The Real Peter Pan: The Lost Boys, and One Girl
- David Salariya
- 3 days ago
- 18 min read
Peter Pan, Christopher Robin and Alice became immortal children. The real children had to find somewhere to grow old.
How children's literature preserves childhood by consuming actual children.
Peter Pan was my favourite book as a child. My parents and my grandmother read it to me many, many times. When I was told that I was going to have a baby brother I apparently announced that I would read Peter Pan to him.
J. M. Barrie was born in Kirriemuir. It is a weaving town in Angus not far from Dundee where I grew up. So the boy who would not grow up seemed almost local.
I then spent most of my working life making books for children.
This story is about what children's books sometimes did to actual children. It is also a chain of coincidences so neat that if you put them into a novel an editor would probably send it back as contrived. Patricia Borlenghi might even have rejected it from her own book of coincidences for trying too hard.
In Look at the Harlequins! Vladimir Nabokov called coincidence a cardsharper in ordinary fiction but a marvellous artist in the patterns of recollected fact.
Everything that follows is fact.
Judge the artistry for yourself.
Peter Pan, Christopher Robin and Alice became immortal children. The real people behind them had to find somewhere to
grow old.
This is a story about child muses, bookshops, publishers, railway lines and a chain of coincidences that seems too neat to be true. At its centre are two men whose childhood identities were turned into enormously successful children's books. They spent their adult lives inside the book trade but never met.
Perhaps they were the only two people who could have understood one another.
And one woman who handled the fame in a different way.
The Real Alice Meets the Real Peter Pan
Let us begin in a bookshop because everything in this story starts and ends with books.
It is late June 1932, we are in the back room of J. and E. Bumpus at 350 Oxford Street. Bumpus was one of London's grandest bookshops, founded in the 1790s and was bookseller by appointment to the King.
A Lewis Carroll centenary exhibition is about to open.
A nervous man of thirty-five is waiting to introduce the guest of honour, she is a formidable woman of eighty named Alice Liddell Hargreaves - at times referring to herself as "Lady Hargreaves".
As a little girl in an Oxford rowing boat she had asked Charles Dodgson to tell her a story.
That request became Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
The man waiting to introduce her is Peter Llewelyn Davies, he is a publisher a war veteran and holder of the Military Cross.
As a baby in a pram in Kensington Gardens he had caught the eye of J. M. Barrie.
He became Peter Pan.
Forever.
And against his will.
Think about that back room for a moment.
The real Alice is shaking hands with the real Peter Pan while members of the book trade look on. Wonderland meets Neverland over a display of Lewis Carroll memorabilia.
Both had been made immortal as children, both had continued ageing in private, the oddity of this meeting is that no photograph of the two together has ever surfaced. There's also perhaps a more human reason Peter Davies might not want to be in the pictures. He detested the association and being photographed as "the original Peter Pan" beside "the original Alice" was possibly the tabloid moment he spent his life dodging. A man like that stands at the back when the flashbulbs come out. That's speculation, but consistent speculation..
Alice knew that becoming a legend offered no protection from ordinary grief, she had lost two sons in the First World War. Financial need had also forced her to sell the original manuscript of Alice's Adventures Under Ground - the first version of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland at Sotheby's. It fetched £15,400. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland has never been out of print and has been translated into 174 languages to put this into context Pinoccio has been translated into 46 translations and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince holds the record, having been translated into over 382 languages.
Being a legend does not pay the bills.
Peter had lost his eldest brother in the same war, both his parents were dead before he was fourteen.
Two of the most famous children in English literature had finally met.
They met at work in a bookshop.
Peter was there in his professional capacity, even the introduction was a booking.
Alice died two years later,
Peter's story took longer.
A Boy on the Railway Line
On the night of 7 May 1920 a Christ Church undergraduate named Alastair Grahame drank a glass of port and went out for a walk.
He was found the following morning on the railway line outside Oxford.
He was nineteen.
