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Essays on Peter Pan

Peter Pan is a beloved character in literature and has inspired countless adaptations and discussions. His story has captivated audiences for generations, and there are numerous essay topics that can be explored in relation to this timeless tale. In this article, we will provide a long list of Peter Pan essay topics, along with tips for choosing a topic and the importance of exploring different aspects of the story.

The Importance of the Topic

Peter Pan is a story that has endured for over a century, and its themes and characters continue to resonate with readers of all ages. By exploring essay topics related to Peter Pan, students and scholars can gain a deeper understanding of the story's significance and its impact on popular culture. Additionally, delving into various aspects of the tale can provide valuable insights into themes such as childhood, imagination, and the concept of never growing up.

Advice on Choosing a Topic

When selecting a topic for an essay on Peter Pan, it's important to consider the specific aspects of the story that interest you the most. Are you drawn to the character of Peter Pan himself, or do you want to explore the themes of escapism and fantasy in the story? Perhaps you are interested in analyzing the portrayal of gender and identity in the tale, or the cultural impact of Peter Pan on literature and media. By identifying your personal interests and areas of curiosity, you can choose a topic that will inspire you to delve deeper into the story and its implications.

List of Peter Pan Essay Topics

• The Symbolism of Neverland in Peter Pan
• The Role of Female Characters in Peter Pan
• Peter Pan and the Concept of Eternal Youth
• The Psychological Impact of Peter Pan's Character
• Peter Pan as a Representation of the "Wild Child" Archetype
• The Influence of Peter Pan on Children's Literature
• Exploring the Theme of Parental Neglect in Peter Pan
• Peter Pan and the Power of Imagination
• The Legacy of Peter Pan in Popular Culture
• The Adaptation of Peter Pan in Film and Television
• Peter Pan and the Representation of Masculinity
• Peter Pan: An Exploration of Antiheroism and Rebellion
• The Evolution of Peter Pan as a Mythical Figure
• The Significance of Wendy Darling in Peter Pan
• Peter Pan and the Idea of Growing Up
• The Role of Tinker Bell in Peter Pan
• Peter Pan and the Theme of Identity and Belonging
• The Impact of Peter Pan on Fairy Tale Literature
• Peter Pan and the Concept of Freedom and Independence
• Exploring the Darker Themes in Peter Pan

The story of Peter Pan continues to captivate readers and inspire discussions on a wide range of topics. By choosing a specific aspect of the tale to explore in an essay, students and scholars can gain valuable insights into the story's themes, characters, and cultural significance. Whether analyzing the symbolism of Neverland, exploring the portrayal of gender and identity, or delving into the psychological impact of Peter Pan's character, there are countless opportunities for in-depth study and analysis. With the list of essay topics provided in this article, readers can find inspiration for their own exploration of Peter Pan and its enduring legacy.

Peter Pan: Comparative Analysis of The Novel and The Film

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Snakes and Snails and Games of Murder

Independent growth through gendered alternate universes: peter and wendy and the lion, the witch and the wardrobe, mother figure in peter pan and the story of the treasure seekers, relevant topics.

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Drama Criticism › Analysis of J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan

Analysis of J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 29, 2020 • ( 0 )

The secret of Peter Pan seems to be that it is not merely a children’s entertainment but a great play in its own right, a memorable theatrical experience, differing only in the nature of its appeal to the adult playgoer or to the child. And so it seems worth studying, not only for its remarkable stage history, but also as a piece of great literature: its background as a story as well as its foreground as a play. Like the other great stories of its kind, it was told first to a particular child or a group of children—but like them also it was invented to please the author and drew from the unsuspected depths of his memory and of his own deepest personality.

—Roger Lancelyn Green, Fifty Years of Peter Pan

James M. Barrie wrote several plays for adults, the best known of which are The Admirable Crichton (1902), Quality Street (1902), What Every Woman Knows (1908), and Dear Brutus (1917), as well as the theatrical version of his most celebrated novel, The Little Minister (1897). Barrie’s works for the stage were popular in their day, and some were later filmed (with varying degrees of success), but by the 1930s his plays had begun to seem less like the charming pastiches they were and more as quaint relics of middle-class Victorian and Edwardian sentimental sensibilities, lacking the intellectual and sociological heft of works by such contemporaries as George Bernard Shaw. Barrie’s plays are infrequently revived now. Only Peter Pan , the first important play written for children and in many ways the most sentimental of Barrie’s work, has continued to enchant both children and adults in numerous dramatic and musical stage, film, and television productions. Peter Pan has attained the status of what one critic has called a “legendary creation,” and the play and its central character have survived to confer upon Barrie and his “Boy Who Would Not Grow up” (the play’s subtitle) a reputation similar to that of Lewis Carroll and his Alice. Barrie’s particular Wonderland, which he called Neverland, with its pirates, Lost Boys, Indians, lagoons, and dueling captains, Hook and Peter Pan, has continued to work its magic on audiences not only because it is a world embodied in productions that are entertaining spectacles but also because this adventurous, storybook milieu is juxtaposed with a sweet idealization of family life and the tenderness and pain of parenthood to speak to a sense of childhood lost. In 1929 the Boston Transcript characterized Peter Pan’ s appeal as an adult, as well as a children’s, play: “It is middle age’s own tragicomedy—the faint, far memories of boyhood and girlhood blown back in the bright breeze of Barrie’s imagination.”

Actress Betty Bronson (center) stars in the silent film Peter Pan (1924)

The inspiration for Peter Pan grew out of several singular experiences in Barrie’s life, as well as from his imagination. The ninth of 10 children in a family that lived in one small cottage, James Matthew Barrie was born on May 9, 1860, in Kirriemuir, Scotland. His father, David, was a handloom weaver; his mother, Margaret Ogilvy, the daughter of a stonemason, was known by her maiden name, according to Scottish tradition. She was the strongest influence on her third son, who would later produce a series of popular newspaper articles about her, as well as a titular biography, published in 1896, a year after her death. Although David Barrie had been poorly educated, he was hardworking, ambitious, and determined that his children should have every opportunity to receive an education. With careful planning the Barries were able to send their children to private schools and to college. Barrie’s eldest brother, Alexander, eventually became a bursar at Aberdeen University and one of the first of Her Majesty’s Inspector of Schools, and four of Barrie’s five sisters to survive childhood were schoolteachers before they married.

