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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
- Sprache: Englisch
In the J. M. Barrie Ultimate Collection: 90+ Titles in one Volume (Illustrated), readers are presented with a comprehensive compilation of the author's literary oeuvre, showcasing Barrie's range from whimsical fantasy to poignant drama. This illustrated collection intricately weaves together well-loved classics, such as Peter Pan, with lesser-known yet equally impactful works, reflecting Barrie's mastery of language and ability to evoke deep emotional resonance. The book serves as a lens into the Edwardian literary context, marked by a blend of nostalgia, innocence, and a critique of adult society, revealing Barrie's profound insights into childhood and the human condition. J. M. Barrie, a Scottish author and dramatist, gained fame for his seminal works that often explore themes of imagination and the fleeting nature of childhood. His own life experiences, including the profound impact of loss and the adventures he shared with the Llewelyn Davies boys, significantly shaped his narrative style and thematic choices. Barrie's inherent understanding of childhood whimsy and the adult world's responsibilities inspires readers to reflect on their own sense of wonder. For enthusiasts of classic literature and new readers alike, this expansive volume is an essential addition to any literary collection. The intricate illustrations complement the text, enhancing the reading experience, while the diverse array of stories invites a journey into Barrie's whimsical and reflective worlds. This ultimate collection is not only a treasury of entertainment but also an exploration of the essence of joy, sorrow, and the eternal allure of youth. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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J. M. BARRIE Ultimate Collection: 90+ Titles in one Volume (Illustrated)
Table of Contents
Introduction
This volume gathers more than ninety works by a single author, presenting an integrated portrait of a novelist, short-story writer, essayist, memoirist, and dramatist whose imagination helped define late-Victorian and Edwardian letters. It is designed as a complete reading room: the landmark fantasies, the Scottish village books, the London sketches, the social comedies, the war-time one-acts, and the reflective prose that frames them. Bringing prose and drama together in one place allows readers to watch motifs migrate across forms and decades, and to follow the gradual sharpening of tone, humor, and sympathy that distinguishes a career both popular and enduring.
At the heart of the collection stands the author’s most widely known creation, introduced in fiction, developed for the stage, and reimagined in later prose. Read consecutively, these related works reveal how a single conceit—childhood as an imaginative republic—expands through varied media, from narrative reverie to theatrical flight to wistful afterthought. The inclusion of both the original play and the novelistic treatments makes evident the different demands of stage and page, while the supplementary coda underscores the work’s evolving conversation with time, memory, and loss. Together they supply a living thread that ties the whole body of writing to its public legacy.
The novels span youthful satire, affectionate portraits of small-town life, and searching studies of ambition and identity. Early efforts show a playful streak and a journalist’s eye for the comic commonplace; later books deepen into portraits of imaginative children, stubborn ministers, and communities held together by custom, gossip, and quiet heroism. Across these works the narrative voice balances sentiment with irony, often pausing to address the reader with genial confidence. Recurrent figures—dreamers, performers, guardians, and skeptics—test the limits of duty and desire. The result is a chronicle of growth and self-fashioning that mirrors the author’s own path from provincial observer to metropolitan storyteller.
The shorter fiction and humorous sketches display a craftsman refining his timing. Written with a newspaper columnist’s brevity, these pieces move from drawing-room absurdities and bachelor confessions to whimsical arguments with umbrellas, clocks, time-tables, and other everyday companions. Some linger in rural lanes; others chase the bustle of the city. A light satiric touch keeps the tone spry, yet beneath the comedy lies a sympathy for the awkward, the overlooked, and the lovably self-deceived. Read as a suite, they show how a fondness for miniature dramas, comic reversals, and gently implausible premises prepared the way for larger theatrical architecture.
The plays gathered here reveal range and experiment: polished comedies of manners, romantic fantasies where enchantment tests character, and compact one-acts written with wartime urgency. Their stages are domestic rooms, nurseries, gardens, drawing rooms, and the occasional uncharted isle, each turned by wit into a laboratory for class, gender, and authority. The dialogue is lucid and buoyant; the situations contrive reversals that expose pretension and reward resourcefulness. Even in the most sparkling pieces, a fugitive melancholy moves among the furniture. The theatre becomes a place where ordinary relations are lightly inverted so that duty, loyalty, and love may be freshly seen.
The essays, prefaces, and occasional journalism add a reflective frame to the imaginative work. They include affectionate portraits of friends and collaborators, memorial pages for a legendary theatrical manager, admiring studies of fellow writers, and playful pieces on reading, publishing, and the press. When he writes about courage, taste, or the uses of brevity, he speaks as a practitioner who has tried every register. His literary appreciations reveal a catholic, generous sensibility; his pleas for practicality in bookmaking show the working dramatist’s respect for audiences and readers. These prose interventions illuminate the convictions that quietly guide the fiction and drama.
The autobiographical works ground the fancy in lived experience. One is a tender portrait of his mother, tracing the house, faith, and idiom that nurtured him. Another offers pencil portraits from student days in Edinburgh, capturing mentors, classmates, and the city’s moral weather. A third is a playful meditation on smoking, club life, and the habits of talk, a minor classic of urban whimsy. These books are companionable rather than confessional, yet they supply the key to the emotional timbre elsewhere: the ache of remembered rooms, the comedy of provincial pride, and the steady admiration for plain courage and tact.
Across the volume, readers will find long novels, novellas, suites of short stories, feuilletons and sketches, extended essays, literary tributes, prefaces, character studies, and a full complement of stage works ranging from short curtain-raisers to multi-act comedies and fantasies. The mixture reflects a working life divided between newsroom, study, and rehearsal room. Narrative prose and dramatic dialogue answer each other: ideas tried in miniature reappear at scale, while scenic ingenuity feeds back into narrative pacing. The arrangement invites sampling by mood and length as well as immersive reading, accommodating both the curious newcomer and the scholar seeking the whole cabinet of work.