Alastair was known as Mouse to his family. He was the only child of Kenneth Grahame. The stories his father first told him at bedtime grew into The Wind in the Willows.
The inquest returned a verdict of accidental death. It may have been a merciful conclusion in an age when suicide brought public disgrace as well as private grief.
Later biographers have been less certain.
The evidence suggests that Alastair may have lain down across the railway line and waited.
His father was a famous author. He had also been Secretary of the Bank of England.
The boy who inspired a children's classic had reached adulthood. He appears to have found it unendurable.
Peter Pan Dies on the Underground
Forty years later Peter Llewelyn Davies was sixty-three.
For thirty-four years he had run the publishing house that carried his name.
On the evening of 5 April 1960 he spent some time in the bar of the Royal Court Hotel at Sloane Square. He then crossed the road to the Underground station. He went down to the platform and stepped in front of an incoming train.
Fleet Street could not help itself.
PETER PAN COMMITS SUICIDE
THE BOY WHO NEVER GREW UP IS DEAD
The New York Times reported:
BARRIE'S PETER PAN KILLED BY A LONDON SUBWAY TRAIN
Peter had spent half a century trying to escape the association.
He called Peter Pan "that terrible masterpiece".
In the end it wrote his obituary.
Two boys stood behind two Edwardian children's classics, both died on railway lines.
The deaths were forty years apart.
Nothing connects them.
Except everything.
The Crowded Calendar of 1920 and 1921
The coincidences become stranger when the dates are placed beside one another.
Alastair Grahame died in May 1920.
Fifteen weeks later Christopher Robin Milne was born in Chelsea.
One child muse left the stage as the next arrived to take up the role.
Then in May 1921 another Oxford undergraduate died.
This was almost exactly a year after Alastair's death. It happened in the same city.
The student was Michael Llewelyn Davies. He was Peter's younger brother and Barrie's favourite. By the family's own account Michael was the truest model for the boy in the play.
Michael drowned at Sandford Pool with his closest friend Rupert Buxton.
The official record said accident.
Rumours suggested a suicide pact. Bizarrely, a London paper included Pan’s famous line in their coverage of the tragedy: “To die will be an awfully big adventure.”
Years later Peter wrote his own verdict into his private notes. He thought it perfectly possible but entirely unproven.
The stories promised eternal childhood.
The real boys did not reach middle age.
Barrie himself admitted that Peter Pan was never really Peter Davies. In the dedication to the published play in 1928 he addressed all five Llewelyn Davies brothers - George, Jack, Peter, Michael and Nico - and confessed: "I made Peter by rubbing the five of you violently together, as savages with two sticks produce a flame." The character was a composite. Peter merely supplied the name, because he was the baby in the pram when Barrie began the stories in Kensington Gardens. It was an accident of christening and timing.
The family knew it, Michael was by common consent the truest model, and Nico said in later life that Peter was the least Pan-like of all the brothers.
Yet it was Peter who carried the label, at school, in the press and finally in the headlines above his own obituary.
He answered for sixty years to a spark struck from five boys.
The name had simply landed on him.
The Name That Would Not Let Him Go
There is another twist that feels almost too tidy.
Peter Llewelyn Davies was christened after Peter Ibbetson. Peter Ibbetson was the hero of a novel written by his grandfather George du Maurier.
Peter had been named after one fictional character as a baby.
Before he could read he was claimed by another.
Some of us inherit our grandfather's watch.
Peter Davies inherited his grandfather's bookshelf.
It never let him go...
When Peter Pan opened at the Duke of York's Theatre in December 1904, Captain Hook was played by Gerald du Maurier. He was the boys' uncle - Sylvia's brother, son of the George du Maurier whose novel had already supplied Peter's name. Gerald doubled the part with Mr Darling, and every production since has inherited the doubling: the father and the pirate wearing the same face.
Mr Darling was partly modelled on Arthur Llewelyn Davies, the boys' actual father. So their uncle stood on stage impersonating their father - then transformed, mid-evening, into the man who steals children from their beds.
