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:
“From his childhood onwards this boy will be surrounded by sycophants and flatterers.... In due course, following the precedent which has already been set, he will be sent on a tour of the world and probably rumours of a morganatic marriage alliance will follow, and the end of it will be the country will be called upon to pay the bill.”
—James Keir Hardie (1856–1915)
“Most childhood problems don’t result from “bad” parenting, but are the inevitable result of the growing that parents and children do together. The point isn’t to head off these problems or find ways around them, but rather to work through them together and in doing so to develop a relationship of mutual trust to rely on when the next problem comes along.”
—Fred Rogers (20th century)
“[Children] do not yet lie to themselves and therefore have not entered upon that important tacit agreement which marks admission into the adult world, to wit, that I will respect your lies if you will agree to let mine alone. That unwritten contract is one of the clear dividing lines between the world of childhood and the world of adulthood.”
—Leontine Young (20th century)