During his childhood Barrie played with a friend’s toy theater and acted out improvised dramas in the family’s little brick washhouse, a building he later identified as the original of the little house the Lost Boys build for Wendy in Peter Pan. He enjoyed Penny Dreadfuls—penny-a-number magazines featuring sensational fiction in serialized form—although when he later read a condemnation of this class of fiction in the morally conscientious children’s magazine Chatterbox , he buried his supply of them in a field. A turning point in Barrie’s life came at the age of seven, when his 14-year-old brother, David, a brilliant boy and his mother’s favorite, died in a skating accident while attending a private school run by Alexander Barrie. Margaret Ogilvy was inconsolable over the loss and became, in Barrie’s words, “delicate from that hour.” Young James attempted to take the place of his elder brother and spent much time in his mother’s room listening to her reminisce about her childhood. Margaret Ogilvy’s mother had died young, and the eight-year-old Margaret had been, as Barrie later wrote, “mistress of the house and mother to her little brother.” The young Margaret would become Barrie’s first model for Wendy Darling, the girl who mothered Peter Pan and the Lost Boys. At the same time, in Margaret Ogilvy’s memory, the dead son, David, was always the golden child who never grew up. The idea of youth frozen in time would inspire Barrie years later in the creation of Peter Pan. Mother and son also read together, beginning with Robinson Crusoe and continuing with other adventure stories, including the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper, as well as R. M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island , a tale of shipwrecked sailors and pirates. When the supply of books at the local library and bookshop was exhausted Barrie began writing his own adventure tales to entertain his mother.

At 13 Barrie was sent to Dumfries Academy, where he joined a make-believe pirate crew of boys and founded a school dramatic society. He wrote and produced an original drama, “Bandelero the Bandit” (1877), the style of which was based on the Penny Dreadfuls and Cooper stories he had read. The production caused a minor controversy when a local clergy-man denounced the piece as “grossly immoral,” a pronouncement that only served to bring welcome publicity to the drama society. At 17 Barrie left Dumfries Academy determined to become a writer, but his parents insisted he attend university and become a minister, as David would have done had he lived. With the help of his brother Alexander a family compromise was reached whereby James would study literature at Edinburgh University. Shy and self-conscious about his short stature of five feet, two inches, Barrie was unhappy during his first few terms at Edinburgh, but he eventually found a welcome niche as a freelance drama critic for a local newspaper. After graduating with an M.A. in 1883 Barrie wrote for the Nottingham Journal for a time and then went to London to try to earn a living as a freelance writer. His first popular success was with a series of semi-fictionalized articles of life in Kirriemuir, later collected in three volumes, Auld Licht Idylls (1888), A Window in Thrums (1889), and The Little Minister (1891). Barrie’s first commercially successful play was Walker, London, a comedy produced in 1892. In the cast was a young actress, Mary Ansell, whom Barrie married in 1894. The marriage was a childless and unhappy one, and the couple eventually divorced in 1909.

The spark that would result in the creation of Peter Pan was kindled by the friendships Barrie developed with various children, most notably the five sons of Arthur and Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, whom he had met while walking his St. Bernard (the prototype for the nursemaid character of Nana in the play) in Kensington Gardens. Barrie, with his flair for playacting and storytelling, became a great favorite of the boys, especially after the death of their father in 1907. Barrie’s close relationship with the Llewellyn Davies boys has led to questions of inappropriateness, but as his biographer Andrew Birkin has pointed out, Barrie was “a lover of childhood, but was not in any sexual sense the pedophile that some have claimed him to have been.” He was certainly, in his platonic way, in love with Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, the daughter of the writer George du Maurier and the sister of actor Gerald du Maurier, who would play the first Mr. Darling and Captain Hook in Peter Pan. When Sylvia died in 1910, Barrie became the boys’ guardian.

In 1902 Barrie published The Little White Bird, a novel that chronicles his growing friendship with the oldest Llewellyn Davies boy, George, in the character of David, the son of a penniless young couple. Barrie appears in the novel as Captain W, a lonely bachelor who plays the anonymous fairy godfather to the couple. Most important, the novel introduces the figure of Peter Pan, named for George’s baby brother, Peter. The character is featured in a story within the story and concerns a baby who flies out of its nursery to the island of the birds. When Peter returns home he finds the window barred against him and another baby in his place. Wendy also makes her first appearance in the novel, as Maisie, a little girl who stays in Kensington Gardens at night to watch Peter Pan and the fairies at play. Despite her temptation to live on the island with Peter she returns to her mother. At around this time the pirate games Barrie and the Llewellyn Davies boys played at the Barries’ country home, Black Lake Cottage, resulted in a self-published book, The Boy Castaways of Black Lake Island, which featured photographs of the boys. Barrie, in his introduction to the first published version of Peter Pan in 1928, dedicates the play “To The Five,” and credits the Black Lake games he played with the boys for inspiring the work: “I suppose I always knew that I made Peter by rubbing the five of you violently together, as savages with two sticks producing a flame. That is all he is, the spark I got from you.”

Barrie was inspired to work on a fairy play of his own after taking the boys to see Bluebell in Fairyland, a work written and performed by Seymour Hicks (another future Mr. Darling/Hook). Although not very successful as art, the piece was an innovation in that it was an original play for children rather than an adaptation of a book or a pantomime (a comic spectacle with songs and speeches taken from fairy tales and nursery rhymes). In November 1903 Barrie began the first draft of what he initially titled “Anon, A Play.” After several changes and refinements (which continued up to the play’s opening and even in subsequent productions while Barrie was alive), Barrie took Peter Pan to actor-producer Herbert Beerbohm Tree, whom he visualized as Captain Hook. Tree disliked the play and told Barrie’s manager and backer, the American impresario Charles Frohman: “Barrie must be mad. He’s written four acts all about fairies, children, and Indians running through the most incoherent story you ever listened to; and what do you suppose? The last act is to be set on top of trees!” Tree would later say ruefully that he would probably be known to posterity as the producer who had refused Peter Pan. Certainly when the play opened on December 27, 1904, it was a spectacle of theatrical trickery, with stage flight attempted for the first time, as well as a variety of other special effects and elaborate scenery and staging. Peter Pan was an instant success in London and in New York, where it was produced in 1905 with Maude Adams in the title role.

