Finding Barrie in his books?

22/9/2017

Captain Hook is described as having a copy of Roget's Thesaurus which was one of Barrie's favourite books. I think this is the only mention of a book in Peter Pan.
In The Admirable Crichton, Crichton is the only person on the island with a book - a collection of W E Henley's poems – Henley of course being a good friend (and whose daughter ‘invented’ the name Wendy). As a non-aristocrat, who is more competent than the rest of the party and who is particularly careful about 'playing the game', Crichton might be seen as one of the personifications of Barrie.
A developing theory is that books might serve as ‘badges’ for Barrie saying ‘this is me’ in his fiction/drama.
What other books are mentioned in Barrie’s work that might serve as being a ‘badge’ for ‘this is me’? And what do others think of this as a theory? Feel free to add your comment below:

Dr Ros Ridley

5 Comments

cally

22/9/2017 10:04:56 am

Barrie hidden in plainsight!

This is fascinating. I shall be looking out for ‘badges’ as I re-read from now on. Barrie did love to 'play games' with his readers/audiences and this is an excellent little puzzle, like a literary version of 'where's lowly worm' in the Richard Scarry books. I'm off to investigate and will return with any findings. thanks for opening this talking shop!

Rosalind Ridley link

27/9/2017 09:22:14 am

Could this be another 'badge'? The narrator is not surprised by this man's reading even though this man is unlike the others because does all the reading for the other men in the bothy.

'Four men and a boy inhabited this bothy, and the rain had driven them all indoors. ….. A third man, who seemed the elder by quite twenty years, was at the window reading a newspaper; and I got no shock when I saw that it was the Saturday Review, which he and a labourer on an adjoining farm took in weekly between them. There was a copy of a local newspaper—the People's Journal—also lying about, and some books, including one of Darwin's. These were all the property of this man, however, who did the reading for the bothy.’

Auld Licht Idylls (1888) Chapter 2 ‘Thrums’.

cally link

27/9/2017 04:04:04 pm

Very interesting - I suspect there are 'badges' everywhere. Now this may be on a wee bit of a tangent, but it serves to prove that Barrie 'knew' what he was doing - a short sketch in the Contemporary Review of 1890 called BROUGHT BACK FROM ELYSIUM which starts:

SCENE.- The Library of a Piccadilly club for high thinking and bad dinners. Time midnight. Four eminent novelists of the day regarding each other self -consciously They are (1) a Realist,(2) a Romancist , (3) an Elsmerian, (4) a Stylist. The clock strikes thirteen, and they all start.

I'm intrigued by who the various 'characters' might be - it certainly shows that he was not averse to some clever play on literary matters even early on in his career.

rosalind Ridley

9/10/2017 10:27:43 am

I think that RDS Jack has something to say about this in The Road to Never Land but I can't now find the quote. I suspect Barrie is all four types of author-critics in different guises. (It might be reading too much into it but 'regarding each other self-consciously' could indicate this.) The four authors are interrogating other novelists and I think Barrie is saying 'I can be anyone'. He may also be having a dig at critics since it is much easier to criticize than to create and critics can say anything they like.

Sarah Green

9/12/2017 12:10:04 pm

This is rather interesting. I'm usually very wary of 'identifying' the author in a text, and would probably hesitate to say that these things indicate Barrie personally waving to the reader out of his books, as it were. But you are obviously right, Ros, that there is a pattern of his indicating that particular characters should be thought of in a literary light, even as having some sort of authorial role. And its interesting that several of the characters, like Hook and Crichton, are ones that have gone a little power mad - the Henley poem that Crichton quotes to Lady Mary is 'I was a king in Babylon / And you were a Christian slave'. I wonder if these might be points at which Barrie wants us to question the absolute power that a writer has, over readers as much as over characters? Like an indication that we should be reading critically, not just being guided by the nose and laughing at all the jokes?

Finding Barrie in his books?

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