Within six years the impersonation curdled into prophecy. Arthur died in 1907, Sylvia in 1910. The children really were carried off - not by a pirate but by the playwright.
Gerald's daughter Daphne watched his Hook from the stalls as a small girl and never forgot it. She later wrote that children had to be carried screaming from the theatre. One du Maurier gave Peter his name, another gave the story its villain and a third grew up to be published a few doors along from Peter's own imprint.
The family supplied the christening, the nightmare and the neighbour.
...And As We're Looking at Christenings
When Peter Davies's first son was christened in June 1933, the Western Morning News carried the news under the headline of a "new Peter Pan." The report is remarkable for who is missing from it - Peter Davies himself. Here is the announcement of a man's firstborn child, yet the father figures only as "the original Peter Pan," a publisher of thirty-six reduced to a walk-on part The baby, Ruthven Barrie Llewelyn Davies, is crowned Peter Pan the Second before he can focus his eyes. Even the birthday belongs to Barrie, the boy had arrived on the 9th of May - Barrie's own birthday - and was carried to the font at St Columba's, Pont Street, in the christening robes Barrie himself had worn at Kirriemuir seventy-three years earlier, with Lawrence of Arabia standing godfather in absentia. A reader in Plymouth learned the baby's connection to a play before learning his name. It is touching, or faintly proprietorial, depending on the light - the old magician dressing the next generation in his own christening gown. Perhaps it explains a great deal, If this was how the press reported a private christening, small wonder that no photograph survives of Peter Davies posed beside the original Alice at Bumpus the summer before.
He knew exactly what the caption would say.
Mary Poppins Comes Home to Peter Pan
Then there are the loops.
These are not quite coincidences. They are examples of the book trade folding back on itself in ways nobody planned.
P. L. Travers admired Barrie and there are clear echoes of Peter Pan in Mary Poppins.
There is the nursery, flight, the magical visitor who refuses to stay. Mr Banks has something of Mr Darling about him. The children are carried away from the ordinary world and then returned to it.
Travers had grown up in Australia, a bank manager's daughter in small-town Queensland. In 1924 she sailed for London and stayed, there she transformed elements of her own past into fiction.
When later Mary Poppins books needed a British publisher where did they land?
Peter Davies Ltd.
Mary Poppins Opens the Door was published by Peter Davies in 1944.
Mary Poppins in the Park followed in 1952.
The character had escaped the man in 1904 and flown out across the world, reaching even the nurseries of Queensland. Twenty years later a young Australian woman carried that childhood to London. Somewhere in the crossing the magical visitor changed sex and acquired an umbrella and a carpet bag.
Then Mary Poppins came home to Peter Pan as a manuscript.
He published her.
The Illustrators Tighten the Knot
The illustrators make the pattern tighter.
E. H. Shepard drew Christopher Robin and Winnie-the-Pooh.
He also illustrated The Wind in the Willows and gave us the most familiar images of Toad.
His daughter Mary Shepard illustrated Mary Poppins.
One family across two generations helped shape the visual identities of Pooh, Toad and Mary Poppins.
The later Mary Poppins books were published by Peter Davies.
Children's literature is full of these hidden corridors. Open one nursery door and you find yourself in another book.
Henrietta Street and the Publishing Families
Even the geography conspires.
Peter Davies Ltd office was at 30 Henrietta Street in Covent Garden. The street was once described as the Paternoster Row of the West End because so many publishers and booksellers gathered there.
At number 14 stood Victor Gollancz.
Gollancz published Daphne du Maurier, she was Peter's first cousin.
The du Maurier grandchildren's books were appearing from the same short London street.
In 1951 the cousins completed the circle themselves. Peter's firm published Daphne's edition of their grandfather's letters.
This was George du Maurier.
He was the grandfather whose novel had given Peter his name.
The street was barely a hundred yards long.
The family story filled it.