Certain themes return with durable insistence. Childhood imagination blesses and complicates adult life; performance, whether on stage or in parlors and kirks, shapes identity; communities bind through language, ritual, and remembered stories; and love, in its comic and sacrificial registers, seeks a tact that words sometimes cannot supply. The author’s Scotland is exact in texture yet open to fable; his London is brisk, ironic, and forgiving. Where satire appears, it is merciful; where sentiment threatens excess, a joke rescues it. The humanities of play, make-believe, and common decency are not escapes here but instruments of moral and aesthetic inquiry.
Stylistically, the writing favors lightness without thinness. An intimate narrator, quick with aside and apostrophe, cultivates complicity with the reader. In drama, the lines are clean and speakable, the structures classical, the coups de théâtre economical and precise. A fondness for framing devices—narrators, prologues, afterthoughts—acknowledges that stories are performances. Dialect appears with care and musicality, grounded in affectionate observation rather than caricature. Fantastical elements are treated as serious tools, not decorations, and are balanced by domestic detail. Most distinctive is the blend of play and pity: laughter clears the air so that tenderness can be felt without embarrassment.
The significance of the oeuvre rests not only on a single immortal character but on the coherence of a temperament across modes. The comedies refreshed popular theatre with civilized wit and unshowy craftsmanship; the village books preserved a social world with tact and sympathy; the shorter pieces minted a durable anthology of urban humor; the memoirs offered a humane key to the rest. Many writers have borrowed the balance of fancy and feeling on display here, and many productions continue to test the plays because they welcome new actors and audiences without loss of clarity. The work endures by remaining playable.
This edition aims to be both archive and companion. By placing disparate genres side by side and enriching them with illustrations, it restores the original variety in which the work was first encountered—serially, on stage, and in volume—while offering the convenience of a single, navigable source. Readers may follow one thread—the fantasies, the comedies, the essays—or move chronologically to watch a career unfold. However approached, the collection honors an achievement sustained by craft, charity, and delight in language. It invites newcomers and long-time admirers to return to the scenes of wonder, wit, and homely wisdom that first made these pages beloved.
Author Biography
James Matthew Barrie was a Scottish novelist and playwright whose work bridged the late Victorian and Edwardian eras and helped define modern fantasy on the stage. Best known for creating Peter Pan, he combined gentle humor, social observation, and a distinctive melancholy about memory and loss. Barrie’s career ranged from local sketches of Scottish life to internationally celebrated plays, and he became a leading figure in London’s theatrical world. His writing explored the pull between youthful imagination and adult responsibility, while his skill as a dramatist shaped early twentieth-century stagecraft. Beyond a single iconic character, he left a versatile body of fiction, drama, and essays.
Barrie was educated in Scotland, attending schools that prepared him for the University of Edinburgh, where he studied in the early 1880s. After university he began working as a journalist, honing a concise style and a feel for dialogue that would later serve him on the stage. He drew on Scottish oral storytelling and on popular theatre of the period, blending sentiment with irony. The literary marketplace of late nineteenth-century Britain—especially magazines and the London stage—helped shape his voice. While not tied to a single movement, his work reflects Victorian realism, fin-de-siècle wit, and the emerging Edwardian appetite for socially observant comedy.
Barrie first gained attention with prose grounded in the rhythms of small-town Scotland. Auld Licht Idylls (1888) and A Window in Thrums (1889) offered affectionate, dramatized portraits of a close-knit community, balancing humor with pathos. They were followed by the popular novel The Little Minister (1891), which reinforced his reputation for accessible, character-driven storytelling. He also published the memoir Margaret Ogilvy (1896), a stylistically distinctive tribute that helped broaden his readership and confirmed his facility with intimate, reflective prose. By the late 1890s, Barrie was firmly established as a successful author whose works could appeal to both general audiences and critics.
Success in prose led naturally to the theatre, where Barrie’s deft dialogue and stage sense flourished. He wrote a series of hits that combined romance, social comedy, and gentle satire, including The Professor’s Love Story (1894), Quality Street (1901), and The Admirable Crichton (1902). These plays featured strong roles for actors and explored class, gender expectations, and the performance of identity. London audiences embraced his mixture of whimsy and clear-eyed observation, and he became a mainstay of commercial theatre. Barrie’s increasing confidence with stage technique—especially pacing, surprise, and visual coups—set the groundwork for the imaginative leap that would define his career.
Peter Pan originated in prose chapters within The Little White Bird (1902) and soon moved to the stage as Peter Pan; or, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up (1904), before being novelized as Peter and Wendy (1911). The figure of the eternally youthful boy drew in part on Barrie’s friendship with a London family whose children inspired elements of the character and world. Audiences were captivated by the play’s blend of fantasy and poignancy, its flying effects, and its inventive stagecraft. Subsequent publications, including Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906), helped consolidate the mythology. The work quickly entered public consciousness and became central to modern children’s literature.
Barrie continued to write for the stage with notable successes such as What Every Woman Knows (1908), Dear Brutus (1917), and Mary Rose (1920), works that examined ambition, chance, memory, and the uncanny. His public standing grew alongside his artistic reputation: he was created a baronet in the early 1910s and received the Order of Merit in the early 1920s. As a respected civic figure, he delivered addresses—most famously at the University of St Andrews—reflecting on courage and public life. In a landmark philanthropic act in 1929, he endowed the copyright of Peter Pan to Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, ensuring enduring charitable support from performances and publications.
In his later years, Barrie remained an influential presence in British letters, advising younger writers and overseeing revivals of his plays. He died in 1937, by which time Peter Pan had already generated a tradition of annual productions, adaptations, and debate about its themes of childhood and responsibility. A statue in London’s Kensington Gardens testifies to the story’s hold on the public imagination. Scholars now read Barrie’s oeuvre for its subtle negotiation of nostalgia, social roles, and theatrical innovation. His legacy endures on stage and page, and the ongoing support for a children’s hospital through Peter Pan underscores the lasting social impact of his art.
Historical Context
James Matthew Barrie (1860–1937) wrote across the late Victorian, Edwardian, and interwar decades, a period that reconfigured British print culture, theatre, and ideas about childhood. Moving from Scottish provincial sketches to London stages, he used the commercial networks of magazines, serial books, and the West End to circulate fiction, essays, and plays. His career threads through fin‑de‑siècle debates over realism and sentiment, the rise of the “problem play,” the Golden Age of children’s literature, and the trauma of the First World War. This collection spans those transformations, from early Scottish idylls and metropolitan journalism to landmark dramas such as Peter Pan (1904) and mature works of memory and loss.
