Product Description

In Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, J.M. Barrie first created Peter Pan as a baby, living a wild and secret life with birds and fairies in the middle of London. Later Barrie let this remarkable child grow a little older and he became the boy-hero of Neverland, making his first appearance, with Wendy, Captain Hook, and the Lost Boys, in Peter and Wendy. The Peter Pan stories were Barrie's only works for children but, as their persistent popularity shows, their themes of imaginative escape continue to charm even those who long ago left Neverland. This is the first edition to include both texts in one volume and the first to a present an extensively annotated text for Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #395118 in Books
• Published on: 1999
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

About the Author
Edited with an Introduction by Peter Hollindale, Senior Lecturer in English and Education at the University of York

Customer Reviews

A Great Book!
This book is very imaginative and well written. James Barrie tells the history side of Peter Pan that most people do not know about. Each chapter tells a different story about Peter Pan's life in the garden. There are stories about Peter Pan living in the trees with the birds, to stories about how the fairies trick the humans who come to visit Kensington Gardens. This book is both funny and sad at parts, and will make you wonder if you were actually owned by a bird at sometime!

More creative than his later, popular stories of Peter.
If you buy this book, definately get an illistrated edition! The fairy images are gorgeous and worth treasuring. The story itself is beautiful: How Peter fell out of his tram, was taught by the birds to fly and finally returned home to find the window locked to him.

A Neat Package
Hmm...., Peter and Wendy is obviously a five star book all the way, but what about Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens? Well, it's not really a complete book, first off. It's just a large section taken out of an earlier Barrie book titled The Little White Bird. So its very fragmented. Second, since it's more of a springboard the for ideas that formed the Peter Pan play than anything else, it repeats quite a bit of what we have already seen multiple times in many of the famous Peter Pan adaptations.

Even so, I did get a lot of enjoyment out of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. Aside from the first chapter (which isn't much fun if you haven't been to the gardens), I was quite entertained. Barrie's theory that people are born as birds and then turn into humans afterward is pretty wild, and I loved Peter's interaction with the girl who was captured by the fairies. Peter thought he played games the same way all real boys did but just embarassed the heck out of himself, throwing the hula-hoops or whatever those things were in the water. Poor guy.

So all in all, you have a great introduction followed by a good book fragment and topped off with an all-time classic. Not a bad purchase at all.