Places: Peter Pan

*Bloomsbury. Peter PanFashionable district of London. James Barrie lived in Bloomsbury before achieving financial success, which is perhaps his reason for locating the home of the Darling family in a somewhat run-down section of the district. One of the place’s fantastic touches is the family’s Newfoundland dog, which acts as the children’s nurse.

Neverland. Fantastical island home of Peter Pan and other parentless boys that the Darling children glimpse during the moment before they fall asleep. Thus, it is not a dream, but a physical analogue of the state between waking and sleeping, a condition when vivid fantasies can be shaped to fit one’s wishes. Barrie describes Neverland as a compact place for adventures, with wild Red Indians in the woods, mermaids in the lagoon, and pirates in the river. Because Neverland also condenses Earth’s seasons, the river is frozen in winter (appropriate to its evil inhabitants), while the lagoon and forest remain in summer.

Among the land’s inhabitants are fairies, seen as a series of lights projected on the stage; lost boys, who fell from their mothers’ perambulators as babies and were taken to Neverland by the fairies; and an assortment of animals, including a musical ostrich and a crocodile with a loudly ticking clock in its stomach.

Since the games of real children in London’s Kensington inspired the drama, Barrie writes that Peter first lived with the fairies there before they took him to Neverland. Indeed, Neverland itself combines the comfort and beauty of that park with characters and sites from the adventures the real children imagined they were having while in the Gardens. In Neverland, the lost boys’ cavern, with seven hollow trees as entrances, is a place of eternal play, threatened by Captain Hook, who in early drafts of the drama appears as a schoolmaster.