Barrie’s Scottish origins grounded his voice. Born in Kirriemuir, Angus—thinly fictionalized as “Thrums”—he drew on the religious culture of the “Auld Licht” (strict Presbyterian) tradition, the rhythms of weaving communities, and the aftermath of the 1843 Disruption of the Church of Scotland. The social textures that inform Auld Licht Idylls (1888), A Window in Thrums (1889), and The Little Minister (1891) reflect tensions between rural piety and modernizing forces in late nineteenth‑century Scotland. These works also locate Scottish speech and custom within a broad British readership, participating in and refining the so‑called kailyard school while resisting its caricature through irony and psychological intimacy.
Barrie’s path ran through journalism. After the University of Edinburgh (matriculating in 1878), he worked in Nottingham before moving to London in 1885, entering the lively newspaper and magazine economy shaped by “New Journalism.” Short sketches, feuilletons, and serial chapters appeared in venues that prized immediacy and character. Collections such as A Holiday in Bed and Other Sketches and essays later gathered in volumes benefited from cheap reprint series, circulating libraries, and weekly miscellanies. The period’s heterogeneous periodical pages encouraged hybrid forms—comic anecdote, social observation, and theatrical vignette—that seeded Barrie’s later novels, short stories, and plays, and trained him to speak to a mass, often urban, audience.
The London stage Barrie entered was dominated by actor‑managers, touring circuits, and strict pre‑performance licensing by the Lord Chamberlain. Producers like Charles Frohman connected West End theatres to Broadway, enabling transatlantic premieres and revivals. Performers—including Gerald du Maurier and his circle—became closely identified with Barrie’s plays, shaping roles and public reception. Technical advances made spectacle integral: revolving stages, limelight, and precision rigging supported increasingly fluid scenography. Within this system Barrie developed an authorial pragmatism—crafting plays for specific companies and houses—while preserving a lyric, exploratory tone that could flourish in intimate venues and transfer to larger theatres without losing its signature conversational delicacy.
Barrie’s most lasting cultural imprint belongs to the Golden Age of children’s literature (roughly 1860–1920). In conversation with Lewis Carroll and George MacDonald, his child figures resist didactic closure, dramatizing play, make‑believe, and ambivalence about growing up. Concurrently, the new “child study” movement—G. Stanley Hall’s Adolescence (1904) and wider pedagogical reforms—shifted discourse toward developmental psychology. That climate aided the reception of Peter Pan’s never‑aging hero and the nursery as a serious imaginative space. Women’s roles as readers, caregivers, and performers (boy roles played by actresses) forged a gendered ecology for these works, tying domestic culture to public entertainment and to philanthropic causes.
Kensington Gardens and Bayswater were more than settings: they were Barrie’s working landscape. Living near Leinster Corner, he befriended the Llewelyn Davies family in the late 1890s, whose boys informed The Little White Bird (1902), Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906), and the novel Peter and Wendy (1911). The stage premiere of Peter Pan at the Duke of York’s Theatre on 27 December 1904—Nina Boucicault in London, Maude Adams in the 1905 Broadway production—depended on new flying systems and lighting tricks. Barrie’s 1929 gift of Peter Pan’s rights to Great Ormond Street Hospital embedded the play in London’s culture of charity and public health.
Debates about women’s education, employment, and suffrage frame several plays. From the 1870s to the Representation of the People Act (1918) and Equal Franchise (1928), changing statutes and social campaigns transformed expectations of female capability. What Every Woman Knows (1908) satirizes political and domestic spheres that underestimate women’s intelligence; The Twelve‑Pound Look (1910) critiques male complacency through typewriting, a new office technology symbolizing independence. Earlier romantic comedies, such as Quality Street (1901), already feature women negotiating respectability and desire. Barrie’s journalism, too, comments on reading habits and the press’s treatment of women, revealing how theatrical fiction and essayistic observation answered the same public arguments.
Class and empire form a second axis. The Edwardian country house—its servants, rituals, and paternalism—was at once aspirational and fragile under economic and political pressure. The Admirable Crichton (1902) famously inverts the hierarchy on a desert island, examining competence, habit, and ceremony when Britain’s class codes are stripped of context. Post‑Boer War patriotism, the imperial civil service, and the social prestige of officers and domestics alike circulate through Barrie’s dialogue and situations. The metropolitan clubs, Scottish provincial towns, and colonial references that populate his fiction and plays mirror a nation at imperial zenith yet already questioning its social foundations and scripts of authority.
Religion and Scottish moral culture, filtered through memory, frame much of Barrie’s early and middle work. The Auld Licht communities he portrays are anchored in Free Church discipline, Sabbath observance, and the rhetorical power of the sermon. Yet nostalgia competes with irony: the inward lives of ministers, elders, and congregants in Auld Licht Idylls and The Little Minister expose both tenderness and constraint. As Scottish rural society encountered migration, industrial employment (notably Dundee’s jute trade), and urban entertainment, Barrie’s Thrums books register a historical pivot—valuing intimacy and communal speech while conceding the allure and dislocation of the South, the press, and the London stage.
The late‑Victorian novel favored growth narratives and artistic self‑fashioning that Barrie reworked in Sentimental Tommy (1896) and Tommy and Grizel (1900). These fictions converse with contemporaries like Robert Louis Stevenson and critics of the romantic imagination such as George Meredith, whom Barrie admired and wrote about. The Scottish tradition of Scott looms, too, as Barrie weighs historical romance against psychological exactness in essays like What is Scott’s Best Novel?. His critical pieces on “Q” (Arthur Quiller‑Couch) signal engagement with English letters and pedagogy, reflecting a public culture in which novelists, reviewers, and lecturers shaped taste across both universities and the lending libraries.
