[BITList] Barrie at 150

[John Feltham]

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Barrie, Sir  James Matthew, baronet  (1860-1937), playwright and novelist, was born in a small house in The Tenements, Brechin Road, Kirriemuir, Forfarshire, on 9 May 1860, the ninth child and third and youngest son of David Barrie (1814-1902), a handloom weaver in Kirriemuir, and his wife, Margaret (1820-1895), daughter of Alexander Ogilvy, a stonemason.

Early years and education, 1860-1884

The Barrie family had to endure not only poverty but a number of domestic tragedies, including the early death of two daughters. These events occurred before James was born, however. The first tragedy to involve him personally was the death in a skating accident of his thirteen-year-old brother David. In his autobiographical novel, Margaret Ogilvy (1896), Barrie tried to recapture his own childhood memories of this incident, especially as it affected his mother.

When David died in 1867 James was still at a local school. But a more ambitious academic route was planned for him. Taking advantage of the democratic Scottish university entrance system, Barrie's parents sent his eldest brother, Alexander, to Aberdeen University. Having graduated with honours in classics Alexander became a teacher at Glasgow Academy. James followed him as a pupil and studied there from 1868 until February 1871, when he transferred to Forfar Academy. When Alexander became one of the first school inspectors his younger brother again followed him, this time to Dumfries Academy. He later recorded in The Greenwood Hat (1930) that the years he spent there, from 1873 until 1878, were among the happiest of his life. The drama society in particular interested him, and for it he composed his first play, a melodrama in six scenes entitled Bandalero the Bandit.

Barrie was himself being prepared for higher education. Edinburgh University was chosen, and he matriculated there in 1878. In An Edinburgh Eleven (1888) he paid tribute to the broad disciplinary base provided by this degree. His literary studies under Professor David Masson not only initiated a creative desire to imitate the dramatists of the English Renaissance; they also led Barrie to compose academic essays on Skelton ('The rector of Diss') and Nash for a projected academic work to be entitled The Early Satirical Poetry of Great Britain. In Professor Campbell Fraser's classes he studied one of the earliest psychology courses offered in Scotland. Fraser's views on perception and the fragility of personal identity had a lasting influence on a young man conscious of the many roles that he played in his own life. In an intensely competitive system Barrie graduated with an ordinary MA, in 1882.

It was journalism rather than academe that first welcomed Barrie. While still an undergraduate he had written articles for the Edinburgh Courant. An unexpected opportunity to become leader-writer at the Nottingham Journal then opened up, and he went south in January 1883. In Nottingham he learned techniques of writing and note-taking that remained with him for the rest of his life. His position also implied tackling a wide range of topics, from the Irish question to Darwinism. As Barrie also contributed fiction and reviews to the paper it is surprising that he found time to compose material for London magazines as well. Some of these were published, and so when the Nottingham Journal folded, in October 1884, he considered moving to the capital as a freelance writer. He wrote for advice to Frederick Greenwood, editor of the St James's Gazette, as he had shown particular interest in his 'Scotch' stories. When Greenwood sternly warned him against coming his young correspondent reacted by catching a train to London.

Literary apprenticeship, 1885-1900

Barrie arrived in the capital on 28 March 1885 and soon justified the bold move he had made. In the succeeding five years he published six books while contributing articles and reviews to fifteen major journals. The most immediately successful of these books were the story-collections Auld Licht Idylls (1888) and A Window in Thrums (1889). These were based largely on his mother's reminiscences of Kirriemuir. None the less the narrator clearly warns his readers not to interpret either village or characters realistically like 'a dull historian'  (J. M. Barrie, Auld Licht Idylls, 10), but imaginatively. Seen in those terms Thrums represents those reinvented dreams of their rural past that its exiled inhabitants use to strengthen their identity in urban exile after the industrial revolution.

After the comparatively solitary life that he had led in Nottingham Barrie found London more congenial. The friends that he did make-notably Thomas Gilmour, secretary to Lord Rosebery, and Alexander Riach, a journalist on the Daily Telegraph-soon discovered their own lives appearing, lightly disguised, in their companion's other early prose works. For example the hero of Better Dead (1887) is called Riach, and Lord Rosebery becomes one of the leading figures that he considers killing in its highly melodramatic plot. Barrie's own romantic and sexual problems also figure in these works. Less than 5 feet tall, he was acutely conscious that women overlooked him in more ways than one. In his earliest fiction unprepossessing artisan writer-heroes recur with some regularity and have more sexual success than their creator had in the days when he shared a houseboat with Gilmour and the novelist Henry Marriott Watson. As outsider he had watched their romances unfold; in When a Man's Single (1888) Barrie turned the fictional tables on them. In that novel it is his own alter ego, the rustic journalist Rob Angus, who wins the beautiful, talented, and affluent heroine.