The Fathers' Cricket Team
The fathers also knew one another because the literary world was small and they had made it smaller.
A. A. Milne played cricket for J. M. Barrie's team of literary amateurs.
Milne later adapted Kenneth Grahame's book for the stage as Toad of Toad Hall.
Barrie. Milne. Grahame.
Three celebrated authors.
Behind them stood three boys who paid a price for the books.
Where Can an Immortal Child Hide?
What did the children who survived into later life do with the fame they had never requested?
Again and again they returned to books.
Peter Davies founded his publishing house in 1926. Barrie provided the money because Barrie's money was the only money available.
Perhaps Peter hoped that the name above the door would come to mean books he had chosen rather than a boy he had never been.
Christopher Robin Milne was bullied at school in the name of his fictional self. Other boys threw the verses at him as taunts.
For many years he refused any further benefit from the enormous income generated by the Pooh books.
In 1951 he opened the Harbour Bookshop in Dartmouth.
There he met his father's readers across the counter every working day.
Alice also found herself back in a bookshop at the age of eighty. She was opening an exhibition about the story that had preserved her as a little girl.
The book trade had consumed their childhoods.
It was also the place where Peter and Christopher tried to build adult lives.
The industry became both the wound and the shelter.
Peter Davies and the Morgue
Publishing sheltered Peter.
It could not save him.
During his later years he worked on the family papers. He assembled them. He annotated them. He also destroyed many of them.
He called the project The Morgue.
The wryness was his own.
Peter had emphysema and drank heavily, his wife carried Huntington's disease. It later emerged that their sons had inherited it.
Then another date began approaching.
J. M. Barrie had been born on 9 May 1860, the spring of 1960 would mark the centenary of his birth.
The retrospectives were being prepared, articles would be commissioned and journalists would soon begin telephoning the man they still introduced as the original Peter Pan.
Peter went to Sloane Square Underground Station five weeks before the anniversary and walked in front of a train.
Thirty years later his youngest son also died by suicide.
Peter's three sons had agreed not to have children, Huntington's disease was the stated reason.
It can stand for the others.
The Street That Swallowed Its Publishers
There is one more turn along Henrietta Street before we leave it.
Publishing did not disappear from the street when Peter Davies Ltd was absorbed into Heinemann in 1977.
Its last great publishing tenant was another Peter, Peter Kindersley of Dorling Kindersley at number 9.
That was a business I knew at the beginning. At the Bologna Book Fair a long time ago Peter Kindersley showed me the thumbnail sketches for the first Eyewitness book.
The whole book had been planned in miniature, every page was drawn as a tiny composition before the finished photography began. The structure had been settled before a single page was made, It was exactly how I planned my own books and how books needed to be planned back then.
DK's ending also rhymes with the rest of this story.
At the turn of the millennium the company was brought low by a children's publishing juggernaut of its own. Millions of books had been printed for a Star Wars promotion, far fewer were sold.
DK was bought by Pearson and folded into Penguin. Peter Davies Ltd had gone into Heinemann. Heinemann's publishing interests eventually travelled towards Random House. The two great publishing operations of Henrietta Street took different routes into the same conglomerate.
At number 30 stood the publishing house created by the real Peter Pan.
At number 9 stood the great visual packager DK.
In another link to books Jane Austen stayed with her brother, Henry Austen, at 10 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, during the summer of 1813 and in March 1814. Henry was a partner in the bank Austen, Maude and Tilson who occupied the building between 1807 and 1816.
The Famous Residents of Henrietta St, London
The Paternoster Row of the West End
Henrietta Street had been connected with publishing long before Peter Davies placed his name above the door at number 30.
The street was built in the seventeenth century and named after Henrietta Maria, the French-born Queen of Charles I. It began as a fashionable address close to the new Covent Garden Piazza. Aristocrats, artists and wealthy merchants lived there.
Books followed.
By the late nineteenth century so many printers, booksellers and publishers had gathered in Henrietta Street that The Builder described it as “fast becoming the Paternoster Row of the West End”.
