If you want to know what’s in and behind the books we all really love — The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, The Secret Garden, Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, the stories of Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm — you can’t beat this series of 14 annotated books, I've found.
These are beautiful hardcover editions of beloved books that Harold Bloom and Jacques Derridas wouldn’t even deign to opine upon, but readers love ’em. Each one is fully illustrated, usually with the original and most famous illustrations, and fully annotated with notes and background material that tell us about the author’s life and how his or her work came to life.
The Annotated Peter Pan is no exception. After “A Message for Those Who Have Grown Up” and other front matter, including a biography of Barrie, we are given Peter and Wendy, the novelized version of the famous play that was first performed on December 27, 1904, starring Nina Boucicault as the famous boy.
In case you know the story best from the 2004 film Finding Neverland, you’ll learn here that there were actually five Llewellyn Davies boys and that both their parents were alive when Barrie first met them in London. As you read about Peter and Wendy, of course, you’ll immediately recognize all the famous scenes — Wendy sewing Peter’s shadow to his feet, the children flying around the nursery and out the window, the redskins (Barrie was not politically correct; he names the tribe the Picaninny tribe), Tinker Bell drinking Peter’s poisoned medicine and being magically revived, the melodramatic battle between the boys and the pirates, and the return of everyone except Peter to the Darling house in London.
We learn some new things, too. The fairy is called Tinker Bell because she used to be a tinker, one who repairs pots and pans. There are (perhaps unconscious) references to other works of literature. “There never was a simpler happier family” may, for example, be an allusion to the first sentence of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” (pg. 18-19). Barrie’s young hero “owes something to the cultural mania about Pan in the Edwardian era,” mania that included Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill, and Dickon in The Secret Garden (pg. 19). Most surprising? Captain Jas. Hook went to Eton! His cabin on the pirate ship is arranged to look just like a student’s room at the famous public school.
Article comments
1 - Lorna Sampson
Wow--thanks! I like how you described the book and I can't wait to read it. Have not seen Peter Pan 360 but will look for that too.