Peter Pan’s Debut
Peter Pan is now an iconic character, but he made his debut in “The Little White Bird,” a novel loosely based on George Llewelyn Davies. In the story, a boy named David becomes friends with the narrator, who pretends he had a son who died. He makes up the lie to gain sympathy from David’s parents.
Photo by Historia / Shutterstock
The narrator then gets uncomfortably excited when David’s mom was duped! Now he was allowed to “take [David] utterly from her and make him mine.” This sounds like kidnapping. Throughout the book, the narrator makes up a story about a magical boy named Peter Pan, who lives in Kensington Gardens and stays young forever. If you read the novel today, it has a really creepy vibe, considering how our society views predators.