Was J.M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan, a pedophile?

In looking over the biographies available online of J.M. Barrie, I notice -very- careful wording around his adult elationships with young children, particularly the five boys that he ended up adopting (two of whom later committed suicide, one clearly and the other not-so-clearly).

The best I can find is of a sort of asexual love story, where Barrie was this super short man (5', maybe) and acted like a perpetual teenager due to the way his childhood played out. The descriptions of his relationships with the boys in particular suggest a man who had very close (some might say inappropriate) relationships with young boys.

He reminded me a bit of Michael Jackson, who seemed to have stunted maturity probably due to his relationship with his father and family. Add in MJ's Neverland Ranch and it's clear he had a particular affinity for Barrie's works and probably Barrie's life.

I'm assuming the very careful wording around his biography is due to him being a National Treasure of the UK, the Peter Pan play and stories, and his beloved children's story The Little White Bird, from which Peter Pan was born, the story of which seems to be at least partly autobiographical.

For example, this is all Wikipedia says about that in the entry for the Little White Bird:

[quote]The main theme of the book is an exploration of the intimate emotional relationship of the narrator, a childless Victorian retired soldier and London bachelor, with a young boy born to a working-class married couple in the same neighbourhood. The narrator secretly assists the couple financially, while meeting with the young boy in various "adventures", presented in a disjointed series of episodes in the book in which the narrator seeks to find a feeling of closeness with the boy, expressed as a desire for fatherhood, as well as other less clearly defined ideas. Peter Hollindale, professor of English and Education Studies at the University of York (retired, 1999), has written extensively about James Barrie and the Peter Pan stories. He states that while modern psychology enables readers to find hints of various abnormalities in the story, it also remains "strangely innocent and asexual"

It's so vaguely worded - "hints of various abnormalities in the story" but it doesn't say what those are. The vagueness of it all is maddening!

Jeez, JM Barrie and Lewis Carroll were both pedos, everyone knows this.

[quote]The children Barrie was fondest of were the young sons of Arthur and Sylvia Llewelyn Davies. He was an aspiring lawyer; she was beautiful and sweet. Barrie charmed Sylvia as he had charmed her kids and soon insinuated himself into the household, visiting frequently and joining the family on holidays, somewhat to the distress of Mary and Arthur.

Mary is his wife, with whom he didn't seem interested in. He sounds more like a gay best friend of Sylvia, but for the purpose of getting closer to her five children. And then Sylvia and Arthur both die a few years apart of cancer, and he ends up - I think - purloining the children under his guardianship.

R1 thanks for your input, but I'm curious if there's more proof than just assumptions, and also why the wording in the online sources about Barrie's life and his stories is so restricted - it barely hints at it, but never goes into detail.

How the hell should I know?

He never sucked MY cock.

Yet something else that the woke/trans legion will eventually cancel and make sure never sees the light of day.

Cue the enraged "only Trumpers use WOKE!" troll, but it's fucking true. That quote, and likely the OP, is merely initiating the first shot in the latest loony hive effort to 'cancel' something, primarily due to it being positively associated with white people.

Oh for fucks sake R5. Get your head out of your ass.

The entire reason I made this post was because I was thinking of the computer game Trinity, that I played as a child, and there I went on a Wikipedia run. The list of books that the game pulls from included The Little White Bird (and it is referenced heavily in the game), which then led me to the book's Wikipedia entry, and that's when I ran into the oddly-worded paragraph mentioned in r2, and from there to Barrie's Wikipedia entry, and then I did a Google search and found the article mentioned in OP, among others.

So you can dial back the hysterical nonsense that this is some precursor to cancelling Barrie. I am genuinely curious about it.

Here's the post from OP, just in case loons like R5 try to "cancel" the thread:

I read a theory that Peter Pan is an angle that takes children to heaven and all of the child characters are dead.

The OP is our resident NAMBLA / uncle troll, attempting to throw you off its scent while starting more threads about sex with little boys.

R10 it's funny how you say that with such confidence, yet are still totally wrong.

Does the internal dissonance make you want to end it all? Perhaps you should listen to those inner voices.

Naturally, Walt Disney liked it.

r10 is the pedo, getting nervous that threads exposing pedos will expose him too

It’s the usual shit stirring by a troll, getting people to comment on a contentious subject, and then sending back to watch the fireworks. Personality disorder.

Interesting angle; I think the kids who were the basis of PP lived terrible lives, died young, etc., so maybe you're right

R15 blocking you now, you are clearly a freak.

R17 I just think it's odd that the bios about him are purposely vague on the subject, the wording is very weird - like they are either trying to get around some restriction, or for legal reasons they can't go into detail.

And I DO wonder if there's some non-sexual relationship building that happens between childlike men like MJ and Barrie where they are just being friends with the boys, or almost like intimate lovers but without having sex. None of the stories about MJ (if I recall correctly) claimed he ever touched the children; it sounded more like he just wanted to be one of them and play with them.

I suppose the suicides could be attributed to a rough childhood (losing two parents a year or two apart at a younger age would be traumatic).

Was Captain Hook a pedo as well?

If the boys never told, maybe no one really knows.

Point taken , r22. I see it as a literary mystery, which is made even more mysterious by the odd wording in the public articles on the matter.

