Find out a little more about the creator of Peter Pan, the boy who didn’t want to grow up, and what he was inspired by
Did you know that the plot of Peter Pan was inspired by real people? The story of the boy who didn’t want to grow up was created by the Scotsman JM Barrie, and was released in 1904 in the format of a play. The tale shows Peter Pan befriending John and Michael, Wendy’s brothers, and taking them to Neverland.
This year, the work will gain a new adaptation in the live-action format released by Disney, which received its first trailer this Tuesday, 28. Check it out!
But, in real life, the story that gave rise to the short story began in 1897, when the author, aged 37, was already married and successful. He would have found three brothers of the family Llewelyn Davies, strolling through Kensington Gardens, and would have been enchanted by them. This admiration is described by Andrew Birkinthe author’s biographer.
At the time, Barrie was the richest writer in the country, but he had no children. He found young George Davies, who was 4, in Kensington walking with his younger brothers, Jack and Peter, and their nanny, Mary Hudson, and started talking to them,” Birkin told the BBC.
The three boys who barrie was delighted they were the first heirs of the lawyer Arthur Llewelyn Davies and your wife Sylvia, who was the daughter of a writer. Later, the couple had two more children, one of whom was named Peter, who for many was the main inspiration for the Scottish writer to create Peter Pan.
birkin commented on the friendship between barrie and the family Llewelyn Davies:
It was almost like being a grandfather to him. He could enjoy living with the Llewelyn Davies family without having to take responsibility for the children.”
The author had a tragic past: when he was young, his older brother died in a roller skating accident and it devastated the family and such a defining moment would have contributed to the writer’s depression. Nicholasone of five brothers Llewelyn Daviesgave an interview to the BBC in 1978 and spoke about barrie:
People might get the impression that he was a sad and lonely man, but in my opinion 80% of the time he was a good-natured person and only 20% was melancholy.”
In 1907, the boys’ father died at the age of 44 from cancer and, three years later, their mother also died, leaving the brothers orphans. barriewho was called by the boys as “Uncle Jim”, had already separated from his wife and ended up becoming an “informal guardian” of the five Llewelyn Davies, going so far as to pay almost all of their study costs.
George, Michael and Nicholas were very fond of Barrie and wrote to him frequently. Michael even wrote 2,000 letters to him. Peter, on the other hand, had a slightly more complicated relationship with the writer,” says Birkin.
tragic end
But the little family of barrie I wouldn’t be happy for long. In 1915, George died in the trenches of World War I, aged 21. Michael, aged 20, he drowned in Oxford six years later than his brother and there are rumors that he committed suicide, but birkin put the tragedy as an accident.
Nowadays, some scholars hypothesize that there would be some “sexual element” in the interest of barrie by the brothers. The supposed evidence for this possibility would be in some passages of the short story “The Little White Bird”, written in 1902, where the friendship between a childless retired soldier and a boy is approached.
However, the author’s biographer claims that he was just a frustrated man for not having become a father and even said that he did not identify any “sexual element” in the Scotsman’s texts, and in his relationship with the Llewelyn Davies boys. Aside from Birkin, Nicholas said he has never seen “Uncle Jim” show any interest in sexual matters and believes he is innocent of this charge.
JMBarriewho never got over the death of George It is Michaeldied in 1937. At the time, peterDavies he worked as an editor, but in 1960 he committed suicide by throwing himself in front of a moving train in London.
Source: Recreio