The story of Peter Pan: Or The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up concerns the titular motherless, half-magical boy, who, the audience learns, has frequently peered into the night nursery of the Darlings in Bloomsbury to watch the family life within. During one visit he has left his shadow behind; when Mr. and Mrs. Darling go out for the evening he comes back with his fairy friend, Tinker Bell, to retrieve it. The Darling daughter, Wendy, awakens and sews the shadow on for him. Despite the warning barks of the dog nursemaid, Nana (whom Mr. Darling had sent to the doghouse over the protestations of his wife), who fears the influence of the boy at the window, Peter teaches Wendy and her brothers, Michael and John, to fly and takes them to the Neverland, where Wendy becomes the mother of the Lost Boys who live underground and in the hollow trunks of trees. (Peter: “They are the children who fall out of their prams when the nurse is looking the other way. If they are not claimed in seven days they are sent far away to the Neverland. I’m captain.”) The children have adventures with Indians and pirates, the latter of which is led by dastardly Captain Hook, named for the steel hook he wears in place of the right hand that was bitten off by a crocodile, who, as Hook explains, “liked my arm so much . . . that he has followed me ever since . . . licking his lips for the rest of me.” There is a war between the pirates and the children, during which Hook and his men capture Wendy and the boys and imprison them on the pirate ship. Hook tries to poison Peter, but Tinker Bell drinks the draught and nearly dies. To save her Peter appeals to the audience to clap their hands if they believe in fairies. As the audience applauds, Tinker Bell’s light grows bright again, and Peter rushes off to save Wendy and the boys. The pirates walk the plank, the crocodile dispatches Hook, and the Darling children return home to their sorrowing parents. Mr. and Mrs. Darling adopt the Lost Boys, but Peter refuses to stay: “I don’t want to go to school and learn solemn things. No one is going to catch me, lady, and make me a man. I want always to be a little boy and to have fun.” Realizing that Peter “does so need a mother,” Wendy convinces her mother to allow her to go to Peter each year for spring-cleaning at the little house the Lost Boys built for her that now nestles in the treetops. In a coda to Peter Pan, titled “An Afterthought,” first presented in 1908 and featured as an extra chapter, “When Wendy Grew Up,” in the 1911 novel, Peter and Wendy, the adult Wendy sadly realizes she can no longer go with Peter and instead sends her daughter Jane with him to do the spring-cleaning. For his part Peter has forgotten the adventures he has had with Wendy: for him there is neither a past nor a future, only the joy of the present moment.

Barrie’s genius in creating Peter Pan was to synthesize the fairy tale and the adventure tale—the two basic elements of popular children’s literature— into a single work that uses the entire space of the stage to create an exciting, but ultimately benevolent, fantasy world juxtaposed with the safe and secure world of the family. The emotional and psychological conflicts within the play, sensed by children and understood by adults, concern the struggle for possession of Wendy as a mother, a daughter, and a spouse (Wendy and Peter play mother and father to the boys) and the contradictory human desire to be both free from responsibility and part of a family and society. Peter Pan speaks to these truths, even as it joyously captures the elemental child in each of us.

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Peter Pan and Wendy: how J M Barrie understood and demonstrated key aspects of cognition

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In a fascinating study of J M Barrie’s classic works for children, Dr Rosalind Ridley (Newnham College) reveals that the creator of Peter Pan, and a panoply of other characters, had a deep understanding of the science of cognition – and was decades ahead of his time in identifying key stages of child development.

... the child who lives in the heart of the adult; memories that we carry with us throughout our life but do not themselves age; dreams that disobey logic; the private world inside our head and those moments of exceptional experience that we rarely talk about. Rosalind Ridley (writing about Peter Pan)

In Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens , J M Barrie describes a moment when a young girl, seeking to comfort a tearful Peter, gives him her handkerchief. But he doesn’t know what to do with it. Barrie writes: “… so she showed him, that is to say she wiped her eyes, and then gave it back to him, saying ‘Now you do it,’ but instead of wiping his own eyes he wiped hers, and she thought it would be best to pretend that this is what she had meant”.

With this touching little scene, J M Barrie neatly demonstrates that he had observed, and understood, something that psychologists call intentionality – a feature of ‘theory of mind’. The ability to understand that one’s own knowledge, beliefs and feelings might not be the same as someone else’s is one of the keys to understanding the complexity of human relationships – and is something that most children learn at the age of three or four.

In illustrating this fundamental stage of child development through the interaction of two children, one with a solid grasp of other minds and the other without, Barrie was remarkably prescient. The Peter Pan books were written at the turn of the 20th century and the term ‘theory of mind’ was not used until the late 1970s. In 1985 psychologists showed that failure to employ theory of mind is an important symptom of autism, its related condition Asperger’s Syndrome and various other psychiatric conditions.

In Peter Pan and the Mind of J M Barrie: An Exploration of Cognition and Consciousness , neuroscientist Dr Rosalind Ridley unpacks the magic and oddity of the tales that have captivated audiences for generations. In doing so through the lens of her own expertise, she reveals that Barrie had an almost uncanny grasp of human cognitive development four to eight decades before psychologists began to work on similar questions about the way we develop thinking and reasoning skills.  

Ridley has a distinguished career in neuroscience research with the University of Cambridge and Medical Research Council. Her work has focused on the brain mechanisms underlying cognitive processes such as learning, memory and problem solving. Since childhood Ridley has been an avid reader of literature and poetry – and a collector of books.

Rereading Barrie’s books for children she began to realise the extent to which Barrie had grasped many of the topics that she has spent her working life researching in order to come up with new treatments for dementia and to gain a better understanding of neurological conditions such as stroke which cause cognitive impairments.

Peter Pan and the Mind of J M Barrie is the first book of its kind to explore fully how Barrie delved into the complexity of the developing human mind in his writing. Published at a time when cognitive psychology was in its infancy, the Peter Pan books were immediate hits and continue to inspire pantomimes complete with pirates, princesses and perambulators.

Ridley argues that Barrie’s enduring appeal (along with that of other authors for children, including Lewis Carroll) lies in his study of the unconscious mind – and its many quirks and foibles. Barrie referred to his nonsensical ideas (a boy who flies, a dog who becomes a children’s nanny, a crocodile who has swallowed a clock) as whimsicalities.  These whimsicalities, proposes Ridley, are the means by which Barrie explores the nature of cognition – and that his purpose was to expiate the pain of his own childhood.  

She writes: “It is Barrie’s deliberate use of cognitive mistakes and confusions in order to both amuse and illuminate the way we think that suggests that he was being intentionally analytical rather than descriptive. The weirdness of some of Barrie’s illogical stories suggests that he is tapping into something important in cognition.”

