The Dark Truth And Origins Behind Peter Pan, The Boy Who Never Grew Up

When anybody thinks of Peter Pan, they likely recall the Disney animated film that became a beloved staple of many childhoods. To a legend that dates back more than 100 years, it has a more sinister origin story that most people don’t know much (or anything) about. 

Born in the Scottish town of Kirriemuir in 1860, James Matthew “J.M.” Barrie and his older brother, David, were the sons of Margaret and Alexander Barrie. David was considered “the perfect child” until tragedy struck the family one day. 

Barrie moved to London in 1894, which is where he met and married Mary Ansell. As a wedding present, he gave her a St. Bernard dog. Due to evidence, it’s proposed that Barrie didn’t consummate their marriage, and that’s why they never had any children together. 

In an area called Kensington Gardens (attached to London’s Hyde Park), Barrie met a few boys in 1889. He saw two brothers, George, and Jack Llewelyn Davies, walking with their nurse. Allegedly, Barrie took a liking to the four and five-year-olds after meeting their parents, Arthur and Sylvia. 

The Peter Pan that we all know and love has been a fabled fictional character for decades now. But, he actually made his initial debut in the novel The Little White Bird. Loosely based on George Llewelyn Davies, the story was about a boy named David that befriends the narrator and pretends his son died. It was a lie in order to gain sympathy from David’s parents. 

In the biography titled Barrie and the Lost Boys by Andrew Birkin, he has a different opinion than most. He believes that Barrie’s intentions with young boys were anything other than explicit and predatory. Instead, he considers Barrie “a lover of childhood” despite the preconceived notions that people have about him. 

Not everybody thought favorably about Barrie, specifically Piers Dudgeon. In his novel, Neverland: J.M. Barrie, the Du Mauriers, and The Dark Side of Peter Pan, Dudgeon claims that there was something more going on between Barrie and the Davies boys. 

Unfortunately, in 1907, Arthur died of jaw cancer, and Sylvia died three years later from lung cancer. You can only guess who became the legal guardian of their children. Yes, Uncle Jim. 

Barrie got away with fooling everybody by becoming their legal guardian. The entire situation is quite strange and, not to mention, illegal, there is actually no substantial evidence that proved Barrie physically hurt any of the Davies children. 

Sadly, Michael’s fate didn’t differ too much from George’s. He and Buxton drowned together in a large body of water near Oxford, called Standford Pool. Reportedly, their bodies were discovered clinging onto one another. Some theorized that Davies and Buxton were lovers and that this was a tragic act to declare their love for each other.

The character of Peter Pan was once called “that terrible masterpiece” by Peter. Ruthven, his son, and others think that Peter became an alcoholic due to all of the unwanted and undesired attention from fame. On the outside, he appeared to be successful and optimistic, but perhaps that was a front. He took his own life in April of 1960.

While writers sometimes can’t foresee how their work will have an impact on their audience, Peter Pan was definitely an anomaly. In the early 20th century, the culture just so happened to be enamored with boyhood. Readers weren’t the only ones impacted by this magical story of a boy who never grows up, the middle classes were, too. 

Even though the saying “boys will be boys” is deemed toxic masculinity these days, it was encouraged and supported back then. Gibson wrote, “When he starts out to be a boy, he is more a little beast.” He continued, “He is, though, a man in the making.” Staunch efforts to develop and protect the innate nature of boyhood became prioritized soon after. 

It’s interesting to put Peter Pan in the middle of the whole “boyology” phenomenon. But, it was also a bit risky at the same time. How does it encourage and teach boys to become men? It doesn’t really; in fact, it’s the opposite.

While this answer may be simple, it’s still being debated to this very day. One of the theories is that since Peter Pan was first published in 1906, Peter is at least 110 years old. And, because, Barrie was born in 1860 that makes Peter 156 years old. Peter’s age was never mentioned in Barrie’s play or novel. 

Anthony Lane, in his 2004 New Yorker essay, writes, “In Peter Pan, Barrie achieved the rarest alchemy of all, the one that no writer can plan or predict: he invented a myth.” There’s a sad and dark tone underlying the story when you read it as an adult, even more than when you saw the movie as a child.

As mentioned earlier on, Peter Pan first appeared in Barrie’s novel The Little White Bird in which Peter is a seven-day-old baby who believes he can fly. In fact, that specific part of the story made it famous. Barrie knew he could take things further due to the success of the book and Peter’s character.

However, in the original story of The Little White Bird, Peter leaves home and doesn’t age. He stayed one week old for all time. Believing that his mother will leave the window open for him always, he plays with the birds and fairies, not fearing that he would lose her affection. So, when he returns to her, he is crushed by a horrifying reality.