Paternoster Row had long been the centre of the London book trade. Henrietta Street had become its smaller and rather grander West End cousin.
The transformation happened gradually.
During the eighteenth century it was still a street of independent booksellers, engravers and print dealers. Mrs S. Sledge sold and published prints there during the 1770s. Her business was associated with political and satirical engravings and she worked with the printmaker William Dickinson.
These were not yet the large publishing houses of the Victorian period. They were small shops in which selling, printing and publishing overlapped. A person might commission an engraving, publish it and sell impressions from the same premises.
Even the street’s bankers became entangled with literature.
Henry Austen, Jane Austen’s brother, had offices at number 10 as part of Austen, Maunde and Tilson’s bank. Jane stayed there during visits to London. The address gave her somewhere to read proofs, negotiate with publishers and supervise the progress of books including Mansfield Park.
The respectable Georgian street was becoming part residence, part counting house and part literary workshop.
Science Moves In
By the Victorian period publishing on Henrietta Street had become larger and more specialised.
Williams and Norgate occupied number 14. Founded in 1842, the company imported foreign books and published scholarly, scientific and philosophical works. It became associated with some of the most influential thinkers of the age including Thomas Henry Huxley and Herbert Spencer.
Huxley’s Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature helped bring the argument over evolution into the Victorian drawing room.
Nearby, Baillière, Tindall and Cox occupied numbers 7 and 8. The company became a major publisher of medical, dental and veterinary books. It also produced a formidable range of professional journals.
Henrietta Street was no longer merely selling books.
It was helping to organise knowledge.
Science, medicine, philosophy and professional expertise passed through its offices before travelling into universities, hospitals and libraries around the world.
Gollancz at Number 14
In the twentieth century the character of the street changed again.
Scientific publishing gave way to politics, modern fiction and the distinctive personalities of independent publishers.
Victor Gollancz established his company at numbers 14 and 15 in 1928.
Gollancz was not an invisible administrator. He was a campaigner, polemicist and brilliant publisher who treated the publishing house as a means of entering public life.
His books were immediately recognisable. Their yellow jackets carried titles and endorsements in dense black lettering. They looked less like decorations than proclamations pasted onto a wall.
From Henrietta Street, Gollancz published writers including George Orwell. He issued Down and Out in Paris and London in 1933 and later became closely associated with politically engaged writing.
In 1936 he helped establish the Left Book Club. Its cheaply priced editions carried arguments about politics, economics and the threat of fascism to a mass readership.
The address that had once housed scientific publishers had become one of the nerve centres of the British Left.
Later Gollancz authors included Kingsley Amis and John le Carré.
A single building had moved from Victorian science to Orwell, espionage and post-war fiction.
Duckworth at Number 3
Duckworth and Co. also made its home in Henrietta Street.
The company had been founded by Gerald Duckworth, Virginia Woolf’s half-brother. It published Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out, in 1915 and was associated with a wide range of modern literary writing.
The family connection did not make the publication of Woolf’s novel uncomplicated. Her later work would appear through the Hogarth Press which she founded with Leonard Woolf. There she gained a degree of control that conventional publishing had not given her.
The story belongs in Henrietta Street.
Again the street brought together family, literature, business and ownership.
Peter Davies at Number 30
Peter Davies founded his own company in 1926 with financial help from J. M. Barrie.
The name over the door was his own.
That mattered.
To the public he remained Peter Pan. Inside number 30 he could become Peter Davies the publisher. The books carrying his imprint were works he had selected rather than a character somebody else had made from him.
Peter Davies Ltd developed a reputation for intelligent, well-produced books. Its list included fiction, memoir, travel writing and literary rediscoveries.
It also published later volumes in P. L. Travers’s Mary Poppins series.
So Henrietta Street gathered another strange literary connection.
The real Peter Pan published Mary Poppins.
Two magical visitors who flew into Edwardian nurseries were joined through the business conducted behind the door of number 30.