Urban bachelorhood and the rituals of sociability animate Barrie’s humorous prose. My Lady Nicotine (1890) captures London’s club and lodging‑house life amid temperance campaigns, shifting medical advice, and the commercialization of leisure. Restaurant etiquette, smart waiters, and the terrors of small embarrassments furnish sketches like The Inconsiderate Waiter (1894). Such pieces belong to a metropolitan print economy that prized the anecdotal column: a writer’s eye for trifles that disclose class codes, new technologies (telephones, lifts, typewriters), and the changing tempo of the gaslit city. This comic mode informs later plays’ conversational cadences, demonstrating continuity between press sketch and stage scene.
The 1890s theatre wrestled with Ibsen’s naturalism and the “problem play,” and Barrie’s Ibsen’s Ghost (1891) parodied the vogue while testing his own dramaturgy. He could collaborate—Jane Annie (1893), a comic opera with Arthur Conan Doyle—yet his signature comedies of character, such as The Professor’s Love Story (1894) and Walker, London (1892), grew from British farce traditions softened by sympathy. Censorship by the Lord Chamberlain’s Office shaped propriety, but matinee culture and touring companies widened audiences. By the time of Half Hours (short one‑act plays later collected), Barrie had mastered a compact, epigrammatic form that matched modern attention spans and the economics of mixed bills.
War changed the register. Barrie’s producer and friend Charles Frohman died in the Lusitania sinking (1915), and several Llewelyn Davies boys who inspired Peter Pan served, with losses that shadow the period. Plays gathered as Echoes of the War (1917–1918) and pieces like Der Tag (1914) confront patriotism, grief, and the strain on domestic language. After armistice, Barrie became Rector of the University of St Andrews (1919–1922), delivering his address Courage (1922), a public meditation on fortitude under modern pressure. The essayistic tone, flexible between consolation and wit, fed back into postwar dramas that explore regret, chance, and the afterlives of choices.
Time, memory, and the uncanny preoccupy Barrie’s later theatre. Dear Brutus (1917) stages second chances in a midsummer wood that refracts private yearning; Mary Rose (1920) interlaces ghost story with a meditation on suspended time, resonating with widespread spiritualist interests after 1918 and with modernist experiments in temporal form. These plays test stagecraft—lighting, sound, and scene shifts—to render liminal states without abandoning clarity for general audiences. Barrie thus straddles older sentimental storytelling and new psychological dramaturgies, keeping faith with accessible dialogue while expanding theatrical means to depict longing, return, and the costs of refusing or being denied adulthood.
Barrie navigated—and helped shape—modern authorship’s institutions. Early novels appeared with T. Fisher Unwin and Hodder & Stoughton; plays were published in acting editions that circulated internationally. Peter and Wendy (1911) translated stage lore into prose, reinforcing cross‑media recognition. Appointed a baronet in 1913 and to the Order of Merit in 1922, Barrie stood at the center of literary‑theatrical life, with friendships extending to the du Maurier family: Gerald du Maurier created roles in his plays; Daphne du Maurier later transformed similar atmospheres in fiction. The 1929 assignment of Peter Pan royalties to Great Ormond Street Hospital linked intellectual property to civic benevolence.
The material modernity of Britain—railways, timetables, postal punctuality, and the growth of London—shapes the collection’s minor pieces as much as its major dramas. Sketches about journeys, maps, clocks, and hotels delight in the machinery of coordination while noticing how individuals are misaligned by it. Gretna Green, long a byword for romantic elopement, functions as comic shorthand for border‑crossing desire. Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park offer commons where classes mingle; Scottish lanes and kirks preserve distinct cadences of speech. Barrie’s prose and dialogue thus register a nation on the move—between north and south, childhood and adulthood, ritual and improvisation.
Reception evolved with the century. Some critics attacked the “kailyard” for sentimentality; others celebrated Barrie’s humane wit and theatrical ingenuity. Peter Pan’s stage life—from the 1904 premiere to the 1924 silent film and the 1953 animated adaptation—secured global memory, but the Scottish books, urban sketches, and nuanced comedies remain essential to his range. Barrie died in London in 1937 and is buried at Kirriemuir, closing the circuit between Thrums and the metropolis. His oeuvre, situated between Victorian storytelling and twentieth‑century stagecraft, records how Britain imagined class, gender, childhood, and consolation across upheavals—from empire’s height to the disenchanted aftermath of war.
Synopsis (Selection)
Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens
A whimsical prequel tracing baby Peter’s flights from his cradle into a London park where fairies and birds tutor him in the freedoms and costs of never growing up. It sketches the mythic origins and rules of his magical world.
Peter and Wendy
The novelized tale of the Darling children who follow Peter Pan to Neverland, encountering the Lost Boys, mermaids, and Captain Hook. It balances adventure with reflections on memory, family, and the pull of childhood.
Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up
Barrie’s original stage play in which Peter whisks Wendy, John, and Michael to Neverland for battles and make-believe. Designed for theatrical wonder, it contrasts innocence with the responsibilities of adulthood.
When Wendy Grew Up
A brief afterpiece showing Peter’s return to find time has changed Wendy though not him. It introduces the next generation while preserving the story’s cyclical enchantment.
Better Dead
A satirical novella about an earnest student who joins a clandestine club dedicated to eliminating ‘public nuisances.’ The dark comedy skewers political pretensions, press hypocrisy, and zealotry.
When a Man's Single
A young Scottish journalist navigates career-making, courtship, and reputation. The novel wryly examines bachelorhood, ambition, and social expectations in urban and provincial settings.
Auld Licht Idylls
Linked sketches of a stern Calvinist community in rural Scotland. Through portraits both comic and tender, Barrie explores faith, foible, and village life.
A Window in Thrums
Intimate vignettes of a Scottish weaving town viewed from a cottage window. Domestic joys and sorrows unfold in understated, affectionate detail.
The Little Minister (novel)
In the village of Thrums, a principled young minister falls in love with a mysterious ‘gypsy’ woman amid civic unrest. Romance and conscience collide in a tale of identity and belonging.
Sentimental Tommy
The formative years of Tommy Sandys, an imaginative boy whose flair for invention reshapes his fortunes. It traces the making of an artist—and the limits of charm—across Thrums and London.
