Indeed, with the recurrence of the Christmas theater seasons, new generations of children attended the drama while the children of past seasons did what all children (except Peter Pan) do: grow up. The aptness of his insight was confirmed by the returning troops of children who came to the play every Christmas season to watch the Darling children cheerfully abandon home and parents.

Barrie was whimsical but not necessarily sentimental about children. Such whimsy was not altogether remote from the contemporary spirit of Sigmund Freud, who was also making maps of the mind, who also recognized that the mind had folded elements at the bottom, and who, especially, discerned 'evil passions' or amoral impulses in children.

Darling, the children's mother, sorting through their minds like chests of drawers while they sleep: 'When you wake up in the morning, the naughtiness and evil passions with which you went to bed have been folded up small and placed at the bottom of your mind and on the top, beautifully aired, are spread out your prettier thoughts, ready for you to put on.' Barrie goes so far as to suggest that one might try to make a 'map' of a child's mind, a 'rather confusing' map, on which one might find the Neverland (pp. Though the character of Peter evolved from Victorian fairy stories, and he was always accompanied by the fairy Tinker Bell, the drama reached the stage in an age of early modernism, and its vision of children's minds is in many ways curiously modern. It was reenacted every year at Christmas time.

If the nineteenth century fostered a Victorian cult of childhood's innocence, preserved according to rigorous forms of domestic propriety, the drama of Peter Pan in 1904 represented a literal escape from Victorian childhood as the Darling children flew right out the window. The part of Peter Pan onstage has been traditionally assigned to an adult actress impersonating a young boy. In particular they do battle against Peter Pan's archenemy, the pirate Captain Hook, whom Peter heroically vanquishes before returning the Darling children to their home in London so that they may eventually grow up. The story tells of Peter's visit to the nursery of the Darling children –Wendy, Michael, and John –and his seductive invitation to them to escape from home and parents by flying to the magical island of the Neverland, where a colony of lost boys pursue boyish adventures involving fairies and pirates. Barrie offered to the adult public a particular vision of childhood from the Edwardian threshold of the twentieth century: Peter Pan, the child hero who never grows up and therefore must remain radically elusive and inassimilable to the adult world. (James Matthew) Barrie, first presented on the London stage in 1904 and then in the form of a novel in 1911, created a literary character who has potently played upon children's imaginations through the entire twentieth century and into the early twenty-first century.

Peter pan by jm barrie