Peter Pan Read Free Page B

acquainted with many other leading figures in theatrical and literary circles. Thanks in large part to the gracious help of Mary Ansell, and despite major difficulties within their marriage, he held parties in his home and attended dinners at the homes of the social elite in London.
    Barrie’s most memorable and notable social event of this period, however, took place not with adults, but with three small boys in Kensington Gardens. Barrie and his wife had moved to a spacious dwelling at Leinster Corner, very near Kensington Gardens, and Barrie customarily took walks there with his large St. Bernard dog, Porthos. In the summer of 1897, he happened to encounter Mary Hodgson, a nurse, who was taking a strollwith the Llewelyn Davies boys: four-year-old George, and his younger brothers Jack and Peter, ages three and one, respectively. Attracted by the boys, Barrie began performing magic feats and playing with them. He continued doing this throughout the summer and into the fall, often inventing stories about fairies, pirates, magical islands, and strange characters. It was not until a dinner party later in the year that Barrie met their mother, Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, daughter of the novelist George du Maurier and sister of the actor Gerald du Maurier, who was later to make the role of Captain Hook famous. Sylvia Davies, a beautiful and gracious young woman, thirty-one at the time, was married to a struggling young lawyer named Arthur, who was thirty-four. Once Barrie realized that Sylvia was the mother of the Davies boys he had met in Kensington Gardens, he felt a strong rapport with her. Whether he fell in love with Sylvia as an ideal woman and mother is insignificant. What is significant is that Barrie embraced and consumed her and her family for the rest of their lives.
    Whether one calls Barrie’s relations with Sylvia and Arthur and their five sons—they later added two more, Michael (born in 1900) and Nicholas (Nico, born in 1903)—invasive, infiltrating, manipulative, and obsessive, the fact is that he took over and “doctored” their lives the way he doctored his fictional works, endeavoring to alter and change the narratives of their lives according to his imagination and whimsy. This is not to say that Barrie was a monster or a dictator, or that he was even fully conscious of how intrusive he could be. Barrie was very loyal, generous, and kind. But he was also a driven man who apparently did not reflect much upon the drives that possessed him in his relations with close friends, and especially women. Thus there was always a price to be paid for the interest he took in people, and for his generosity. In fact, Arthur Davies, and later one of his sons, Peter, did not appreciate Barrie’s involvement in the family.
    Yet, once attached, Barrie would not be shaken off. By 1898, after he had met Sylvia, he was no longer satisfied to meet the boys in Kensington Gardens; he now followed them home and often invited himself for tea or dinner. His stories about fairiesexpanded, and he named Peter Pan after both the third Davies son and Pan, the mythic god of herds, known for his riotous behavior and revelry. Of course, Barrie’s Pan was not as virile and licentious as the Arcadian god. Rather, he was a little boy locked out of his mother’s home, a boy who could fly and had learned to fend for himself in the fairy realm of Kensington Gardens—but outside this realm, he was powerless.
    In the meantime, Mary (Ansell) Barrie, who had realized very early that she was in a dilemma of a marriage, had bought a cottage in Surrey, outside London, which she redecorated and made into a country home to which friends and relatives were invited. The Davieses were among the guests, and it was there that Barrie took photographs of the boys and Porthos that he made into a book titled
The Boy Castaways of Blacklake Island Being a Record of the Terrible Adventures of the Brothers Davies in the Summer of 1901.
One copy he kept for himself,