not for The Lost Boys, stepping out of Neverland into reality, everything about Peter Pan could represent the passing of a dream or Barrie asserting his own patriarchal idea that childhood is only a time for adventure and something to be left behind as we face the responsibilities of adulthood.
Barrie also appears to prepare the child reader to leave the magic of childhood behind. The authorial voice is that of an adult, telling stories to a child. The story is laden with subtext. The reading could suggest Peter Pan is a tragic figure, locked in childhood for perpetuity. Rather than Pan personifying freedom, he becomes the yearning for a childhood lost, which may have alluded to how Barrie’s childhood was lost through the death of his brother, David, who drowned on the eve of his fourteenth birthday and so became the child who did not grow up.
Conclusion.
Writers are often at the forefront of debate, known for political commentary beyond the narrative. Those Writing for children during the Edwardian period were often associated with the changing and challenging of ideas. While I have not discussed E. Nesbit, she was a Pantheist, politically motivated more directly than many of her contemporaries. Unlike Barrie or Grahame, Nesbitt experienced poverty and wrote from the viewpoint of children. Pan, as a muse was for some writers a journey, for others, the idea of embracing freedom beyond the constraints of Victorian conservatism. With this, came an era that celebrated the child, or least middle-class childhood. With this enlightenment, possibly benefitting from hindsight, the modern reader may also perceive a warning. The Industrial Revolution pushed society away from connections with the land, with self and spiritual awareness. The momentum of change was mourned in writing which created an idealist version of childhood. Protagonists found redemption by a return to or discovery of nature. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, ‘The Romantics’ revered nature and explored Pantheists ideals, at a time when the world embraced Industrialisation. Victorian and Edwardian Pantheist writers urged the celebration of childhood and spiritual connection. On the eve of a war which created so many lost boys, perhaps the writing was a subconscious warning to the next generation, that without connecting to nature and ourselves, industrialisation would lead to a point of no return.
Post World War One, whilst ideas of connecting with nature and magic still manifest in writing for children, direct references to Pan were fewer. Kenneth Grahame returned to the ideas of Christianity. A notable physical manifestation of a Pan character, beyond the Edwardian period, merits mention. The innocuous Mr. Tumnus, in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Closer reading and research show the book is burdened with religious symbolism, the children being the daughter and sons of Eve, Aslan the Lion is readily related to the Christian idea that Jesus was the Lion of Judah, (ignoring the former representation of the lion as Satan in earlier teachings). The White Witch could readily be associated with the Pagan Goddess figure and her servant, or double agent is Mr. Tumnus.