In a wealth of detail, and through close textual analysis, Ridley shows how Barrie created a narrative that works on several levels: as a coming-of-age story, as the myth of a golden age, as a fantasy to delight child and adult readers. Most importantly, asserts Ridley, Barrie invented Peter Pan to “make some sense of his own emotional difficulties, to investigate the interplay between the world of facts and the world of imagination, and to re-discover the heightened experiences of infancy”.

In Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens Barrie describes for readers how the story comes from an inner dialogue with the fictional boy David during walks together in the park. “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.”

Peter Pan is the boy who doesn’t quite fit in, a ‘betwixt-and-between’ who can fly and, most famously, never ages and never becomes adult. There is, suggests Ridley, a bit of Peter in all of us: “the child who lives in the heart of the adult; memories that we carry with us throughout our life but do not themselves age; dreams that disobey logic; the private world inside our head and those moments of exceptional experience that we rarely talk about”.

Barrie was fascinated by children – they were his preferred companions throughout his adulthood – and he, just like Peter Pan, was in many ways a boy “who could never grow up”. Ridley suggests that the Peter Pan books can be read as an escape from adulthood into a fantastical childhood, where anything can happen, but also as a plea for greater understanding of the mental and emotional needs of children.

A broad university education equipped Barrie to think across disciplines, and in fashionable London he was exposed to the ideas of leading thinkers, including Thomas Huxley, H G Wells and Henry James. The belief that God made the world in seven days had been newly overturned by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution which showed that humans were animals.

Barrie saw children not as miniature adults waiting for their minds to be filled with facts, or small savages needing to be disciplined (as Baden-Powell who founded the Boy Scouts had done), but as developing beings who required nurture and encouragement in order to become sensitive adults. Ridley notes, interestingly, that Barrie believed education was often damaging.

Ostensibly, Barrie wrote the Peter Pan books to entertain five boys whom he met in Kensington Gardens in central London. The nature of his relationship with them (their parents died and he became their guardian) is likely to remain a vexed question.  Despite the almost purple prose in which Barrie described the overnight visit of an imaginary child, Ridley is impressed by the view of the youngest of the boys themselves, who said that Barrie was “an innocent, which is why he could write Peter Pan”.  

Ridley, like most other scholars, sees Barrie’s tragic childhood as pivotal to his creativity. His older brother died in a skating accident and remained more alive in their mother’s thoughts than her surviving son. Ridley writes: “He learnt from his mother’s pre-occupation with his dead brother that things that do not exist physically can be more important in people’s minds than things that do exist.” Barrie’s mother was present but lost to him – and a search for a mother is a strong theme in his books.

Barrie married but was childless (it’s thought that he may never have had sex with his wife). He was painfully aware of his diminutive stature, writing in a letter: “Six foot three inches … if I had really grown to this it would have made a great difference in my life”.  He struggled with sleep problems and described many of the states of consciousness and unconsciousness later identified by psychologists as parasomnias.

An important role of sleep is to consolidate and rationalise memory. Barrie expresses this charmingly in Peter and Wendy : “It is the nightly custom of every good mother after her children are asleep to rummage in their minds and put things straight for next morning, repacking in their proper places the many articles that have wandered during the day… It is quite like tidying drawers … When you wake in the morning, the naughtiness and evil passions with which you went to bed have been folded up small and placed at the bottom of your mind; and on top, beautifully aired, are spread out your prettier thoughts, ready for you to put on.”

Ridley describes Barrie as “a naturalist of the mind”. Woven into his stories are dozens of details about human behaviour – from contagious yawning (Wendy’s “light blinked and gave such a yawn that the other two yawned also”) to mental constructs such as time travel (an aspect of memory and recollection) and the power of opposites (“It was her silence that they heard”). They reveal Barrie to be an acute observer of animals and people in a period when the theory of evolution was still hotly contested.

Barrie may have been extraordinarily forward-thinking but he was also a man of his time. Although he champions girls in some respects (“Wendy, one girl is of more use than twenty boys”), his attitude was frequently misogynistic: in creating his female characters he conflates femininity with domesticity. The original Wendy house, that potent symbol of gendered play, is built around Wendy by the fairies who seek to protect her from the cold of the night.

Ridley concludes that Barrie was more than anything interested in “the nature of consciousness and those rare moments of sublime consciousness and sublime imagination that we all experience” – the happiness that so often eluded him.  She ends her voyage into JM Barrie’s mind with a quote from his protégé, A A Milne, creator of Winne the Pooh . In his autobiography, It’s Too Late Now , Milne wrote: “Childhood is not the happiest time of one’s life; but only to a child is pure happiness possible.”

Peter Pan and the Mind of J M Barrie: An Exploration of Cognition and Consciousness by Rosalind Ridley is published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

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'Away he flew, right over the houses to the Gardens': illustration by Arthur Rackham for 'Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens'

Credit: Rosalind Ridley

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Peter Pan

Introduction.

• First Editions
• Modern Editions
• General Criticism
• In Performance
• Dramatizations of Barrie’s Biography
• Popular Psychology
• In Its Time
• Children’s Literature
• Adaptations

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Peter Pan by Kirsten Stirling LAST REVIEWED: 25 October 2017 LAST MODIFIED: 25 October 2017 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199791231-0069

Peter Pan is a classic of children’s literature, and the name of its hero has passed into the English language and taken on a life of its own. Everyone has heard of Peter Pan, whether or not they have encountered J. M. Barrie’s original works, and he has acquired a significance in popular culture that goes far beyond the reach of Barrie’s texts. The story of Peter Pan, who entices the Darling siblings to fly away to the Neverland, and their storybook adventures involving fairies, pirates, mermaids, and battles with the eternal enemy Captain Hook, enchanted its original audiences in 1904 and continues to fascinate children and adults today. Drawing on the pattern and archetypal characters of the fairy tale and the British pantomime tradition, Peter Pan gives the impression of being a much older story than it actually is, an effect that Barrie carefully crafted. Although Peter Pan is a play (and later also a novel) that has always been accessible to adults as well as children, it has children and the nature of childhood at its center. It dramatizes imaginary childhood games, both fantastic and domestic, and it stages the relationship between parents and children, as well as a child’s grief at the absence of that relationship. It can be read as a celebration of eternal childhood; however, it can equally be read as a cautionary tale about the risks of committing to such a state. The fact that the villainous pirate captain, Hook, is traditionally played on stage by the same actor as the children’s father, Mr. Darling, illustrates the play’s interest in family relationships and how they may be expressed in imaginative play. Not only has Peter Pan proved a goldmine for critics using psychoanalytic theory and gender theory, but popular psychology has also used Barrie’s eternal boy to name a psychological type: “the Peter Pan syndrome” describes men who seem to have difficulty growing up and assuming the responsibilities of adulthood. The 1953 Disney cartoon of Peter Pan is still, for many people, their first access to Barrie’s iconic character, but the range of critical approaches gathered here bears witness to the fact that Barrie’s original Peter Pan texts are much more complex and disturbing than the Disney adaptation makes apparent.

