J.M. Barrie

A first edition, first printing of The Little White Bird by J.M. Barrie, inscribed to his friend and agent.

• J.M. Barrie (Scottish).
• London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1902.
• With contemporary gift inscription from Barrie on the half title page, ‘To Addison Bright the best of friends from J. M. Barrie, Nov. 1902’,
• Includes a frontispiece map of Kensington Gardens.
• Boards bound in publisher’s original black morocco cloth with gilt titling to the spine, gilt top edge to the text block.

The very first appearance of Peter Pan, inscribed by Barrie to his closest friend and literary agent.

Arthur Addison Bright (1861-1906) was a theatrical agent, most famous for his close friendship with J.M.Barrie, but who also acted for a number of successful playwrights including Arthur Conan Doyle, E.W. Hornung and Stephen Phillips. Bright was more than an agent to Barrie; he was a close friend and confidential adviser and played a key role in persuading Barrie to take up play writing. It was Bright who introduced Barrie to the Broadway producer Charles Frohman, who was ultimately responsible for the production of Peter Pan in Britain and America.

In 1906 it was discovered that Bright had embezzled royalties from many of his clients, including Barrie and Arthur Conan Doyle. In spite of the financial loss, Barrie staunchly supported his agent. Bright however, found the prospect of legal proceedings too much to bear and on a trip to Lucerne, ostensibly to take the air, he committed suicide.

Barrie wrote a short but loving obituary for Bright, which appeared in the Times on Friday, 1st June, 1906,

"To the many to whom the keenly intellectual face and noble character of Arthur Addison Bright were incentives to well-doing, it will come as a painful shock that he died suddenly on Tuesday night... Mr Bright had represented a number of authors besides myself in their affairs of the theatre, and it was owing to his encouragement and zealous help more than any other cause that novelists and poets have of late years produced plays. He was a man of a mind the most catholic and cultured, and so beautiful and modest a nature that it may be said of him, he had never time to be much interested in himself, he was so interested in his friends. For many years he had been my most loved friend."

The Little White Bird introduces Peter Pan as a magical baby who escapes from being human as an infant, and flies around Kensington Gardens with fairies. This episode, which began as a single chapter, grew into an "elaborate book within a book" as Barrie worked on the novel. Seeing the appeal of the character, Barrie developed Peter Pan into a play first performed in 1904, and following its outstanding success, published a slightly expanded version of the Peter Pan chapters as a single work, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, published in 1906, with illustrations by Arthur Rackham.