Childhood
Davies was an infant when Barrie befriended his older brothers George and Jack during outings in Kensington Gardens, with their nurse Mary Hodgson and him in a pram. Barrie's original description of Peter Pan in The Little White Bird (1902) was as a new-born who had escaped to Kensington Gardens. However, according to family accounts, his brothers George and Michael served as the primary models for the character as he appeared in the famed stage play (1904) and later novel (1911), as a pre-adolescent boy.
In 1904, the year when Barrie's play, Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up, debuted at London's Duke of York's Theatre, the Davies family moved out of London and went to live Egerton House, an Elizabethan mansion house in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire. Their time there lasted only three years; in 1907, Davies's father died of cancer and his mother took Davies and his brothers George, Jack, Michael, and Nico back to London. She too developed cancer and died in 1910, whereupon Barrie became the de facto guardian of Davies and his brothers. Hodgson continued to serve as nurse and surrogate mother for him and his brothers. Davies, like his brothers (apart from Jack), attended Eton College.
Read more about this topic: Peter Llewelyn Davies
Famous quotes containing the word childhood:
“The fact remains that the human being in early childhood learns to consider one or the other aspect of bodily function as evil, shameful, or unsafe. There is not a culture which does not use a combination of these devils to develop, by way of counterpoint, its own style of faith, pride, certainty, and initiative.”
—Erik H. Erikson (1904–1994)
“and I really hope no white person ever has cause to write about me
because they never understand Black love is Black wealth and
they’ll
probably talk about my hard childhood and never understand that
all the while I was quite happy.”
—Nikki Giovanni (b. 1943)
“The real dividing line between early childhood and middle childhood is not between the fifth year and the sixth year—it is more nearly when children are about seven or eight, moving on toward nine. Building the barrier at six has no psychological basis. It has come about only from the historic-economic-political fact that the age of six is when we provide schools for all.”
—James L. Hymes, Jr. (20th century)