Editions and Related Texts

The complicated history of the Peter Pan texts sees the character move from prose to drama and back to prose again. Peter Pan first appeared in Barrie 1902 , Barrie’s novel for adults The Little White Bird , but it was the production of the play Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up first performed in 1904, that proved so popular with first British and then American audiences. Although various non-authorial literary spin-offs from the play were produced in the following years, Barrie did not write his novelization of the play, Peter and Wendy , until 1911 and did not publish a definitive script of the play until 1928 (all cited under First Editions ).

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Classic Children's Literature to Screen: J.M Barrie's Peter Pan

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Imelda Whelehan , Deborah Cartmell

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone can be seen, on one level, as a critique of the attractiveness of Peter Pan's eternal youthfulness. Indeed, JK Rowling, through Professor Dumbledore, rewrites Peter Pan's famous comment,“to die would be an awfully big adventure” to “to a well-organised mind, death is but the next great adventure”(Rowling, 1997: 215). In order for the story to reach to a happy conclusion, the elixir of youth must be destroyed and the passage of time acknowledged.

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This paper discusses the depiction of women in J.M. Barrie's "Peter Pan". It takes Barrie's close relation to his mother and the suffragette movement into consideration and reveals their reflections in "Peter Pan". It argues that Barrie's work shows the bipolarity of the status of women in the society of the early 20th century.

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This paper discusses the darker side of our beloved hero Peter Pan. Is it true that Pan would kill the Lost Boys? Would he really kidnap children left in Kensington Gardens? The impish Peter Pan is much more sinister than we believed him to be. EDIT: it MUST be noted that this is a paper I wrote for my undergraduate degree (Level 5).

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This paper explores the classic fairy tale: Peter Pan by James Matthew Barrie and highlights the hidden meaning behind the story as well as discusses the author’s inspiration and personal relationship to the characters in the book. In addition, this paper discusses the evolution of Peter Pan as well as debates the points as to whether or not hidden adult themes in children’s literature should be exposed to children.

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Peter Pan may be a cultural icon in his cultural settings, but from a different perspective Peter seems to be the creation of an imperialistic mindset as he bears all the paraphernalia of the children’s upbringing at the height of imperialism; in the games, in the symbols, in attacking and defeating the alien forces, in the territories acquired, in associating or despising ‘uncivilized’ and ‘inferior’ peoples, etc., i.e. everything their imagination could conjure up from the raw materials around. Therefore, no surprise Peter is a white man, his regiment of lost boys is a brigade of white men, Wendy is a white woman, and all the rest (“the villains”) are either non-whites or whites lost to the English society for their “bad” character! The question is: whose culture is it, anyway, Peter is an icon of? Isn’t it the right time to look into the images Peter seems to have been created to represent? Peter refuses to grow up. Can’t we take it as a malady of imperialists who refuse to grow up; still want to play childhood games and wish to live on tree-tops with fairies, places secure and away from “contamination?” Keywords: Culture, imperialism, cultural images, imaginary lands and climes

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El escritor James M. Barrie, creador del personaje de Peter Pan, tuvo siempre un gran interés por la traducción de sus obras de un medio artístico a otro. Buena prueba de ello es el recorrido que tuvo su personaje más famoso dentro de su propia obra. Desde su nacimiento como personaje secundario en el seno de la novela El pajarito blanco en 1902, pasando por su trasvase al teatro –ya como protagonista– en 1904 y su vuelta al ámbito de la novela en 1911, Barrie se preocupó todavía de realizar una adaptación más, escribiendo un guión para la primera versión cinematográfica de la obra que finalmente fue rechazado por los productores del film. Llevado por ese mismo espíritu de preocupación por la adaptación, en este artículo analizaré las distintas películas que han tratado de llevar al personaje creado por Barrie desde el texto a la pantalla, prestando especial atención al tratamiento que ha recibido Peter Pan en el ámbito español.

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From the days of its inception by Walt Disney, the Disney Company has been known for its classical films. Classics such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Cinderella, Mulan, Pocahontas and others, despite being inspired from universal fairy tales and folk tales, have been molded by the Disney Corporation in order to fit into the American culture. Such fact accounts for the success of Disney’s classics which have become box-office hits, garnering millions of dollars for their production company and serving as a source of inspiration for Americans. Viewers of Disney’s classics, which are chiefly children, are deeply affected by the gender and ethnic stereotypes encompassed in the classics. As a result, these classics turn out to be a teaching tool for children and a major means of shaping child culture, and consequently American culture. This study examines how the gender and ethnic stereotypes embedded in Disney’s classics serve as symbols of their times and stand witness to cultural trends like consumerism, patriarchy, the Sexual Revolution, the Women’s Liberation Movement, the melting pot ideology and multiculturalism. The current research also seeks to prove that the stereotypes permeating Disney’s classics seem to market and promote ideals like cultural imperialism and white privileging, thus victimizing minority groups due to the various ethnic stereotypes they include. An additional objective of the present study is to shed light on the gender stereotypes omnipresent in Disney’s classics as well as on their negative impact on women and on the paramount role these stereotypes play in shaping American culture. Through heavily relying on primary and secondary sources dealing with the classics of Disney, the current research endeavors to offer a qualitative analysis of the stereotypes filling Disney’s classics and to establish a link between the latter classics and American culture as well as the widespread media forms in the US.

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Loitering in Neverland: the strangeness of Peter Pan

L ast summer, I was walking on the beach in Brighton. Men of a certain age sped by on scooters or skateboards; one bloke just the near side of 60 pluckily bounced down the prom on a pogo stick. In the shelters, old-age pensioners compared piercings. "What's going on?" I wondered. "Didn't you know?" said my brother-in-law. "You're back in Neverland."

Deterred by the probability of Mabel Lucie Attwell -style fairies, I never read Peter Pan as a child, but there was a cobwebby Wendy house in our back garden, and the boy who wouldn't grow up flew through seasonal editions of Disney Time , a feisty American teenager from the days of James Dean. From teaching experience, I know that the Disney versions of the "kiddie lit" classics have long usurped the books themselves. Yet Peter Pan has been doubly ousted, replaced not just by the movies, but by behind-the-scenes knowledge of how it came to be written.

