Selected by Scribners) (as Contributor)
Tommy and Grizel
What Every Woman Knows
A Window in Thrums
The Young Visiters or, Mr.