According to historians and biographers, the most controversial element of Barrie’s life was whether or not his relationship with the Davies boys was inappropriate or not. To this day, there is no concrete evidence to say that he did or didn’t have such an association with them. Despite this, his closest acquaintances said that he was never attracted to anybody.

People will continue to think whatever they want about Barrie. But, even before he became the Davies boys’ legal guardian, he was a loyal friend to the whole family. Barrie and his wife even went on vacation with them. He was around a lot, playing with the kids around the lake, and sharing stories about fairies and pirates. 

We all know now that Peter Pan was a play before it was anything else. Aside from the chapters mentioned earlier, there weren’t book versions of Peter Pan’s story. Barrie finally made the play into a novel called Peter and Wendy. And, Peter was loosely based on Barrie.

Barrie got married in 1894 and it was never clear why the marriage ended. His wife was desperate to start a family of her own, but Barrie felt differently (or, rather indifferently). It’s interesting since he loved children so much. 

In both the Peter Pan book and play, the backstory from The Little White Bird is the same, except that Peter can leave Kensington Gardens. Neverland is his playground. It’s filled with Lost Boys to goof around with and go on adventures, pirates to fight, and Wendy Darling and her offspring miraculously transforming into mothers. They replace his biological mother who abandoned him. 

Of course, the end supplies us with the inevitable dread we’ve been anticipating. Peter meets grown-up Wendy. She is “helpless and guilty, a big woman [with] something inside her… crying, ‘woman, woman, let go of me!’” Of course, she feels sad for abandoning Peter the same way his mother did. Guilt tore her apart. 

In both the book and the play, Peter ruthlessly kills the pirates without any noticeable remorse. And, in the book, it’s revealed that he killed the Lost Boys for possible reasons such as to “thin the herd” or perhaps because they were growing up which wasn’t allowed in Neverland. 

Throughout the book, the Lost Boys and the Darlings are faced with many dangers. But, Peter being Peter, views the danger as pure entertainment instead of being scary. He ends up saving them every time, yet it’s because he wants to show off his cleverness, not because he actually wants to rescue them.

One of the most recent versions of the Peter Pan story is Christina Henry’s Lost Boy. In her rendition, Peter Pan is a bloodthirsty cult leader instead of the embodiment of eternal youth. He lures little boys away from their families, starves them, and forces them to play a game called “Battle,” where they are driven to kill one another. 

If you really give some thought to it, Henry’s version of the classic tale doesn’t stray too far from Barrie’s portrayal of Peter. However, the one glaring difference is that Barrie didn’t focus on the Lost Boys’ perspective, rendering them 2D characters without original thoughts, feelings, or perspectives. They were objects, just as Peter saw them. 

When Barrie was first creating the idea of Peter Pan, he envisioned him as a fantasy. Being selfish and heartless yet maintaining innocence appealed to Barrie, which is how he was able to turn the story into a fairytale ripe with sentimentality. Even though he had intentions to develop Peter into a more empathetic character, he realized it wouldn’t work. 

For some, the tale of Peter Pan is associated with the magical tradition of Christmas. The historical reason behind this is that during that time of year most plays were performed. In those days, plays were usually geared toward young children and based on either fairy tales or nursery rhymes. 

As you know, Barrie left the Peter Pan rights and proceeds to the Great Ormond’s Street Hospital’s children’s charity. They hold the rights to the royalties for everything in the United Kingdom. So, they receive all royalties from broadcasts, publications, on-stage productions, and adaptations, but not sequels, prequels, and spin-offs. 

Barrie would switch it up a little by constantly changing the story every year. Because of these alterations, the version of Peter Pan that we are most familiar with takes place in the late 1950s and early 1960s. During those periods, society’s conception of young and old was changing. With Barrie updating Peter Pan for an entirely new era, the idea of the boy who doesn’t grow old or grow up remained exciting.

Initially when Peter Pan was just a stage play, Tinker Bell’s character was a dot of light on the stage. She moved around by using a focusing mirror. In current productions, the character is a beautiful, intricate puppet designed by Sue Dacre, a talented puppet maker for Jim Henson.

Adventure novels were all the popularity in 20th-century England, such as Robert Lewis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. In the play’s original version, the last words of Captain Hook were the Eton College motto, “Floreat Etona.” Even though both stories were penned by different authors, they both seemed to have existed in the same fictional realm. 

In order to grab the attention of younger audiences, Disney had to strip away some of the characters’ darker traits. But, there is still some of the original darkness from Barrie’s original version of the character into the one that Disney popularized. Peter Pan remains a beloved story and a timeless classic.