The story begins in James Matthew Barrie's childhood in Kirriemuir. When he was seven, his older brother David died in a skating accident. His mother took to her bed, too depressed to engage with her remaining children. Young Barrie did his best to claim her distracted attention, calling her back by amusing her and consciously impersonating his dead brother. But David would always win, destined as he was to remain forever 12 years old, while Barrie was condemned to grow up.

It can be no surprise that this upbringing scarred him. His quirk is the knowing zest with which he exploited his past in books. His eyes saw what his hands did. Barrie presents a portrait of the Author as such, a paper man whose life passes between the event and the notebook that records it. There was little he did not know about the guilt of authorship.

In watching or reading about Barrie's life, one discovers improbable strangeness. There's a sense that back then people were uninhibited by knowledge of inhibition. Already a highly successful writer, in 1897, while walking in London's Kensington Gardens, Barrie befriended the young Llewelyn Davies boys (five-year-old George, and his younger brothers Jack and Peter; later came Michael and "Nico"). Barrie was not so happily married to the actress Mary Ansell; they themselves had no children. It is possible their marriage was never consummated.

He soon got to know the boys' beautiful mother Sylvia, and also her unfortunate husband, Arthur. Barrie became indispensable to the boys, a playful companion and teller of tales. George seemed his favourite. To the mother, he was at least a very good friend and confidant; what the father made of him is a little more opaque. When Arthur died of cancer of the jaw, Barrie helped the family financially, sending the boys to Eton. As the sons grew older, his interest wandered from George to young Michael. Ansell left Barrie for a younger writer, Gilbert Cannan. When Sylvia herself succumbed to cancer, Barrie became the boys' guardian. Then George Llewelyn Davies died on the western front during the first world war; and after the war, Michael killed himself, drowning in the arms of a friend at Oxford. Barrie never recovered from the loss.

What motivated Barrie will always remain uncertain. Was he "in love" with George and then Michael? Was he attempting to return to his own boyhood through theirs? Did he love or lust after Sylvia? No one knows. What facilitated the friendships was Barrie's zest for fantasy combined with a sense of self-enclosure about the man. That his remoteness involved a possessing hunger for company was his – and the boys' – tragedy.

Yet out of his friendship with the Llewelyn Davies family emerged Barrie's various versions of the Peter Pan story. The tales long for a lost and heartless innocence, and are key texts in what has been perceived to be the golden age of children's literature, that series of great works running from The Water Babies to Winnie the Pooh . Though complex, out-of-kilter and puzzling, such books also evoke an enchanted quietness.

That we now know so much about the story behind Peter Pan is mostly down to one writer. It can be hard to forgo any myth of departed splendour, and for me, watching Andrew Birkin's The Lost Boys (1978) itself fostered nostalgia for the hallowed decades of British television drama. The programme's brilliance arises both from Birkin's commitment to accuracy and from the knowledge that truth must be something concealed from us, somewhere playing hide and seek among the manuscripts and letters. The acting is note-perfect too, especially Ian Holm's performance as Barrie. The attentiveness and patience of the piece, its combining the richness of a novel and the virtues of theatre with the resources of television (the voice-over, the use of landscape) are qualities that it would be hard to find now on British TV.

Holm has played both Barrie and Lewis Carroll; more recently, and more implausibly, Johnny Depp has nearly followed in his footsteps by acting both The Mad Hatter and, in Marc Foster's Finding Neverland (2004), the author of Peter Pan . Finding Neverland tenders the same story as The Lost Boys , but this time as a sweet romantic fable. Everything odd and intriguing about the real story is smoothed away – no inconvenient Arthur Llewelyn Davies, no thought of blaming Barrie for the failure of his marriage, no marked interest in the boys as boys, no insight into Barrie's glum and fantastical complexities. Instead there's just a summer-soaked hymn to the imagination and a subdued, unspoken love affair, Brief Encounter with Billy Liar dream-escapades thrown in. There is plenty of boyish romping, but no scene that lingers long enough to give room to complexity. And so all the power of Barrie's strangeness slips away, leaving only an immense pity for a young mother dying and leaving her sons.

Just as we return over to Barrie's personal life, versions of the Peter Pan story itself proliferate (we hurry past Steven Spielberg's Hook (1991), averting our eyes in silence); the play still on occasion holds the stage. But these multiple reimaginings only perpetuate a process that Barrie himself began. The first problem faced by Maria Tatar, the editor of The Annotated Peter Pan , is what version of the story one would choose to annotate. There are least six possible contenders: The Boy Castaways of Black Lake Island , purportedly by Peter Llewelyn Davies, a photo book of the Llewelyn Davies boys playing out the adventures of shipwrecked sailors, of which two copies were made in 1901; The Little White Bird (1902), a novel for adults with some chapters devoted to Peter Pan; the original stage play (1904); the Peter Pan chapters from The Little White Bird reissued, with Arthur Rackham's wonderful illustrations, as Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906); Peter and Wendy (1911), "the book of the play", and the closest thing to a standard children's book; and finally the printed, much revised play text of Peter Pan published in 1928. It's a bibliographer's dream, and an editor's nightmare. Understandably Tatar plumped for Peter and Wendy , though in my view, the play is the thing, the finest and most interesting expression of Barrie's personal myth.

Nonetheless, Tatar makes up for her choice with four separate introductions, plus Barrie's introduction to the play, FD Bedford's original illustrations to the children's novel, Rackham's illustrations, an essay on Rackham, a facsimile printing of The Boy Castaways , Barrie's scenario for a proposed silent movie version of Peter Pan , an essay on adaptations, prequels, sequels and spinoffs, and a collection of quotes and responses by people as diverse as George Bernard Shaw, George Orwell and Patti Smith. As will be obvious, it's a sumptuous and copiously illustrated book that anyone who loves Peter Pan would love.

Barrie is the most ironical of children's writers. He stands always at a winking distance from words, making faces behind the phrases. This is why the play remains the classic version. For here Barrie bases his story of a child given over to perpetual playing in the fact that theatre anyway consists of adults seriously playing the childhood game of "let's pretend". Here there are only pretend mothers and fathers, pretend food, pretend deaths. The play's stage directions call for an infected realism, precise and literal, and yet utterly fantastic. The play's preposterous demands, with its flying children, swimming mermaids, pirate ship and hungry crocodile, dance around the limits of theatrical illusion. And then the horrible appeal to the audience comes, that they should play "let's pretend" too and assert their belief in fairies, to clap their hands and save Tinkerbell's life. They must pretend really to believe in the pretence, and act as though they are more childlike than they are. No wonder that when he saw the play as a child, Graham Greene sat on his hands.

Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens dishes up a potent local myth, one that even now endows that park with magic. To have permanently altered the way we imagine a part of London is a grand achievement. The later reworking of the plot, with Tinkerbell, pirates, Indians and the Darlings lost this specifically local beauty, but gained a great deal. Above all, it discovered Neverland, that map of Barrie's imagination. Other than its central myth of eternal youth, the life of Peter Pan itself now resides mostly in Captain Hook – a man hungry for admiration, flamboyant, maimed, vindictive, a passionate hater of the child and yet condemned to play for ever in a world of children. He's the bad parent waiting to be slain. In the story, fathers come in for a hard time, conceited and insubstantial Mr Darling being consigned to the kennel; mothers on the other hand have it even worse. Barrie contemplated naming the story "The Boy Who Hated Mothers", and tried to have the actress playing Mrs Darling double with Captain Hook (Barrie himself remarked, "There is the touch of the feminine in Hook, as in all the greatest pirates). In a remarkable moment in Peter and Wendy , the narrator declares that he despises Mrs Darling; a little later, he says that he likes her best of all. Out of such idiosyncratic, rapid switches of feeling, this classic draws its life.

Pan kills Hook; it's only "pretend", only a play, of course, but also an intimation of a darker world. It reminds us that RM Ballantyne's The Coral Island inspired both Barrie and William Golding's The Lord of the Flies . Peter is both the hero of the play and its true villain; there is something of the Hook in him too. The fact that children are learning to become moral agents and accept a place in the world failed to touch Barrie. Imaginatively he loved children's amorality, and wished that they could stay outside the world, before it or beyond it, inside the fenced-in territory of Kensington Gardens or marooned on a faraway island. He himself freely mixes sentimentality with heartlessness. The joke was to present emotional situations and then to refuse emotion for them, not to play "the crying game". Perhaps for Barrie feigning heartlessness rescued him from the pain of loving, whether an unwinnable mother or the lost boys themselves.

But what's oddest of all is that the public shared Barrie's private fantasy. In literature, success means finding a market for monomania. In order to resurrect Tinkerbell, adults as well as children applauded. They too, it seems, were attuned to Barrie's desire to remain a child. For us that desire has gone. Who now would really want to be a child and never grow up? Of course, in our wish to escape from work, responsibility, or money worries, I am sure that many on occasion would like to be a kid again. But a hankering for childhood – that now seems entirely lost. Very likely the long, protected "childhood" was anyway a myth, a middle-class prerogative, but then Peter Pan is a very middle-class tale. Still it is hard to imagine anyone now suggesting that childhood is holy, or that it represents the peak of life, with everything that comes after being merely a long descent. We are more likely to call someone a Dorian Gray than a Peter Pan.

These days it seems that the twilight zone of adolescence is the preferred place to be shipwrecked. "Youth" has advanced on two fronts, seizing the ground of "childhood" while occupying the place of maturity. As on that beach in Brighton, many look to loiter for ever in a state once considered ephemeral and transitional. In The Disappearance of Childhood (1982), Neil Postman persuasively argued that with childhood's disappearance, adulthood vanishes too. All that is left is one marketed expanse, where the consumers cling to the illusion of youth, a Botoxed utopia.

Maybe that's a preferable fate to Barrie's. While I was writing this piece, the news was full of Michael Jackson, and it proved difficult to ward off thoughts of the Neverland ranch, or of Jackson declaring that he was Peter Pan . It's curious, but hardly surprising that both Lewis Carroll and Barrie liked to photograph children. Ultimately, both men desired what only a photograph could offer, the possibility of retaining the transient moment of childhood for ever. Writing was a way of clinging on to his own boyhood and that of the Llewelyn Davies boys too. And for all the fun, the huge freedom promised by Peter Pan and Neverland, it is indeed somehow a sinister work, imbued with the subtle selfishness of wanting to possess another's family. Both Barrie and Peter Pan were strangers who came to steal the children away.

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by J. M. Barrie

Peter pan study guide.

Peter Pan is playwright and novelist J.M. Barrie's most famous work, published both as a play in 1904 and in 1911 as a novel. It tells the story of the magical Peter Pan , who flies into the Darling family's nursery in London one night and persuades the children to fly to Never Land with him, where they get caught up in a number of wild adventures. The play was an instant success upon its premiere and quickly found a following of devotees in both children and adults, who saw the story of the eternally young Peter Pan as a compelling allegory for the melancholy of growing up.

Barrie was inspired to write the story of Peter by the Davies children, whom Barrie adopted after the death of their parents, Sylvia and Arthur. Their names were used for the names of some of the characters in the story, and the adoption of the Lost Boys by the Darling Family is said to have been based on Barrie's experiences of adopting the Davies children. Barrie created Peter Pan as a story to amuse two of the boys, George and Jack.

Unlike many novelists and playwrights, Barrie attained fame and popularity during his lifetime. A patriotic Scot who lived in London, he was made a Baronet by King George V in 1913, which is the highest honor that can be bestowed on a "commoner" and is ranked above all other knighthoods. Although he wrote many other books, including Little White Bird, and Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens , Barrie is still best known for his creation of the little boy who could fly. Shortly before his death, he bequeathed the copyright of Peter Pan to Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital in perpetuity.

Peter Pan Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Peter Pan is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Study Guide for Peter Pan

Peter Pan study guide contains a biography of J. M. Barrie, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Peter Pan
• Peter Pan Summary
• Character List

Essays for Peter Pan

Peter Pan essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie.

• Understanding Peter Pan’s characters through their Relationship with Animals
• Peter Pan as Seen by James Barrie (Original Text) and P.J. Hogan (2003 Film)

Lesson Plan for Peter Pan

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to Peter Pan
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• Peter Pan Bibliography

67 pages • 2 hours read

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-4

Chapters 5-8

Chapters 9-13

Chapters 14-17

Character Analysis

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Discussion Questions

Summary and Study Guide

Author James Matthew Barrie adapted his 1904 play Peter Pan; or, the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up to novel in 1911 with the hit Wendy and Peter , known today simply as the timeless classic Peter Pan . The mischievous character Peter Pan first appeared in Barrie's 1902 novel The Little White Bird and later in the 1906 novel Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens . Barrie's works explore themes of coming-of-age, the importance of imagination, the clash of fantasy and reality, the power of maternal love, and more. Since its debut, Peter Pan has captured the adoration of children and adults alike.

