Peter Pan

The Edwardian era was the Golden Age of childhood, of high adventure and fantasy, and home for tea in the nursery. Or not... The story of the boy who took the quest for untrammelled freedom to its utmost limits, who refused to grow up, could effortlessly fly, and who enticed three children from their comfortable Kensington home to fight redskins and pirates with him in the storyteller's paradise of Neverland ('Second to the right and then straight on till morning') is the anarchic product of its era; but more than a hundred years after Barrie's play opened in London, Peter Pan is performed regularly as a Christmas pantomime, as spellbinding now as it ever was, and TV documentaries continue to probe the nature of the relationship of author J.M. Barrie with the tragic Llewellyn Davies boys who inspired him. Wendy, John and Michael; Captain Hook, Smee, Starkey, Tinkerbell and the Lost Boys are part of our childhood consciouness. Not everyone who thinks they know Peter Pan has read it as Barrie wrote it, and adults too will enjoy the original text (published as Peter and Wendy in 1911) with its ironic presentation of the Darling ménage, its appreciation of the cruelty and carelessness of children and its amusing depiction of the villain Hook as an ex-public schoolboy obsessed with 'good form'. This funny, haunting modern myth appears in Everyman together with the wonderful illustrations of F. D. Bedford which accompanied the 1911 edition.