A Street Built From Books
Henrietta Street was never one kind of publishing street.
It began with printsellers and small booksellers. It became home to scientific and medical publishers. Then came radical politics, modern fiction, children’s literature and the great personalities of twentieth-century publishing.
Jane Austen corrected proofs there.
Victorian scientists argued about humanity’s place in nature.
Victor Gollancz published Orwell beneath his yellow covers.
Virginia Woolf’s first novel passed through Duckworth.
Peter Davies tried to build an adult identity from the same trade that had trapped him inside an eternal childhood.
The street was only a few hundred feet long.
Yet a surprising portion of British publishing history passed through it.
Later Dorling Kindersley would occupy number 9. Its books looked entirely different from those of Gollancz or Peter Davies. They were visual, architectural and planned page by page before the artwork began.
I knew that building.
At the Bologna Book Fair Peter Kindersley once showed me the thumbnail plans for the first Eyewitness book. Every page had been worked out in miniature. The book existed as a structure before it existed as a finished object.
It was exactly how I planned my own books.
Henrietta Street had moved from engravings to scientific treatises, from modern novels to highly visual children’s publishing.
The methods changed.
The street remained full of people trying to decide what a book could be.
The Meeting That Happened
We know that one meeting did happen.
Alice and Peter met in the back room at Bumpus,
Wonderland met Neverland.
The old woman who had once been Alice met the middle-aged publisher who had once been Peter Pan.
For one afternoon the real children stood beside the stories that had outlived them.
The Meeting That Never Happened
Another meeting did not happen.
Peter Davies and Christopher Robin Milne lived parallel lives for four decades.
They were perhaps the two most symmetrical figures in British publishing.
Both had been taunted at school by children using a fiction that carried their name.
Both had complicated relationships with money earned from those fictional selves.
Both fled into the world of books.
One hid behind an imprint.
The other hid behind a till.
Both eventually became memoirists of their confiscated childhoods.
Peter attempted to record his family history in The Morgue. He did not finish it.
Christopher wrote The Enchanted Places. He waited until both his parents were dead before he could do it.
Yet Peter Davies and Christopher Robin Milne never met.
There is no known letter between them. There is no recorded conversation or public acknowledgement that either recognised the strange resemblance of the other's life.
Not even in April 1960.
Christopher was then a working bookseller in Devon. He can hardly have missed the headlines announcing that Peter Pan had died under a train.
Each man seems to have carried his story as though he were the only person to whom such a thing had happened.
Perhaps one meeting might have helped.
A book of coincidences ought to end with a collision. This story has provided enough of them.
Instead it ends with a miss.
Chance arranged the trains. It arranged the calendar. It arranged the illustrators and the publishers. It placed the real Alice and the real Peter Pan in the same bookshop.
It placed Peter Davies and Christopher Robin Milne inside the same trade.
But it could not arrange the one quiet afternoon that might have done either man some good.
I once wrote that Peter Pan is a haunted house with fairy dust on the windows.
I had not realised quite how many of its ghosts were real children.
The pattern is the work of Nabokov's marvellous artist.
Even marvellous artists leave things out.
What this one left out was mercy and empathy.
David Salariya is an author, illustrator, book designer and the founder of The Salariya Book Company. During a career spanning more than forty years he created and designed over fifty children's book series - from picture books and early learning to You Wouldn't Want To Be..., Inside Story, Spectacular Visual Guides and A Very Peculiar History - published in more than thirty-five languages. Unlike the authors in this essay, he never fed on a child to do it. His one raid on a nursery went the other way: when Random House dropped Jane Hissey's Old Bear books, he had the text edited, redesigned and then republished them - which meant, in effect, rescuing an old bear from an attic rather than putting one there. He writes about children's publishing, visual storytelling, creative ownership and the strange machinery that turns ideas into books. In 2022 he sold The Salariya Book Company IP to Bonnier Books UK, and the books he created and designed are now published under Bonnier's Hatch imprint.
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