Scottish Authors > Sir J M Barrie Novelist & Dramatist 1860-1937

James Matthew Barrie was born in Kirriemuir (Forfarshire), the "Thrums" of his fiction, on 9th May 1860, the seventh surviving child of a hand-loom weaver. Educated at Glasgow Academy, Forfar Academy and Dumfries Academy, he took his MA at Edinburgh University. He worked as a journalist for the Nottingham Journal before moving to London in 1885 to freelance. Success came with a series of sketches of life in bygone Thrums contributed to the St. James's Gazette, published in 1888 as Auld licht idylls, followed by When a man's single (1888) and A Window in Thrums (1889). These works and the novels The Little minister (1891), Sentimental Tommy (1896) and its sequel Tommy and Grizel (1900) have been regarded by George Blake and others as examples of the Kailyard School. Leonee Ormond's J.M. Barrie (1987) argues that it is more rewarding to assess Barrie's regional fiction beside that of Hardy and George Eliot.

Barrie's dramatised adaptation of The Little minister was enormously successful, persuading him to write increasingly for the stage.

Notable among his early plays are Quality Street (1902), The Admirable Crichton (1902) and What every woman knows (1908). In 1894 he married the actress Mary Ansell. The marriage was childless and ended in divorce in 1909. However, he had befriended and was ultimately to adopt the five boys of Arthur and Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, a relationship brilliantly explored in Andrew Birkin's book, J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys (1979). Out of stories he spun for the Davies boys came the material for Peter Pan (1904), probably the most famous children's play ever written. It is a complex work, perceptive and unsentimental about childhood. Peter, "the boy who would not grow up", the conceited leader of the Lost Boys of Never Land, forever dodges the world of adulthood. Like Sherlock Holmes he seems destined for greater immortality than his creator.

Honours followed - a baronetcy in 1913, the Order of Merit in 1922, the Rectorship of St. Andrews University, to whom he delivered a moving address on Courage (1922), and the Chancellorship of Edinburgh University. His later plays include Dear Brutus (1917), Mary Rose (1920), and The Boy David (1936). A final work of fiction, the ghost-story Farewell Miss Julie Logan, appeared in The Times in 1931. Barrie died on 19th June, 1937.

Despite the celebrity attaching to Barrie thanks to Peter Pan, there has been scant critical interest in the remainder of his prolific output, in particular his essays and letters, although R.D.S. Jack's The Road to the Never Land (1991) persuasively describes his genius for stagecraft.

Barrie's grave is in Kirriemuir Cemetery, and his birthplace at 4, Brechin Road is maintained as a museum by The National Trust for Scotland. Many of the localities in his fiction may still be identified in Kirriemuir. A statue of Peter Pan stands in the town square, a smaller version of that in London's Hyde Park, and a pavilion housing a camera obscura which he gifted to the town in 1930 on being made its only Freeman.

John MacRitchie

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