It was a play first, and the play is strange
Peter Pan opened in a LONDON theatre in December 1904 and was not published as the novel most people know until 1911. Seven years of performances came first, and J.M. Barrie kept rewriting it throughout, so the early versions disagree with each other constantly.
Two things from the stage survive into everything since. The FLYING was done on wires by a company that charged per performance and guarded the method closely, and because the harness was rigged for a light adult, PETER has been played by a woman for most of the play's history. And the audience is asked to clap to keep TINKER BELL alive — a piece of direct address that should not work and does, every time, to the visible alarm of anybody who has watched a theatre full of adults applauding a light bulb on a wire.
The copyright gift that still pays
In 1929 Barrie signed the entire copyright over to Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in LONDON. Every production, book, film and adaptation has paid the hospital since. He asked that the sums never be disclosed, and they never have been.
The copyright should have expired fifty years after his death in 1937. When it did, Parliament passed a special provision in the 1988 Copyright Act granting the hospital a right to royalties from stage performances and publications of Peter Pan in perpetuity — the only work in British law with that arrangement. It is an odd legal monument, and it exists because one author decided a play about a boy who would not grow up should pay for children who might not get the chance.
Neverland runs on a clock nobody escapes
Captain HOOK is frightened of the CROCODILE, which is ordinary enough, except that the crocodile has swallowed a clock and can be heard coming. A ticking predator is a strange image for a children's book and a very clear one: Hook is a grown man being audibly pursued by time, on an island where a boy has arranged never to be caught by it.
The cost is in the text rather than the films. PETER keeps forgetting — HOOK, the LOST BOYS, whole adventures — because remembering would mean accumulating a past. WENDY goes home, grows up and has a daughter, and Peter returns years later having forgotten her entirely, still the same age. The book is far sadder than its reputation, and the last line is about the arrangement continuing for as long as children are heartless.
The cast, and one part that has changed
The grid holds the DARLING children and their dog-nurse NANA, PIXIE DUST and a happy thought for FLYING, PETER chasing his own SHADOW, the THIMBLE that stands in for a kiss, HOOK and his bosun SMEE aboard a PIRATE ship, a MERMAID lagoon and the STARS over LONDON.
TIGER LILY needs a word. Barrie wrote her tribe in the language and stereotypes of 1904, and most modern productions rewrite the part heavily or cut it, which is the sensible response to a much-loved book with a section that has aged badly. A class meeting an older edition should know it is coming, and that books arrive from their own time carrying its assumptions. Our fairy tales page covers how much older stories get quietly rewritten by whoever tells them last.