The 1890s saw Barrie firmly established as a leading novelist. Old Kirriemuir was revived in The Little Minister (1891) and this was followed by three novels on the topic of the artist as young man: Sentimental Tommy (1896), Margaret Ogilvy (1896), and Tommy and Grizel (1900). These produced initial sales of over 225,000 copies in Britain and the United States. Yet with the exception of works on the Peter Pan theme-Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906), Peter and Wendy (1911)-they were also the last novels that he wrote. Instead he turned to and persevered with drama, although a mixed reception had greeted his early experiments in that mode. While Ibsen's Ghost (1891) and Walker, London (1892) proved him capable of writing farces in one-act and three-act form respectively, his attempt at a problem play, The Wedding Guest (1900), had failed to move its audiences. Even his dramatization in 1897 of The Little Minister did not match the popularity of its prose source. But Barrie was now under the spell of the theatre, attracted by its glamour and the artistic challenge of adapting to its visual dimension.

Social and sporting interests relieved Barrie's heavy work schedule. His love of cricket led him to found his own club, the Allahakbarries, in 1887; this group of media stars, explorers, and dignitaries remained active until 1913. His habit of invading the families of married friends and inventing dramatic games for their children also dates from this period. Before the children of Arthur and Sylvia Du Maurier famously became the 'co-authors' of Peter Pan, Margaret, the daughter of W. E. Henley, and Bevil, the son of Arthur Quiller Couch, had enjoyed that role.

Romantically, however, Barrie was less successful. Attracted throughout his life to independent women who had gained that freedom on the stage or through noble birth, he found his powers of invention of more limited use in this area. In 1891 the object of his infatuation was Mary Ansell (b. 1862), the ambitious actress daughter of a licensed grocer. He demanded a major part for her in Walker, London. Three years later, when Barrie's mother became ill, this actress-playwright alliance was still in force, and Mary accompanied Barrie to Kirriemuir. Their engagement and marriage at his parents' house in July of that year were somewhat subdued, as Barrie himself had also fallen ill with pneumonia. That physical problems existed for the couple can be indirectly deduced from Sentimental Tommy's self-absorbed, role-playing inability to 'think himself' into sexual love  (J. M. Barrie, Tommy and Grizel, 168, 380), but proof was as yet withheld.

The middle period, 1901-1916

Between 1901 and 1904 Barrie produced three major plays, all of which followed the pattern of those Shakespearian romances that Masson placed at the apex of literary achievement. In 1902 Quality Street and The Admirable Crichton used that form to explore different kinds of social imprisonment. In the former Phoebe Throssel's gender and gentility, in the latter Crichton's social position prevent their full potential flourishing in hierarchical, paternalistic, Victorian England. Once the central issue has been defined these plays test it out imaginatively in their equivalent of Prospero's island in The Tempest. The ball scenes in Quality Street and the island in Crichton allow them fantastically to prove those powers for greatness that are doomed to waste unseen in early twentieth-century England.

While Quality Street ran for eighteen months and The Admirable Crichton for ten it was the third 'romance'-Peter Pan (1904)-that broke all previous theatrical records and proved Barrie's most enduring success. Testing out the age-old questions of origin in a child's 'Never land', this strange adult pantomime uses the allegorical method described in 'The rector of Diss' to link the simplest kind of sensual appeal to a mythic exploration of the issues recently highlighted by Darwin. If Barrie prided himself on counterpointing light and serious messages in his art he was also intent on pushing the resources of the theatre to their absolute limits. Peter Pan was his most ambitious attempt at each. It should be remembered that only his most enthusiastic friend, the American impresario Charles Frohman, was willing to take a chance on producing a spectacle that, in its original form demanded a cast of over fifty, with five major scene changes and almost every dangerous piece of theatrical business known. It was this strange work that became the high point of every Christmas in the London theatre for three decades.

The fact that its central character was a little boy unable to face the facts of adulthood at a time when Barrie's own sexual inadequacies came under public scrutiny adds a sadder twist to the plot of the author's life. When he wrote Peter Pan he had found another 'distant' woman to adore. Sylvia Du Maurier, now wife of Arthur Llewelyn Davies, was a talented society lady. She also had a young family for Barrie to captivate in his accustomed role of playmate and storyteller. In his dedication to Peter Pan in 1928 he suggested that the games he played with the Llewelyn Davies boys in his newly acquired Surrey property, Black Lake Cottage, were part of the work's creation process. While he was enjoying the fruits of his theatrical fame and finding excuses to invade the Llewelyn Davies family Mary Ansell found herself deprived of both a professional career and her husband's attention. In 1907 she began an affair with the young actor Gilbert Cannan. When Barrie's gardener blurted out the truth to him, and Mary refused his appeals to end the liaison, divorce proceedings became inevitable. The undefended case, on grounds of adultery, that the playwright brought before the court on 13 October 1909 was fully reported. As his own failure to consummate the marriage was part of the evidence his impotence became common knowledge.

