A Hundred Years of Peter Pan

The centenary of the first performance of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan was celebrated in December 2004. Taking account of the various events in Britain to mark the occasion—newspaper articles, radio and television programmes, retrospects in the original theatre—this article examines the status and popularity of Peter Pan after a hundred years. The article traces the double story of Peter Pan—the play itself, and the biographical narrative of those events in Barrie’s life that led to and succeeded its creation—and examines the two recent films, Peter Pan (2003) and Finding Neverland (2004) as examples of fresh approaches to both life and work in the centenary year.Peter Hollindale retired in 1999 as Reader in English at the University of York. He edited ‘Peter Pan and Other Plays’, and an edition of ‘Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens’ and ‘Peter and Wendy’, both for the Oxford University Press World’s Classics series He is author of the critical study ’Signs of Childness in Children’s Books’.