Description

Hodder & Stoughton 11th edn 1893
8vo, black bevel-edged bds with small name and black titling to spine, top edge gilt, small name and date (1894) to 1/2 title page, min wr to surface of bds o/w VG+ 635 gms
(Order reference 12963).

Sir James Matthew Barrie, 1st Baronet, OM (9 May 1860 – 19 June 1937) was a Scottish author and dramatist, best remembered today as the creator of Peter Pan. The child of a family of small-town weavers, he was educated in Scotland. He moved to London, where he developed a career as a novelist and playwright. There he met the Llewelyn Davies boys who inspired him in writing about a baby boy who has magical adventures in Kensington Gardens (included in The Little White Bird), then to write Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up, a fairy play about this ageless boy and an ordinary girl named Wendy who have adventures in the fantasy setting of Neverland.

This play quickly overshadowed his previous work and although he continued to write successfully, it became his best-known work, credited with popularising the name Wendy, which was very uncommon previously. Barrie unofficially adopted the Davies boys following the deaths of their parents. Before his death, he gave the rights to the Peter Pan works to Great Ormond Street Hospital, which continues to benefit from them.