Humphrey Carpenter comments in Secret Gardens: The Golden Age of Children’s Literature (1985):
Peter Pan was a success from its very first performance, at the Duke of York’s Theatre, London, on 27 December 1904. The audience’s response – both adults and children – was wildly enthusiastic; the play thereafter became an annual fixture in London each Christmas and also toured Britain for much of the year, as well as being performed from coast to coast in America. Moreover, it initiated – or played a larger part than any other work in initiating – a fashion for ‘fairy’ literature and illustration in the Edwardian nursery, a fashion that scarcely abated until the 1930s. The effect of Peter Pan was, in other words, more immediate than that of any earlier work of children’s literature, Alice in Wonderland included. … We are dealing here not just with a piece of imaginative creation by one man, but with a public phenomenon. [p. 170]
During the week of 11–16 April 1910 a touring company brought Peter Pan to the Prince of Wales Theatre in *Birmingham. Dimitra Fimi has noted that reviews in Birmingham newspapers praised the spectacular presentation, ‘impressively painted scenery’, ‘complicated [flying] machinery’, and ‘high quality acting’, especially by Pauline Chase as Peter (Tolkien, Race and Cultural History: From Fairies to Hobbits (2009), p. 35). Having seen one of the performances, Tolkien wrote in his diary: ‘Indescribable but shall never forget it as long as I live. Wish *E[dith Tolkien] had been with me’ (quoted in Humphrey Carpenter, Biography, p. 47). Carpenter suggests that the play may have influenced the ‘light fairy things tripping so gay’ in the poem Wood-sunshine that Tolkien wrote in July 1910, but Tinker Bell is the only fairy prominent in Peter Pan, and she appeared on stage only as a moving light – though Tolkien may have been moved by the plea to save her by applauding. As a child, he did not enjoy Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, and although he ‘liked Red Indian stories and longed to shoot with a bow and arrow’ (Biography, p. 22), the ‘redskins’ in Peter Pan are not authentic.
Years later in On Fairy-Stories Tolkien rejected the sentimental attitude to childhood of much Edwardian writing. ‘The process of growing older is not necessarily allied to growing wickeder’, he wrote, ‘though the two do often happen together. *Children are meant to grow up, and not to become Peter Pans. Not to lose innocence and wonder, but to proceed on the appointed journey. …’ In a rejected draft, the second part reads: ‘Children are meant to grow up and to die, and not become Peter Pans (a dreadful fate)’ (extended edn. 2008, pp. 58, 190). An important theme of Tolkien’s developed mythology was accepting change and *mortality.
Both Dimitra Fimi in Tolkien, Race and Cultural History and John Garth in Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth (2003) see a connection between Never Never Land (later Never Land, or Neverland) and the Cottage of Lost Play in *The Book of Lost Tales. There are similarities, but also differences: in Peter Pan the children travel physically to the Never Never Land, the setting for a series of superficially violent adventures, while in the Lost Tales some at least of the children who reach the Cottage of Lost Play travel by the Path of Dreams and occupy themselves in the garden and on the shores in peaceful occupations such gathering flowers, chasing bees and butterflies, or dancing. In the poem You & Me and the Cottage of Lost Play (*The Little House of Lost Play: Mar Vanwa Tyaliéva) the writer remembers a time when a dark child and a fair child met in their dreams and enjoyed happy companionship by the Cottage of Lost Play. Fimi suggests that the reason why, at the end of poem, the two children can no longer find the path is that they are growing up. In Barrie’s play, Peter refuses to grow up, and he is the only one to stay in the Never Never Land.
On two occasions in 1957 Tolkien expressed approval of designs in the style of Arthur Rackham in connection with a proposed film of *The Lord of the Rings (*Adaptations). Some of Tolkien’s own art has Rackhamesque qualities, such as Taur-na-Fúin and Old Man Willow (Artist and Illustrator, figs. 54, 147; Art of The Hobbit, fig. 48, Art of The Lord of the Rings, fig. 23); in particular, these recall Rackham’s illustrations in Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, perhaps the most reproduced and best known of his work.
In *On Fairy-Stories Tolkien refers to another play by Barrie, Mary Rose, first performed in 1920. Tolkien saw this performed at least twice, and may have seen or read other plays by Barrie. His daughter *Priscilla recalls that one performance was probably in the 1940s in the *Oxford Playhouse, which she attended with her parents. Mary Rose opens with a soldier, Harry, returned from the war and visiting a house he knew as a boy. There he sees visions of past events: of youthful Mary Rose, her fiancé Simon, and the girl’s parents, who feel duty bound to reveal to Simon that during a holiday in the Hebrides years before, Mary Rose had vanished from an island and turned up twenty days later with no knowledge of the passage of time. Four years later, Mary Rose and Simon visit the same island, leaving their young son Harry behind. The call comes to Mary Rose, whisperings of her name developing into ‘a fury as of storm and whistling winds that might be an unholy organ. … Struggling through them, and also calling her name, is to be heard music of an unearthly sweetness that is seeking perhaps to beat them back and put a girdle of safety round her’ (The Plays of J.M. Barrie (1931), p. 573).
After a further gap of twenty-five years, when Simon is visiting her parents, it seems that time has blurred the loss of Mary Rose, and even of her son who ran away to sea at the age of twelve. Mary Rose appears on the island again, unchanged, thinking that no time has passed; she returns home and looks for her young child. As the stage darkens, Mary Rose appears to the soldier, Harry, who has heard that ghosts can rest when they find what they are looking for – he himself is her son, now physically older than his mother – but he cannot get her to recognize him. She wants to go somewhere lovely, but does not know where that is – Harry thinks it might be Heaven. He wonders if she broke some law, coming back to look for her child. The stage instructions say: ‘The call is again heard, but there is in it now no unholy sound. It is a celestial music that is calling for Mary Rose … first in whispers and soon so loudly that, for one who can hear, it is the old sound in the world. … The smallest star shoots down for her, and with her arms stretched forth to it trustingly she walks out through the window into the empyrean. The music passes with her’ (p. 594).
In the published On Fairy-Stories Tolkien writes:
*Drama can be made out of the impact upon human characters of some event of Fantasy, or Faërie, that requires no machinery, or that can be assumed or reported to have happened. But that is not fantasy in dramatic result; the human characters hold the stage and upon them attention is concentrated. Drama of this sort [is] exemplified by some of Barrie’s plays. … There are, for instance, many stories telling how men and women have disappeared and spent years among the fairies, without noticing the passage of time, or appearing to grow older. In Mary Rose Barrie wrote a play on this theme. No fairy is seen. The cruelly tormented human beings are there all the time. In spite of the sentimental star and the angelic voices at the end (in the printed version) it is a painful play, and can easily be made diabolic: by substituting (as I have seen it done) the elvish call for ‘angel voices’ at the end. [extended edn., p. 82]
In a rejected draft he is much more outspoken:
In Mary Rose Barrie made a play on this theme: Successful in the sense that no machinery was required, and the fantastic events were by his art made ‘credible’. But nothing whatever is done with the horrible suffering inflicted upon the rest of the family. It is as if Barrie, expending his art upon making a Celtic fantasy credible in the centre of the stage, had ignored the human torment going on in the wings. The play is diabolic, or at least it can only stand as diabolic drama: that is, if an interpreter or producer says: ‘Yes, the sufferings of the characters are the thing, watch them squirm and die; the fairies do not matter, except as being malicious, and inhuman: no explanations given, there aren’t any.’ So it was as I last saw it. Mary Rose walked out finally to a summons of the same elvish tone as those which had called her away before. But not so Barrie. With characteristic shirking of his own dark issues, in the