In the light of this Barrie's continued dramatic interest in different kinds of female power is understandable. His basic thesis, as expressed in the dedication to Peter Pan, is that woman has a complex Russian-doll type of mind, superior to its simple male equivalent. This is played out in Wendy's clever manipulating of Peter. Before this it had been malevolently established in Becky Sharp (1893) and had been benevolently matched, ten years later, in Little Mary (1903). Alice Sit by the Fire (1905), What every Woman Knows (1908), The Adored One (1913), and A Kiss for Cinderella (1916) extend the survey. Unsurprisingly while London's West End found the benevolent side of heroine power easy to applaud it was not at all happy when the manipulative potential of the Machiavellian female was dramatized. The socially unthreatening cleverness of Maggie Shand in What every Woman Knows was acceptable. But when Leonora in The Adored One throws a man to his death from a railway carriage because his smoking annoys her baby, then fools a male judge and jury into acquitting her, the audiences booed. Barrie rewrote the conclusion, turning her crime (and the subversive power-play that accompanied it) into a dream. 'Reality' now became a rural idyll, with Leonora restored to Edwardian, paternalist views of woman's role in society.

Barrie's experiments with film techniques and the music hall also belong to this period. But it is the one-act form that dominates. The best of these-notably The Twelve Pound Look (1910) and Rosalind (1912)-continued his dual interest in heroine-ism and the split personality. Barrie admitted that personal problems were interrupting his work and causing him to tear up more plays than he completed. Before his divorce Barrie's agent, Addison Bright, was found guilty of embezzlement, and committed suicide in 1906. His friend and financier Charles Frohman sank with the Lusitania in 1915. First Arthur and then Sylvia Llewelyn Davies died, in 1906 and 1910 respectively, making Barrie the guardian of their 'lost boy' children. In 1913 his close friend the explorer Robert Scott wrote to him from the South Pole 'as a dying man', asking him to look after his wife and child  (Letters of J. M. Barrie, 46, n. 3). Although Lady Scott maintained her independence Barrie was now at the head of a vastly expanded 'family'. That he took his duties very seriously is confirmed in the many thoughtful and loving letters he wrote to the Davies boys as they grew up.

Later years, 1917-1937

Barrie's melancholic moods were commented upon frequently by his friends during the period 1915-20. A more pessimistic view of life is also reflected in the two major fantasy plays, which appeared in 1917 and 1920. Dear Brutus, whose very title is drawn from Julius Caesar, is the most overtly Shakespearian of all Barrie's plays. There is, however, a melancholy wistfulness absent from its major source A Midsummer Night's Dream. The magic wood into which the Puck figure, Lob, sends his house guests on midsummer's eve is used to enact the sad truth that most people, if offered a second chance in life, would make the same mistakes all over again. Mary Rose, whose troubled ghost returns sadly from the world of faery to seek out her lost son, draws its storyline from a summer holiday spent in the Western Isles and from James Hogg's poem 'Kilmeny' rather than from Shakespeare; but it too is tragicomic in spirit.

In 1910 Barrie had been among those considered by the Liberal government for a peerage if a forced creation became necessary to get Lloyd George's budget through the House of Lords. Although this initiative proved unnecessary he was created a baronet by the king in 1913. In 1922 he was appointed to the Order of Merit. A year earlier Michael, one of the Llewelyn Davies boys, whom he had come to regard as his sons, died unexpectedly and in mysterious circumstances. Cynthia Asquith, who in 1918 had become the author's secretary at his Adelphi Terrace house, records 'What his death dealt Barrie in shock and in sorrow cannot-should not-be told'  (Asquith, 135). Life and work continued, however, and in 1923 five of his plays were running contemporaneously in London. His powers as an orator were also regularly called upon at this time either to promote causes or to mark the honours being conferred upon him. His rectorial address at St Andrews University in 1922 wittily and pathetically discusses the need for 'courage', while his inauguration as Edinburgh University's chancellor, in 1930, produced an equally passionate speech, defending the right of all social classes to higher education. As he became president of the Society of Authors in 1928 and gained honorary doctorates from Oxford (1926) and Cambridge (1930) public opportunities to celebrate and brood upon his own life were not lacking.

