Sir James Matthew Barrie, 1st Baronet (; 9 May 1860 19 June 1937) was a British novelist and playwright. He was born and educated in Scotland and then moved to London, where he wrote several successful novels and plays. There he met the Llewelyn Davies boys, who inspired him to write about a baby boy who has magical adventures in Kensington Gardens (first included in Barrie's 1902 adult novel The Little White Bird), then to write Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up, a 1904 West End "fairy play" about an ageless boy and an ordinary girl named Wendy who have adventures in the fantasy setting of Neverland.
Although he continued to write successfully, Peter Pan overshadowed his other work, and is credited with popularising the name Wendy. Barrie unofficially adopted the Davies boys following the deaths of their parents. Barrie was made a baronet by George V on 14 June 1913, and a member of the Order of Merit in the 1922 New Year Honours. Before his death, he gave the rights to the Peter Pan works to Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in London, which continues to benefit from them.
Childhood and adolescence James Matthew Barrie was born in 1860 in Kirriemuir, Angus, Scotland, into a conservative Calvinist family during the Victorian era. His father, David Barrie, was a moderately successful handloom weaver, a common occupation in the Scottish textile industry at the time. His mother, Margaret Ogilvy, came from a working-class Scottish background. After her own mother died when Margaret was only eight years old, she was forced to take on many of the responsibilities of managing the household at a very young age. These experiences later influenced Barrie’s understanding of childhood, family, and loss.
Barrie was the ninth of ten children, although two of his siblings died before he was born. Education was important in the Barrie household. The children were taught the basic “three Rs,” reading, writing, and arithmetic, which were considered important foundations for children who might eventually enter professional occupations. Growing up in nineteenth-century Scotland, Barrie was also surrounded by religious traditions, Scottish culture, storytelling, and literature. From an early age, he was known for being small in stature and for entertaining others with stories. His ability to create stories would eventually become one of the most important parts of his career as a writer and playwright.
A major event in Barrie’s childhood occurred in 1866, when he was six years old. His older brother David, who was fourteen, died in an ice-skating accident on the day before his birthday. David had been especially loved by their mother, and his death had a lasting emotional impact on the family. Margaret was deeply affected by the loss of her son. Barrie attempted to comfort her and, in some ways, tried to take David’s place in her life. He wore David’s clothing and even copied the way his brother whistled.
Margaret eventually found comfort in the belief that David would remain a boy forever because he had died before reaching adulthood. For Barrie, this idea of childhood being preserved and protected from the responsibilities of adulthood became an important theme throughout his later writing. He and his mother spent time together telling stories and reading books, including Robinson Crusoe, works by Scottish author Walter Scott, and The Pilgrim’s Progress. These experiences helped shape Barrie’s imagination and his lifelong interest in childhood, storytelling, memory, and the contrast between childhood and adulthood.
Barrie’s early life therefore took place within a particular historical setting: Victorian Scotland, where family, religion, education, work, and social expectations strongly influenced children’s lives. His experiences with his mother, the death of his brother, and the importance of storytelling in his childhood would later appear in his literary work, most famously in his creation of Peter Pan and the idea of a child who refuses to grow up.
Literary career
Barrie knew that he wished to follow a career as an author; however, his family attempted to persuade him to choose a profession such as the ministry. With advice from Alexander, he was able to work out a compromise of attending a university, but studying literature. Barrie enrolled at the University of Edinburgh where he wrote drama reviews for the Edinburgh Evening Courant. He graduated and obtained an M.A. on 21 April 1882.
Following a job advertisement found by his sister in The Scotsman, he worked for a year and a half as a staff journalist on the Nottingham Journal some way south into the East Midlands of England. Back in Kirriemuir after this, he submitted a piece to the St. James's Gazette, a London newspaper, using his mother's stories about the town where she grew up (renamed "Thrums"). The editor "liked that Scotch thing" so well that Barrie ended up writing a series of these stories.Chaney, Lisa. Hide-and-Seek with Angels A Life of J. M. Barrie, London: Arrow Books, 2005 They served as the basis for his first novels: Auld Licht Idylls (1888), A Window in Thrums (1889), and The Little Minister (1891).
The stories depicted the "Auld Lichts", a strict religious sect to which his grandfather had once belonged. Modern 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 19th century, seen as characteristic of what became known as the Kailyard School. Despite, or perhaps because of, this, they were popular enough at the time to establish Barrie as a successful writer. Following that success, he published Better Dead (1888) privately and at his own expense, but it failed to sell. His two "Tommy" novels, Sentimental Tommy (1896) and Tommy and Grizel (1900), were about a boy and young man who clings to childish fantasy, with an unhappy ending. The English novelist George Gissing read the former in November 1896 and wrote that he "thoroughly dislike[d it]".Coustillas, Pierre ed. London and the Life of Literature in Late Victorian England: the Diary of George Gissing, Novelist. Brighton: Harvester Press, 1978, p.427.
