J.M.Barrie and the Lost Boys

Up to the age of six, James Barrie lived in the shadow of his elder brother David, the golden boy of his mother's eye; and when David died in a skating accident, it was a catastrophe from which she never recovered. But she drew a measure of comfprt from the notion that her favourite son, in dying a boy, would remain a boy for ever. It was a notion that, acting on the unusually powerful imagination of her son James, would emerge thirty-three years later in the creation of Peter Pan. In November 1884, Barrie left his birth place Kirriemuir, in Scotland, and went to London in the hope of making a career as a journalist and writer. His first novel Better Dead appeared in 1888 and was not well received. But the Thrums novels - Thrums was his native Kirriemuir - the first of which appeared in the same year, were an immediate success and attracted the attention of the great literary figures of the time.