The ghost story 'Farewell Miss Julie Logan' (1931) ended Barrie's prose fiction on a high note. Theatrically he was not so fortunate. The conclusion of his career saw him once more bewitched by a young actress, this time Elizabeth Bergner. It was at her suggestion that he began his last play, on the biblical theme of David and Jonathan. As The Boy David it had a successful trial run in Edinburgh towards the end of 1936. But the London opening was damned with faint praise, and it closed after seven weeks, on 21 January 1937. Barrie had been ill throughout this period. Cancer was suspected, bronchial pneumonia set in, and on 19 June at his home-3 Adelphi Terrace, London-the curtains closed on his own life. His body was buried in the family grave, on the hillside above Kirriemuir, on 24 June. At his request his name was inscribed on the stone 'with no embellishment of any kind'  (Mackail, 718).

Posthumous reputation

Barrie's literary epitaph is not so clearly established. That he was a genius was taken for granted in his own day. For William Archer 'no rational being doubts that Sir James is a humorist of original and delightful genius'  (Archer, 231). Robert Louis Stevenson agreed: 'It looks to me as if you are a man of genius'  (Letters, 273). But adulation turned to denigration shortly after Barrie's death. With the advent of Freudian criticism the temptation to turn 'this diminutive, dark-haired Scotsman' with the 'deep-hoarded sadness in his blue eyes'  (Asquith, 2) into an Oedipal version of his own most famous creation proved irresistible. In 1971 Harry M. Geduld produced the most exhaustive of these analyses. While Geduld's James Barrie seeks evidence of a mother complex across a wide range of texts, later writers have advanced the same thesis from a much reduced canon, confined to Margaret Ogilvy, the Tommy novels, and Peter Pan.

While this movement withdrew Barrie's claim to genius on the grounds of authorial immaturity the Scottish literati were busy rejecting him on other grounds. As their interest was confined to treatments of Scotland another eclectic canon in which the prose works of his literary apprenticeship again dominate was erected. Critics like George Blake, whose own novels were resolutely realistic, serious, socialistic, and nationalistic, were unlikely to have much sympathy with a manneristic, right-wing, comic myth-maker offering Scottish stereotypes for the amusement of London audiences. Blake's book Barrie and the Kailyard School dismisses his countryman in literal and naturalistic terms, despite Barrie's consistent plea-from 'The rector of Diss' (1884) to The Greenwood Hat (1930)-that his art was essentially allegorical and artificial. Later a counter-movement, initiated by Jacqueline Rose and Leonee Ormond, paid attention to these claims. By redefining him on his own terms, as a man of many personalities whose finest dramas followed the seriously fantastic method of Shakespearian romance, they saw him not as a backward-looking sentimentalist but as one of the first modernists.

In the worlds beyond academe a more positive judgement had already been made. In the popular imagination Barrie's myths are retranslated for each age. Psychologically (the 'Wendy complex'), politically ('the boy David'), and commercially (Quality Street chocolates) his mythic prototypes outlive him. Andrew Birkin's BBC television trilogy The Lost Boys (1978), with its sensitive portrayal of Barrie's powerfully mysterious character, carried this legacy forward in another mode. Birkin's script and subsequent book also illustrated how Barrie's enthusiasms for the theatre and the media in general usually found support from those who shared these passions.

Later West End revivals of The Admirable Crichton and Peter Pan proved Barrie's continued power to please. More humbly his major full-length and one-act plays continued to attract amateur companies throughout Britain. The visual power of his dramas also made him an established cinematic favourite. From the earliest days of silent film, when Cecil B. de Mille produced The Admirable Crichton as Man and Woman (1919), to Disney's Peter Pan (1953), and Spielberg's Hook (1991), his thought-provoking images have given pleasure to audiences across the world.

The assessment emanating from stage and stalls was always of paramount importance to Barrie. His constant attendance at rehearsals, amending his text in consultation with actors and directors, proves the first contention; his absence from most first-night performances, in fear of audience rejection, the second. None the less James Barrie MA also sought academic approbation throughout his life. To this end he provided a far more detailed critical commentary on his own art than most authors do. Any academic assessment of his status as a writer must surely begin from those premises.

