The Little White Bird

A bachelor in Kensington Gardens attaches himself to a small boy and his parents and tells the child stories, among them the first appearance anywhere of Peter Pan, who is a week old and flies out of a nursery window. Barrie wrote it for the Llewelyn Davies boys before he wrote the play. It is a strange book, half whimsy and half the loneliness of the man telling it, and the six Peter chapters were later carved out and published on their own. Fifty-two plates from 1863 to 1928, among them Arthur Hughes and John Lavery, gather the parks, gardens and quiet corners of childhood that Barrie's Kensington stories inhabit.