Peter and Wendy

For Peter Pan and Wendy – the first full narrative version of the story – the separation between the domestic spaces of London and the Nursery and the far-away world of NeverLand is less distinct, due to the shared toporefs.  Here there is far greater merging of spaces created by the narrator’s voice with a greater sense of slippage between – or in Peter’s case invasion into – the ‘real’ world. References to ‘the mermaid’s lagoon’, ‘the nests on top of the trees’, ‘the house we build for Wendy’, mean that the nursery at ‘Number 14’ in Peter and Wendy is much more of an interim space, between real and imagined, wakefulness and dream. But so too does the real encroach upon the lost: Peter’s home is full of echoes of the real or adult world: ‘the drawing-room’, ‘nurseries’, ‘London Station’. Opposing these pseudo-domestic resonances, the toporefs also reveal that the NeverLand of Peter and Wendy is the darkest of the three, full of unsettling places– ‘Mysterious river’, ‘shapeless pool of lovely pale colours suspended in the darkness’, ‘the cruel sea’ into which Michael almost falls, NeverLand itself a ‘fearsome island’. And, with the ‘Execution dock’ and ‘hut fast going to decay’, the possibility of not returning from it is a more constant and material threat. Finally, and perhaps most notably, NeverLand has morphed and multiplied: ‘the NeverLand’ is one of many possible NeverLands. It is, like its creator Peter Pan, multiple, unstable, and shifting.