R. D. S. Jack 

Sources  D. G. Mackail, The story of J.M.B. (1941) + C. Asquith, Portrait of Barrie (1954) + L. Ormond, J. M. Barrie (1987) + J. Rose, The case of Peter Pan (1984) + W. Archer, The old drama and the new (1923) + J. M. Barrie, 'University notebooks', NL Scot., Adv. MSS 6648-51 + D. Masson, Essays biographical and critical (1856) + D. Masson, Shakespeare personally (1914) + The letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. S. Colvin (1924), vol. 4 + H. Garland, A bibliography of the writings of James Matthew Barrie (1989) + A. Birkin, J. M. Barrie & the lost boys (1979) + R. D. S. Jack, The road to the neverland (1991) + R. L. Green, Fifty years of Peter Pan (1954) + R. D. S. Jack, 'Barrie and the extreme heroine', Gendering the nation, ed. C. Whyte (1995), 137-67 + J. Dunbar, J. M. Barrie: the man behind the image (1970) + The letters of J. M. Barrie, ed. V. Meynell (1942)
Archives Boston PL, letters + Harvard U., Houghton L., literary MSS and MSS + Indiana University, Bloomington, Lilly Library + NL Scot., corresp.; letters + NRA, corresp. and literary papers + NRA Scotland, priv. coll., corresp., literary MSS, and MSS + Princeton University, New Jersey, letters + Ransom HRC, MSS + Yale U., Beinecke L., corresp., literary MSS, and MSS + Yale U., Beinecke L., letters | BL, letters to William Archer, Add. MS 45290 + BL, corresp. with G. K. Chesterton and F. A. Chesterton, Add. MSS 73235, fols. 51-67; 73455 C, fol. 204; 73482 A, fol. 8 + BL, letters to G. L. Craik, Add. MS 61895 + BL, letters to Alfred Daniell, RP 2004 [copies] + BL, letters to Lady Juliet Duff, Add. MS 57853 + BL, Ashley collection, letters to Edmund Gosse + BL, letters to William Meredith, RP 2223 + BL, letters to George Bernard Shaw, Add. MS 50529 + BL, corresp. with Society of Authors, Add. MS 56660 + Bodl. Oxf., letters to Robert Bridges + Bodl. Oxf., corresp. with Geoffrey Dawson; letters to Lewis family; corresp. with Gilbert Murray; letters to A. A. W. Ponsonby + CAC Cam., letters to Duff Cooper + Cheltenham College, letters to Charles Turley + CUL, letters to Stanley Baldwin + CUL, letters to M. R. James + Dorset County Museum, Dorchester, letters to Florence Hardy; letters to Thomas Hardy + Ellen Terry Memorial Museum, Smallhythe, Kent, letters to Ellen Terry + GL, corresp. with Hodder and Stoughton + Harvard U., Houghton L., letters to Maude Adams + Harvard U., Houghton L., letters to Charles Frohman + Hunt. L., letters to R. Golding Bright + King's Cam., letters to Lady Keynes + Morgan L., letters to William Ernest Henley and literary MSS + NL Scot., letters to Sir Graham Balfour + NL Scot., letters to Haldane family; letters to Elizabeth Haldane; letters to Richard Burdon Haldane + NL Scot., letters to Seymour Hicks; letters to Sir William Nicholson; letters to Lilian Norrie; letters to Katherine Oliver; letters to Lord Rosebery + NYPL, Berg collection + PRONI, letters to Lady Londonderry + Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, letters to J. A. Roy + Richmond Local Studies Library, London, corresp. with Douglas Slader + Scott Polar RI, letters to Scott family + Shrops. RRC, letters to first Viscount Bridgeman + V&A, theatre collections, letters to Pauline Chase + U. Birm. L., corresp. with John Galsworthy + U. Leeds, Brotherton L., letters to Edmund Gosse + U. Leeds, Brotherton L., letters to Clement Shorter + U. Reading L., corresp. with Nancy Astor + Worcs. RO, letters to Sir Edward Elgar FILM BFI NFTVA, documentary footage; home footage; news footage
Likenesses  Barraud, photograph, c.1880-1889, NPG · two photographs, 1892-c.1904, V&A · H. Furniss, pen-and-ink drawing, c.1900-1910, NPG · G. C. Beresford, photograph, 1902, NPG [see illus.] · W. Nicholson, oils, 1904, Scot. NPG · A. L. Coburn, photogravure, 1909, NPG · M. Beerbohm, caricature, 1912, AM Oxf. · W. Stoneman, photographs, 1922, NPG · D. Low, caricature, 1927, NPG · J. Lavery, oils, 1930-39, Scot. NPG · W. T. Monnington, pencil drawing, 1932, NPG · G. C. Beresford, photographs, NPG · F. Hollyer, photograph, V&A · A. Lowe, caricature, Garr. Club · photograph (in his library), V&A · various photographs, Scot. NPG
Wealth at death  £173,467 9s. 5d.: probate, 15 Sept 1937, CGPLA Eng. & Wales