Tommy and Grizel
The adult continuation of Tommy Sandys’s story and his complicated bond with steadfast Grizel. The novel tests love against self-regard and responsibility.
The Little White Bird
An episodic London narrative about a solitary bachelor’s bond with a child, interleaving the origins of Peter Pan. It blends whimsy with melancholy and reflections on attachment.
Short Scottish Novellas (Lady's Shoe; A Tillyloss Scandal; Life in a Country Manse)
Light, village-scale narratives of courtship, rumor, and kirk-side comedy. Misunderstandings and small scandals reveal character and custom in Barrie’s Scottish milieu.
A Holiday in Bed and Other Sketches (collection)
Humorous essays and sketches about the pleasures of idling, domestic mishaps, passing manias, and social quirks. The tone is playful, observational, and gently satirical.
Two of Them and Other Stories (collection)
Short tales of marriage, household economies, and everyday absurdities—sometimes told through quirky objects or pets. They highlight small conflicts, comic reversals, and fond ironies.
Other Stories (Scottish and comic tales)
A miscellany ranging from Scottish courtship pieces and village portraits to urbane satires and a playful Holmes pastiche. Human vanity, habit, and kindness are shown in miniature.
Ibsen’s Ghost
A parody of Ibsen’s problem plays that teases high-minded dramaturgy with domestic nonsense. It pokes fun at theatrical fashions while remaining cheerfully light.
Jane Annie
A comic opera co-written with Arthur Conan Doyle about schoolgirl intrigues, hypnotic mischief, and elopement mishaps. It is brisk, frothy, and farcical.
Walker, London
A lively farce of mistaken identities and threatened reputations in the capital. Social propriety collides with improbable coincidence.
The Professor's Love Story
A shy academic, absorbed in abstractions, slowly recognizes the affection before him. The comedy turns on obliviousness, sincerity, and gentle awakening.
The Little Minister: A Play
Stage adaptation of the Thrums romance between a conscientious minister and an enigmatic outsider. It condenses the novel’s conflict into theatrical encounters and reversals.
The Wedding Guest
A brief stage piece built on an interrupted celebration and the revelations a ceremony can prompt. Misapprehensions give way to wry clarity.
Little Mary
A whimsical fantasy in which a child’s aura or dream-life unsettles and softens the adults around her. It suggests innocence as quiet enchantment.
Quality Street
A comedy of manners about a woman who reinvents herself as a livelier ‘younger’ alter ego to outwit ageist assumptions and a returning suitor. Disguise exposes desire and decorum.
The Admirable Crichton
After a titled family and their butler are marooned, class roles invert and competence rules. The satire asks what rank means when circumstances change.
What Every Woman Knows
Maggie Wylie’s unshowy intelligence steadies and advances her ambitious husband’s public career. A shrewd comedy about partnership, pride, and political image.
Der Tag (The Tragic Man)
A wartime sketch lampooning swaggering militarism and fatal conceit. It offers a pointed, topical rebuke through brevity and irony.
Dear Brutus
Guests enter an enchanted wood on Midsummer night to glimpse the lives they might have led. The play weighs second chances against unaltered character.
Alice Sit-by-the-Fire
A daughter, enthralled by melodrama, misreads the adults around her and sets off comic alarms. The result is a domestic comedy about imagination and empathy.
A Kiss for Cinderella
A Cinderella-inflected fantasy set among the urban poor during wartime, following a young woman’s steadfast dreams. Fairy-tale aspiration meets harsh reality with tender humor.
Short One-Act Dramas (Half an Hour; Seven Women; Old Friends)
Concise relationship pieces about impulsive choices, self-knowledge, and long acquaintance. Their stakes are intimate, their turns swift.
Mary Rose
A haunting drama about a woman who mysteriously vanishes on a remote island and later returns unchanged. It meditates on time, memory, and the supernatural.
Half Hours (Pantaloon; The Twelve-Pound Look)
A pair of one-acts: an aging clown faces eclipse by youth, and a self-made typist confronts her pompous ex-husband. Together they examine dignity, independence, and performance.
Rosalind
A curtain-raiser about a celebrated actress who preserves an illusion of youth for audience and suitor alike. It gently probes the gap between role and reality.
Echoes of the War (The Old Lady Shows Her Medals; The New Word; Barbara's Wedding; A Well-Remembered Voice)
Four WWI one-acts on home-front courage, awkward rites of passage, hurried unions, and the solace of remembered voices. They balance sentiment with clear-eyed wit.
Essays and Literary Pieces (Neither Dorking Nor The Abbey; Charles Frohman: A Tribute; Courage; Preface to The Young Visiters; The Man from Nowhere; Woman and the Press; A Plea for Smaller Books; Boy's Books: Their Glorification; The Lost Works of George Meredith; The Humor of Dickens; Ndintpile Pont; Q; What is Scott's Best Novel?)
Short nonfiction on remembrance, publishing, journalism, and reading, along with tributes and prefaces. Barrie appraises Dickens, Scott, Meredith, and ‘Q,’ praises pluck and brevity, and muses on fame, taste, and the bookish life.
Margaret Ogilvy
An intimate portrait of Barrie’s mother and the world that formed him. It is a filial memoir of character, loss, and Scottish domesticity.
An Edinburgh Eleven: Pencil Portraits from College Life
Lively sketches of notable contemporaries and mentors from Barrie’s student days. The pieces mix anecdote, appraisal, and local color.
My Lady Nicotine: A Study in Smoke
Humorous reminiscences of a bachelor’s club bound by pipes, rituals, and affectionate vice. It personifies tobacco and chronicles the foibles of its devotees.
J. M. BARRIE Ultimate Collection: 90+ Titles in one Volume (Illustrated)
Peter Pan Adventures
Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens
The Kensington Gardens are in London, where the King lives.
Table of Contents
Map of Peter Pan's Kensington Gardens
I. The Grand Tour of the Gardens
You must see for yourselves that it will be difficult to follow Peter Pan's adventures unless you are familiar with the Kensington Gardens. They are in London, where the King lives, and I used to take David there nearly every day unless he was looking decidedly flushed. No child has ever been in the whole of the Gardens, because it is so soon time to turn back. The reason it is soon time to turn back is that, if you are as small as David, you sleep from twelve to one. If your mother was not so sure that you sleep from twelve to one, you could most likely see the whole of them.
