Peter Pan, Language and the State

Abstract

In 1925, Barrie wrote a short story called ‘Jas Hook at Eton, or The Solitary’ for inclusion in an anthology of short stories for children, The Flying Carpet (Barrie, 1926(b)). Instead of being published in that anthology, the story was delivered as a speech to the First Hundred at Eton on 7 July 1927, and published in The Times. It was replaced in the anthology by a sequel to ‘The Blot on Peter Pan’ (see pp. 39–41 above), a short story called ‘Neil and Tintinnabulum’ which describes how the male narrator loses his godson when he is absorbed into the life of a public school — the title reflects the loss as the little boy’s name is changed at school from Neil to Tintinnabulum, from English to Latin. Latin is the element which connects the two stories. The autograph manuscript version of Barrie’s 1927 story is accompanied by a leaf of manuscript in an unidentified hand which gives the following Latin inscription for James Hook: ‘Gratissimus Almae Matris filius magistro inform. et alumnis omnibus avete hoc ivto Iunii die MDCCC? ex Moluccis Iacobus Hook Floreat Etona’ (Beinecke, 1927).1 The sequence from the earlier story ‘The Blot on Peter Pan’, which turns on the child’s use of language as picture puzzle, to ‘Neil and Tintinnabulum’, therefore, describes the passage from the most elementary of child’s play in language to the most elevated of linguistic/cultural norms.