Meanwhile, Barrie's attention turned increasingly to works for the theatre, beginning with a biography of Richard Savage, written by Barrie and H. B. Marriott Watson; it was performed only once and critically panned. He immediately followed this with Ibsen's Ghost, or Toole Up-to-Date (1891), a parody of Henrik Ibsen's dramas Hedda Gabler and Ghosts. Ghosts had been unlicensed in the UK until 1914,Dominic Shellard, et al. The Lord Chamberlain Regrets, 2004, British Library, pp. 77–79. but had created a sensation at the time from a single "club" performance.
The production of Ibsen's Ghost at Toole's Theatre in London was seen by William Archer, the translator of Ibsen's works into English. Apparently comfortable with the parody, he enjoyed the humour of the play and recommended it to others. Barrie's third play Walker, London (1892) resulted in his being introduced to a young actress named Mary Ansell. He proposed to her and they were married on 9 July 1894. Barrie bought her a Saint Bernard puppy, Porthos, who played a part in the 1902 novel The Little White Bird. He used Ansell's first name for many characters in his novels. Barrie also authored Jane Annie, a comic opera for Richard D'Oyly Carte (1893), which failed; he persuaded Arthur Conan Doyle to revise and finish it for him.
In 1901 and 1902, he had back-to-back successes; Quality Street was about a respectable, responsible old maid who poses as her own flirtatious niece to try to win the attention of a former suitor returned from the war. The Admirable Crichton was a critically acclaimed social commentary with elaborate staging about an aristocratic family and their household servants whose social order is inverted after they are shipwrecked on a desert island. Max Beerbohm thought it "quite the best thing that has happened, in my time, to the British theatre".
Peter Pan
The character of "Peter Pan" first appeared in The Little White Bird. The novel was published in the UK by Hodder & Stoughton in 1902 and serialised in the US in the same year in Scribner's Magazine. Barrie's more famous and enduring work Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up had its first stage performance on 27 December 1904 at the West End’s Duke of York's Theatre. The tradition of having a woman play the title role started because at the time children were not allowed to act on stage, and smaller women were considered more believable in the role of a young boy. This play introduced audiences to the name "Wendy"; it was inspired by a young girl named Margaret Henley who called Barrie "Friendy", but could not pronounce her Rs very well. The Bloomsbury scenes show the societal constraints of late Victorian and Edwardian middle class domestic reality, contrasted with Neverland, a world where morality is ambivalent.
George Bernard Shaw described the play as "ostensibly a holiday entertainment for children but really a play for grown-up people", suggesting deeper social metaphors at work in Peter Pan. In 1907, it was parodied by H. G. Pélissier and The Follies at the Apollo Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue in a sketch entitled Baffles or the Peterpan-tomime. This parody was in fact reviewed by Barrie himself in a magazine called Sphere as being "funny in little bits", although he also concluded that The Follies were "one of the funniest things now to be seen in London."
Barrie had a long string of successes on the stage after Peter Pan, many of which discuss social concerns, as Barrie continued to integrate his work and his beliefs. The Twelve Pound Look (1910) concerns a wife leaving her 'typical' husband once she can gain an independent income. Other plays, such as Mary Rose (1920) and Dear Brutus (1917), revisit the idea of the ageless child and parallel worlds. Barrie was involved in the 1909 and 1911 attempts to challenge the censorship of the theatre by the Lord Chamberlain, along with a number of other playwrights.
In 1911, Barrie developed the Peter Pan play into the novel Peter and Wendy. In April 1929, Barrie gave the copyright of the Peter Pan works to Great Ormond Street Hospital, a leading children's hospital in London. The current status of the copyright is somewhat complex. 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.
Social connections
Barrie moved in literary circles and had many famous friends in addition to his professional collaborators. Novelist George Meredith was an early social patron. He had a long correspondence with Robert Louis Stevenson, who lived in Samoa at the time. Stevenson invited Barrie to visit him, but the two never met.Shaw, Michael (ed.) (2020), A Friendship in Letters: Robert Louis Stevenson & J.M. Barrie, Sandstone Press, Inverness He was also friends with S. R. Crockett who like Barrie would sometimes write in the Scots dialect. George Bernard Shaw was his neighbour in London for several years, and once participated in a Western that Barrie scripted and filmed. H. G. Wells was a friend of many years, and tried to intervene when Barrie's marriage fell apart. Barrie met Thomas Hardy through Hugh Clifford while he was staying in London. He was friends with Nobel prize winner John Galsworthy.
Barrie remained in touch with his roots and visited his hometown of Kirriemuir regularly with his wards. When choosing his first personal secretary, Barrie chose E. V. Lucas's wife, Elizabeth Lucas, who had Scottish ancestry despite her more immediate American parentage. After Elizabeth Lucas moved to Paris, France, Barrie chose Cynthia Asquith as his personal secretary.