Childhood
The boys were born and grew up in the Paddington and Notting Hill areas of London. Their parents were a barrister and the daughter of a successful cartoonist and writer, and they enjoyed a comfortable middle class upbringing in a household with servants. They were befriended in 1897 by playwright/novelist J. M. Barrie, who first met George and Jack in Kensington Gardens during outings with their nurse (nanny) Mary Hodgson and infant Peter. He initially entertained them with his playful antics such as dancing with his dog Porthos, wiggling his ears, and performing feats with his eyebrows, and further endeared himself to them with his stories. He became a regular part of their lives, whom they came to call 'Uncle Jim'.
In addition to the time the boys spent with Barrie in Kensington Gardens and at the Davies home, the family accompanied him to his retreat Black Lake Cottage, where George, Jack, and Peter were the subjects of The Boy Castaways, a photobook made by Barrie about their play adventures living on an island and fighting pirates. The boys and their activities with Barrie provided him with much of the inspiration for the character of Peter Pan, introduced in The Little White Bird in 1901, and the characters of the Lost Boys and Wendy Darling's brothers, introduced in Barrie's 1904 play Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up and further immortalized in its 1911 adaptation as the novel Peter and Wendy.
In 1904, the year when Barrie's play debuted, the Davies family moved out of London and went to live in Egerton House, an Elizabethan mansion house in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire.
Read more about this topic: Llewelyn Davies Boys
Famous quotes containing the word childhood:
“Childhood lasts all through life. It returns to animate broad sections of adult life.... Poets will help us to find this living childhood within us, this permanent, durable immobile world.”
—Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962)
“... a country encapsulates our childhood and those lanes, byres, fields, flowers, insects, suns, moons and stars are forever reoccurring.”
—Edna O’Brien (b. c. 1932)
“The route through childhood is shaped by many forces, and it differs for each of us. Our biological inheritance, the temperament with which we are born, the care we receive, our family relationships, the place where we grow up, the schools we attend, the culture in which we participate, and the historical period in which we live—all these affect the paths we take through childhood and condition the remainder of our lives.”
—Robert H. Wozniak (20th century)