Plot Summary

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Mr. and Mrs. Darling worry about money before they have three children: Wendy, John, and Michael. In an effort to save money, they hire a dog to be their nanny. One night, a flying boy tries to come into the house. The dog, Nana, is able to shut the window before the boy can make it inside. However, the window cuts the boy’s shadow off, which Mrs. Darling folds and puts away in a drawer. Despite their fear that the boy will return, Mr. Darling ties Nana up outside, and he and Mrs. Darling head to a party. The same night they go to the party, the boy returns with his fairy, Tinker Bell. They scour the nursery and find the boy’s shadow.

However, the boy is not able to reattach his shadow. He sits down on Wendy’s bed and cries. When she wakes up, she asks him what is wrong, and he shows her that he can’t attach his shadow. She sews it back on for him. The boy tells Wendy his name is Peter Pan. When Wendy finds out Peter wants someone to tell stories for him and his friends, she convinces him to take her with him. They wake her brothers and all of them fly off into the night. Before they arrive on the island, they are separated in the sky. Tinker Bell convinces Peter’s friends, the lost boys , to shoot Wendy out of the sky.

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The boys are devastated when they learn that they’ve shot their new mother, and they nurse her back to health and build her a home. Through various adventures, the lost boys, Peter, and Wendy face the pirates and their Captain, Hook. All the while, Peter insists that all mothers are bad, except Wendy. Wendy takes care of Peter and the lost boys: feeding them, teaching them, and nursing them. Sometimes the line between real and make-believe is blurred.

One night, Wendy tells the story she tells often. Peter, who normally doesn’t listen, sits and watches. The story is about her parents and how they keep the window open always, waiting for their children to return. The others are fascinated and ask Wendy when the children will return. She decides at that moment that they should return home that night. Peter pretends he doesn’t care and tells them they can go.

Up above their subterranean home, Captain Hook and his pirates await. They capture Wendy and the others when they emerge to leave. Tinker Bell wakes Peter and tells him what has happened. He vows that he will save them and it will be either him or Hook this time. On Captain Hook’s ship, he saves the others, and kills Captain Hook. The lost boys return home with Wendy and her brothers.

Wendy tries to convince Peter to stay with her and the others, but he insists he never wants to grow up. Instead, they agree Peter will come each spring to bring Wendy to the Neverland so she can clean. After a couple of visits, Peter forgets to come for Wendy and she grows up. However, when he arrives again to find her grown up, he takes her daughter. And so it continues.

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The story begins in the nursery of Darling home, where Mrs. Darling is "sorting through her children’s minds" at bedtime. She is surprised to find that all the children have been thinking of someone named Peter Pan . When Mrs. Darling asks about this mysterious boy, Wendy explains that Peter sometimes visits them when they’re asleep. One night, when she is resting in the nursery, Mrs. Darling wakes up to find that Peter Pan has indeed come to visit. When Peter notices an adult in the room, he jumps out the window, but the children's canine nanny, Nana , traps his shadow inside the room.

A few nights later, when the Darlings are dressing for a party, Mr. Darling quarrels slightly with the children and ties Nana in the yard, to everyone’s dismay. When the Darling parents leave for the party, the children are left unguarded, and Peter and Tinker Bell fly into the nursery. They are looking for Peter’s shadow, which Mrs. Darling had hidden away in a drawer. When Tink gives Peter the shadow, Peter finds that he can’t get it to stay on. His bitter crying wakes Wendy, who quickly sews the shadow on for him. Peter confesses that he has been listening in on the children’s bedtime stories so that he could repeat them to the lost boys. He asks Wendy to come with him to Neverland, where she could go on adventures and be a mother to all the little boys. Wendy hesitates, but finally agrees. Peter teaches all three Darling children how to fly and they set off to Neverland.

After flying for several days and nights, they finally spot the island on the horizon. The island seems dark and dangerous. Pirates who also inhabit the island fire a gun at the group and everyone flies in different directions. Tinker Bell, who is jealous of Peter and Wendy’s new friendship, uses the opportunity to try and get rid of Wendy: she tells the lost boys to shoot Wendy, and Wendy almost dies. But soon everything is well: Peter returns, and Wendy agrees to be the boys’ mother. She cooks and cleans and mends clothes, and she has a wonderful time with it. The boys all love to have regular mealtimes and bedtimes, like regular little boys. Peter takes them on many wonderful adventures.

One night, Wendy is telling the boys their favorite bedtime story: it describes three children who flew away to Neverland, and who returned many years later to find their mother and father waiting for them with open arms. Peter doesn’t like the story: he reluctantly explains that his own mother did not wait for him. Wendy becomes very upset and decides to take John and Michael home immediately. She invites all the boys to come, but Peter coldly declines.

As it happens, the pirates are waiting just above the children’s underground house. When Wendy and the rest come out, they are all captured and taken to the pirate ship. Meanwhile, Peter is lying in bed asleep. Captain Hook , the leader of the pirates, slips down into the lost boys' house and poisons Peter’s medicine. When Peter wakes up, Tinker Bell tries to warn him about the poison, but he doesn’t believe her; at the last moment, she drinks the medicine herself. She grows weaker and weaker, but she is saved by the sound of children clapping all around the world. When she is well again, Peter sets out to save the others.

Hook and his crew have returned to the ship. They are about to make the children walk the plank, when suddenly they hear the ticking of the crocodile – the same crocodile that has been trying to eat Hook. The children see that it is Peter who is ticking, not the crocodile. Peter slips onto the ship, and in the ensuing confusion he and the children kill most of the pirates. When only Hook is left, Peter fences with him and finally throws him to the crocodile waiting in the water.

Soon, the Darling children come home to London. Mr. and Mrs. Darling are overjoyed, and they adopt all the lost boys except Peter, who returns to Neverland. Peter promises to take Wendy back to Neverland every year to do his spring cleaning, but he comes for her only twice.

Wendy and the other boys grow up. The boys get ordinary jobs, and Wendy marries and has a daughter named Jane . One day, Peter returns: he wants to take Wendy to do his spring cleaning, but she is too big to fly, so he takes Jane instead. When Jane grows up, he comes every so often for Jane’s daughter, and so on forever.