When I was quite a bit younger than I am now, I came across a book called Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. And it was a confusing discovery. It was by J.M. Barrie, the same guy who wrote Peter Pan. And I checked the copy write dates (I didn’t have the internet but I was at a library and Peter Pan was next to it on the shelf) and saw the Kensington Gardens was first published in 1906, five years before the Wendy-Neverland-Hook version. And the two versions are radically different.
I now know that Barrie first wrote about Peter Pan as part of an adult novel called The Little White Bird. He then wrote the stage play, which introduced the familiar version of Peter Pan. Then the chapters that featured Peter Pan from The Little White Bird got published as Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. And THEN Barrie wrote the novelization of the stage play.
Whew.
And, seriously, the Kensington Peter is radically different than Peter Pan. He’s an eternally seven-day-old baby. He lives in London. The book reads more like Charles Kingsley’s Water Babies. Seriously, it’s twee to the point of being creepy. (Which, given that the Little White Bird is about parenting, may have been the intent)
I’m not going to spoil the book because, in all honestly, I feel it comes across as more about tone and setting than actual plot. For me at least, Peter Pan at Kensington Gardens is less about what Peter does and more about who he is and what his version of Kensington Gardens is like.
Kensington Peter is definitely not an origin story for Peter Pan. It’s not even a beta version of the character. It is a completely different character in a different genre, despite a few similarities. Yes, there are fairies in Kensington Gardens but they make any version of Tinker Bell look like Dirty Harry.
I do agree with history. The right version of Peter Pan won. Be it an innocent adventurer or a disturbing view of eternal youth or a creepy child kidnapper, the Neverland Peter Pan is a vibrant creation open to a lot of interpretation and storytelling. Kensington Peter has his dark elements but is, at most, a deconstruction of Victorian cherubs.
I also want to note that the first version of the book on Project Gutenberg had a chapter I didn’t remember, a fascinating description of Kensington Gardens. Looking further, I found versions on Project Gutenberg that had fewer chapters than the book I found in the library. Clearly, Peter Pan at Kensington Gardens has an interesting publishing history.
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