The Gardens are bounded on one side by a never-ending line of omnibuses, over which your nurse has such authority that if she holds up her finger to any one of them it stops immediately. She then crosses with you in safety to the other side. There are more gates to the Gardens than one gate, but that is the one you go in at, and before you go in you speak to the lady with the balloons, who sits just outside. This is as near to being inside as she may venture, because, if she were to let go her hold of the railings for one moment, the balloons would lift her up, and she would be flown away. She sits very squat, for the balloons are always tugging at her, and the strain has given her quite a red face. Once she was a new one, because the old one had let go, and David was very sorry for the old one, but as she did let go, he wished he had been there to see.
The lady with the balloons, who sits just outside.
The Gardens are a tremendous big place, with millions and hundreds of trees; and first you come to the Figs, but you scorn to loiter there, for the Figs is the resort of superior little persons, who are forbidden to mix with the commonalty, and is so named, according to legend, because they dress in full fig. These dainty ones are themselves contemptuously called Figs by David and other heroes, and you have a key to the manners and customs of this dandiacal section of the Gardens when I tell you that cricket is called crickets here. Occasionally a rebel Fig climbs over the fence into the world, and such a one was Miss Mabel Grey, of whom I shall tell you when we come to Miss Mabel Grey's gate. She was the only really celebrated Fig.
We are now in the Broad Walk, and it is as much bigger than the other walks as your father is bigger than you. David wondered if it began little, and grew and grew, until it was quite grown up, and whether the other walks are its babies, and he drew a picture, which diverted him very much, of the Broad Walk giving a tiny walk an airing in a perambulator. In the Broad Walk you meet all the people who are worth knowing, and there is usually a grown-up with them to prevent them going on the damp grass, and to make them stand disgraced at the corner of a seat if they have been mad-dog or Mary-Annish. To be Mary-Annish is to behave like a girl, whimpering because nurse won't carry you, or simpering with your thumb in your mouth, and it is a hateful quality; but to be mad-dog is to kick out at everything, and there is some satisfaction in that.
If I were to point out all the notable places as we pass up the Broad Walk, it would be time to turn back before we reach them, and I simply wave my stick at Cecco Hewlett's Tree, that memorable spot where a boy called Cecco lost his penny, and, looking for it, found twopence. There has been a good deal of excavation going on there ever since. Farther up the walk is the little wooden house in which Marmaduke Perry hid. There is no more awful story of the Gardens than this of Marmaduke Perry, who had been Mary-Annish three days in succession, and was sentenced to appear in the Broad Walk dressed in his sister's clothes. He hid in the little wooden house, and refused to emerge until they brought him knickerbockers with pockets.
You now try to go to the Round Pond, but nurses hate it, because they are not really manly, and they make you look the other way, at the Big Penny and the Baby's Palace. She was the most celebrated baby of the Gardens, and lived in the palace all alone, with ever so many dolls, so people rang the bell, and up she got out of her bed, though it was past six o'clock, and she lighted a candle and opened the door in her nighty, and then they all cried with great rejoicings, 'Hail, Queen of England!' What puzzled David most was how she knew where the matches were kept. The Big Penny is a statue about her.
Next we come to the Hump, which is the part of the Broad Walk where all the big races are run; and even though you had no intention of running you do run when you come to the Hump, it is such a fascinating, slide-down kind of place. Often you stop when you have run about half-way down it, and then you are lost; but there is another little wooden house near here, called the Lost House, and so you tell the man that you are lost and then he finds you. It is glorious fun racing down the Hump, but you can't do it on windy days because then you are not there, but the fallen leaves do it instead of you. There is almost nothing that has such a keen sense of fun as a fallen leaf.
From the Hump we can see the gate that is called after Miss Mabel Grey, the Fig I promised to tell you about. There were always two nurses with her, or else one mother and one nurse, and for a long time she was a pattern-child who always coughed off the table and said, 'How do you do?' to the other Figs, and the only game she played at was flinging a ball gracefully and letting the nurse bring it back to her. Then one day she tired of it all and went mad-dog, and, first, to show that she really was mad-dog, she unloosened both her boot-laces and put out her tongue east, west, north, and south. She then flung her sash into a puddle and danced on it till dirty water was squirted over her frock, after which she climbed the fence and had a series of incredible adventures, one of the least of which was that she kicked off both her boots. At last she came to the gate that is now called after her, out of which she ran into streets David and I have never been in though we have heard them roaring, and still she ran on and would never again have been heard of had not her mother jumped into a 'bus and thus overtaken her. It all happened, I should say, long ago, and this is not the Mabel Grey whom David knows.
Returning up the Broad Walk we have on our right the Baby Walk, which is so full of perambulators that you could cross from side to side stepping on babies, but the nurses won't let you do it. From this walk a passage called Bunting's Thumb, because it is that length, leads into Picnic Street, where there are real kettles, and chestnut-blossom falls into your mug as you are drinking. Quite common children picnic here also, and the blossom falls into their mugs just the same.
Next comes St. Govor's Well, which was full of water when Malcolm the Bold fell into it. He was his mother's favourite, and he let her put her arm round his neck in public because she was a widow; but he was also partial to adventures, and liked to play with a chimney-sweep who had killed a good many bears. The sweep's name was Sooty, and one day, when they were playing near the well, Malcolm fell in and would have been drowned had not Sooty dived in and rescued him; and the water had washed Sooty clean, and he now stood revealed as Malcolm's long-lost father. So Malcolm would not let his mother put her arm round his neck any more.
Between the well and the Round Pond are the cricket pitches, and frequently the choosing of sides exhausts so much time that there is scarcely any cricket. Everybody wants to bat first, and as soon as he is out he bowls unless you are the better wrestler, and while you are wrestling with him the fielders have scattered to play at something else. The Gardens are noted for two kinds of cricket: boy cricket, which is real cricket with a bat, and girl cricket, which is with a racquet and the governess. Girls can't really play cricket, and when you are watching their futile efforts you make funny sounds at them. Nevertheless, there was a very disagreeable incident one day when some forward girls challenged David's team, and a disturbing creature called Angela Clare sent down so many yorkers that—However, instead of telling you the result of that regrettable match I shall pass on hurriedly to the Round Pond, which is the wheel that keeps all the Gardens going.
