Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens
In 1906, four years after "The Little White Bird" was published,
Barrie's publishers Hodder and Stoughton released the story book "Peter Pan in
Kensington Gardens", beautifully
illustrations
by Arthur Rackham. The main audience to the book was of course little children,
which shouldn't come as a surprise, but surprisingly the book consisted of six
chapters from a novel for adults, namely the chapters 13-18 from "The Little
White Bird".
The book was mentioned and treated like an independent book although it was just
an excerpt from a novel. The excerpt was, though, fully capable of standing on
its own and only minor changes had been made, most of them in order to explain
things, now that the rest of the novel is “missing”. There are no edits in
Barrie's use of language or style, which is quite remarkable as the audience to
"Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens" is quite different from that to "The Little
White Bird".
“Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens” tells the same beautiful and tragic story
about Peter as “The Little White Bird” did. He runs away from home when he is
only seven days old and comes to live in Kensington Gardens in London. Here he
befriends the birds and the fairies and he also gets a human friend, the girl
Mamie who is a wild and strange forerunner for Wendy. Although Peter loves Mamie
dearly and even marries her, he misses his mother, but when he returns to his
home, his mother has replaced him with a new little boy and barred the windows,
so that Peter cannot come back inside again. Since then Peter has lived alone in
Kensington Gardens, where he helps children who has stayed after the gates have
closed. If they are still alive, he leads them to a little fairy house, but if
they are dead, he buries them. Unfortunately Peter has a problem distinguishing
between life and death, though…
“Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens” is much better than “The Little White Bird”,
mainly because it is solely about Peter, which “The Little White Bird” isn’t.
I’m therefore going to give it 4 out of 5 stars: ****
© Lise Lyng Falkenberg, 1990