Photographer Unknown, (On the Rock)

“Peter was not quite like other boys; but he was afraid at last. A tremour ran through him, like a shudder passing over the sea; but on the sea one shudder follows another till there are hundreds of them, and Peter felt just the one. Next moment he was standing erect on the rock again, with that smile on his face and a drum beating within him.”

–J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

Born in Kirriemuir, located in the council area of Angus in May of 1860, James Matthew Barrie was a Scottish playwright and novelist. The ninth of ten children of a conservative Calvinist family, he was sent at the age of eight to the Glasgow Academy where he was put in the care of his siblings Alexander and Mary Ann, who taught at the school. Two years later, Barrie returned home and studied at the Forfar Academy and, later, at the Dumfries Academy. 

James M. Barrie enrolled at the University of Edinburgh to study literature and graduated with an Masters of Arts in April of 1882. In the next decade, he wrote several short stories, which served as basis for his first novels. These were popular enough to establish Barrie as a successful writer. In 1891, Barrie wrote a successful theater play, “Ibsen’s Ghost or Tool Up-to-Date”, a parody of Henrik Ibsen’s dramas “Hedda Gabler” and “Ghosts”. 

Barrie’s character of Peter Pan first appeared in his 1902 novel “The Little White Bird”, published in book form by Hodder & Stoughton and serialized in Scribner’s Magazine. His more famous and enduring theatrical work “Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up” had its first stage performance on the 27th of December in 1904 at the West End’s Duke of York’s Theatre. The play introduced the character of Wendy and contrasted the social constraints of late Victorian and Edwardian middle class domestic reality with the moral ambivalence of Neverland.

In 1911, J. M. Barrie developed the “Peter Pan” play into the novel “Peter and Wendy”. Both versions tell the story of Peter Pan, a mischievous little boy who can fly and has many adventures on the island of Neverland that is inhabited by fairies, mermaids, Indians, and pirates. The stories also involve the Darling children Wendy, John and Michael, the fairy Tinker Bell, the Lost Boys, and the pirate Captain Hook. Barrie continued to revise the play for years after its debut; the final version was published in 1928. 

Prior to the publication of Barrie’s “Peter and Wendy”, the play was adapted into a 1907 novelization entitled “The Peter Pan Picture Book” written by Daniel O”Connor and illustrated by Alice Woodward. The original 1911 novel contains a frontispiece and eleven half-tone plates by Francis Donkin Bedford. With Barrie’s permission, the novel was first abridged by May Byron in 1915 and published under the name “Peter Pan and Wendy”; this version was later illustrated by Mabel Lucie Attwell in 1921. Barrie gave the copyright to the Peter Pan works in April of 1929 to the Great Ormond Street Hospital, a leading children’s hospital in London. 

Disney was a long-time licensee to the animation rights, and cooperated with the hospital when its copyright claim was clear. After following the directive to harmonize copyright laws within the European Union in 1995, the copyright was extended to the end of 2007. The original versions of the play and novel are now in the public domain in most of the world including all countries where the term of copyright is eighty-five years or less after the death of the creators. In spite of the expiration of the copyright, a 1988 United Kingdom statutory provision grants royalties, regarding any public performance, commercial publication, and communication to the public of any substantial part of the play or adaptation of it,  in perpetuity to the Great Osmond Street Hospital.