It is round because it is in the very middle of the Gardens, and when you are come to it you never want to go any farther. You can't be good all the time at the Round Pond, however much you try. You can be good in the Broad Walk all the time, but not at the Round Pond, and the reason is that you forget, and, when you remember, you are so wet that you may as well be wetter. There are men who sail boats on the Round Pond, such big boats that they bring them in barrows, and sometimes in perambulators, and then the baby has to walk. The bow-legged children in the Gardens are those who had to walk too soon because their father needed the perambulator.
You always want to have a yacht to sail on the Round Pond, and in the end your uncle gives you one; and to carry it to the pond the first day is splendid, also to talk about it to boys who have no uncle is splendid, but soon you like to leave it at home. For the sweetest craft that slips her moorings in the Round Pond is what is called a stick-boat, because she is rather like a stick until she is in the water and you are holding the string. Then as you walk round, pulling her, you see little men running about her deck, and sails rise magically and catch the breeze, and you put in on dirty nights at snug harbours which are unknown to the lordly yachts. Night passes in a twink, and again your rakish craft noses for the wind, whales spout, you glide over buried cities, and have brushes with pirates, and cast anchor on coral isles. You are a solitary boy while all this is taking place, for two boys together cannot adventure far upon the Round Pond, and though you may talk to yourself throughout the voyage, giving orders and executing them with despatch, you know not, when it is time to go home, where you have been or what swelled your sails; your treasure-trove is all locked away in your hold, so to speak, which will be opened, perhaps, by another little boy many years afterwards.
But those yachts have nothing in their hold. Does any one return to this haunt of his youth because of the yachts that used to sail it? Oh no. It is the stick-boat that is freighted with memories. The yachts are toys, their owner a fresh-water mariner; they can cross and recross a pond only while the stick-boat goes to sea. You yachtsmen with your wands, who think we are all there to gaze on you, your ships are only accidents of this place, and were they all to be boarded and sunk by the ducks, the real business of the Round Pond would be carried on as usual.
Paths from everywhere crowd like children to the pond. Some of them are ordinary paths, which have a rail on each side, and are made by men with their coats off, but others are vagrants, wide at one spot, and at another so narrow that you can stand astride them. They are called Paths that have Made Themselves, and David did wish he could see them doing it. But, like all the most wonderful things that happen in the Gardens, it is done, we concluded, at night after the gates are closed. We have also decided that the paths make themselves because it is their only chance of getting to the Round Pond.
One of these gypsy paths comes from the place where the sheep get their hair cut. When David shed his curls at the hair-dressers, I am told, he said good-bye to them without a tremor, though his mother has never been quite the same bright creature since; so he despises the sheep as they run from their shearer, and calls out tauntingly, 'Cowardy, cowardy custard!' But when the man grips them between his legs David shakes a fist at him for using such big scissors. Another startling moment is when the man turns back the grimy wool from the sheeps' shoulders and they look suddenly like ladies in the stalls of a theatre. The sheep are so frightened by the shearing that it makes them quite white and thin, and as soon as they are set free they begin to nibble the grass at once, quite anxiously, as if they feared that they would never be worth eating. David wonders whether they know each other, now that they are so different, and if it makes them fight with the wrong ones. They are great fighters, and thus so unlike country sheep that every year they give my St. Bernard dog, Porthos, a shock. He can make a field of country sheep fly by merely announcing his approach, but these town sheep come toward him with no promise of gentle entertainment, and then a light from last year breaks upon Porthos. He cannot with dignity retreat, but he stops and looks about him as if lost in admiration of the scenery, and presently he strolls away with a fine indifference and a glint at me from the corner of his eye.
The Serpentine begins near here. It is a lovely lake, and there is a drowned forest at the bottom of it. If you peer over the edge you can see the trees all growing upside down, and they say that at night there are also drowned stars in it. If so, Peter Pan sees them when he is sailing across the lake in the Thrush's Nest. A small part only of the Serpentine is in the Gardens, for soon it passes beneath a bridge to far away where the island is on which all the birds are born that become baby boys and girls. No one who is human, except Peter Pan (and he is only half human), can land on the island, but you may write what you want (boy or girl, dark or fair) on a piece of paper, and then twist it into the shape of a boat and slip it into the water, and it reaches Peter Pan's island after dark.
We are on the way home now, though of course, it is all pretence that we can go to so many of the places in one day. I should have had to be carrying David long ago, and resting on every seat like old Mr. Salford. That was what we called him, because he always talked to us of a lovely place called Salford where he had been born. He was a crab-apple of an old gentleman who wandered all day in the Gardens from seat to seat trying to fall in with somebody who was acquainted with the town of Salford, and when we had known him for a year or more we actually did meet another aged solitary who had once spent Saturday to Monday in Salford. He was meek and timid, and carried his address inside his hat, and whatever part of London he was in search of he always went to Westminster Abbey first as a starting-point. Him we carried in triumph to our other friend, with the story of that Saturday to Monday, and never shall I forget the gloating joy with which Mr. Salford leapt at him. They have been cronies ever since, and I noticed that Mr. Salford, who naturally does most of the talking, keeps tight grip of the other old man's coat.
Old Mr. Salford was a crab-apple of an old gentleman who wandered all day in the Gardens.
The two last places before you come to our gate are the Dog's Cemetery and the chaffinches nest, but we pretend not to know what the Dog's Cemetery is, as Porthos is always with us. The nest is very sad. It is quite white, and the way we found it was wonderful. We were having another look among the bushes for David's lost worsted ball, and instead of the ball we found a lovely nest made of the worsted, and containing four eggs, with scratches on them very like David's handwriting, so we think they must have been the mother's love-letters to the little ones inside. Every day we were in the Gardens we paid a call at the nest, taking care that no cruel boy should see us, and we dropped crumbs, and soon the bird knew us as friends, and sat in the nest looking at us kindly with her shoulders hunched up. But one day when we went there were only two eggs in the nest, and the next time there were none. The saddest part of it was that the poor little chaffinch fluttered about the bushes, looking so reproachfully at us that we knew she thought we had done it; and though David tried to explain to her, it was so long since he had spoken the bird language that I fear she did not understand. He and I left the Gardens that day with our knuckles in our eyes.
