veryone knows Peter Pan. Almost no one has read him.The character the world inherited - plucky, green-clad, endlessly cheerful - comes from the stage and the screen. The character J.M. Barrie actually wrote in 1911, in the novel he titled Peter and Wendy, is a stranger and darker creature: a boy who forgets every kindness and every wound the instant it happens, who cannot always tell a real meal from a pretend one, and whose capacity to fly depends on a quality the book names outright, in its closing line, as heartlessness.This edition prints Barrie's unabridged 1911 text - the real novel, not the Disney story, not a modern retelling, not the stage play - exactly as Hodder and Stoughton and Scribner's first published it.Accompanying the novel is a new critical afterword by Henry Bugalho, which reads the book on its own unsettling terms: the narrator who confesses, mid-story, to being "a looker-on" that nobody wants, and who intervenes once in a sleeping woman's dream, with painful results; the law of forgetting that lets Peter remain a child because he carries no memory of being hurt; Mrs. Darling's locked "innermost box," the one part of her that is given to no one; and the colonial fantasy built into the very architecture of the Neverland, read neither as an excusable relic nor as a simple indictment, but as what it is. The afterword also traces the novel back to its origin in five real boys, the Llewelyn Davies brothers - two of whom did not live to see old age, and one of whom came to call the book "that terrible masterpiece."Also included: a full biographical essay on Barrie, and a note on the text documenting exactly what this edition does and does not contain - no silent modernizing, no invented content, every quotation in the afterword checked against the page it cites.