He was a successful playwright and then became a National Treasure after Peter Pan became such a longtime hit; however in Victorian England it's likely that any rumors about him would be squelched considering he had wealth.

It's just interesting because you could see Little White Bird as him trying to genuinely explain himself because on some level he knew it was an unusual situation, or you could see it as him trying to whitewash his actions and offer an explanation for them.

Ooh, there's a Wikipedia page on the Llewellyn Davies boys that goes into more detail and actually uses the "p" word:

[quote]The boys' relationships with Barrie varied. George and Michael were very close to him, and their deaths affected him strongly. Jack harboured some resentment towards Barrie for taking his father's place during and after Arthur's illness. Peter's relationship with Barrie was ambivalent, but Nico adored him.[/quote]

[quote]Although there has often been suspicion about the nature of Barrie's relationship with the boys, there is no evidence that he engaged in any sexual activity with them, nor that there was any suspicion of such at the time. Their father Arthur was troubled by Barrie's relationship with them, but that was based on its interference with his own relationship with them as their father, and he didn't care for the man personally. As an adult, Nico flatly denied any inappropriate behaviour or intentions by Barrie. 'I don't believe that Uncle Jim ever experienced what one might call "a stirring in the undergrowth" for anyone — man, woman, or child,' he wrote to biographer Andrew Birkin in 1978. 'He was an innocent — which is why he could write Peter Pan.' In an interview taped in 1976, bisexual Conservative Party politician Robert Boothby, who had been a close friend of Michael during their teens, described Michael's relationship with Barrie at that time as 'morbid' and 'unhealthy', but dismissed the notion that there had been a sexual aspect to it.[/quote]

See, that makes me wonder if MJ was the same way, too.

But then again, they all had a reason to squelch such rumors, too, so 🤔

Disney is now so woke they're closing Peter Pan's Flight at all the parks.

R20, I recall reading the deposition of Jordan Chandler (was that his name?) where he claimed Michael Jackson would masturbate with him and refer to semen as “duck butter.”

Ew.

Although I am curious why he called it "duck butter".

Wonder if Barrie did something similar then. With five boys it seems like he would have a favorite or two so the others might not know what was going on. The one that clearly committed suicide perhaps?

I just want R5 to know that if he thinks we haven't figured out the fact that he has a condition whereby he can only become sexually aroused via his own tedious outrage, well, we have.

[quote]'I don't believe that Uncle Jim ever experienced what one might call "a stirring in the undergrowth" for anyone — man, woman, or child,' he wrote to biographer Andrew Birkin in 1978. 'He was an innocent...

This is so reminiscent of some of the things people said about MJ I would have believed it if you told me this WAS a quote about him. Eerily reminiscent, actually. It also maddeningly gets you no further to the truth of either situation. Is it possible for man-children like this to exist, who somehow, absent some obvious disorder of their sexual development, remain childishly "innocent" into old age? I don't see why not. But I also see how it would be a mighty convenient excuse for a man who wasn't actually childlike or innocent at all in his intentions...

R20 Did you not see the M J documentary? Now adults, the guys describe the abuse in horrifying detail. I will not describe what activity one of them claims to have endured while disassociating, fixing his gaze upon a Peter Pan doll MJ had sitting on shelf in his bedroom.

After the first two hours, you think "maybe he just had a twisted childhood and twisted romantic notions". After the last two hours, you realize he had a dark and evil side and did nasty, damaging shit for decades.

R32 did any of those claims get made in court, though? Those are the ones I'm curious about. Like the "duck butter" quote above.

Of course it was sexual with MJ. What “innocent” and wholesome childhood activities need to happen behind a closed bedroom door with no other adults around? He couldn’t just fly kites and read comics and play cops ‘n robbers like regular kids do?

His house maid insists she saw him sexually abusing Macaulay Culkin. She admits he paid her off. Not much actually. But what was she going to do in any case? His lawyers would have destroyed her.

Culkin has denied that Jackson ever abused him.

I feel like Culkin would have said something by now if MJ actually had, but I'm no psychiatrist.

I've read that Barrie's genitalia were under developed and like those of a small child and he was incapable of normal marital relations. He didn't reveal this to his wife until their wedding night and she almost left him. The condition has a a name I forget.

He was supposed to be really short, like 5'1" or something, maybe that was also part of it 🤔

As I get older my genitalia are shrinking but I don't feel the urge to befriend little boys.

One can consider Robert Baden Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts, in the same class. He used to collect photos of naked scouts.

[quote]Although Baden-Powell himself never landed in court, he was certainly a strange man. He was obsessed with boys and “boyology.” The index of Tim Jeal’s excellent biography Baden-Powell speaks of his “aesthetic and sexual interest in men,” “pre-marital celibacy,” “dreams of young men,” and “anxieties over sexuality.” He got married, at 55, to (as Jeal put it) “a sporting girl whose interest in outdoor comradeship seemed at least as great as her desire for sexual fulfillment,” and he even managed to beget three children. But thereafter he always slept out on his balcony (and this in the English climate) rather than in the marriage bed.

"Boyology". I think I majored in that.

If one is old enough to pick a subject major in education, R41, it's sufficiently old for 'boyology' to be a problem.

r42 I was a child prodigy.

What are next week's winning NY lottery numbers, r46?

Wouldn’t you like to know, r47?

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