II. Peter Pan
If you ask your mother whether she knew about Peter Pan when she was a little girl, she will say, 'Why, of course I did, child'; and if you ask her whether he rode on a goat in those days, she will say, 'What a foolish question to ask; certainly he did.' Then if you ask your grandmother whether she knew about Peter Pan when she was a girl, she also says, 'Why, of course I did, child,' but if you ask her whether he rode on a goat in those days, she says she never heard of his having a goat. Perhaps she has forgotten, just as she sometimes forgets your name and calls you Mildred, which is your mother's name. Still, she could hardly forget such an important thing as the goat. Therefore there was no goat when your grandmother was a little girl. This shows that, in telling the story of Peter Pan, to begin with the goat (as most people do) is as silly as to put on your jacket before your vest.
Of course, it also shows that Peter is ever so old, but he is really always the same age, so that does not matter in the least. His age is one week, and though he was born so long ago he has never had a birthday, nor is there the slightest chance of his ever having one. The reason is that he escaped from being a human when he was seven days old; he escaped by the window and flew back to the Kensington Gardens.
If you think he was the only baby who ever wanted to escape, it shows how completely you have forgotten your own young days. When David heard this story first he was quite certain that he had never tried to escape, but I told him to think back hard, pressing his hands to his temples, and when he had done this hard, and even harder, he distinctly remembered a youthful desire to return to the tree-tops, and with that memory came others, as that he had lain in bed planning to escape as soon as his mother was asleep, and how she had once caught him half-way up the chimney. All children could have such recollections if they would press their hands hard to their temples, for, having been birds before they were human, they are naturally a little wild during the first few weeks, and very itchy at the shoulders, where their wings used to be. So David tells me.
I ought to mention here that the following is our way with a story: First I tell it to him, and then he tells it to me, the understanding being that it is quite a different story; and then I retell it with his additions, and so we go on until no one could say whether it is more his story or mine. In this story of Peter Pan, for instance, the bald narrative and most of the moral reflections are mine, though not all, for this boy can be a stern moralist; but the interesting bits about the ways and customs of babies in the bird-stage are mostly reminiscences of David's, recalled by pressing his hands to his temples and thinking hard.
Well, Peter Pan got out by the window, which had no bars. Standing on the ledge he could see trees far away, which were doubtless the Kensington Gardens, and the moment he saw them he entirely forgot that he was now a little boy in a nightgown, and away he flew, right over the houses to the Gardens. It is wonderful that he could fly without wings, but the place itched tremendously, and—and—perhaps we could all fly if we were as dead-confident-sure of our capacity to do it as was bold Peter Pan that evening.
He alighted gaily on the open sward, between the Baby's Palace and the Serpentine, and the first thing he did was to lie on his back and kick. He was quite unaware already that he had ever been human, and thought he was a bird, even in appearance, just the same as in his early days, and when he tried to catch a fly he did not understand that the reason he missed it was because he had attempted to seize it with his hand, which, of course, a bird never does. He saw, however, that it must be past Lock-out Time, for there were a good many fairies about, all too busy to notice him; they were getting breakfast ready, milking their cows, drawing water, and so on, and the sight of the water-pails made him thirsty, so he flew over to the Round Pond to have a drink. He stooped and dipped his beak in the pond; he thought it was his beak, but, of course, it was only his nose, and therefore, very little water came up, and that not so refreshing as usual, so next he tried a puddle, and he fell flop into it. When a real bird falls in flop, he spreads out his feathers and pecks them dry, but Peter could not remember what was the thing to do, and he decided rather sulkily to go to sleep on the weeping-beech in the Baby Walk.
At first he found some difficulty in balancing himself on a branch, but presently he remembered the way, and fell asleep. He awoke long before morning, shivering, and saying to himself, 'I never was out on such a cold night'; he had really been out on colder nights when he was a bird, but, of course, as everybody knows, what seems a warm night to a bird is a cold night to a boy in a nightgown. Peter also felt strangely uncomfortable, as if his head was stuffy; he heard loud noises that made him look round sharply, though they were really himself sneezing. There was something he wanted very much, but, though he knew he wanted it, he could not think what it was. What he wanted so much was his mother to blow his nose, but that never struck him, so he decided to appeal to the fairies for enlightenment. They are reputed to know a good deal.
There were two of them strolling along the Baby Walk, with their arms round each other's waists, and he hopped down to address them. The fairies have their tiffs with the birds, but they usually give a civil answer to a civil question, and he was quite angry when these two ran away the moment they saw him. Another was lolling on a garden chair, reading a postage-stamp which some human had let fall, and when he heard Peter's voice he popped in alarm behind a tulip.
When he heard Peter's voice he popped in alarm behind a tulip.
To Peter's bewilderment he discovered that every fairy he met fled from him. A band of workmen, who were sawing down a toadstool, rushed away, leaving their tools behind them. A milkmaid turned her pail upside down and hid in it. Soon the Gardens were in an uproar. Crowds of fairies were running this way and that, asking each other stoutly who was afraid; lights were extinguished, doors barricaded, and from the grounds of Queen Mab's palace came the rub-a-dub of drums, showing that the royal guard had been called out. A regiment of Lancers came charging down the Broad Walk, armed with holly-leaves, with which they jag the enemy horribly in passing. Peter heard the little people crying everywhere that there was a human in the Gardens after Lock-out Time, but he never thought for a moment that he was the human. He was feeling stuffier and stuffier, and more and more wistful to learn what he wanted done to his nose, but he pursued them with the vital question in vain; the timid creatures ran from him, and even the Lancers, when he approached them up the Hump, turned swiftly into a side-walk, on the pretence that they saw him there.
